Adventures In Recordland, Post #18: The Bs 15

I've had a very busy week, so I had to take some time off from going through my records. I finished up the Bs today, though. Let's take a look.

#1/#2: Robert Bryan & Marshall Dodge- "Bert And I... And Other Stories From Down East"/"More Bert And I", 1958/61:

Two albums of New England folk humor. My parents and I go up to Maine every summer and we love it there, so it's nice to have a humorous reminder of our favorite vacation spot. Bryan and Dodge were not exactly comedians- their delivery is very dry and has none of the "performance" aspect of a typical comic- they just tell stories and short jokes. Some are amusing and provide a few chuckles- others apparently are only funny if you're a New Englander. The first record from 1958 was a big hit in its native territory, but it doesn't always travel well.

#3: "Lord Buckley In Concert", 1959:

Richard "Lord" Buckley was an unusual man with an unusual act. The equivalent of what we would today call a performance artist, he delivered fast, rambling monologues on various subjects, combining humor, beat poetry, philosophy and free association in the guise of a character who was part English aristocrat (hence the name) and part jive-talking hipster. He influenced many later performers, one of the more obvious ones being the late Robin Williams who seemed to borrow quite a bit of His Lordship's rhythm.
It's difficult for me to say whether he was really "funny" in the conventional sense or not- he just did what he did, and listening to him is an entertaining and unusual experience. Perhaps the best bit is the closing one, "God's Own Drunk", and it's funny because of his personality and delivery, so any attempt to explain it in text wouldn't do it justice.

#4: Burns & Schreiber- "In One Head And Out The Other", 1965:

Jack Burns and Avery Schreiber were members of the famous Second City improv group who went on to become a successful comedy team in clubs and on television. Their most famous bit, which takes up an entire side of this album, involved Burns playing an obnoxious, pushy, Archie Bunker-type bigoted windbag, with Schreiber as the cab driver taking him to a hotel. Burns rambles on making stupid remarks and Schreiber stoically deflates his pomposity. It's a wonderful piece of character comedy.
The other side of the album is a bit milder, with a long bit about a faith healer, which seems to be an odd choice for an album as some of its humor seems to have been visual. But the cab driver routine is a highlight.

#5: Burns & Schreiber- "The Watergate Comedy Hour", 1973:

After the success of Vaughn Meader's "First Family" album, there were a number of political sketch comedy albums through the '60s and well into the Nixon administration. This one features not only Burns and Schreiber, but a number of other actors, including the great animation voice actor Frank Welker as Richard Nixon and several other characters. Obviously, this album satirizes the Watergate scandal. It's very dated now, but there are some funny moments, although some of it goes over my head since I wasn't around at the time and don't get all the references.

Adventures In Recordland, #17: The Bs, part 14: Lenny Bruce marathon

I normally do three records a day- I was too tired yesterday to bother writing a blog, so now I'll write about all six records I've listened to over the past two days- which is all right since they're all Lenny Bruce.

#1: Lenny Bruce- "I Am Not A Nut, Elect Me", 1959:

This is early Lenny, when he was still doing "bits" instead of free-form ad-libbing the way he did after he was busted. The highlight is undoubtedly his classic "Palladium" routine about a third-rate comic bombing at the London Palladium. It takes up nearly all of side 2 of the album and is a tour-de-force. The rest of the album feels more like filler- most of the bits are either dated or not especially funny, although his bit about being censored on the Steve Allen show is also noteworthy. This would be a minor Lenny album if it weren't for the Palladium bit.

#2: Lenny Bruce- "Interviews Of Our Time", 1958:

This was Lenny's first album, and it's an odd one. Somehow the record company (Fantasy Records) must not have had much faith in him, as he is forced to "share" the album with other material- the "interviews of our time" are Henry Jacobs interviewing Dr. Sholem Stein about calypso music, and jazz musician Shorty Petterstein who really has nothing to say and rambles on about it anyway. These interviews take up nearly half the album, and are so odd that I'm not even sure whether to take them seriously or not.
The rest of the album is Lenny- very early on, doing short bits. And the bits are not even treated very well- some of them are just cut off in the middle without a punchline. What's there is pretty good- the most interesting bit is a slightly Twilight Zone-ish studio-recorded bit, "The March Of High Fidelity", about a hi-fi addict whose head turns into a Victrola. Other than that, this is a curious footnote in Lenny's career. He wasn't happy about having his material used as an afterthought to an otherwise rather pointless album, and as you can see, he asked for his name to be removed from the back cover.

#3:  Lenny Bruce- "The Law, Language And Lenny Bruce", 1974:

This is, obviously, a posthumously-released album, recorded around the same time as the "Berkeley Concert" album in 1965. That was towards the end for Lenny, and it was at this point that he was reading his trial transcripts onstage in a desperate effort to prove that what he was doing was not obscene. So it's not his funniest album, it's more of a rant- and even the parts that are funny duplicates a lot of material from the Berkeley show. It's more of a historical document than a comedy album.

#4: Lenny Bruce- "Lenny Bruce Is Out Again", 1966:

 

This is probably the best of all the Lenny albums I have. It repeats a lot of material from his other mid-'60s albums, but he's in good form here, it's one of his most enjoyable performances.

#5: Lenny Bruce- "The Sick Humor Of Lenny Bruce", 1959:

 More early Lenny. This was his first full-length album, after "Interviews Of Our Time." They don't call it "sick humor" for nothing- he opens with a bit about a plane crash, and the album also contains a bit about Hitler and a poem about a man who's in love with a horse. Some of it is uncomfortable today, and unfortunately much of the rest of it is dated, but it shows you how daring Lenny was in the beginning and why he stood out as somebody who was different.

#6: Lenny Bruce- "What I Was Arrested For", 1971:

This is a compilation of the bits that got Lenny arrested, as the album title would imply. It's remarkable to think that Lenny got busted for material which any comedian today could use freely. Toilet humor, sex jokes, gay jokes, words like "bullshit" and, in one notorious instance, "cocksucker"- comedians have been using such material for decades now, but in 1961 it was Lenny who got in trouble for it. There are some bits that are funny, but again, this album really is a historical document of a comedy martyr, I can't rate it based on whether it's funny or not.

Adventures In Recordland, post #11: The Bs, part 8

#1: Shelley Berman- "New Sides" (1963):

This was Berman's last standup album before an incident that showed him in a bad light caused his career to go downhill. (Some documentary footage was taken out of context to make him appear more temperamental than he really is, which gave him a bad reputation as a result.) It's not a bad ending. I don't feel it's as strong as some of his previous albums, but there are some very good bits. Probably my two favorites are "The Complete Neuroses" about a psychiatric patient whose amnesia is triggered by the word "porcupine", and "Lost Dog" about a man calling a little boy who has accidentally stolen the man's dog. It's pretty solid stuff, but doesn't quite reach the heights of his previous work.

 

#2: Shelley Berman- "Outside Shelley Berman" (1959):

This is one of the classics. After a few opening remarks, Shelley goes into one of his phone routines (in my opinion one of his funniest), "Franz Kafka At The Telephone." It sounds like most of the audience had never heard of Kafka- certainly I hadn't when I first heard this album at age 10- but the Kafkaesque frustration of trying to get a phone number in the days of operators and pay phones is certainly understandable, and rendered very funny by Mr. Berman's writing and witty performance. The highlight, which takes up nearly the entirety of side 2, is perhaps one of his most famous bits- "Father And Son", a monolog dramatizes, from his father's point of view, young Berman's attempt to convince his father to give him a hundred dollars to go to acting school in New York. It's not so much a comedy monolog as an acting piece, exploring the personality of a character in a very human situation. It's funny, well-acted, and ultimately poignant. It's one of Berman's masterpieces. In fact, there's a YouTube video of him performing it just a year or two ago, and even after 55 years, it was extraordinary to see an old master still giving a beautiful performance of something I grew up listening to. He then closes the album with a few minutes of audience-participation improv in a game of "PTA"- Berman plays a child psychologist and the audience asks him questions. It's a quick, fun closer to a great album.

 

 #3: Shelley Berman- "A Personal Appearance" (1961):

I'm glad this one happened to come last alphabetically. This is Berman on all cylinders- it's a passionate, delirious, brilliant performance. There are some phone-call bits just to please the crowd- and they're very good- but the highlights are when Berman just talks to the audience, in "confessional" mode- and muses on black specks in glasses to milk, dentists, folk singing, television advertising, and other things. As a comedian, he's very funny, and as an actor, he's more energetic and extraordinary than ever before. I don't think my words can describe the experience of listening to such a great show- go out and buy it yourself and I'm sure you'll see what I mean.

Adventures In Recordland, post #10, The Bs, part 7

#1: Shelley Berman- "The Edge Of Shelley Berman", 1960:

I think it's fair to say Shelley Berman is one of my comedy heroes. I grew up listening to his albums, and somehow found them funny even when I was too young to understand references to Gertrude Stein or Franz Kafka. So I've heard them many times over the years, and it's always a pleasure to revisit this brilliant performer every few years.
For those of you who may only know him from his, for lack of a better word, "comeback" as a member of the cast of "Curb Your Enthusiasm", I should explain that Mr. Berman had a career decades before Larry David did. He was an early member of what became the famous Second City improv group in Chicago, and went from that to doing standup comedy (or sit-down comedy in his case, as he usually sat on a stool), dramatic acting, a great deal of writing, and in recent years has been teaching college writing classes.
His comedy records in the early '60s were truly groundbreaking. First of all, they proved that comedy albums were a viable and profitable medium- his first album, "Inside Shelley Berman", went gold and was among the first comedy records to win a Grammy, and the followup, "Outisde Shelley Berman", was an equally big success. I mentioned this in an earlier blog, but the idea of recording a nightclub comedian's live act and putting it on an album was a brand new and somewhat revolutionary idea in record production in 1959. Mort Sahl got there first, but it was "Inside Shelley Berman" that created a sensation and made record companies pay attention to this new concept.
What was even more groundbreaking about Berman was his approach and subject matter. Of course, the previous generation's comedy had been ruled by vaudeville performers who told one-liners (although there were exceptions, of course- the character-based humor of Jack Benny comes to mind). In the '50s and '60s, a new breed of comedians came along- Berman, Sahl, Jonathan Winters, Lenny Bruce, Bob Newhart, etc.- who were smart and satirical and, instead of reciting old jokes, took more chances by expressing their individual personalities and being honest about who they were and what they felt. All of today's comedians have been inspired by this revolutionary group- their attitudes, their subject matter, their delivery, even the way they dressed. Those performers changed the game forever, and Berman was one of them. He was the most vulnerable- the hapless, neurotic everyman who seemed tortured by the embarrassments and frustrations of everyday life. He presented his fears and insecurities nakedly to the audience in ways that were relatable, sometimes even poignant, and always hilariously funny.
His delivery and performance style were different too. He was not a vaudeville performer who had to get to the next joke quickly. He didn't tell jokes. He was, and is, first and foremost a very talented writer and actor, and so his performances consisted of carefully honed and polished theatrical pieces delivered very skillfully. They were not mere comedy monologs, they were literate performance pieces., whether he was talking directly to the audience in his more confessional pieces, or portraying various characters engaged in imaginary telephone conversations- the latter of which became his trademark and was later emulated by the aforementioned Bob Newhart.  To my knowledge, no one had ever done quite that sort of thing in a nightclub before, and I can't think of anyone who's done it since.

But to get to this particular album. Unfortunately, the title is a bit misleading- the material is hardly edgy. After two hugely successful albums, Berman found that when he performed live, the audience knew the routines by heart and therefore wouldn't laugh. So he had to keep coming up with new material, and I'm guessing he was a bit burned out by this point. The routines here are amusing, but very mild compared to the creative peak of the "Inside" and "Outside" albums. The highlight is the closing monolog in which he confesses to the audience that he needs them there because hc couldn't be funny without them. It's a bold thing to admit to an audience, and as a comedian myself, I understand it all too well.

#2: Shelley Berman- "Inside Shelley Berman", 1959:

As I mentioned, this is one of the great and most important albums in the history of recorded comedy. I listened to this album many times as a child, so it's rather nostalgic for me, and it still holds up as one of Berman's masterpieces. He starts off with a 14-minute monolog about airlines which, while slightly dated now, is still very funny, encapsulates his stage persona perfectly right from the start, and really shows his craftsmanship as he starts off slowly and then builds it into an exploration of just about every comedic angle one can find in the subject. He later said it was this monolog more than anything else that made him famous, and I can see why. It's one of his best.
There are a few "confessional" routines here, but those are fairly brief. The highlights are the phone call routines- whether he's a harried everyman trying to alert the staff of a department store that a customer is hanging from their window, a hung-over slob who finds out what an ass he made of himself at last night's party, or a man whose young nephew doesn't quite understand how the phone works yet, these are all great pieces of comedy. "Outside Shelley Berman" has some equally great moments- I'll get to those next time- but it's easy to see why "Inside" made him a star. This is brilliant stuff, even 55 years later.

#3: Shelley Berman- "Let Me Tell You A Funny Story...", 1965:

There's actually not much to say here. This is just a "best of" compilation, mostly consisting of bits from "Inside" and "Outside", with a few brief comments from Shelley introducing the bits. His comments contain a small amount of interesting trivia, but really, if you have the other albums, you don't need this one. I've hung on to it anyway just because it was given to me when I was a kid.

Next time: three more Berman records, all very good.

Adventures In Recordland, post #8: The Bs (and a little left over from A), part 4

Three more done today. I'd say I'm making good progress.

#1: Steve Allen- "More Funny Fone Calls", 1963

The internet really is a remarkable invention. I enjoyed the first Steve Allen phone calls album a lot (see my previous blog, "The As part 2", for more details), so I went and bought the second volume on Amazon. Years ago, when I started collecting, I would have had to just keep looking through record bins in whatever stores I happened to be in and hope that somewhere, somehow, someday, I might happen to find it. Now, in 2014, I just typed in "Steve Allen, More Funny Fone Calls" and there it was on my doorstep a week later. Fantastic.
The second album is almost as good as the first one. Adding to the fun are celebrity guests like Jack Lemmon, Jerry Lewis and Shelley Berman. But as fun as the good-natured pranks are, what's most interesting is when they don't quite work. On one call, Steve talks to a woman who is very monosyllabic and barely answers his interrogations, but Steve keeps trying anyway- it doesn't play out too well, but these were the days of LIVE television where you never knew quite what was going to happen. Probably the highlight of the album is Louis Nye calling a woman who's obviously a bit tipsy- he calls her saying his television set is broken and asking her to turn her set on and tell him what she sees, but before you know it, she starts flirting with him and they get into some pretty heavy conversation. Even when Steve jumps in and reveals that the whole thing is a gag, the woman seems oblivious and says she's never heard of Louis Nye or Steve Allen! Other times, the person being called catches on to the joke and hangs up, but it's routines like that one that make it interesting. It's a fun record, I'm glad I went out of my way to buy it.

#2: Orson Bean- "Orson Bean At The Hungry i", 1960:

Orson Bean, who, by the way, is 86 years old today and still living, is perhaps best known today for being on the TV game show "To Tell The Truth." But long before that, he was a rather unusual nightclub comic. He wasn't a vaudevillian like Milton Berle or Danny Kaye, he wasn't really in the new so-called "sick" school of comedy of the late '50s/early '60s era as practiced by Shelley Berman, Lenny Bruce, etc. He was a cheerful, whimsical sort of comic who told meandering "shaggy dog" stories.
He's a good storyteller, often using dialects and character voices, and the humor is as much in the details of the telling as in the silly punchlines. And while the material isn't always laugh-out-loud funny, I love the comedy albums of this era and enjoyed Bean's particular style.

#3: Brendan Behan- "Brendan Behan On Joyce", 1962

I used to be obsessed with James Joyce in high school. I may be in a minority in being able to say I have read both "Ulysses" and "Finnegans Wake", the latter being one of my favorite books, simply because I have such a love for wordplay and the various ways the English language can be used.
My father sells rare books for a living, and he met someone who had a large collection of Joyce memorabilia, some of which he gave to me, including this record, a lecture that the Irish writer Brendan Behan gave to the James Joyce Society in New York City.
However, if you're really looking to know more about what Joyce was like as a person, this may not be the best source. Behan comes across as a typically eccentric Irish writer (and with a name like Gilmore, I would know), and he's entertaining, but his lecture tends to ramble on quite a bit and doesn't give any information that one might use in a biography or essay about Joyce. So it's an interesting item, but not what one hopes it would be.

Adventures In Recordland, Post #7: The Bs, part 3

I only did three albums today. I actually don't have much to say about them, but let's take a look.

#1: Count Basie- "Basie's Basement" (1959):

This is a compilation of sides Basie and his band originally recorded in the late '40s on 78. Whether playing swing, slow blues, or the occasional novelty like "The Jungle King", Basie was one of the greats. Definitely a record I'd recommend to any fan of the big band era. Wonderful stuff.

#2: Count Basie: "Basie's Beatle Bag" (1966):

Yes- it's Count Basie playing the songs of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. An unusual item, to be sure.
But I actually can't comment on this record. And I'll tell you why.
I was never a big Beatles fan. When I was a kid, I immediately got the sense that this was the most popular band in the entire world, and something in my brain went "Well, if that's what everybody ELSE likes so much, I'm gonna go in a different direction and find my own thing." Of course I've HEARD the Beatles- you'd have to be living under a rock not to have heard them at some time in your life on this planet. But there's a lot of stuff by them that I've never heard. I'm a long way from an expert on the subject. MY favorites from the era are people like the Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa, both of whom the average person knows by name but probably couldn't tell you anything about their music. I am by my own admission an eccentric person, and my refusal to submit to the world's love for the Beatles has been my way of resisting the status quo. Sure, I have all their albums on my backup hard drive, and I do intend to listen to them sometime, and maybe I'll discover that I was wrong. In fact, I'm sure I am. But because I haven't heard the original versions of most of the songs Basie covers here, I don't want to spoil them by hearing his versions first. Therefore, I just digitized this album and let it play with the sound down, and didn't listen to it. Someday, a few years from now, when I've caught up to the rest of the human race and can recite Beatles trivia at the drop of a hat, I'll give Basie's interpretations a listen. But not now.

 

#3: Count Basie & Duke Ellington: "First Time! The Count Meets The Duke" (1962):

Judging from the liner notes, Basie and Ellington had been good friends and mutual admirers for many years before this album was made, but apparently this was the first, perhaps the only, time that these two giants ever worked together. I'm more familiar with their earlier work from the '30s and '40s, so I can't comment on the type of work they were both doing at this time, but the pieces on this album sound more like Stan Kenton-style "modern jazz" (as it was called- at least it was modern at the time) than the big-band sounds I'm used to. Nonetheless, Count and Duke create some fine stuff accompanied by a great group of sidemen. Again, I wish I could say more, but I'm using this blog more to jot down my reactions than give professional-quality reviews. If I could do that, I'd be working for a newspaper, not a blog. Anyway, it's a good record by two of my all-time favorites. Worth a listen.

That's all I'm doing today. See you again tomorrow.

Adventures In Recordland, Post #6: The Bs, part 2

I cut down a little and only did three albums today. Well, technically four. I'll explain that in a moment.

#1: The Bangles- "Interchords"/"Tell Tales interview" (1986)

Record companies pulled a bit of a trick on buyers here. "Interchords" is a promotional record released to plug their album "Different Light" (see yesterday's blog) in 1986. It consists of an interview with the group and several cuts from the album. The "Tell Tales" album, it turns out, is the exact same interview with a different DJ asking the questions and the original answers spliced in from the other album to make it sound like they're in the same room together! I found this out the hard way. But at least "Tell Tales" is a picture disc, so that makes it collectible. Anyway, it's an interesting interview from when the group was at its peak, they sound like they're having fun together, and it gives you an idea of their songwriting process. There's nothing very unusual about it as interviews go, but for a Bangles fan, it's a fun footnote.

#2: Dr. Murray Banks- "How To Live With Yourself, Or, What To Do Until The Psychiatrist Comes" (1965)

I've had this album since I was about ten years old and have always been rather fond of it, so it was fun to hear it again.
The late Dr. Murray Banks (he passed away as recently as 2008, aged 91) was a psychology professor who toured for many years as a lecturer and after-dinner speaker. He made a series of albums about various topics- some are straightforward, but on others, especially this one, Dr. Banks uses a lot of humor to get his point across. He discusses the psychology of human behavior and human desires, an interesting subject in itself, and illustrates his various points with funny stories. He does it quite well- many of the stories are genuinely funny, and get a tremendous response from the audience. He also seems to have a natural instinct for performing- he ad-libs when a joke doesn't go over ("Would you explain it to this side of the room so we can go on?"), does character voices, and overall comes across as a charming entertainer, as well as making some interesting observations about human nature. Of course, this album is fifty years old, so some of the psychology is a bit dated, but the roots of his ideas are timeless, as is much of the humor.

#3: Belle Barth- "If I Embarrass You, Tell Your Friends" (1960)

Belle Barth, birth name Annabelle Salzman, was a comedienne who told dirty jokes in nightclubs after hours. This album, her first, sold a million copies. Barth is something of a cross between Sophie Tucker and the late Joan Rivers, with a dash of Redd Foxx's raunchiness.
Back in 1960, of course, dirty jokes were to be told strictly between adults in the privacy of their homes. Today, you can hear much dirtier stuff than this every day on television. In fact, Barth sometimes pulls her punches- instead of saying all the dirty words, she'll substitute Yiddish, or use cute euphemisms like calling male private parts a "yo-yo"- although that's undoubtedly because she would have been arrested at the time for using a word like "penis" onstage, even in a 4 A.M. show. So, her material comes across as slightly naughty and coy by today's standards rather than the outright filth it was probably perceived as at the time.
But is she funny? Sometimes. There are certainly a few good one-liners in there, but a lot of it is bantering with the crowd and the kind of thing you would find in the average dirty joke book. It's an enjoyable album for those who like the risque Borscht Belt style, but I'm not in a hurry to buy more of her albums.

That's it for today. See you tomorrow for some Count Basie!