Notes on Allan Sherman

When I was a teenager, I went through a pretty intense Allan Sherman/Tom Lehrer phase. That was a little before Weird Al Yankovic became weird. Dr. Demento was definitely demented. But I think it had more to do with a girl named Marjorie I was dating who was a bigger fan than I.

When my 7-year old was picking out songs from my iTunes for a CD, he added Allan Sherman's "Pop Hates the Beatles" and all three kids instantly loved it. The song is cute and funny--even when insulting to their favorite band, the Beatles. A parody to the tune of "Pop Goes the Weasel," they are familiar with the sound. And it gave me (like a true homeschooling Dad) an opportunity to give them a slice of American cultural history from the early 60's, although that was even before my time. So I explained about girls fainting, and the British invasion and even changes in economic scales (the daughter in the song bought a pair of tickets for $47... we extrapolated that to hundred of dollars today). But silliness always wins out and the favorite line remains:

There's Beatles books and t-shirts and rings/and one thing and another
To buy my daughter all of these things/I had to sell her brother

So I picked up a CD of Allan Sherman and started listening again, and I came to have a better chance of listening and a clearer understanding of his songs as a cultural snapshot of the early 60's. I has always know him to be a parody of "the borscht belt" entertainers in the Catskills in the 50's and 60's, and certainly his Yiddish accents and constructions are familiar to me.

Everyone has no doubt heard his "Hello Muddah Hello Faddah" letter from Camp Grenada, his biggest and longest-lasting hit. It has an honored place amongst the novelty songs of the world, and deserves it.

"Harvey and Sheila" is a slice-of-life to the tune of the Jewish celebratory song "Hava Nagila." It explores the intrusion of letters, abbreviations,and acronyms into everyday life. But it also gives the listener an opportunity to understand a snapshot of American culture of the period. It was entertaining for me to have to explain all the abbreviations to the kids.

She shopped at A & P/he bought a used MG
They sat and watched TV/on their RCA
Borrowed from HFC/bought some AT&T
And on election day/worked for JFK
...
Traded their used MG/for a new XKE
Switched to the GOP/that's the way things go.

"Al and Yetta" similarly outlines the TV programming of the day to the tune of "Alouette"

Al 'n' Yetta/fans of Art Linkletta
And they love to/sing along with Mitch
They just found in TV Guide/reruns of December Bride.
(December Bride) TV Guide
(Mister Ed) Stay in bed
(Dorothy Gish) What a dish
Ohhhh......

I still need to look up (or ask my folks) who Loretta was and what door she came through.

In "Chim Chim Cheree" we learn of chemicals and mass marketing:

There's Tufsyn, and Retsyn, and Acrylan too,
And Marfac and Melmac and what else is new?
There's Orlon and Korlan, and there's Accutron,
And Teflon, and Ban-Lon, and so on and on.
These wonderful words spin around in my brain;
Each one is a mystery I cannot explain.
Like what does that Blue Magic whitener do --
Does it make blue things white, or make white things blue?

Putting them all together, I found myself thinking of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire," a musical history lesson, which even came with educational guides for teachers.

Hemingway, Eichmann, Stranger in a Strange Land
Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs Invasion
Lawrence of Arabia, British Beatlemania
Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston Beats Patterson
Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British Politician Sex
JFK, blown away, what else do I have to say?

And I started thinking, as a good sociologist might, that perhaps there was something to using song lyrics as cultural history lessons. Other songs I thought of that call out for an educational guides include Peter Gabriel's "Jeux Sans Frontier" and Tim Curry's "I Do the Rock."

Yet the oddest connection I made while reveling in Allan Sherman was about "Sarah Jackman," a parody of two old friends catching up on the phone, to the tune of "Frere Jacque."

Sarah Jackman, Sarah Jackman/How's by you? How's by you?
How's your brother Bernie/He's a big attorney.
How's your sister Doris/Still with William Morris.
How's your cousin Shirley/She got married early.
How's her daughter Esther/Skipped a whole semester.

Was this the precursor to the Nails' "88 Lines About 44 Women?"

Debbie-Rae had no such problems,perfect Norman Rockwell home.
Nina sixteen had a baby, left her parents lived alone.
Bobbie joined a new-wave band, and changed her name to Bobbie-sox.
Eloise who played guitar, sang songs about whales and cops.

And the one song that I came away from with new respect was "One Hippopotami," which tells us about the differences in word forms between singulars and plurals, and of course does a great butcher job on the English language, in particular words about pairs.

A paranoia is/a bunch of mental blocks
And when Ben Casey meets Kildaire/that's called a paradox
...
A paramecium/is not a pair
A parallelogram/is just a crazy square
Nobody knows just what/a paraphernalia is
And what is half a pair of scissors/but a single sciz?

In the end, go listen to some Allan Sherman. Have a few laughs and see what you learn! Maybe someday we'll start putting together lesson plans!

Subway Zoetrope

This weekend, I took my sons into Cambridge for a museum and Harvard trip. We visited the Museum of Natural History,a favorite of theirs and then went to my old house on campus, Lowell House, to take part in the Bells Symposium and to hear the old bells ring one last time. See here for more info, I'll spare you the details, fascinating as they are to me.

The museum was cool, and I enjoyed the bells symposium more than the kids, but my older son really got into hanging out in the bell tower watching the bells rung. But one of the coolest parts of our journey was on the subway. Now kids love trains, and unfortunately in our family schedules, we drive 99% of the time, but this time the commuter train to Boston and the subway to Cambridge worked for us.

I have not been on the subway in years, and I don't know if this is old news or brand-new technology, The MBTA has installed commercials on the subway walls. They went back to the future and used the same technology as old-fashioned zoetropes (remember those cartoon strips spinning in cylinders with slits cut in the side to see animation).

On the way into South Station, we saw Speed Racer zooming along in an ad for the new movie. On the way out of Central Square, we were invited to canoe in Vermont. I'm not one to love the insertion of advertising into every square inch of our lives, but this technology--and its appeal to a captive and bored audience--was very cool.

Guess it has been a while since my last T ride. The program maight have begun in 2002. Here's a link to more about it at techpark.net

Of Wikipedia and Widgets

As I teach my kids about the internet as an information repository, we have spent a fair amount of time talking about Wikipedia. Certainly it is a place to find out about anything, but it is a full of information whose veracity and neutrality are often called into question. My own position on the site, and the lesson I teach my children, is to treat it as resource but not a source.

This opinion is shared by many institutions. I checked with a high school English teacher of mine, Malcolm Flynn, now Assistant Headmaster at my alma mater Boston Latin School. He responds that school policy is that students may read it for general background but may not cite it as a source.

The issue of citing Wikipedia arose for me as I was browsing through a recent issue of 1to1, a marketing and customer service magazine I receive. I spotted this wondrous quote from an article by Jeremy Nedelka:

A widget, or more precisely Web widget, is defined by Wikipedia as a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any Web page by an end user without requiring additional programming.

My first problem here is, not surprisingly, the phrase "defined by Wikipedia." I'm not sure how a writer, a technology writer moreover, can get away with defining anything out of Wikipedia. Donna Shaw, in the American Journalism Review, sheds some more interesting light on Wikipedia in the newsroom in this article . Too bad the editors at 1on1 did not encourage Nedelka to see Wikipedia "more as a road map to information than as a source to cite."

Now I suppose I can get over an occasional slip of citing Wikipedia, but lets look at the definition itself. Yeah, read it again. Now everyone together... "Huh?"

Had Nedelka dug just a bit deeper into the Wikipedia article, he would have found some better ways to explain widgets. Here are two much clearer definitions found in sources listed right on the same Wikipedia page, just one click away each. BusinessWeek:

Widgets are small, easy-to-forward bundles of software that let users play with graphics and information online.

And even better, Clearspring:

These movable mini-applications are used by consumers to craft custom experiences on their desktops, start pages, social networks, blogs and more. Widgets can be almost anything, common examples include games, stock tickers, video and audio players, quizzes, slideshows, personal productivity tools, system utilities...

Finally, of course, one major problems of citing (and quoting) Wikipedia is that it is an unstable text, constantly chaging, sometimes for the good, sometimes for the not-so-good. The definition used by Nedelka in his piece is now no longer quoted the same as it was. The page has been edited more than two dozen times in the last three months.

So, my children, let this be yet another lesson for you in the proper use of citation, quotation, and the wiki-ization of the world.

Nonsonguitur

Why is the song commonly known as "Teenage Wasteland" by The Who actually entitled Baba O'Riley? Neither a Baba nor an O'Riley is mentioned anywhere in the lyrics, nor is it clear that song has anything to do with either or with a Baba O'Riley, whatever that might be. It's all about a teenage wasteland... but that's not the title.

As it turns out (more info at songfacts.com), the title is a tribute to two major influences on Pete Townshend, Meher Baba and Terry Riley, and the song was penned as an opening for Townshend's next rock opera.

I can't find a suitable name for this type of pop culture constriction--a song whose title is not part of the lyrics--so I have invented the word "nonsonguitur." Needless to say, it is a corruption of the phrase"non sequitor" from the Latin meaning "it does not follow." In this case, a nonsonguitur is a song whose title does not follow from the lyrics, or more precisely, whose title is not found in the lyrics.

While Baba O'Riley is likely the most prominent nonsonguitur of the rock era, there are many other notable songs whose titles are not significantly part of the song lyrics, if mentioned at all.

Absolute Nonsonguiturs
One might even say there are shades of nonsonguitur. Some like Led Zeppelin's Black Dog or the Mamas and the Papas Creeque Alley, both like Baba O'Riley, wherein there is absolutely no apparent reason for naming the song. Black Dog (Hey hey mama say the way you move/gonna make you sweat gonna make you groove) was apparently named for a black dog that wandered into the studio as they were recording. Creeque Alley, an autobiographical song of the formation of the band, was named for a road in the Virgin Islands where the band had played.

Other songs that fit this category of nonsonguiturs are:

Neil Young's After the Gold Rush (Look at Mother Nature on the run in the nineteen seventies). See this article for some speculation on the meaning of both the title and the haunting apocalyptic lyrics.

Unchained Melody, perhaps one of the most popular love songs of all time (Oh, my love, my darling/I've hungered for your touch), first made famous by the Righteous Brothers, was named because it had been the theme song for the 1955 film "Unchained."

For What It's Worth by Buffalo Springfield (Stop, hey what's that sound/everybody look what's going down). See an analysis here of song and lyrics.

Danny's Song, written by Kenny Loggins, and charted highest by Anne Murray (Even though we ain't got money/I'm so in love with ya honey), never mentions a Danny in the lyrics. It was reported written by Loggins for his older brother Dan.

Logical Nonsonguiturs
Other nonsonguitirs are more logical, such as The Ballad of John and Yoko by the Beatles and Space Oddity by David Bowie. In these songs, the title implies the subject of the song, or some other reference to the story contained in the lyrics, even though the title does not appear verbatim. The Ballad of John and Yoko (Christ you know it ain't easy, you know how hard this can be/and the way things are going, they're gonna crucify me) details the marriage and honeymoon "bed-in" of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Space Oddity describes the adventure of astronaut Major Tom though his conversations with ground control.

Others in this group include

Life During Wartime by the Talking Heads, (This ain't no party/this ain't no disco/this ain't no fooling around) See this interesting link

A Day in the Life by the Beatles, known for it's opening line I heard the news today oh boy
interesting link

Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen, a most eclectic rock symphony.

Land of 1000 Dances was recorded most successfully by Wilson Pickett. Earlier versions had a verbal introduction that explained that the singer was going to take you to such a place. See the story here.

Non Nonsonguiturs
On the list of songs that I don't consider to be nonsonguiturs are songs which have a lyric used as a parenthetical subtitle, such as The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feeling Groovy) by Simon and Garfunkel or R.E.M.'s So. Central Rain (I'm Sorry).

Similarly, if a song title is reflected essentially in the lyrics, even though it is not verbatim, it really can not be a nonsonguitur, as the title does follow from the lyrics. Examples of this include Billy Joel's Scenes from an Italian Restaurant (Abottle of red, a bottle of white) or Bobbie Gentry's Ode to Billy Joe (Today Billy Joe MacAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge).