Raised on records

Michael Flanders and Donald Swann

Stan Freberg

I was shaped by records. First by the old 78rpm discs made of bakelite or shellac, then, more profoundly, by the ubiquitous vinyl seven-singles and LPs.

Young people today, raised on the sterile sounds of CDs and, heaven forbid, MP3 players and iPods, can have very little idea of what it was like in those heady days, which, to my mind,  were the heyday of recorded music.

It started, as a kid growing up in East London, with those old 78s. And these were played on a gramophone. No the device wasn’t as old as the His Master’s Voice image shown on many of those early records – the one with the dog in attendance.

But it was all contained inside a wooden, horizontal cabinet on legs which was opened by lowering a flap in the front. The loudspeakers were behind a layer of fabric, with the radio dial on the right and the turntable on the left. It was the turntable which was the blighter – because it rested on a grey, steel base which was a magnificent repository of static electricity. We kids were often quite terrified, when we were very young, of this rather malign turntable. For no reason at all it would give us a nasty little shock when we put our tiny fingers on any of its cold metallic parts.

It was on this old gramophone that we first listened to the radio, mainly on shortwave at that stage, and to our parents’ collection of records in the late 1950s. 

Just a word on “records” for those too young to remember them. The old “78s” turned at 78 revolutions per minute (rpm). They were hard, thick and brittle. The ubiquitous vinyl 7-singles were plastic discs with a seven-inch (17,8cm) diameter and a song on each side which you played at 45rpm. Long-playing records (LPs) had a diameter of about 29cm, slightly larger than the old 78s, and were played at 33rpm. Most record-players would have a switch to enable you to play albums at the various speeds.

I can’t recall much of the radio we listened to in the late 1950s and early 1960s (I was born in 1956), but a few of the records stick in my memory. Firstly, there was an old 78 with one long song, Bonnie Black Bess, about a highwayman, which contained the regularly repeated lines: “Giddy up, giddy up, bonny black Bess /Only a few more miles I guess.” This culminated in: “… Dick Turpin rode to York.”

A quick Google search revealed that there was a folk song called Bonnie Black Bess dating back to 1888, by John Ashton. But the lyrics aren’t the same. The song we listened to was full of drama. I recall a pistol shooting, a lot of galloping on that black stallion, and everything apparently happening in darkness or in a forest, as Dick Turpin held up carriages and robbed the rich occupants, ala Robin Hood, though who knows if he ever gave to the poor.

My Web surfing revealed, on the reliable Wikipedia, that Dick Turpin (1706-1739) was a notorious, swashbuckling English highwayman. But precisely who performed that version of an old English song about him which became popular remains a mystery.

At about the same time we also listened to the rather quaint Doggy In The Window. “How much is that doggy in the window? / The one with the waggily tail?” This, it emerges from Wikipedia, was a song written by Bob Merrill in 1952, adapted from a well-known Victorian music-hall song. The best-known version was evidently by Patti Page and recorded in 1952. It went to No 1 in the US. But it is possible we heard the Lita Roza version, from 1953, which went to No 1 in the UK.

The song is about a young woman who “must take a trip to California”. She wants to buy a dog for her boyfriend so he won’t be lonely. Hardly a substitute, I would have thought. 

Another tune from this era was about a woman who sings, in a tired, desperate voice: “I took me harp to a party, but nobody asked me to play / So I took the darned thing away.” This song, it emerges from a Web surf, was written by Noel Gay and performed by Gracie Fields. This presented a problem, because on Wikipedia’s Gracie Fields pages I found no reference to it, including among the list of her top songs. 

Nevertheless, it is humbling to realise how much one has missed, by being born so late in the history of the world. Fields was born Grace Stansfield above a shop in Rochdale, Lancashire, in 1898 and died in 1979. According to Wikipedia she was “an English singer and comedian who became one of the greatest stars of both cinema and music hall”. Yet for someone of my generation, all I know of her, really, is that odd little song about a harp. If, indeed, it was she who sang it. According to Wikipedia, her most famous song was Sally. It became her theme and was worked into the title of her first cinema film, Sally In Our Alley (1931), which was a major box office hit.

It was all rather strange fare, really, but this was the post-war era, when modern music was still a distant dream, apart from the rock and roll which a bunch of inventive descendants of African slaves in America were shaping out of an even older tradition for singing the blues, gospel music and jazz. But I don’t recall any of their records lying around our house in the 1950s.

The next record I do recall was not a 78 but a “modern” 33rpm vinyl LP by American comedian Stan Freberg. It was called The Stan Freberg Show and was probably one of our first experiences of the American accent. One sketch parodied the slo-o-o-ow drawl of cowhands on the range in the Wild West. As two cowboys inspect a ranch boundary, one finally, after many pregnant pauses, expresses the opinion that, yes, indeed, “it looks like somebody sure cut through that fence alright”. 

Freberg was born in 1926 in Los Angeles – the same year as my mother – and, according to Wikipedia, was still active on radio in the US in 2006, hosting a syndicated anthology of old-time radio shows. 

It is fascinating researching the life of a famous person about whom you had only the faintest knowledge – one long-playing album you last heard before you were ten. It emerges that Freberg was a highly original comedian and satirist, who is also credited with being the first person to introduce humour into television advertising. 

Initially, as I tried to recall what was on that one album, I wrote that there was “a song on it that spoke about Pop Grass, or Pop Jazz”. My subsequent research has revealed that the album would have been a recording from The Stan Freberg Show, on CBS Radio. Because of the controversial nature of its content, the show only ran for 15 episodes in 1957. That album we listened to would surely have been a collection of sketches from his radio show. And the cover I recall had the very picture found on the Net and used above. Clearly, here was a man who explored the opportunities radio offered like few others had done before – and like Spike Milligan and the Goons were doing in the UK on the BBC at about the same time. Anyway, back to Pop Grass, or Jazz. The story here was that in fact Freberg, the son of a Baptist minister, refused to have his show sponsored by a tobacco company, as its predecessor was. Indeed, sponsorship was an ongoing problem, hence the short run of the show. So what Freberg did was to run mock commercials in lieu of actual advertisements. And what I recall from probably the age of six or eight, was Freberg running a spoof ad for a product called “Puffed Grass”. Yes, neither “pop”, nor “jazz”, but “puffed grass”. And reading about it on Wikipedia, a line from the “ad” comes back clear as day: “It’s good for Bossie, it’s good for me and you! Puffed Grass!” 

I think I have long underestimated my father, who was obviously into some very good, indeed quite intellectual, stuff back then. How sad he never heeded Freberg’s warnings on smoking… 

In researching this, I had the most uncanny sensation. It was like travelling back in time 40 or more years. Instant déjà vu, if you like. Wikipedia reveals that one Freberg sketch was about Cold War gamesmanship between the US and the Soviet Union, in which both were portrayed as casinos engaged in an “ever-escalating public relations battle”. The casinos are the El Sodom and the Rancho Gomorrah. As I read the words “Rancho Gomorrah” it all came flooding back. As a young kid I would have had no inkling of what this was all about, but those words are embedded in my memory. This sketch culminates in the “ultimate tourist attraction, The Hydrogen Bomb”. Indeed, even that comes back to me. “The Hydrogen Bomb” was announced over a loudspeaker, as I recall, like just another bit of fun entertainment. The sketch was called Incident at Los Voraces, a thinly veiled reference to Las Vegas.

Another political satire I grew up with on that album is not mentioned on Wikipeida. It was a skit on the then already ongoing crisis in the Middle East. Gaza Strip was sung as a dancehall-type tune, with the “Gaza Strip” becoming a raucous song performed with dancing girls. It seemingly had nothing to do with that sliver of Palestinian territory which remains beset by turmoil to this day. 

Freberg’s version of Old Man River (“he just keeps rolling along”) introduced us, at this stage subliminally, to the clever use of satire. Here, I remember, he refers to “Elderly” Man River – so as not to offend anyone getting on in years. What does Wikipedia have to say about it? “Another sketch from the CBS radio show, entitled Elderly Man River, anticipated the Political Correctness movement by decades. Daws Butler plays Mr Tweedly, …” Whoa! Hold it! Stop right there! I remember that too. “What now, Mr Tweedly?” I can distinctly hear Freberg saying as he is constantly interrupted by this official for his politically incorrect lyrics as he sings the song. Wikipedia says Tweedly was “a representative of a fictional citizens’ radio review board, who constantly interrupts Freberg with a loud buzzer as Freberg attempts to sing Old Man River.” Tweedly objects first to the titular word “old”, “which some of our more elderly citizens find distasteful”. As a result, the song’s lyrics are progressively and painfully distorted, as Freberg struggles to turn the classic song into a form which Tweedly will find acceptable “to the tiny tots” listening at home (I was one of them).” Freberg was apparently most proud of the following: “He don’t, er, doesn’t plant ’taters, er, potatoes ... he doesn’t pick cotton, er, cotting... and them-these-those that plants them is soon forgotting”. I remember this as if it were yesterday. 

While Freberg brought us a sense of the great US comedy tradition, it was an album or two by Flanders and Swann which held greater sway, reflecting as they did, for me, the first in a series of British comic shows which have helped shape the world and are of unparallelled quality. (The Goon Show, Monty Python and Rowan Atkinson will be dealt with later, God willing.) 

Michael Flanders and Donald Swann’s At The Drop Of A Hat has become an iconic album, along with most of their others. For a young boy learning language and acquiring a vocabulary there could be few better teachers than the wheelchair-bound Flanders, who wrote the lyrics to numerous classics. Swann, with his higher-pitched voice and virtuoso piano technique, was the perfect foil for the beautifully spoken Flanders.

Even today, children at pre-primary schools are sometimes taught one of his most famous songs, The Hippopotamus: “Mud, mud, glorious mud / Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood / So follow me, follow / Down to the hollow / And there let us wallow / In glorious mud”. Lovely stuff. The song and the mud.

Flanders (1922-1975) and Swann (1923-1994) were prolific. Having both gone to school at Westminster, and then to Christ Church, Oxford, they started collaborating before the war, and then joined up by chance again in 1948. Between 1956 (when I was born)  and 1967 they staged their long-running two-man revues At The Drop Of A Hat and At The Drop Of Another Hat. Both were recorded in concert, along with several studio-based albums. In all, says Wikipedia, they jointly composed over 80 comic songs. 

Flanders’s monologues between songs on the live recordings were as endearing and delightful as his songs. They offered us an insight into English culture which we, as mere colonials on the tip of Africa, would otherwise never have had.

Flanders had contracted polio in 1943. So on stage, both men remained seated, with Swann behind his piano and Flanders in a wheelchair.

Flanders played with words like kids play with toys. “I’m a gnu, I’m a gnu / The g-nicest work of g-nature in the zoo /  I’m a gnu, that’s G-N-U / You really ought to know w-who’s w-who.”

A more adult song was Have Some Madeira M’Dear (“it’s really much nicer than beer”). As Wikipedia notes, it is a “song about seduction, full of complex word-play, including three oft-quoted examples of syllepsis”. For those who, like me, need reminding what syllepsis is, the Concise Oxford informs us it is “a figure of speech in which a word is applied to two others in different senses (e.g. caught the train and a bad cold) or to two others of which it grammatically suits one only (e.g. neither they nor it is working).” 

“A chorus of yums ran around the table: yum-yum-yum-yum / Except for Junior / Who put down his fork, pushed away his plate and said / I don’t eat people / Eating people is wrong.” This is how I recall The Cannibals sketch. Thanks to Wikipedia, I am able to pick up on a line that would have passed me by. The father then responds to this attitude with: “It must have been someone he ate – he used to be a regular anthropophaguy.” 

The English tendency to look down their noses at their continental neighbours was captured in the short verse, Lines On Meeting a Portuguese Man-of-War While Bathing: “I have no wish to share the seas / With jellyfishes such as these … / Particularly Portuguese.” The Ps starting those last two words are pronounced with sneering, pointed relish.

Flanders’s sense of the absurd was to be picked up by many other brilliant English (and Scottish) comedians in the succeeding decades. It was an integral part of his humour. Even a little piece like this, has great depth: “Said the mouse to the elephant: Ooo, aren’t you big / Said the elephant: aren't you small / Said the mouse to the elephant: yes, I know, I’ve not been well at all.”

The Bestiary Of Flanders And Swan was packed with lovely tales about animals as diverse as the armadillo, the duckbilled platypus and the Wompom, a hybrid, fictional cure-all which they sing about at break-neck speed. “You can do such a lot with a Wompom / You can use every part of it, too / For work or for pleasure / It’s a triumph, it’s a treasure / Oh there’s nothing that a Wompom cannot do / Nothing that a Wompom cannot do…”

There was so much brilliant writing on these songs. In The Whale (Mopy Dick), for instance, he notes that “The bottle-nosed whale is a furlong long and likewise wise / But headstrong strong / And he sings this very lugubrious song / As he sails through the great Arctic Ocean Blue.”

The Sloth rues his slothfulness, as he hangs around upside-down, from where “every smile’s a frown”.  “I could paint a Mona Lisa, I could be another Caesar … / But I just don’t have the time”. 

I once borrowed an image from The Ostrich for a cartoon I attempted about the political leaders in this country. This song, much of it narrated, concerns an ostrich which finds itself in a nuclear testing ground, and instead of heeding warnings to depart, simply buries its head in the ground. A few feathers are all that remain after the blast. 

For young boys growing up, The Spider was a delightfully scary tale about a confrontation with “a great big hairy spider in the bath”. As the tension mounts, Flanders sings: “Now you think you’ve flushed it down the plughole / But here it comes a-crawling up the chain …” 

Probably my favourite song from At The Drop Of A Hat was A Transport Of Delight, about the ubiquitous red double-decker London bus. “That big six-wheeler, scarlet-painted, London Transport, diesel-engined, ninety-seven-horse-power om-ni-bus.” It is sung by a Cockney driver: “When cabbies try to pass me, before they overtakes / I sticks me flippin’ hand out / As I slams on all me brakes.”

Further clever word games were to be found on “A Song Of Reproduction”, which had nothing to do with the birds and the bees, but was an attempt by a luddite to come to grips with that great new invention of the time, High Fidelity. “It’s like having an orchestra actually playing in your living room,” says Flanders in his introduction. To which he adds, as an aside: “Frankly, I can’t think of anything I’d like less than to have an orchestra actually playing in my living room.” Anyone who’s been burdened by a technical whiz who can speak for hours about arcane mechanical matters without you understanding a jot of what he’s on about, will fully identify with this piece. In it, you also have the hi-fi installation expert saying: “Raise the ceiling four feet, move the fireplace from that wall to that wall, you’ll still only get the stereophonic effect if you sit in the bottom of that cupboard.”

The chameleon gave Flanders great scope for creativity: “If that chameleon were me, I’d be ashamed to sham / Each night, all white between the sheets / I’d wonder who I am.”

But enough of Flanders and Swann. As a kid I also had a strange attachment for a song called “Bimbo”, which in those innocent years never, I believe, had the connotation it has today. My research on Wikipedia reveals it was probably a recording made by Jim Reeves in 1965 that we listened to. My mother, Brenda, was a Reeves fan. This was definitely a 7-single, so it seems to fit. Despite the dominant role of British pop, led by the Beatles, it was still easy to be sucked into enjoying a sweet little ditty that went: “Bimbo, Bimbo, where you gonna go-i-o? / Bimbo, Bimbo, what ya gonna do-i-o? / Bimbo, Bimbo, does your mommy know / That you're goin’ down the road, to see your little girl-i-o?”

We grew up in a house near the sea at Bonza Bay, about 5km up the coast from East London. My dad was an architectural draughtsman, my mom a nursing sister. There were five of us kids. We had electricity, but no mains water. We relied on a water tank, which captured rain water from the flat-roofed house. For baths, we made a nice fire in an inside geyser in the bathroom. It was a bit crowded, but lekker.

Meanwhile, another sweet person who made life even more lekker was Julie Andrews. We first heard her on the soundtrack of My Fair Lady, but it was The Sound Of Music which clinched it for me. Naturally, we had this record, which was played often. Everyone saw the movie when it came out in 1965. Indeed, given that this was before the advent of videos and television in SA, many saw it literally dozens of times. Those songs have also become absolutely iconic in the history of recorded music. Julie Andrews was such a pure-as-the-driven-snow sort of character in the movie I couldn’t help falling desperately in love with her.

My Fair Lady taught my three brothers, one sister and I something about elocution. Based on George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, we discovered that even the English, especially those growing up on the wrong side of the tracks, have “bad” accents. “Why can’t the English learn to speak?” asks Rex Harrison’s character, Professor Higgins in his plummy accent.

So there we were, little urchins standing not more than two ticks and a bricky high, listening to all these records from a tender age. But what of the radio? Initially, it was the only accessible form of electronic entertainment – unlike today, when there is a glut of technological gadgetry at every child’s fingertips. Our head-in-the-sand National Party government delayed introducing television for decades until 1976, which meant our little imaginations were spurred on by the magical medium of radio. Our generation was probably the last to rely to such a large extent on the imagination when it came to entertainment. Indeed, radio is sometimes called “the theatre of the mind”, while TV is disparagingly known as “the theatre of the mindless”. (This, of course, does not apply to the best of British television, which can be utterly brilliant.)

So what captured our young imaginations? The best programme by far was the series, No Place To Hide, featuring Mark Saxon and Sergei (a WASP and a Russian working together, despite the cold war – shock, horror). There were many others which had us spellbound throughout our childhood. But it was popular music – that great catalyst for the youth revolution of the Sixties – that really fuelled our quest for making new discoveries. 

This revolution, fomented by The Beatles, held us all captive for decades to come. Indeed many, like myself, never managed to escape it. And of course we wouldn’t have wanted to either.