I too like words, as did Robert
Pirosh: (…) “Fat buttery words, solemn,
angular, creaky words, spurious, black-is-white words, suave "V"
words, crunchy, brittle, crackly words, sullen, crabbed, scowling words. I too like Oh-Heavens, my-gracious,
land's-sake words. Elegant, flowery
words, wormy, squirmy, mealy words, sniggly, chuckling words.” (…)
September marks five years
that I first appeared in this vast digital wilderness where blogs appear and
vanish like wind-swept tumbleweed. Alas,
circumstances prevent me from writing, so this will be my last post.
While this may have been a
singular odyssey, its richness and appeal, to my mind, was in the connection to
each of you. When a comment or post came
in from anywhere on this planet I marveled at the experience that connected
us. To this wondrous conclave of muse,
family, friends and, well, ranters, who filled these pages with insight,
inspiration and occasional bile, here are two of the most beautiful words in
the English language - thank you.
Usually it is the patient
who is disturbed. This time it was the psychiatrist. "You know," he
informed the man on the couch, "you write as if your life depends on every
line."
"It does,"
replied Alan Jay Lerner, and in two words he encapsulated the difference
between the epochs of My Fair Lady and, well, today.
Every year extravagant
claims are advanced for top tunes. It is a common mistake made by those who
confuse jingles with wit and technique with tune. The error is understandable:
after all, digital processes and multiple-track devices can now grant any mating
yowl the resonance of a late Mahler symphony. Audiophilically, this is the
golden age.
Lyrically, however, it is
the Styrofoam era. Granted, some pop rhymers have produced indelible phrases.
Several of Bob Dylan's works are blowing in the wind, still; Jim Croce's
"meaner than a junkyard dog" presents an entire character in five
words; Kris Kristofferson's "Freedom's just another word for nothing left
to lose" has lost none of its trenchancy. But can anyone remember the
second or third lines of these songs? If we ever listened closely we would have
to sit still for lines like these from George Michael's "I Want Your
Sex":
Sex
is natural,
Sex
is fun. Sex is
best
When
it's one on one.
Every time I inveigh
against the banalities of modem culture, my godchildren point out that
top-of-the-chart refrains were never meant to be printed out of context.
Examining words without their melodies, they insist, is like taking oxygen
without hydrogen and then judging it as water. Perhaps, I reply, but that
oxygen was quite capable of sustaining life in other decades. And then I bring
my ultimate weapon onstage: the versifiers themselves. Cole Porter's
"You're the Top" may boast the most repeated lines in American
popular song:
You're
the top!
You're
the Colosseum. You're the top!
You're
the Louvre Museum.
Far fewer know the
self-parody:
You're
the top!
You're
Miss Pinkham's tonic! You're the top!
You're
a high colonic.
You're
the burning heat of a bridal suite in use,
You're
the breasts of Venus, you're King Kong's penis,
You're
self-abuse.
This is not to say that
the leading songwriters of today are valueless. Paul Simon displays an uncommon
literacy and conscience. No one is quicker at seizing buzzwords and
catchphrases. In "You Can Call Me Al," for example, he chants:
A
man walks down the street, he says, "Why am I short of attention and ...
my nights are so long ... who'll be my role model now that my role model is
gone? . . . All along there were incidents and accidents, there were hints and
allegations ...
This is the lingua franca
of contemporary life, and in "Al" Simon shows himself to possess a
Panasonic ear. He also exhibits a lazy mind. He has emptied his notebook into
his song without bothering to polish the work or even to give it metrical integrity.
It is enough, for most of his followers, to recognize the banalities of
contemporary chatter. Never mind if there is any sparkle behind the laundry
list.
The lyricists of the past
were just as voracious in their pursuit of cliches, but they were not content
merely to ransack the cocktail parties and gossip columns. They worked and
revised and polished their poetry until you could see your face in it. For
"The Babbitt and the Bromide," Ira Gershwin produced patter with an
intent very much like Simon's. On the way, as Fred Astaire pointed out, Gershwin
wrote for feet, physical and metrical:
Hello!
How are you? Howza folks? What's new? I'm great! That's good! Ha-ha! Knock
wood. . .
Nice
weather we are having but it gives me such a pain;
I've
taken my umbrella, so of course it
doesn't
rain.
Heigh-ho!
That's life! What's new? Howza wife? Got to run! Oh my!
Ta-ta.
Olive Oil! Goodbye!
Louis Kronenberger
included "The Babbitt" in his Anthology of Light Verse back in 1934,
where it sat unembarrassed beside the works of Eugene Field and Hilaire Belloc.
That marked the first time American song lyrics were given such status. Since then
progress has been intermittent but relentless. In recent years, Oxford
University Press has published two highly significant volumes of humorous
poetry:
American Light Verse and English Light Verse. Besides the expected
Gershwin, the American volume includes lyrics by, among others, Johnny
Mercer-not a major name to the digital generation, but a vital architect in the
development of popular song. "Blues in the Night" is his (music by
Harold Arlen); so are "Lazybones" (Hoagy Carmichael), "Too Marvelous
for Words" (Richard Whiting), and "Moon River" (Henry Mancini).
The Oxford anthology prefers his antic side and sandwiches him between Theodore
Roethke and Peter De Vries:
Glow,
little glow worm, fly of fire,
Glow
like an incandescent wire.
Glow
for the female of the specie;
Turn
on the AC and the DC. . . .
Thou
aeronautical bolt weevil,
Iluminate
yon woods primeval. ...
This is no effete display
for a Ph.D. oral. The Mills Bros.
recorded "Glow Worm" and took it to the hit parade in 1951. American
audiences were no more elitist then than now; the writers simply had more
respect for them.
When Lorenz Hart
impudently mocked the hangover of passion, he used Shakespeare's iambs to make
his point in lines three and four:
When
love congeals,
It
soon reveals
The
faint aroma of performing seals,
The
double-crossing of a pair of heels.
I
wish I were in love again.
Here he laments the
passage of love:
Once
you told me I was mistaken,
That
I'd awaken with the sun
And
order orange juice for one.
It
never entered my mind ....
You
have what I lack myself,
And
now I even have to scratch my back myself.
In the period when Hart
was collaborating with Richard Rodgers, their choreographer, George Balanchine,
fantasized about a day when publishers "would print Larry's lyrics without
the music as a book of verse or poetry." And here they are The Complete Lyrics of Lorenz Hart, produced in a large and
handsome format by Alfred Knopf.
Alan Jay Lerner, who
became the premier lyricist of his time, with such shows as My Fair Lady, Camelot, and Gigi, once analyzed his colleagues:
"Frequently, aficionados and practitioners of musical theater play the
pointless game of comparisons. Was Ira Gershwin 'better' than Cole Porter? Was
Oscar Hammerstein 'superior' to Larry Hart? As I say, it is pointless because
they were all master craftsmen, each with an expression of his own. I am exhilarated
by the gaiety, style and surprising passion of Cole, overwhelmed by the wonderfully
slangy sentimentality and ingenious versatility of Ira, touched by the disarming
simplicity of Berlin, and forever impressed by Oscar Hammerstein's dramatic
ability. Yet there is a tenderness in some of Larry's lyrics that always
catches me off guard and brings a tear to my eye. His wit was delicious. . . .
"
It is impossible to
imagine anyone's writing that about contemporary lyricists, and it is worth
considering why. The IQs of wordsmiths cannot have diminished so drastically
since Lerner's time-the man died only in 1986. Were there really giants on the
Earth in those days?
Cole Porter, like many
another pathological worker, liked to give the impression that he tossed off
his rhymes between martinis. In fact, he wrote more than 800 songs under
increasingly adverse conditions. His family wealth guaranteed him comfort but
not success, and for fifteen years after leaving Yale he was known as the
author of flops and fripperies. By the time he was recognized as a master
craftsman he was nearly forty and close to the tragedy that was to maim him for
life. During a horseback ride he took a spill. The mount toppled on his legs,
crushing them. Porter endured more than thirty operations, and he was in nearly
constant pain from then on. Still, he continued to write songs that bore
no hint of his anguish.
Porter was lucky in his
lineage, but he was more fortunate in his epoch. As John Updike pointed out,
the late thirties was a lighthearted era, “a heyday of light verse; there were
book reviews in verse, and sports stories; there were droll ballades and
rondeaux and triolets.”
As to the "disarming
simplicity" of Berlin, the man is about as simple as a Byzantine chapel.
Back in 1924 he was rhyming "child would" with "wild wood"
and "peaceful" with "valise full." He has seen his
hundredth birthday, but had he stopped writing at the age of thirty Berlin
would have been rich and famous as the composer of popular ditties like"
Alexander's Ragtime Band" and "Remember." Had Berlin begun at the age of thirty and
stopped at forty-five, he would have been rich and famous as the composer of
melodies for such Astaire-Rogers films as Top
Hat. And if Berlin had begun his career at the age of forty-five he would
be rich and famous for his indelible Broadway melodies like "There's No
Business Like Show Business":
Yesterday
they told you you would not go far,
That
night you open and there you are,
Next
day on your dressing room they've
hung
a star,
Let's
go on with the show.
Some of the composer's
monosyllables seem to carry the clang of the schoolyard. But Berlin and his
peers were always acutely aware of something the Romantic poets also knew:
English is a language of fricatives and tight endings. Italian, with its large
vowels, its as and as and es ending every phrase, is the ideal singer's tongue.
The arias of Puccini and Verdi can be boomed in the shower. Henry Purcell's
melodies, with their crunching consonants, are confined to the concert hall.
Byron sensed all that back
in 1818. His solution was to steal from the Italians, copying their ottava
rima, an eight-line stanza with a rhyme scheme of a, b, a, b, a, b, c, c. In
Don Juan those a's and b's are diverting, but it is the c, c's that bring a
foretaste of American song:
What
men call gallantry, and gods call
adultery,
Is
much more common where the climate's
sultry.
In Byron's day audiences
really read poetry. In the thirties and forties and even up to the fifties,
they truly heard the messages above the treble clef. Rhymers aimed for thoughts
that could be compressed and words that would carry a tune. Much can be done
with amore, but what can be done with "love"? Glove, above, shove-the
rhymes were used up a century ago. Hence Ira Gershwin's sardonic song:
Blah,
Blah, Blah your hair,
Blah,
Blah, Blah your eyes,
Blah,
Blah, Blah, blah care,
Blah,
Blah, Blah, blah skies.
T
ra la la la, tra la la la la, cottage for
two.
Blah,
Blah, Blah, blah, blah, darling,
with
you.
The great ones learned to
vault over the iron restrictions of their native tongue, placing the emotion in
the middle of the song and the wit in the title and at the close, where punch
lines belonged. Berlin wrote of dancing cheek to cheek and changing partners.
Porter inquired, "What is this thing called love?" ("Just who
can solve its mystery? Why should it make a fool of me?"); he had a call girl chant about "love for
sale," cannily putting the emphasis on the antepenultimate syllable:
Let
the poets pipe of love
In
their childish way,
I
know every type of love
Better
far than they.
If
you want the thrill of love,
I've
been thru the mill of love;
Old
love, new love,
Every
love but true love.
Hammerstein, the ultimate
tongue-and-groove craftsman, employed many of the same techniques, but without
the panache. The third-generation showman, who worked with two of America's
greatest Broadway composers, Jerome Kern and Richard Rodgers, cultivated a
personal plainness. He avoided nightclubs, rose early, started work by 9:30,
spent the evenings with his close-knit family, and labored for tormented weeks
on a single lyric until it achieved the effect of utter spontaneity. (He was
then driven to distraction when Richard Rodgers took his rhymes and set them to
fluent, soaring melodies overnight.) Hammerstein's love songs are full of
expected sentiment and unpredictable attack: not, for example, "How do I
feel?" but "If I loved you"; not "forbidden love" but
"We kiss in a shadow"; not "We love women" but "There
is nothing like a dame." Rodgers's celebrated collaborator has been much
maligned for bringing the melodies down to earth-and it is true that once Hart
had died they never climbed so high or sounded so fresh. But from Oklahoma! right through The Sound of Music, Hammerstein wrote
integrated ballads, waltzes, and character songs that define the essence of
theatrical integrity.
Yet even at his finest,
Hammerstein lacked the one element that Porter and Hart had in superabundance:
astonishment. Students of lyrics have a favorite game, Prediction-calling the
punch line before the singer does. In fairness, it can be played only when a
song is heard for the first time. The soloist chants a verse that praises a
girl's charms, and the student knows at once that the next line will invariably
contain the final word "arms." "Witty" bounces down to
"pretty," "romance" to "chance," and so on. No
lyricist has ever eluded the guessers better than Noel Coward.
"The police had to
send a squad car-" begins one of his more outrageous couplets. Can you
call the rhyme?
"-When Daddy got
fried on Vodka."
Unlike Coward, Porter,
Hart, and others who expressed a bone-deep gaiety in all senses of the word,
and unlike Hammerstein, who was inwardly placid, Alan Jay Lerner married seven
times and was dogged by ulcers and a fatal streak of perfectionism. He
miserably sided with those who believe, as he says in his autobiography, that
"lyrics, no less than music, are written to be heard. A lyric without its
musical clothes is a scrawny creature and should never be allowed to parade
naked across the printed page." I say miserably because he then proceeded
to follow that statement by printing thirty-nine of his songs, sans melodies,
from "The Rain in Spain" to his salute to Gerontion:
The
fountain of youth is dull as paint,
Methuselah
is my patron saint;
I've
never been so comfortable before.
Oh,
I'm so glad that I'm not young any more.
The great lyricists have
always taken second billing: Rodgers and Hart, Kern and Hammerstein, Arlen and
Mercer. When they shared the last name, George Gershwin came before Ira, and
even when words and tunes came from the same man, they were more often listed
on song sheets as "Music and lyrics by Cole Porter." Yet the numbers
were remembered as much for a single phrase as for a whole melody. The sung
genius Dorothy Fields specialized in images that took hold of their audience
and never let go. No one who has once heard "On the Sunny Side of the
Street" can forget to grab his hat and get his coat and put his worries on
the doorstep; in one hit she spoke for an entire post-Depression public-and for
anyone today who is young, ambitious, and smitten:
Gee,
I'd like to see you looking swell, Baby,
Diamond
bracelets Woolworth doesn't sell, Baby,
But
Till that lucky day you know dam well, Baby,
I
can't give you anything but love.
Howard Dietz, a man who
managed to be an MGM executive as well as a lyricist, gave the key to his
success in a remark to Louis B. Mayer, who caught him waltzing into the office
at eleven A.M. "Pretty late to start work," the mogul growled,
looking at his watch. "Yeah," Dietz replied, "but I make up for
it by going home early." Obviously
when he got home he churned out elegant and low-down rhymes for Arthur
Schwartz, with whom he wrote, among many other songs, "Dancing in the
Dark," "Something to Remember You By," "A Shine on Your
Shoes," "By Myself," and the classic backstage number,
"That's Entertainment," in which Oedipus is recalled as a chap who
kills his father and causes a lot of bother.
There are many other
craftsmen in the ateliers of Broadway, Hollywood, and Tin Pan Alley: Frank
Loesser (Guys and Dolls), Sheldon
Harnick (Fiddler on the Roof!), E. Y. ("Yip") Harburg (The Wizard of
Oz) j but here I run the danger of making my own laundry list. Besides, only
one lyricist today belongs up there with the Pantheon figures, and because of
Stephen Sondheim's unique status his opening nights have the quality of a
retrospective. In Gypsy, he drove with Porter's poetic license, rhyming
"he goes," "she goes," "egos," and
"amigos"; and he brought Coward home when a stripper reminded her
audience, "Once I was a shlepper, now I'm Miss Mazeppa." But
Sondheim's wormwood soliloquy for A Little Night Music was strictly his own:
Isn't
it rich, isn't it rare?
You
with your feet on the ground, me in mid-air ....
I
thought you wanted what I want. Sorry, my dear.
Send
in the clowns, where are the clowns?
Don't
bother-they're here ....
Occasionally Sondheim gets
lost in his own woods; even so, he remains the last of the Broadway giants. If
anyone doubts it, let him listen to a smash-hit non-Sondheim show. The Phantom
of the Opera is so swollen with self-importance it has not one but two
lyricists. Charles Hart and Richard Stilgoe have filled Andrew Lloyd Webber's
calculated pseudo-romantic music with calculated pseudo-romantic effects, but
when it comes to the denouement they resort to this:
Pitiful
creature of the night,
What
kind of life have you known?
God
give me courage to show you-
The last line, anyone?
Exactly:
-You
are not alone.
Too bad; given the
contemporary wordsmiths, there is a lot to be said for solitude. And silence.
And memory.
