Eternal Troubadour

Justin Martell

Description

As Bing Crosby once put it, the rise of Tiny Tim represents ‘one of the most phenomenal success stories in show business.’ In 1968, after years of playing dive bars and lesbian cabarets on the Greenwich Village scene, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Bob Dylan and Lenny Bruce, the falsetto-voiced, ukulele-playing Tiny Tim landed a recording contract with Frank Sinatra’s Reprise label and an appearance on NBC’s Laugh-In. The resulting album, God Bless Tiny Tim, and its single, ‘Tip-Toe Thru’ The Tulips With Me,’ catapulted him to the highest levels of fame.

Soon, Tiny was playing to huge audiences in the USA and Europe, while his marriage to the seventeen-year-old ‘Miss’ Vicki was broadcast on The Tonight Show in front of an audience of fifty million. Before long, however, his star began to fade. Miss Vicki left him, his earnings evaporated, and the mainstream turned its back on him. He would spend the rest of his life trying to revive his career, with many of his attempts taking a turn toward the absurd.

While he is often characterized as an oddball curio, Tiny Tim was a master interpreter of early American popular song, and his story is one of Shakespearean tragedy framed around a bizarre yet loveable public persona. Drawing on more than a hundred interviews with family, friends, and associates, plus access to Tiny’s diaries, which have never before been made public, Eternal Troubadour tells the incredible true story of one of the most fascinating yet misunderstood figures in the history of popular music.

Sujets

• Musique
• Histoire de la musique
• Music
• Musician
• Individual Composer

Informations

• Publié par: Jawbone Press
• Date de parution: 10 février 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781908279880
• Langue: English

Extrait

This book is dedicated to my mother, Michelle Audette O’Donnell, and also to two of Tiny’s biggest advocates and my friends, the late Martin Sharp and the late Ernie Clark.
—Justin Martell
For my strong mom, who gave me books.
—Alanna Wray McDonald


ETERNAL TROUBADOUR
The Improbable Life Of Tiny Tim
Justin Martell with Alanna Wray McDonald

A Jawbone book
First edition 2016
Published in the UK and the USA by Jawbone Press
3.1D Union Court,
20–22 Union Road,
London SW4 6JP,
England
www.jawbonepress.com

Volume copyright © 2016 Outline Press Ltd. Text copyright © Justin Martell. All rights reserved. No part of this book covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or copied in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except inthe case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews where the source should be made clear. For more information contact the publishers.

Edited by Tom Seabrook
Cover design by Mark Case
Contents

Introduction by Harry Stein
One Neighborhood Children
Two The Human Canary
Three America’s Answer To The Beatles
Four You Are What You Eat
Five Welcome To My Dream
Six The Holy Freak
Seven My Community
Eight Beautiful Thoughts
Nine Miss Vicki
Ten ‘Being Of Sound Mind …’
Eleven Don’t Bite The Hand That’s Feeding You
Twelve The Blessed Event
Thirteen ‘This Thing Kills Me To The Bone’
Fourteen Fears Of Failure
Fifteen Can’t Help But Wonder Where I’m Bound
Sixteen The Eternal Troubadour
Seventeen Do You Think I’m Sexy?
Eighteen Forever Miss Dixie
Nineteen Miss Jan
Twenty The Great American Circus
Twenty-one Marvelous Mervo
Twenty-two Tiny Saw Elvis!
Twenty-three Hide Away In I-O-Way
Twenty-four Sweet Sue, Just You
Twenty-five Some Sort Of Bad Alice Cooper Video
Twenty-six I Know God Still Loves Me
Twenty-seven This Is Not Madness Or Acting
Twenty-eight ‘Tiny Tim Is Signing Off!’
Twenty-nine Tiptoe To Eternity
Acknowledgments
A Note On Sources
Illustrations
I feel that I’ve done my best to keep romantic crooning alive. It’s not really that hard. I would say it’s just a matter of closing your eyes and dreaming. People may say that now is not the time for crooning, but I think that if a song is good, it’s good for all time. There have been thousands and thousands of hit songs on record and sheet music—songs that deserve to be remembered forever. After all, just as much happened yesterday as is going to happen tomorrow. That’s why words like then and now don’t mean anything to me. It’s true the great crooners have faded away, but that doesn’t mean that the beauty and romance and peace they worked so hard to create has faded with them. It can still be with us—it’s alive and real—in fact, I heard it just this morning.
—Tiny Tim, ‘The Great Crooners,’ Playboy , December 1969
The Tiny Tim image is not one that people rejoice over. It is an image that [is] the Master of Confusion. What is he? What is he saying? Is he a geek? Is he a queer? They can’t relate and they’re ashamed to say they even remember me. … If I say I’m putting you on, they’d say, I told you so. If I said I’m not, they’d still say the same thing. The difference between me and Rudy Vallee, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, is with them, people said, Aaahh! With me they said, Uugghh! The emotion of negativity was so, so emotional that they had to be there. I was the one they loved to hate.
—Tiny Tim to the Phoenix New Times , November 3 1994
Introduction
by Harry Stein, author of Tiny Tim: An Unauthorized Biography

When Tiny Tim burst on the scene in the late 60s, like most everyone else I assumed that if not precisely a fraud, he was surely a put-on. How could he not be? From that otherworldly falsetto to his stringy hair and pancake makeup, from the ukulele in the shopping bag to the absurd formality with which he addressed even children, to his bizarro answers to questions about women and sex, no one was that weird by accident. Not even in the 60s. Indeed, smirking away with friends in my girlfriend’s dorm room the night in 1970 he married Miss Vicki on The Tonight Show , we had no doubt this was America’s new low in anything-for-ratings cynicism.
It was only about four-and-a-half years later—November 12 1974, to be precise, as the vastly entertaining and scrupulously researched book in your hands confirmed—that I began to understand how wrong we’d been. Unable to sleep that late evening, I snapped on the TV, and there was Tiny Tim, back on Johnny Carson’s guest couch after a long hiatus. I would soon learn that this is what was known as a ‘charity booking,’ for in the interim, both Tiny’s career and his personal life had taken a steep nosedive. Talking to Carson, he was almost somber, seeming to have no interest in playing to the audience. When Carson expressed his regret over the collapse of his marriage, Tiny waxed philosophical: ‘Well, Mr. Carson, we’re still married in the eyes of the Lord. My door is always open to her. All I ask is that she get a VD test.’
As the audience erupted in astonished laughter, Carson bounced his pencil on the desk and gave his patented blank stare. Yet, watching, it couldn’t be clearer the guy meant it. I walked into my editor’s office the next morning and announced: ‘I want to write about Tiny Tim.’
All of this was of course well before Justin Martell was born, yet when he embarked on Eternal Troubadour , it was with eyes far more open than mine had been. As a longtime student of Tiny and his oeuvre, he already knew what I was only now about to find out: that far from merely a freakish flash-in-the-pan, the performer known as Tiny Tim ( né Herbert Khaury, and with a dozen or so names in between) was seriously gifted. Indeed, his talent went beyond merely recording the long-forgotten music of another era, for he uncannily reproduced vocal stylings of the original recording artists. In this way, almost singlehandedly, he was responsible for bringing back from oblivion an entire and quite wonderful musical genre.
I got my first glimpse of this the very first day we met. As we talked in an unkempt motel room in Decatur, Illinois, he fell to reminiscing about his early days in the business and his friendship with Bob Dylan. He recalled telling Dylan that in key ways he was reminiscent of the flapper-era crooner Rudy Vallee—adding that to show that he pulled out his uke and sang Dylan his own ‘Like A Rolling Stone,’ except in Vallee’s voice, then followed it by singing Vallee’s classic ‘My Time Is Your Time’ in Dylan’s voice; at which point, he reproduced the entire performance there for me. Both renditions—of Vallee’s reedy tenor and Dylan’s gritty whine—were spot-on, pitch-perfect, incredible.
That evening, in the seedy club in downtown Decatur where Tiny and his little troupe were appearing, I saw the same magic. The crowd started out a bit unruly—they had obviously come to have a few laughs at the expense of the oddball they used to see on TV—but by the end of Tiny’s set they were totally hooked. The guy was just a terrific performer.
True enough, he also was weirder than anyone I’d ever met—and ever more so, the better I got to know him. You simply never knew what would come out of the guy’s mouth, all of it delivered with the utter sincerity of a choirboy. Moreover, over the years, navigating the gutters of show biz, he’d attracted other characters almost as strange as he was, in a couple of cases even more so.
While as an outsider I found it endlessly fascinating, it also became clear that for those with whom he worked, the guy could be a total nightmare. Tiny was thoroughly self-absorbed, a narcissist intent on doing everything on his own terms and in his own way—from showering every time ‘nature calls’ to splurging on cosmetics and hockey sticks—and, when challenged, he wouldn’t hesitate to invoke the Lord in self-defense. Little wonder that he ran through so many managers and agents or that he was constantly being sued for having broken contracts signed without a moment’s forethought.
Eternal Troubadour captures all that, and a great deal more. Martell’s research is nothing short of prodigious; he seems to have tracked down almost every interview Tiny gave over the years, and almost every recorded performance. Indeed, what I like about it most—and have no doubt Tiny would also—is the focus it puts on the music. In that regard, this book could not be more aptly titled. Strange as he was, infuriating as he could often be, Tiny Tim left the world a genuine and important legacy. With Eternal Troubadour , Justin Martell passes it on to a new generation.
Chapter One
Neighborhood Children
What has become of the neighborhood children? I used to know.
—‘Neighborhood Children,’ from Tiny Tim’s Second Album , 1968

It began in 1877, with a patent filed by Thomas Alva Edison. The phonograph: the first machine capable of reproducing recorded music and simultaneously enabling individuals to possess music in a new way, to collect it, and to enjoy the voices of the stage from the comfort of their homes. As the Gutenberg Bible transformed renaissance Europe’s relationship to the written word, so the phonograph brought with it a new and intimate relationship between listeners and music. Concert halls and traveling performance, which were previously responsible for the comparatively sluggish popularization of song across the United States, lost their cultural impact as the phonograph, with the continued assistance of inexpensive sheet music, allowed the public to consume music at an accelerated rate.
New York City, America’s financial and artistic capital, led the country in the turn-of-the-century composition of songs and music publishing, the center of which was Tin Pan Alley. Named for its cacophonous collection of songwriters and ‘song pluggers’ banging away on cheap pianos—like so many tin pans banging in an alley—the phrase Tin Pan Alley came to represent not just a physical locati