Music

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.”

 
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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The Story of The MGP

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The Magnificent Glass Pelican (MGP) is a radio comedy, audio theater, live half-hour show that my friends and I have written, produced, and acted in for over two decades. 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 weren’t looking. This current season is our 22nd, I believe.

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. I am retired. Among our influences are the usual suspects: Monty Python, Firesign Theater, Del Close. The late Matt Coleman, a beloved friend and 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., the MGP half-hour is broadcast on 88.7 FM WFNP (“The Edge”) in the Rosendale-New Paltz, New York, area or live streaming 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.

Farewell, Pete Seeger

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In 1996, in my job of assistant editor at a weekly newspaper, I awarded myself the title of music reviewer for a single issue and attended a concert given at a local high school by Pete Seeger, who died today at age 94. (Our newspaper’s actual title-holder was only interested in rock concerts.) I wrote a review, knowing full well that a review is not what one writes regarding a Pete Seeger concert. An appreciation. A thank-you note. But not a mere review judging aesthetic merits.

It was a great night out, by the way.

For someone who grew up in the Hudson Valley during the 1970s like me, Pete Seeger was as much a part of the environment as the river itself and as real as the Catskills, and his effect on our lives was incalculable but tangible. His ship, the sloop Clearwater, brought attention to the polluted state of our beautiful river and helped lead to change. Launched in 1969, he and its crew sailed it to Washington, DC, in 1972 to deliver over a hundred thousand signatures to Congress during debate over the Clean Water Act, which was passed over President Nixon’s veto. The Hudson River that I remember standing beside as a little boy, bubbling with a soapy scum that became and remains my personal image of the word “pollution,” is not that river any longer.

Thousands of public school students in the mid-Hudson Valley visited the sloop at least once as a part of the checklist of things our local schools brought their pupils to; it was the first boat I ever set foot on.

Pete (no one called him “Mr. Seeger,” it seems) was an elderly man by the night I saw him sing in 1996, but he stood through the entire, intermission-less, two-plus hour show. He complained that his voice had lost a lot of its range, but really, that was his cover story for getting the audience to feel more comfortable with singing along. “You can reach the notes I can’t any more,” he stated, and then strove to hit them anyway.

And then came what remained for me the centerpiece, watching this master showman split the audience up by voice type and urge us in singing the lyrics and the “Hallelujah” chorus to “Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore”—just like he did in his legendary “Children’s Town Hall” album.

Pete Seeger was born to an artistic family and introduced to folk music at an early age. With plans to be a journalist, he attended Harvard, but dropped out after a couple years to forge his own path, first working for John Lomax and the folk song archives at the Library of Congress, then, after meeting Woody Guthrie, traveling alone and with Guthrie to wherever the music could be found and made.

His music career took off in fits and starts through the 1940s and ’50s, but it seemed that whenever he grew too popular, an accusation that he was too anti-war—before World War 2, he sang antiwar songs, but switched to entirely antifascist songs after America entered the conflict—or, later, a Communist—would almost derail that career, but not him. In the 1950s, his testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee led to him being blacklisted and fighting a contempt of Congress indictment for several years.

In one of the eternally great performances of a witness facing an unfriendly committee, Seeger refused to use the Fifth Amendment to protect himself and steadfastly refused to answer questions he called “improper.” The transcript, which I link to above, shows how Kafka-esque the proceedings were, and what a nightmare of single-sided questions the committee thrived on forcing people to answer. Several times, Seeger even offered to sing his answers, only to be rebuffed. If he had merely pleaded the Fifth, he would not have faced the contempt of Congress indictment, but Seeger was not the type to plea for anything.

Blacklisted from television and the major concert stages, he sang in church halls and high school auditoriums and helped found the Newport Folk Festival. Many years later, in 1967, Seeger was invited on to the Smothers Brothers prime-time television show to end the ban. He chose to sing “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” a parable he had written that is set in WW2 but was very translatable to the futile war we were fighting at the time. The show’s network, CBS, censored the song from the broadcast, continuing the blacklist. The Smothers Brothers fought hard, and Pete was re-invited to sing it in 1968.

Once upon a time, songs and words could get the attention of the powers at hand. It has been a privilege to share some time on this earth with this thin, powerful-voiced, banjo-picking, attention-getter.

* * * *
While I was writing today, I came across this video, produced by our local newspaper, the Times Herald-Record, of Pete Seeger singing and leading an audience (at a local high school, where else?) in “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” He coaxes a lovely rendition and offers an editorial comment that rouses the audience to cheers. It was recorded just before his 90th birthday—he was performing up until very recently, and appeared at a benefit concert in my town of New Paltz last fall—and it captures almost everything one needs to remember this grand man.