MUSIC VIDEO: from the LP "Music to Suffer By", by Leona Anderson

I don't believe we've ever postsed two music videos in a row, let alone three, but the news this week, ranging from ridiculous to depressing, is such that Walt just can't bear to write about it. It's time for an interlude!

Accordingly, we are pleased to present, from the library of rightly forgotten music, "Italian Street Song" from "Music to Suffer By", a 1957 LP by Leona Anderson. As you can read below, Ms Anderson was a star of the silent screen. When you listen to this, you'll know why her career faltered with the coming of "talkies".

 

Leona Anderson (née Aronson) was born on 3 April 1885 in St. Louis MO. She was the younger sister of Broncho Billy Anderson, who co-founded Essanay Studios in Chicago in 1907, for which company she appeared in several films, beginning in 1914, without much success.

In 1915, she appeared with Charlie Chaplin in the Essanay Studios comedy In the Park. In 1922, she starred opposite Stan Laurel in the comedy Mud and Sand, a spoof of the Rudolph Valentino film Blood and Sand.

In 1953, Ms Anderson revived her career in music, billing herself as "the world's most horrible singer". Who could argue with that? She became a favorite of comedian Ernie Kovacs and appearing several times on his TV show. Mr Kovacs' widow, Edie Adams, later recalled that "She (Anderson) knew she was camp, but she was very funny, and very sweet."

Discography: In 1953, Leona Anderson recorded a single, "Fish", for a small New York City record label. The song would later appear on the 1997 CD "The Ernie Kovacs Record Collection." This led Columbia Records to issue two singles by Anderson in 1954–55. This was followed by "Music to Suffer By" published by Unique Records in 1957, later reissued in 2011 on Trunk Records. 

"Music to Suffer By" featured Ms Anderson slaughtering several classics and standards, such as Georges Bizet's "Habanera" from Carmen and Cole Porter's "I Love Paris", as well as new material such as "Rats in My Room" and "Limburger Lover". By the late 1950s, she had become widely known for her bad singing, which was apparently an act she created to mock the pompous style of serious opera singers; "Opera singers just can't kid themselves properly," she said. "They can never let their voices go."

Leona Anderson came to Walt's attention and affection for her recording of the theme song for some of the Bob and Ray radio shows on WINS, New York. Yes, we have the video... well, the audio...

Leona Anderson's final film appearance was as the frightening Mrs. Slydes in the 1959 horror film House on Haunted Hill, starring Vincent Price and directed by the legendary William Castle. She died in Fremont CA in 1973, at the age of 88.

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Remembering Bob and Ray, the greatest radio comedians of all time.

AUDIO: Bob and Ray present Independence Day

As we said in our Independence Eve greeting, this should be a day on which we forget about political divisions and share good thoughts about the country which has risen from being a handful of British colonies to the greatest republic on Earth. 

Here are three sketches on the subject of 4th of July celebrations written and performed by Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding, the greatest sketch artists in the history of radio. 

Happy Independence Day, everyone!

 

VIDEO: Can you trust AI to answer your questions correctly?

IMHO, Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding, aka "Bob and Ray", were the greatest American broadcast satirists of the 20th century. Their career spanned five decades, most of it in radio in the Boston-New York area, with a few forays into TV.

The duo's format typically satirized the medium in which they were performing, for example conducting radio or television interviews, with off-the-wall dialogue presented in a generally deadpan style as though it were a serious broadcast.

In 1984, Bob and Ray took their act to Broadway, starring in "The Two and Only". Directed by Joseph Hardy, the show was a theatrical celebration of their classic radio and television sketches, featuring iconic parodies, soap opera spoofs, and character interviews. Walt will never forget seeing them live and in-person.

Many of Bob and Ray's skits were prescient, poking fun at institutions, politicians and sacred cows years before the general public realized that those emperors had no clothes. One example was their send-up of the Army-McCarthy hearings. 

Another is this radio interview which aired in the early `60s, in which their award-winning reporter Wally Ballou (Bob) puts to the test the computer invented by Dr Matthew E. Pulcifer (Ray) which its creator said would use previously input information to answer simple questions. This was before the terms "artificial intelligence" or "AI" had been coined. Did it work? Listen and learn.

MAD no longer

It was a noisy weekend in this neck of the woods, what with the July 4th celebrations and all. Independence Day was great, if not greater than ever. We didn't see any tanks rolling down main street but the Fort Mudge fire department put some extra wax on Old Number 1 and it looked great, pulled by those beautiful white horses. Over at the Arts Park (named after Art Holmgren, Art Ross and Art Fuldodger) last night concluded with a truly spectacular fireworks show, which must have lasted half an hour. Good weekend to be proud to be an American!

Walt was saddened, though, to hear that one of America's greatest-ever magazines, MAD, will no longer be available on newsstands after next month's issue. After that, they're going to do only reprints (with new covers) until subscriptions expire, and then it's lights out.

Perhaps it's just as well. The mag isn't what it was in the glory days of the `50s and `60s, when I first discovered it. Founded in 1952 by editor Harvey Kurtzman and publisher William Gaines, MAD launched as a comic book before it switching to a larger magazine format.

So it was when I first saw it on the shelf (amidst the Disney and Warner Bros. "comics") at McQueen's Variety Store (on Queen Street, natch). I was dismayed to see that the cover price was a whole quarter -- half my allowance for a week -- and more dismayed that Old Man McQueen, being a dour Scot, didn't take kindly to kids thumbing through his wares. I was forced to take a paper route to finance my reading.

I couldn't help it. I was hooked on MAD's well-written and well-illustrated satire on all aspects of life and popular culture, politics, entertainment, and public figures. My liking for their "humour in a jugular vein" (the subtitle to the early comic books) was heightened by the contributions of guest writers, notably Bob and Ray, whose radio show I never missed.

In its earliest years, MAD frequently used outside "name" talent, with Bob and Ray's [Bob's and Ray's? Ed.] contributing no fewer than 12 pieces, more than anyone else. MAD simply illustrated their preexisting material. When MAD learned that Tom Koch was the writer behind the Bob and Ray radio sketches, the editors hired him, and he wrote more than 300 MAD articles over the next 37 years.

Second only to Bob and Ray, Ernie Kovacs -- one of my TV favourites in the `50s -- contributed 11 pieces. His off-the-wall humour was perfect for MAD, if not for your average boob tube viewer. Other irregular contributors included Tom Lehrer, Wally Cox, Stan Freberg, Henry Morgan, and Sid Caesar. There were also single pieces by Charles M. Schulz, Chevy Chase, Will Eisner (the great "dark" illustrator), Jean Shepherd, Jules Feiffer, and the late great Walt Kelly, creator of Pogo.

MAD didn't rely solely on guest shots. It had its own excellent (and not-so-excellent) writers and illustrators, as well as writer-illustrators like Don Martin and Dave Berg. I was never a fan of either of them. Don Martin, in particular, pandered to the truly juvenile. Too bad he couldn't illustrate fart jokes.

The artists deserving of the name who stick in my mind were Wally Wood, Mort Drucker, Bill Elder and Jack Davis. Their work graces the issues of the `50s and `60s, and can be found in pocket-book collections of the early issues. Their drawings were really edgy. Wally Wood, in particular, used to crowd every panel with little bits and pieces which would only reveal themselves to the keen and careful reader. The more anodyne style of the more recent illustrators was, IMHO, one of the reasons for MAD's fall from the heights.

In 2015, "Weird Al" Yankovic served as MAD's first and only guest editor, writing some material and guiding the content in issue #533, while upping his own career Mad byline total from two to five. On social media this weekend "Weird Al" expressed his sorrow at the magazine's demise. "I am profoundly sad to hear that after 67 years, MAD Magazine is ceasing publication," said the singer-songwriter. "I can't begin to describe the impact it had on me as a young kid--it's pretty much the reason I turned out weird. Goodbye to one of the all-time greatest American institutions. #ThanksMAD."

The Komodo dragon expert

There's a story on the AP mojo wire this morning from the wilds of eastern Indonesia. It's in that eastern part of the archipelago [How long have you been waiting to use that word? Ed.] that you would find the islands of Komodo, Padar and Rinca, home of the fabled and fearsome Komodo dragon.

Yes, folks, the Komodo dragon really does exist. And here's what one looks like.

Ugly brute, isn't it? How would you feel if one of those wandered into your workplace? Well, that's what happened at Komodo National Park, where one of the monster reptiles attacked two park rangers... in their office!

A KNP spokesthingy, Heru Rudiharto -- no hero he! -- said the 2-metre-long lizard bit the rangers badly enough that  both had to be evacuated to a hospital on Bali.

This story reminded me of a classic sketch by the greatest radio comedians ever to be heard on US airwaves. I refer of course to Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding,  known to legions of fans as "Bob and Ray".

The Bob and Ray Show began, more by accident than anything else, in 1946 on WHDH in Boston. It ran under various titles on national networks including NBC and NPR, until 1987. There was even a TV version, briefly, back in the golden (i.e. black-and-white) years. The TV version didn't do all that well, possibly because the spoofs were created for radio, and didn't depend at all on visuals for the gags.

It came as something of a surprise, then, when stage versions -- Bob and Ray: the Two and Only and A Night of Two Stars -- played for months to packed houses at Carnegie Hall and on the road. Walt was there, and remembers clearly hearing and watching them do one of their best radio sketches, "The Komodo Dragon expert". No video has found its way to YouTube, but here's the audio portion.



Hey... they're not making that stuff up. What the expert told you are the facts about Komodo dragons. If you'd like to know more about life in the land they come from -- eastern Indonesia -- you're in luck, because one of Walt's agents lives and works there. Click here to read her blog, "Life is a gift; live it!" Good words to remember, especially if a Komodo dragon wanders into your workplace.