Comedy

Vivian Stanshall: Not an Eccentric

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band played the role of jester in the court of the Beatles in the late 1960s, and Vivian Stanshall was the charismatic, curious leader of the leaderless and leader-resistant Bonzos. The missing link between the Beatles and Monty Python (if one was needed), in 1967 the Bonzos appeared in both “Magical Mystery Tour” (partially entertaining the Beatles with a performance of “Death Cab for Cutie”) and in the pre-Python but mostly Python-staffed afternoon television show, “Do Not Adjust Your Set.”

Here, Michael Palin of the Pythons introduces the Bonzos, and Stanshall does his best worst Elvis in “Death Cab for Cutie.”

 
Stanshall, a writer for whom no declarative statement could be too perplexing (“I’ve never met a man I didn’t mutilate”), was paired up with Neil Innes, a songwriter whose Beatles-esque melodies led not only to to the Bonzos being produced by Paul McCartney (the minor hit “I’m the Urban Spaceman”) but also to a Beatles lawsuit after music for his parody group, “The Rutles,” was thought to be too reminiscent for comfort. (Further cementing the Beatles-Python link, “The Rutles” was an Eric Idle project.)

Their collaboration “Mr. Apollo” combines an almost-too-catchy Innes tune with Stanshall’s absurdly deep baritone and lengthy fake sales pitch for an exercise gimmick: “Five years ago, I was a four-stone apology. Today, I am two separate gorillas. No tiresome exercises. No tricks. No unpleasant bending.” It also features a heavy metal guitar lick invented about six months before heavy metal.

 
Vivian Stanshall was born 71 years ago tomorrow, March 21; few people have spent their lives (his ended in a house fire in 1995, a sadly Stanshall-esque end if anyone did not deserve one) confounding more people and delighting in the resulting stares than he. After the Bonzos disbanded, if they ever truly did—the group’s set lineup varied in name and number whimsically and reunited a number of times, so it could be said that its members simply wandered away—Stanshall became known as a presence. He was a person about whom wild anecdotes proliferated, usually starring Stanshall, his friend Keith Moon, and their friend, alcohol; whose voice was heard on overnight radio talk shows that had no set sign-off time except daybreak; and who semi-occasionally emerged with enormously creative, incredibly language-saturated audio theater pieces, usually concerning the fictional family of Sir Henry Rawlinson. (In one of the oddest of all possible odd coincidences, Stanshall and the real Sir Henry share a death date, precisely one century apart, March 5, 1895 and 1995.)

Joycean in its surreal ambitions, Stanshall’s “Sir Henry at Rawlinson End” always opts for the obscure joke and invented pun over the profound statement, which resembles Joyce in many of his Joycean ambitions, too. The recorded piece was made into a film starring Trevor Howard and Stanshall that may as well have been a rumor until its DVD release a few years ago. One can piece together the hour-long film from clips on YouTube. The Rawlinson family saga offers an English Addams Family whose adventures take place in a landscape of long-standing family games with long, obscure, histories behind them and traditions that must be celebrated by exploding them. It is aristocracy viewed through the eyes of an alien, not just to these traditions, but to the idea of tradition.

The opening sentence: “English as tuppence, changing yet changeless as canal-water, nestling in green nowhere, armored and effete, bold flag-bearer, lotus-fed Miss Havishambling, opsimath and eremite, feudal-still reactionary Rawlinson End. The story so far.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pa4gPaQjC1M
 
According to radio legend John Peel, the friend on whose programs the Rawlinson stories were first dictated, Stanshall’s appetite for drink and tranquilizers hindered his career. “Unreliability and prevarication, on an epic scale,” is how Peel mournfully described his friend’s habits of work, in a comment about how working with Stanshall could yet be extraordinary and worth the effort.

In most articles, Stanshall is described as an eccentric, a member of the famous English eccentric class. No other country is said to celebrate its eccentrics more than England, or to reflect more on the idea of having a group of people called “eccentrics,” and Stanshall offered plenty of material to draw from: living on a houseboat, showing up in a Nazi officer’s uniform for photo sessions with Keith Moon, cultivating an epic beard. He dressed the part, alternating between hobo-chic and carnival barker classy.

 
But for those who insisted he was an eccentric in the classic, “English” sense, Stanshall had a reply:

A few years ago a woman from the Daily Mail phoned to inform me they were doing a piece on Sir John Betjeman and they would like me to companion him in the article, I being representative of the younger English eccentric. She wanted to know if was still doing it. Well, I don’t do it, I’m merely myself, … I’m whatever you like, just don’t expect me to join in. I do like games, though. You see, I’m not different for the sake of being different, only for the desperate sake of being myself. I can’t join your gang: you’d think I was a phony—and I’d know it.

“For the desperate sake of being myself.” That is as true and good a personal code as any statement one could come up with towards having a worthwhile life.

Around the time of the “Sir Henry at Rawlinson End” film, 1980, Stanshall provided his friend Steve Winwood, one of the least cynical or eccentric of performers, with a lyric that is confident in its obscurity (“my rock and roll is putting on weight”) and yet sweet and plain in its sentiment (“This time to the sky I’ll sing, if clouds don’t hear me/To the sun I’ll cry, and even if I’m blinded/I’ll try moon gazer…because with you I’m stronger”). “Arc of a Diver” does not seem like a Vivian Stanshall lyric because it is.

 

She bathes me in sweetness, I cannot reveal
For sharing dreams I need my woman
This humble expression…meagerly dressed
My eyes so mean it has no meaning
But jealous night and all her secret chords
I must be deaf…on the telephone…I need my love to translate
 
I play the piano, no more running honey
This time to the sky I’ll sing if clouds don’t hear me
To the sun I’ll cry and even if I’m blinded
I’ll try moon gazer, because with you I’m stronger…I’m stronger…I’m stronger
 
Arc of a diver…effortlessly…my mind in sky and when I wake up
In daytime or nighttime…I feel you near
Warm water breathing…she helps me hear
But jealous night and all her secret chords
I must be deaf…on the telephone…I need my love to translate
 
This time to the sky I’ll sing if clouds don’t hear me
To the sun I’ll cry and even if I’m blinded
I’ll try moon gazer…because with you I’m stronger
 
But jealous night and all her secret chords
I must be deaf…on the telephone…I’ll need my love to translate
 
This time to the sky I’ll sing if clouds don’t hear me
To the sun I’ll cry and even if I’m blinded
I’ll try moon gazer…because with you I’m stronger
 
Lean streaky music…spawned on the streets…I hear it but with you I have to go
Cause my rock ‘n’ roll…is putting on weight…and the beat. it goes on
Arc of a diver…effortlessly…my mind in sky and when I wake up, woah-oh-oh
Daytime and nighttime…I feel you near
Warm water breathing…she helps me hear
 
But jealous night and all her secret chords
I must be deaf…on the telephone…I’ll need my love to translate
 
With you my love we’re going to…raid the future
With you my love we’re going to stick up the past
We’ll hold today to ransom…’til our quartz clock stop…until yesterday
Woah, until yesterday
Until yesterday
Til our quartz clock stop

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A Thought on David Brenner

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

For a ten-year-old who was starting to notice two things: 1. the grown-up world had a lot of gaps in its “logic” and 2. laughter felt better than confusion, David Brenner and his droll commonsense stand-up act turned out to be a revelation. He was one of the first stand-ups I unofficially studied; I remember listening to his albums over and over, searching for the moment, the word, that would make the recorded audience laugh. That makes me pretty sure he resides in my perspective on the world. As Johnny Carson introduces him in the clip below, it was a “somewhat warped” perspective.

The news that David Brenner died today at age 78 reminded me that I had not thought about Mr. Brenner for a long time, much like most things I liked when I was 10. A love for the New York Yankees, strawberries, and comedy in general are about the only things I have in common with my ten-year-old self.

In my teen years I ignored or even rejected anything I had liked when younger, and of course, like every teenager worth the term, I also rejected anything my parents liked. So, with prejudices like these, David Brenner stood no chance in my world. He was not “edgy,” not “interesting,” not a lot of things. He was not absurd like Steve Martin and not dry like Steven Wright and not inflamed like Sam Kinison or angry like Bill Hicks. He was in my comedy DNA, but he was one of my mom’s favorite stand-ups, so he was old.

But I also liked, even loved, “old” comedians. The old vaudevillians, all of them, I adore. When YouTube started to become popular, one of the first things I looked up was Ed Sullivan clips—I wanted to see if my recollection of certain comics was right or not. I like to think I was the first person to enter “Myron Cohen” as a search term on YouTube. My parent’s generation of performers? Not old enough, I guess.

One of the first Tweets I saw today about Brenner’s death asked, “Why is it so hard to believe he was 78?” Almost every photo of him in his obituaries today is from the 1970s, with a helmet of hair and Johnny Carson nearby. He remains ever 40. Even though he was still a working stand-up at his death, he was not a television presence and had not been one for almost 20 years, when he briefly had a show on MSNBC. (Who hasn’t “briefly” had a show on MSNBC by now?) He had a couple hit books in the ’90s, but so did every comic.

Something did not happen for David Brenner that happened for a lot of comics when the next generation came along: They did not bring him on their shows very often. When Johnny moved on and Jay and Dave took up permanent residence at 11:35 p.m. and yet more talk shows proliferated, Brenner was an only occasional presence, even with the larger number of late-night stand-up slots available. Brenner was dubbed “the father of observational humor,” but only after “observational humor” became a term, after Jerry Seinfeld and Paul Reiser and others were making millions talking about how interesting it could be to find mundane the things that … actually were mundane.

Among Brenner’s generation, George Carlin started out doing fairly conventional characters before he became an unconventional character himself, one who noticed absolutely everything and filtered it through a jazz poet’s brain. Robert Klein was the cool history professor. Bill Cosby told shaggy-dog stories that made the familiar comfortable. Richard Pryor was a force of nature—the reason “Pryoresque” is not a term is because he was uniquely himself and made the unfamiliar uncomfortable. None were “observational comics,” none were professional noticers of the lack of logic in our everyday lives like David Brenner. He was one of the first.

Brenner did not yield details about his current life, but he reminisced about growing up in West Philadelphia with a novelist’s eye for detail; he did not do impressions, but he easily tossed out one-liners from cabbies he encountered and the like (they all sounded like him). He did not bring audiences into a tortured psyche like Richard Lewis; he was ever cheerful, and ever 1970s. When Johnny Carson started making his schedule easier and bringing in “guest hosts,” Brenner filled in 75 times, but all in the late ’70s and early ’80s. By the time Carson was retiring, the battle to replace him was between Letterman and Jay Leno and there were no other names.

David Brenner never found himself on the outside looking in and was thus never the subject of a “where are they now”-style re-discovery, but he also never got bigger than he was in the 1970s, when he appeared on almost every talk and game show and in every nightclub and medium size theater. For a time, he seemed as ubiquitous as a public utility, and then, for showrooms on the Vegas strip, he was a public utility: cheerfully reliable and pleasantly maintenance-free.

There are worse things to be said about a career. So even though I did not think often in recent years about the late David Brenner, I was aware he was still out there, still making people laugh. I have come to respect the people who are public utilities in our lives, and I only wish I had randomly written this appreciation yesterday instead of today, before an occasion brought it.

* * * *

The story that Steve Martin tells in “Born Standing Up,” his “autobio”: “I called the comedian David Brenner for advice. David was successfully guest-hosting The Tonight Show and filling theaters and clubs. Our paths had crossed, and we had exchanged phone numbers. I explained that I was getting jobs, but the travel costs were killing me. If I got five hundred dollars for an appearance, it would cost me three hundred just to get to it. He told me the deal he always proposed to club owners. He would take the door, and they would take the bar. He said he would hire someone to stand at the entrance with a mechanical counter to make sure he wasn’t being cheated.”—”Born Standing Up,” 146-7.

The Mag. Glass Pelican & You

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The Magnificent Glass Pelican (MGP) is a live half-hour radio comedy show that my friends and I have written, produced, and acted in for over two decades. Lately, it has been an improvised half-hour, produced by us and scripted live on-air.

It is broadcast from a college FM radio station during the school year, and even though none of us has had any connection with the school as an educational institution for many many years, no one seems to have noticed our graying hair and lack of school books, so the station keeps inviting us back. Or we bribed them when we could not help ourselves. This current season is our twenty-second.

That’s a lot of comedy.

Some of the members, “Pelicans” we call ourselves, have had long careers in the creative arts, some have gone on to careers in technical writing. Myself, I am retired. Among our influences are the usual suspects: Monty Python, Firesign Theater, Del Close. The late Matt Coleman, a beloved friend and eternally a Pelican, once declared to a newspaper interviewer that we “separate the wheat from the chaff and keep the chaff!”

Each Wednesday night at 7:30 p.m. (tonight), the MGP half-hour is broadcast on 88.7 FM WFNP (“The Edge”) in the Rosendale-New Paltz, New York, area or is streaming live here at this link. This is at 7:30 p.m. Eastern, and the broadcasts are not archived, so if you can check us out live tonight, thank you.

Here are two samples of our work, via my friend John’s SoundCloud stream; he is a founder of the Magnificent Glass Pelican and of the great rock/pop group, the Sweet Clementines. The first skit, “My Mother,” was written for us by our friend Brian Scolaro, who once upon a time shared a studio with us. I play the jury foreman. “We find the defendant guilty.”

And “Radio Pirates” is a personal favorite.

Again and always, thank you for listening.