Vinyl Memories—To the Silent Majority, With Love

How’s about three cheers for the good guys
They don’t march and they don’t shout
So you never read about
The quiet men, who are the backbone of our land.

“Three Cheers for the Good Guys” (Harlan Howard)

1969 was not a good year for me. I graduated from high school and started college—and found myself increasingly out of sync with my context. I wanted to quietly learn Greek and master calculus, while my government looked on me as another body to be used in a failed exercise in something-or-other in Southeast Asia. Protests of this policy shut down classes and made learning difficult—sometimes impossible. Our relatively new President, a fellow named Richard Nixon, best known for his red-baiting activities as a Congressman and as the monumentally unpopular Vice-President under Eisenhower, was pushing a plan he called Vietnamization—the ludicrous concept that somehow, someway, the corrupt and incompetent regime in South Vietnam would be able to take over the war and run it successfully. On 3 November the old Idiot-in-Chief made one of the most amazing speeches I ever read, one of those pay-no-attention-to-the-man-behind-the-curtain moments, three parts artful dodging and one part divide-and-conquer.

The war, it seems, was not his problem, as he kept reminding us—he’d inherited it from his predecessors in the office. But he had a plan. A plan for peace. He believed it would succeed. It would be a “just peace through a negotiated settlement if possible, or through continued implementation of our plan for Vietnamization if necessary—a plan in which we will withdraw all of our forces from Vietnam on a schedule in accordance with our program, as the South Vietnamese become strong enough to defend their own freedom.” The important thing was that we present a united front to our enemies “for the more divided we are at home, the less likely, the enemy is to negotiate” and that the protests of the “vocal minority” who were actually being called on to fight the war should be ignored in favor of the “great silent majority of my fellow Americans”—older folk who could sit back at home and watch other people’s children being sent off as cannon-fodder in an endless war.

Ah, memories. In my limited circle what we knew about the war came primarily from its veterans, people who had been there and had lived through what seemed like a real-life black comedy. Maybe it was all bullshit—I don’t know—but they had no patience with the “silent majority” or “walking dead” as one guy I knew called them. Maybe the guys at the Pentagon have a plan, one veteran observed, but they sure as hell aren’t letting us in on it. Disjointed fragments from a time best forgotten—Kent State and Cambodia, Song My and Medina, Agnew and his “effete corps of impudent snobs”, the Berkeley Barb and the Free Press, and the Great American Hero William Calley, praised by the likes of Jimmy Carter and George Wallace.

It was a weird and wondrous time, with The War lurking behind everything we did. My personal connection with The War ended in September 1970 when the United States Army turned me down for the draft as being subject to “psychotic depression”. “Son,” one fellow gently explained to me as I was classified 1-Y (later 4-F), “you’d be more of a danger to our side than to the enemy.” I still don’t know what actually happened on that occasion—I suppose I had the mother of all panic attacks—but my impression at the time was that I got rejected because I couldn’t pee into a paper cup. I don’t suppose my disorientation or mild hallucinations helped matters much either. In any case when they kicked me out with my New Testament and a bus ticket to find my own way home I knew that The War and I were not destined to be on speaking terms any time soon, if ever.

I’d been collecting odd bits of vinyl for years—radio-station discards, Good Will rejects, bargain bin oddities—but in the early 70s I had a sort of competition going with a friend; I’d match his Wild Man Fischer with my Captain Beefheart, and so on. Sometime during 1971 I turned up something called To the Silent Majority With Love featuring the hit single “Sunday Morning Christian”. The “artist” was a certain Harlan Howard, whom I’d never heard of. The lyrics to the songs were printed on the back cover, and they combined self-pity, anti-intellectualism, and self-righteousness in a fine goulash. I had trouble believing it was intended seriously (the title alone seemed perfect as a satire), with songs like “Uncle Sam (I’m a Patriot)”, “Better Get Your Pride Back Boy”, and “Mister Professor”. I had to have it, and I quickly shared it with my friend.

Although it was clearly intended seriously, in some ways it surpassed my wildest expectations. In “Uncle Sam” the singer lamented that his tax-dollars were being taken away for the benefit of foreigners and millionaires and suchlike unworthy types, but concludes “and though I’ve got a complaint or two you can write my name in red, white and blue.” Yes, the perfect tool for Nixon’s vision of America. In “Sunday Morning Christian” he laments the way good Christians cheat and rob and lie and still turn up at church on Sunday “singing louder than the rest”. He doesn’t seem to draw the obvious conclusion from this, and makes sure we understand that the Good Guys (“Three Cheers for the Good Guys”) are restricted to Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. Buddhists, Freethinkers, and Atheists obviously need not apply. (“Thank God if we’re cheering for you.”) It’s even clearer in his paeon to anti-intellectualism, “Mister Professor”:

They’re under your influence, so hear my cry in the night
And if you go changin’ the good kids we sent you
Be sure that you’re right
On the subject of God if you have any doubts don’t discuss ‘em
For a teacher should teach and a preacher should preach
Not betrayin’ the people that trust ‘em
We sent you a good Christian boy and he knows right from wrong
Beware of the danger, don’t sent us a stranger back home

Rick Santorum would feel right at home here.

My buddy used to refer to the album as Better Get Your Hair Cut Boy, referring to the song “Better Get Your Pride Back Boy”:

I’m just a truck driver and I don’t think I know it all
But son you got thoughts in your mind that I don’t understand at all
They’re needin’ you boy and you’re sittin’ in your coffee house
Whatcha gonna do when your woman begs you save her from a mouse?
You better get your pride back boy,
Better get your pride back boy,
That’s the most important thing that the Lord ever gave you…

And repeat ad nauseum. With stuff like this Harlan Howard could give Janet Greene a run for her money.

While this may look like a sort of precursor to the whole Mad Tea Party Movement, Howard reflected a kindler, gentler era. He had sympathy for “the little dirt farmer” who “works all his life and leaves eight dollars to his kids and wife” where the modern conservative crowd would chant their mantra, “Let them die” and cheer. And at least old Howard thought kids should go to college, even if he didn’t want them actually learning anything. And when Mr. Jones sold him that defective car (“Sunday Morning Christian”) he didn’t rhapsodize about the wonders of the Free Market™; no, he sings “Mr. Jones I’d like you better if you robbed me with a gun.” And if he objects to “too many lazy people lookin’ for a hand out” he at least can feel sorry for “too many cold and hungry children walkin’ about” (“We Didn’t Build This World”). Short of actually doing something about it, of course. So far the right wing has come in forty years—but there’s still a lot of the same old shit there.

Yeah, okay, I have a certain fondness for Harlan Howard. His crazed meanderings took me through some dark times, and I was still including his “Mister Professor” and “Better Get Your Pride Back Boy” on anthology tapes for friends as late as the 1980s. Wikipedia tells me that he died almost exactly ten years ago, on 3 March 2002. It also credits him with a definition of a great country song: “Three chords and the truth.” This album definitely comes up a bit long on that first element, and way short on the second. Still, it perfectly encapsulates its little moment of time, like a prehistoric beetle trapped in amber.

Vinyl Memories: The Baroque Beatles Book

Many years ago, in some high-school class or other—World History, maybe—we had a guest presentation by an art teacher of four centuries or so of Western Art—slides and music, as I recall, depicting painting and sculpture while accompanied by examples of music from the various eras—Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and so on.

One bit that cracked me up was a piece selected for the Baroque section. Although it sounded as if it ought to be something by (say) Bach, it was actually a sort of orchestral fanfare version of “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” I asked the guest presenter about it when the question-and-answer session came, and he said it was from something called The Baroque Beatles Book by Joshua Rifkin. I didn’t say this, but I thought it was kind of a clever idea, using a familiar tune to illustrate the peculiarities of the era’s music, but that illusion was immediately shattered when a girl in my class raised her hand to ask what on earth did that piece have to do with the Beatles or “I Want to Hold Your Hand”? as she at least saw no similarity between them. Several others appeared to agree with that assessment, and the class went on.

This is an example of what I would have called a “travesty” at the time—though my Latin teacher said there was no such literary genre, pointed out that travesty and transvestite were from the same roots, and traced the components back to reconstructed Proto-Indo-European. But I digress. “Travesty”—a change of clothes—dressing one subject in the style of another. It’s an old sport. It can be done for humorous effect, as with the eighteenth-century Hamlet Travestie (which took aim as much at contemporary Shakespeare scholarship as at Shakespeare himself), or seriously, as with the Duke Ellington versions of suites by Tchaikovsky and Grieg. Rifkin’s effort was somewhere in between, as indicated by his own notes: “We were absolutely crazy about this music,” he observed, meaning the Lennon-McCartney compositions. “Even if we had fun with it, it was fun with it in a way that was taking it seriously, giving it its due.”

I recently dug up my old copy of the record and listened to it again. My current system (essentially my computer) sucks, but it was still enjoyable. The liner notes, supposedly written by a Baroque musician looking for patronage, are at least mildly amusing:

I have also written, for your splendid court festivities—to which your unworthy servant hopes that he may be invited—a festive cantata, beginning with the words and melody of Please Please Me (your Lordship will remember how you sang it to me with a most melodious voice while we played croquet that afternoon, I still limp from the broken leg I suffered when you, justly displeased with my insolent correction of the way you sang the second half of the melody—how like an upstart of me to suggest to you that it was in the major mode—properly struck me).

About the same time I heard three Indian musicians do a version of “Greensleeves” featuring a sarod. That was memorable too, but it wasn’t recorded, and I can’t revisit it

Riding Out On a Rail

Take a sniff of this
Then play a little riff
Don't be afraid to try
Don't need no airplane
To get off the ground
There's more than one way to fly
Have a little taste, baby,
Don't hesitate,
Every hit don`t have to be a song
Gonna take you to the cosmos, baby,
And boogie with you all night long.

...Riding out on a rail, feels so fine
Talking about that cocaine express mainline,
Taking a midnight cruise.
Never lived up in the northlands,
But I've been snowblind
Out in San Berdoo
Snowblind in San Berdoo.

Gr-t-f-l D--d (Tony Scheuren)

On 10 August 1974 I was living on the Oregon coast sharing house space with my mother, step-father, and a step-brother whom I will call for the purposes of this narrative Bill, as that happens to be his name. It was an interesting moment in time; President Nixon had just resigned and the fellow that was taking over, Gerald Ford, was largely an unknown quantity. Bill and I had marked the occasion of the resignation by eating all the frozen fish in the house; this because Bill had asked what a large red button on the refrigerator did, incautiously pushing it at the same time. Well, what it did was send the refrigerator into its defrost cycle, which on a hot summer day meant that the frozen fish had to be eaten...

We only got two stations on the radio then—I'm not totally sure why, now, to be honest—but one of them was a free-form rock station from Eugene, and I remember it playing away in the background as we frantically wrapped fish in newspaper and tried to get the refrigerator through its defrosting cycle before deciding we had to cook what we had. They had one of the best radio news people ever—I wish I could remember her name—Melinda something maybe—and I remember her dispassionate rundown on Nixon's entire career, complete with excerpts from his famous speeches—running as a counterpoint to our battle with the frozen food.

Bill and I had the house to ourselves at the moment for whatever reason, but our folks returned on Saturday, 10 August, bringing with them Aunt K, and things were festive. It was a Saturday, and on Saturdays the Eugene station played The National Lampoon Radio Hour. It was a favorite of mine at the time; I'd already discovered the albums Radio Dinner and Lemmings, and I liked the humor. I particularly enjoyed the song parodies. Burlesques were fairly common in that era; parodies were much rarer, and some of their efforts were pretty damn good. So that hot August day we all gathered around the radio and listened to it.

The episode was the one known as The Canada Show, and it started off with a lukewarm parody of something called "The Americans," a recording of an editorial written by a Canadian who was damn sick and tired of hearing the Americans being kicked around by the foreign press. To be honest I thought the original was pretty lame at the time, and the takeoff didn't impress me that much, though there were a couple of good lines: "I, for one, am damned glad the Americans had the generosity to invade Canada three times or we'd never have found out who our real friends are" for instance. And my stepfather laughed over the adventures of a Canadian library official after the nation's only copy of the Kama Sutra, now months overdue in the frozen north. And then came the moment that I, personally, have never forgotten.

There was the familiar guitar work, and then the voice—was that really the "sensitive whining of Neil Young"? He sang of his search for the ideal woman—the girl who would "keep my bed warm, and keep my shorts clean. I need a maid to give for free, ooo-ooh, and sew patches on my jeans." I was entranced. I was savagely depressed at the time, and the song suited my mood perfectly.

Gonna go home now, where I can grow old
With the cowgirl of my dreams.
Gonna stayed stoned now,
Just stare out my basement window and scream
Aa-aaa!

When the final words faded into the sunset—"Topanga Canyon freaks, you won't see me around no more..."—my stepfather remarked, "I knew Topanga Canyon way back when it was still Topanga Canyon."

The Neil Young parody was both written and performed by a relatively young singer-songwriter named Tony Scheuren. He'd been in the band Chamaeleon Church in the late sixties, along with Kyle Garrahan, Chevy Chase (yes, that Chevy Chase), and Ted Myers, and he'd been part of the final lineup of Ultimate Spinach. By late 1973 he'd joined the cast of National Lampoon's Lemmings, working alongside John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Rhonda Coullet, Nate Herman, Bob Hoban, and Zal Yanovsky. (This is not the cast that appeared on either the album or the videotape, by the way.) None of his compositions appear to have been featured in the show, however, which seems amazing to me, as he was one of the most gifted song-parodists of all time.

As Johnny Cash he mused about the true unsung heroes of the world—receptionists, locksmiths, and reupholsterers—and all black men who polish brass spitoons.

'Cause without invisible menders
And deep-fried donut tenders
Our country wouldn't stand a chance of getting by.

As James Taylor he looked forward to the coming of his methadone maintenance man; as Cat Stevens he mused over his S&M lover; and as the Grateful Dead he celebrated that "cocaine express mainline". Both music and lyrics were dead on. It's instructive, perhaps, to compare his work to others in the field—his Johnny Cash parody to Neil Innes' for example, or his James Taylor to Christopher Guest's and Sean Kelly's. In each case Scheuren is truer to the original, and cuts closer to the bone in his takeoff. Only Philip Pope comes as close musically, and maybe Liam Lynch lyrically, though that last is a tough call.

One Tony Scheuren parody I've never found a copy of is his Bob Dylan "Hurricane Carter" parody, celebrating the exploits of Patty Hearst. Ted Myers wrote about it in a piece I can no longer find, except as quoted by a Scheuren fan on YouTube:

Tony and I drifted apart for a number of years when I moved out to California in April of 1969. I didn't see him again until around 1977 when he was in Los Angeles working for the touring company of National Lampoon's show, Lemmings. He showed me his new songs, and we even did some recording together when he was in LA. But what really impressed me were these parody tapes Tony had made for the National Lampoon's radio show. They were brilliant: perfect vocal impersonations of people like Dylan, James Taylor and Neil Young. What's more, the songs they sang were completely original, new songs, with rippingly funny, satirical lyrics, and in the exact style of that artist. For instance, there was a Dylan send-up called 'Queen Of the S.L.A.,' chronicling the exploits of Patty Hearst in the style of Dylan's Hurricane Carter song, or there was a biting James Taylor parody called 'Methadone Maintenance Man' where he would nod out before the song was over.

For whatever reason Tony Scheuren's work has been neglected since his untimely death on Halloween, sixteen years ago. I wish I could have let him know how much I personally enjoyed his work, but he might not have appreciated it. I read somewhere (probably that same Ted Myers piece I can't find) that he regarded his parodies as throwaways, something to pass the time while working on more serious stuff. Maybe so—but it's a rare talent nonetheless.

His family has released an album of his solo (serious) work on Wham! records in 2003, which appears to be still available. When I wrote to Beacon Agency (which represents him) a while back, I was informed that an album of his parodies is in the works, and I personally am looking forward to it. For the moment, however, it is possible to enjoy his James Taylor and Neil Young parodies, courtesy of uploaders at YouTube. They should appear below this paragraph, always assuming I managed to embed them correctly.

Bobby "Boris" Pickett: A One Hit Wonder Passes On

I have a collection of 45s dating back to my childhood. (45s are small vinyl disks that can be decoded to play music with the appropriate mechanical device, known as a phonograph or record-player. They were the MP3s of my generation.) One of these is a thing put out by Garpax records, with a black-and-white picture-sleeve showing a monster against a background of tombstones. I don't know where or when I picked it up.

The song was something called "Monster Mash" sung by Bobby Pickett backed by the Crypt-kickers. Mr. Pickett sang, in a stunning Boris Karloff imitation, a strange piece about a mad scientist and his dancing monster. I'm sure you must have heard it; it resurfaces every Halloween like a bad penny taped to a cork in a bloodwort stew.

It's actually kind of a survivor in a way; this sort of macabre humor was once common. Spike Jones, at the end of his career, when he was trying desperately to compete with the likes of Stan Freberg and Mort Sahl, put out an entire album devoted to this sort of thing. Katie Lee was edgier, with songs like "When I Was a Little Girl" and "Group Therapy." And of course Tom Lehrer was way ahead of the curve with "A Hunting Song" and "Irish Ballad." Eventually even the Cultural Wasteland succumbed, in a somewhat sanitized way, with TV shows like The Addams Family and The Munsters. (Who can forget the exchange between Wednesday Addams and an Avon Lady?

Wednesday: Nobody uses anything like that except Uncle Fester. He uses a preservative.
Avon Lady: A preservative? Oh, to keep young?
Wednesday: No, just to keep.

Or maybe, who can remember it?)

"The Monster Mash" went right to the top of the charts, as I recall--though if I looked it up I'd probably find out that it was only #11 on the Billboard chart, or something. Still, I'm doing this from memory, and I may as well tell it my way.

It was 1962 and "The Monster Mash" went straight to the top of the charts only a couple of weeks after it was released. It was impossible to escape that Halloween. I'm thinking this was that strange Halloween, not long after the Columbus Day Storm, when trees were still lying across parts of houses, and debris was everywhere. My buddy and I felt we were too old to go out begging for candy, but we still got into costume (as a television and a wall socket, I think) to shepherd our younger brothers and sister and friends about.

It would be a decade before I heard of Bobby "Boris" Pickett again, and this time we were on the road in search of America, or maybe just a good time. As we crossed the country that summer of 1973 every station in every town seemed to be playing it. Why, I wondered. It's just because of the success of the horror film guy (now I can't remember his name--Portland's equivalent of SCTV's Count Floyd anyway), one of my fellow-travelers suggested. But that wouldn't explain why it's playing out here in Iowa, I replied. Nobody knew, and apparently nobody cared. But me. And I didn't care that much.

From all accounts Pickett took his one hit wonder status with a certain grace and style. He used to announce his performances by saying that he was going to do a medley of his hit--fair enough, I guess, though that line must have gray whiskers by now. And one hit is more than most performers get, though fewer than most musician's ambitions. And what a hit it was, sure to resurface every Halloween for years to come.

Bobby "Boris" Pickett passed away last Wednesday. A moment of silence, please.

(Once again, I am doing this without benefit of my notes, records, or library, so some of the titles above may well be wrong. Not to mention dates, persons, sequence of events, and the like. Ah, well.)