1. “My Dogs.” I only just discovered this one, on one of the Broadway internet channels the girls and I listen to. It’s from the William Finn song cycle “Elegies.” On the soundtrack album, it’s sung by Christian Borle, a wonderful actor whom I first raved about when he played Riff at the New Haven’s Shubert in a non-Equity national tour of West Side Story. A lot of performers never make it out of that circuit, but Borle moved up to Equity tours, returning to the Shubert in Footloose and joining that show’s Broadway cast in the final weeks of its
years-long run. Adept, from the very outset of his career, at shows that blend death and comedy, Borle totally nails Finn’s fetching numbers about deceased best friends and short-lived relationships.
2. “Pup Tune.” My favorite Willie Alexander song, and that’s saying a lot. Improvised during the recording of the Live at the Rat sets in 1976. Between namedropping (Is that Celia Cruz he’s wailing about? And how nice to mention “Rodney Rush, just like Third Rail”) and his patented goo-goo-ya-yas, Willie “Loco” spins a yarn about how “the dog just swallowed another pair of panties. He puked them up in the hall; they’re in a ball now.” Punk rock in Boston started right here.
3. “Teddy Bear’s Picnic.” Are they pets? Well, they eat like pets. One of the thing I love about this classic kid’s song, which I love playing on ukulele, is how it introduces the concept that a picnic for teddy bears might be terrifying. “You’d better go in disguise.” “It’s better to stay at home.” Seriously, you’d think this was the dismemberment of Pentheus in Euripides’ The Bacchae, not a play date with stuffed bruins.
4. “Theme from Ruff and Reddy.” This early Hanna-Barbera foray into low budget, limited-animation series for television is notable because, unlike in Tom & Jerry where Tom is indeed a tomcat, here Ruff is a red-haired cat and Reddy is a white dog. Perhaps due to these counterintuitive monikers, “They sometimes have their little spats/Even fight like dogs and cats … But when they need each other/That’s when, they’re rough and ready.”
5. Pet Soul. The band Splitsville developed their deft blend of Rubber Soul Beatles and Pet Sounds Beach Boys, in the late 1990s, returning to the highly harmonized, studio-precious pop of two of the founding members’ days in the band Greenberry Woods. I remember Splitsville bestowing an advance cassette version on me at a show at Yale GPSCY Café. I treasured it, and still have it. It was years before The Complete Pet Soul came out on CD, with Splitsville’s history-of-rock cover of “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” as a bonus track. No songs directly about pets, but the whole EP is recalled and loved as fondly as one.