The Play's The Thing

As loyal readers will know by now, Mrs. DJStan and I are both big theatre fans. One of the benefits of living in NYC is the wealth of theatre available at any time. Sometimes it's not so hot (see my post on Ring of Feh, for example) but sometimes it's just great. Two recent outings were both in the second category, and both had something musical going on.

In the first case, it's obvious: we saw a Musical. It's now in previews, and it's called The Drowsy Chaperone. The basic premise is simple: a contemporary devotee of 1920's musical theatre - a somewhat effete divorced man, living in a decent but run-down studio apartment - breaks the fourth wall and tells us that he's going to play his favorite recording (emphasis on "record", which he cleans diligently before laying down the tonearm) for us: the original cast album of a typical 20's antique entitled - yes, that's right - The Drowsy Chaperone. The scratchy overture merges into a fuller sound as the pit band takes over, and the show begins. The characters emerge from the closets (and the refrigerator), sets and props appear, and the entire play takes place before your eyes, with the narrator wandering in and out of the action.

Bottom line: it's a hoot, very funny, and very true to the form it parodies. There's a producer and his bimbo, a star who wants true love, a pair of comic gangsters, an aviatrix, and - of course - the drowsy chaperone herself, a jaded vamp who gets involved with a latin lover. The songs are pastiches of period music, including a hysterical number entitled "I Put A Monkey On A Pedestal" (yes, it makes sense in context) .

I ended up listening to a lot of 20's popular music the following week, including Classic Bing Crosby - 1927-34, Fascinating Rhythm: Gershwin on Broadway (original recordings), Dippermouth Blues (King Oliver), an RCA 20's collection from their archives (part of the Nipper's Greatest Hits series) and a Geoff Muldaur produced set of Bix Beiderbecke's music called Private Astronomy, orchestrated for what Muldaur calls a "chamber jazz orchestra". All great listening, and all patches in the brilliant crazy quilt that is American music.

The second play was The Lieutenant of Inishmore, a Tarantino-esque comedy of terrors with a brogue that had me laughing from start to finish. Set on a bleak Irish island in the early 90's, the play tells the story of two daft characters who get involved with a dead cat beloved of a psychotic member of a tiny IRA splinter group (the IRA itself wouldn't have him because he's too crazy), and the consequences. It's fiendishly funny if you're not put off by the sight of stage blood, and makes some sharp points (with axes and otherwise) about the nature of politics, terror, and how murder for lofty goals can easily become an addiction where lip service to the goals merely serves to shore up the dark joys of killing. It reminded me of Tom Waits' growling take on Brecht's lines - "Mankind can keep alive, thanks to its brilliance at keeping its humanity repressed; For once, you must not try to shirk the facts: Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts" - from the Weil collection, Lost In The Stars (an excellent album, unfortunately out of print).

Anyway, while the blackout pauses are punctuated by cannon-like percussion (heavy tympanies), there's also the occasional piece of an Irish song, particularly Dominic Behan's "The Patriot Game". Even if you don't know this song, the melody will probably be very familiar to you - Dylan took it, whole cloth, for "With God On Our Side" - and the lyrics are worth contemplating in light of the state of the world today (or almost any day, sadly enough). The opening verses go like this (sing along if you know the tune):

Come all you young rebels, and list while I sing,
For the love of one's country is a terrible thing.
It banishes fear with the speed of a flame,
And it makes us all part of the patriot game.

My name is O'Hanlon, and I'm just gone sixteen.
My home is in Monaghan, where I was weaned.
I learned all my life cruel England to blame,
And so I'm a part of the patriot game.

It's barely two years since I wandered away
With the local battalion of the bold IRA,
I'd read of our heroes, and I wanted the same
To play out my part in the patriot game.

As you might guess, the song doesn't end well for the singer.

Skyliner

I was listening to the Manhattan Transfer's Swing today. Aside from being a natural set of songs for them and one of their best albums - since they're very much in the model of swing vocal groups like the Hi-Lo's and the Modernaires - it contains my single favorite Man Trans cut: "Skyliner". This Charlie Barnet song, with vocalese lyrics and Ricky Skaggs playing some tasty guitar, is about someone flying home to a waiting loved one who gets totally caught up in the romance of flying.

"The romance of flying" - hard to say that nowadays without a thick coat of irony. I suppose I'm old enough to remember when flying had some shade of exoticness to it; when the Saarinen TWA building opened out at Idlewild (later Kennedy a/k/a JFK); when being a stewardess (not a "flight attendant") was considered a glamourous job; when airplane food was not a sad joke; when you could kick back with a cigarette and a cocktail and watch the clouds flow by....well, you get the idea.

The first flight I ever took was when I was in High School and flew up to Rochester for a college interview. My father took me out to LaGuardia airport where we encountered Mayor Robert Wagner; Dad, an inveterate amateur photographer always ready to take a snapshot, inveigled the Mayor to pose with me ("OK, your honor - big smile now!") and then it was time to walk out on the tarmac and up the portable stairs to the plane. That first lift-off was a moment of pure joy mixed with a little fear, which surprisingly sweetens the moment. There's a Taxi episode where Reiger goes sky-diving; as he free-falls he's screaming "I'm gonna die! I'm gonna die!" - then the chute pops open, he realizes he's not going to die, and he bursts into Sondheim's song "Being Alive". It was kind of like that, without the singing.

Anyway, this song brings it all back - a swinging kind of romantic optimism whose very sound - timbre and rhythm - is totally cool but in a happy, engaged kind of way - hip without the anomie. Sometimes I miss that exuberant vision of a streamlined future, even as false as it ultimately turned out to be. All technology eventually becomes banal, I suppose. The trouble with the future, as someone once said, is that it's always tomorrow, and never today; you can't live there.

More Angular Banjos

Donald Fagen’s new cd, Morph the Cat, is classic Steely Dan, which really tells you everything you need to know. Steely Dan’s work as a group, and Fagen’s as a solo artists, are of a piece. There are those devilishly simple grooves that you just can’t put down; the cool sixths and soft dissonances in the harmonies; the I’m-so-hip-I-just-can’t- bear-it lyrics; and always Fagen’s naturally ironic vocals, a voice utterly incapable of sincerity. Count me as a fan.

The new one is a good as the average old ones, and that’s good enough. Steely Dan hasn’t produced a great album in quite a while (Gaucho was the last; Pretzel Logic and Aja were the other two), and the output of their relatively recent reunion is middling SD at best. In fact, despite being a Fagen solo, this is probably the best Steely Dan-type recording in quite a while.

It’s only Fagen’s third album. The first – and best – was his homage to the early sixties’ sensibility, The Nightfly; Kamakiriad, which followed years later, is an interesting failure, with no really outstanding tracks. Morph the Cat is fine. It’s what you’d expect, and if you like that Steely Dan-ish thing, you’ll enjoy this one. In some recent interviews, Fagen has said that he views this as a mature set, dealing with Death and other serious metaphors (even conversing with the spirit of Ray Charles, who tells him that it’s not what’d I say; it’s what I do) – but Fagen was an old man long ago. A funky, sassy old man, but an old man notwithstanding.

Meanwhile, I can’t get the title track’s groove out of my head. Which is OK, ‘cause it’s so cool.

Town Without Pitney

Just to note the passing of another teen icon of my youth. Gene Pitney never had the kind of success he dreamed of in his own country. He did OK, but he was always a bigger star in Europe, and especially in Britain, where he recently died while on tour. I’ll remember him best as the author of “Hello, Mary Lou” (yes, I was a Rick Nelson fan and proud of it!), and for “Town Without Pity”, “Twenty-four Hours from Tulsa”, and “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”.

Swinging Texans and That Yellow Rose...

Back in the early sixties, one of the more weirdly popular shows was “Sing Along With Mitch”, featuring the soothing blandness of Mitch Miller’s arrangements of folk and light pop tunes, scored for the entire viewing audience. Mitch even had a hit or two, and the one I remember best was “The Yellow Rose of Texas”. I never much wondered about why the rose was yellow; I figured it was some kind of a Texas thing – maybe that was the color they came in down there.

So I recently acquired a 4 disc set of Western Swing music from the 30’s and 40’s (Doughboys, Playboys and Cowboys), and while listening to the likes of Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys, Spade Cooley, and the Tune Wranglers (fine swingers all, and Wills plays the fiddle like a soul inspired, wisecracking all the while – but that’s a subject for another time), I heard a version of “The Yellow Rose of Texas” performed by Milton Brown & His Musical Brownies – and the scales fell from my eyes. She’s “yellow” because she’s a light-skinned black woman, as the song’s original verses make clear – and which were not what I sang along with Mitch. The Rose is a song to a real woman, perhaps a heroine of the War for Texas Independence (remember the Alamo?), named Emily West Morgan. Gives the song a whole other feel, knowing that. I wonder if Mitch knew? Probably.

p.s. As usual, the Emily West legend is more aesthetically pleasing than the truth.