Adventures In Recordland, post #4: The As, part 4

Five more records done today. But it looks like this project is eating up my entire day, so from now I'll be doing 3 a day. That'll take longer- probably about a year to finish the whole collection- but it's saner. So here are the five I did today.

 

#1: Louis Armstrong- "Louis Armstrong At The Crescendo, Vol. 2" (1955):

Do I really even need to comment on this? It's Louis Armstrong being great. That's all you need to know. He plays a lot of standards ("Old Rockin' Chair", "C'est Si Bon", etc.) and gives them his usual sense of fun. There's really not a lot I need to say- if you're reading this, you're probably familiar with him and love him.

#2: Louis Armstrong- "Town Hall Concert Plus" (1957)

This was issued in 1957, but consists of material recorded about a decade earlier, half of it in the studio and half of it live. The studio stuff is a bit more low-key, but still classic Satchmo. The live stuff is fantastic- some of the songs are the same as on the Crescendo album, but the performances are even more energetic and fun. Great stuff.

#3: Louis Arsmtrong & Eddie Condon- "Live At Newport" (1956):

Armstrong's and Condon's sets at the Newport Jazz Festival are split on both sides of this record- Armstrong and a little Condon on side 1, the rest of Condon on side 2. Both are excellent. I would recommend this record to any jazz fan.

#4: Cliff Arquette- "Charley Weaver Sings For His People" (1959)

If you're of a certain age, you might remember Charley Weaver. If you're too young- he was a whimsical old codger from the mythical country town of Mt. Idy played by vaudevillian actor Cliff Arquette, on the Jack Paar and Steve Allen shows first, then on many other shows over the years, including "Hollywood Squares" which he was on until he passed away in 1974. This album was made to capitalize on his early success with Paar.
I have to admit this album grew on me. It's hokey, and many of the songs are memorable more for their humor than their melodies, but I thought the first couple of songs weren't that funny, and then suddenly I started laughng. Much of it is silly, slightly subversive, and very enjoyable.

#5: George Atkins & Hank Levine- "Washington Is For The Birds"

I couldn't find the exact date on this one, but obviously it's from around 1966 or '67.
I would file this more under novelty than comedy. A couple of engineers named George Atkins and Hank Levine created an album featuring politicians singing. Or at least they manipulated their voices so that that's what it sounds like. They took the voices of Lyndon Johnson, Bobby Kennedy, Barry Goldwater and Lady Bird Johnson, and set various phrases from their speeches to Broadway show tune-style music. It's a clever idea, and impressive that Atkins and Levine thought of it decades before digital editing was possible, but the novelty wears thin pretty quickly and it's more interesting than funny. Fortunately, it's a short album, only 12 minutes per side, but I still think it would have been better off as a single rather than an album. Nonetheless, an interesting footnote.

Well, that finishes the As. See you tomorrow for the Bs!

Adventures In Recordland, post #2: The As, part 2

Remember when I said I'd be back tomorrow? I lied. I had some technical problems with my turntable. But now I'm back to work and got five more albums done today. I'll briefly offer some thoughts on them.

#1: Fred Allen- "Linit Bath Club Revue"

This album offers two half-hour shows from Fred's earliest years in radio. Hints of the later satirical Allen work are on display, but much of the scripts are more of the wisecracking vaudeville one-liner school, as was typical of most radio shows of the time: comedy sketch, musical interlude, another sketch, more music, and so on. On these early shows, Fred would apparently have a different occupation each week and do various sketches involving whatever the occupation was. On these, the only two extant "Linit Bath Club Revue" shows, Fred runs a department store in the first show and is a courtroom judge in the second. The department store show is the funnier of the two. Unfortunately, both are dragged down by the presence of Roy Atwell, a vaudeville comic who specialized in rambling spoonerism routines, stumbling over his own words and constantly trying to correct himself while getting ever more confused. It's mildly funny, but he seems to go on for about eight minutes with such nonsense, and seems to be an excuse to pad the show out to half an hour. Other than that, there's some amusing material here. That's about all I have to say.

#2: Allen & Rossi- "Hello Dere!", 1962

Shortly after Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis split up in 1956, there was another comedy team featuring a good-looking Italian singer and a zany Jewish comic. Their names were Marty Allen (comic) and Steve Rossi (straightman). As far as I can tell, their rise to fame was not quite as meteoric as that of Martin and Lewis, but they got good reviews and appeared prominently on television for a while in the '60s. Over the years they would get back together occasionally. Steve Rossi passed away just a few months ago, but Marty Allen, as of this writing, is still with us at age 92 and apparently still working.
This record is short- only 10 minutes on each side- but it was recorded live in Vegas and gives a good idea what their nightclub act was like. Allen assumes various characters and is interviewed by Rossi, using the basic vaudevillian question-and-answer pattern. I've read comments recently from people saying they never found the team funny at all, so I may be in the minority, but I enjoy them. Their act was cute and silly (with an occasional mildly suggestive line for the grown-ups) at a time when people really needed to laugh. Some of the topical material (Rossi interviewing Allen as various people who were in the news at the time) is a bit dated, but a lot of their stuff is still fun.

#3: Steve Allen- "Funny Fone Calls", 1963

 

Unlike the micro-managed and overly prepared late-night talk shows, Steve Allen's early TV shows had a fun air of genuine spontaneity about them. Steve was a quick wit who could ad-lib and experiment with different ideas as they came to him. One night, just to kill time, he made a prank phone call on the air. I don't know whether history has recorded what this first call was or not, but whatever it was, it went over quite well, and making gag calls, usually based on classified ads in the newspaper, became one of Allen's trademarks, and some of the most memorable ones are collected on this album.If such a thing were tried on today's shows, they would undoubtedly have to make the pranks completely outrageous and mean-spirited, but here Steve is simply playful, and usually the people he's calling are unintentionally funnier than he is. I enjoyed this album so much that I just bought a copy of the second volume that came out later. More about that when I get it.

#4: Steve Allen- "Man On The Street", 1959

Another regular feature of Steve Allen's early TV shows was the "Man On The Street" segment, an homage to Fred Allen's famous "Allen's Alley", where a regular group of characters- Louis Nye as flamboyant advertising executive Gordon Hathaway, Don Knotts as jittery Mr. Morrison, and Tom Poston as a befuddled character who could never remember his own name- were asked questions by Steve and would give funny answers. This segment was only done for a few years, but is still fondly remembered by baby boomers today. Steve mentions in the liner notes that after a while the audience responded less and less to the bit and that for whatever reason it seemed to be getting old, so this album was compiled to sort of preserve and document what had been a very famous and well-loved routine. I feel the same way about this album that I do about Dayton Allen's "Why Not?" album (see previous blog)- it was meant to be a three- or four-minute bit, but hearing it for more than half an hour is a bit much. Not that I'm denigrating the album, though, because Nye, Knotts and Poston were, of course, wonderfully funny performers and their material is a lot of fun.

#5: Woody Allen- self-titled album, 1964

I hardly think I need to introduce anyone to Woody Allen. He started out doing stand-up, was terrified by it, and quit as soon as he possibly could. That said, I'm grateful that his early work was preserved on three albums (I don't have the other two.. yet), because, as a comedian myself, his writing is awe-inspiring. The jokes on this album are like some kind of perfect, comedic haiku. It's a great album. It's just too bad the guy never had much of a career after this. He had potential.

Well, that's it for today. I'll see you tomorrow (this time I mean that!) for a very special blog. You'll find out why.

Adventures in recordland, post #1: the As, part 1

Hello, Blogspotters!
I started digitizing my LPs today. I decided to do somewhere between 3 and 5 per day, depending how much time I have. At this rate, it will take maybe five or six months to do, but... I expect to be alive six months from now, so why not?
I did five today. Here's what they were.

#1: Abbott & Costello: "When Radio Was King", 1974

 I bought this album when I was maybe ten years old. You can see it still has the price sticker on it from the dearly missed Plastic Fantastic record shop in Bryn Mawr, which I used to go to every now and then. Got a lot of great stuff there, too.

Being a comedy nerd with OCD, I have copies of all of Abbott & Costello's movies and just spent the past summer watching all of them, so I've learned quite a bit about them. I'd have to agree with the consensus that radio was not their best medium- although they had their moments, and the show on this disc is enjoyably silly. It's about the boys going on safari to hunt big game. Costello meets a lion, who turns out to be a misanthropic hermit wearing a lion skin to fool people. He lets Costello take the skin, Abbott thinks Costello has successfully killed the lion, he eventually finds out the truth and Costello's in trouble again. That's about all you need to know.  Oh, and there's a gratuitous musical number about what a hero Costello is. Anyway, it's an amusing show with some good lines. Trouble is that, where most record companies give you two half-hour shows on a record, this one stretches the half-hour show over both sides and only gives you a so-so version of the team's classic "Who's On First?" routine as a "bonus", so it's hardly their best representation on vinyl. But hey- not a bad way to start off. I'm glad I have it.

#2: Don Adams- self-titled album, 1963

Comedy albums were a fairly new phenomenon in the early '60s. Of course there had been comedy records of some kind going back to the dawn of recorded sound in the 1890s, but they were primarily of a musical nature, such as the 1940s records by people like Spike Jones or Danny Kaye. It wasn't until long-playing records became popular in the 1950s that two new kinds of comedy records came into being: radio-style concept albums recorded in a studio- the most famous of those being Vaughn Meader's famous "First Family" album from 1962- which I'll be discussing in a later blog- and recordings of a nightclub stand-up comic doing their act. The latter particularly was a whole new experience in the 1950s. Remember, this was long before the internet or hour-long cable specials could bring famous stand-up comics immediately into our homes. The whole idea of a "live album"- sitting around listening to a recording of a comedian doing his act in a nightclub- was brand new. Mort Sahl was among the first to release a live comedy album- Shelley Berman won a Grammy for it. They were followed in rapid succession by Lenny Bruce, Jonathan Winters, Bill Cosby, Bob Newhart, and many others. (More on all of those talented gentlemen in later entries.) Just about every nightclub comic gave vinyl a try back then. Among them was a young up-and-comer named Donald Yarmy- known professionally as Don Adams.
Of course you all know him as Maxwell Smart on the "Get Smart" TV series, but that didn't start until a couple of years after this album was recorded- but the liner notes mention that he had already been on television, on Steve Allen's show among others, so he was certainly becoming famous by this time.
What's interesting about this album is how different it is from today's comedy. Adams is relaxed and confident, and, instead of having to hit the audience over the head with a comic attitude right away, he just starts talking, conversationally, really taking his time, and leads the small but appreciative audience into some very funny, very well-crafted jokes. I grew up listening to the albums of this era, and because I'm a curmudgeon who doesn't like modern comedians very much (with some very notable exceptions I might discuss some other time), I wish today's audiences had the attention span to appreciate the humor of an act like Adams'. His opening series of monologs, lasting a full 13 minutes, is wonderful.
Unfortunately, the rest of the album is rather mild in comparison. A lot of the bits involve parodying the clichés and characters found in old movies, so you have to be a real movie fan to get some of the humor. This being an album from 1963, of course audiences at the time would have recognized names like Edward Arnold, Conrad Nagel or Chester Morris, but it's a bit dated now. Adams' talent is obvious, and there are some good lines here and there, but aside from the opening, much of this album isn't his best work- that would come later.

#3: Kip Addotta: "The Comedian Of The United States", 1985

 

Another album I've had since I was maybe 11 or 12. The reason I knew who Kip Addotta is- and this is probably the case for many of you- was because I heard his song "Wet Dream", a funny song involving about 40 or 50 puns about fish- on a Dr. Demento compilation tape. Of course I was too young then to even know what "wet dream" meant, but... I digress.
I love puns- if you read my blog long enough, you're bound to see many of them here- so I still find that song amusing. Unfortunately, the rest of the album doesn't have anything nearly as clever. A few bits of average '80s standup (though I admit I laughed at a couple of the jokes) combined with mediocre studio-recorded songs. Really nothing very memorable. The opening "State Of The Humor Address" (in keeping with the presidential theme established by the album's title and cover, which otherwise has nothing to do with most of the album) is cute, but that's about it.

#4: Dayton Allen: "Why Not?", 1960

Back to the innocent, whimsical humor of the late '50s, a style I really enjoyed as a kid and still do now. I only got this record a few years ago, but it's a fun one.
Dayton Allen, for those who don't know, was a comedian and voice actor, probably best known for doing cartoon voices for characters such as Deputy Dawg and Heckle and Jeckle. At this time, he was a regular on Steve Allen's TV show, and this album compiles some of his appearances there.
He delivers a series of goofy, slightly surreal monologs in a cartoony voice, in the guise of an expert on various topics- criminology, surgery, the military, etc. There's some good material here (interestingly, his satirical lines about early television have not dated), but the album does run out of steam after a while. His shtik was meant to be taken in three-minute bits, and in that small dosage, it's very funny, but a full half-hour of that stuff wears thin. But there's still a lot of fun to be had, and I enjoyed this one.

#5: Fred Allen: "Down In Allen's Alley"

 I know I have at least one or two younger readers here who may not be entirely familiar with who Fred Allen was.
Fred Allen was a vaudeville comedian who found his greatest success in radio with a cerebral, sarcastic brand of humor. He was on the air from 1932 to 1949 when, much to his dismay, he was replaced by a quiz show, a genre of radio programming he found idiotic and often ridiculed mercilessly on his own show. He tried to adapt to the new medium of television, but never really found his niche, and then died suddenly in 1956.
So unfortunately, because so few people today remember or appreciate the kind of purely radio-based humor which Fred did so well, his remarkable wit and talent have been largely forgotten except by a few comedy devotees like myself. I've been listening to him since I was ten, so it's hard for me to review his work in an objective way- all I can do is describe.
The most famous and best-remembered element of Fred's radio shows was the "Allen's Alley" segment, where Fred would stroll down an imaginary street and interview a group of recurring characters about their opinions on things that were in the news that week. Many characters came and went over the seven years that Fred wrote "Allen's Alley", but the best-remembered group consisted of the Southern loudmouth Senator Claghorn (played by Kenny Delmar, a character who partially inspired the famous Warner Brothers cartoon character Foghorn Leghorn), dour New England farmer Titus Moody (Parker Fennelly), Jewish housewife Pansy Nussbaum (Minerva Pious) and excitable Irishman Ajax Cassidy (Peter Donald). Many other memorable characters with names like Falstaff Oppenshaw and Socrates Mulligan were featured in the segment over the years, but only the four I mentioned are featured on this record.
The album features four "Allen's Alley" segments which are all delightful and funny. Side 2 has something a little different- a 1949 radio show with Fred discussing the history of American humor, and where he thought it was going at the time. His comments about the decline of radio comedy and the lack of originality in television comedy, again, are not entirely outdated in lieu of the lack of quality comedy material around today, and very interesting to a comedy nerd.
One other very important point about Fred for those who don't know- he had a long-standing "feud" with Jack Benny (if you don't know who Jack Benny was- shame on you!). The two comedians insulted each other constantly on their respective shows for almost 20 years. It was all for the audience's amusement, of course- in real life they were close friends who respected each other greatly. But of course that made the insults even funnier. So this record closes with a wonderful six minutes of Fred roasting Jack Benny at the Friar's Club in 1951.

That's all the records I did today. See you tomorrow for more.