On Oct. 13, had he lived, Lenny Bruce would have turned 86 years old. You could joke about the very idea of him ever living that long, but the fact remains that there was nothing at all funny about him dying at age 40 in 1966.

Lenny Bruce’s preferred music was jazz, though in the last days of his life he apparently played recordings of Sousa marches at top volume on his home stereo while poring over the minutiae of court briefs related to his various arrests for obscenity.
Here’s a list of songs of more recent vintage which revere or otherwise reference Lenny Bruce. Lenny Bruce had a number of pop star friends, most prominently Phil Spector, who lent the impoverished comic money, produced two of his albums and paid for his funeral.
A good number of the songs listed here can be found in the admirably exhaustive “pop culture” section in the Lenny Bruce entry on Wikipedia. Wikipedia has snuffed such ephemeral sections out of its database, but the list has lived on at sites which steal info wholesale from Wikipedia.
I was able to find a bunch of items not on that list. I also sorted and cleaned the whole lot up, so it’s clearer which songs are full-scale tributes, which get by on casual mentions, and which Lenny Bruce tributes are actually covers of other people’s Lenny Bruce tributes.

Happy 86, Lenny Bruce.

Songs About Lenny Bruce
1. Grace Slick & the Great Society, “Father Bruce”: “Oh, oh, Lenny, we’re so glad you’re getting well, well, well Fuck!”
2. Tim Hardin, “Lenny’s Tune”: “I’ve lost a friend and I don’t know why.” Hardin wrote it, but the song was originally released by Nico, under the title “Eulogy to Lenny Bruce.” The Nico version (and title) was later covered by Damon & Naomi.
3. Bob Dylan, “Lenny Bruce”: This is the first Lenny Bruce song that springs to a lot of minds, but it’s not very good. Some critics have even conjectured that it’s not about Lenny Bruce at all. Stan Ridgway’s cover version at least gives it some bite.
4. Nuclear Valdez, “Unsung Hero (Song for Lenny Bruce)”: Also mentions Lenny’s ex-wife Honey.
5. Chumbawumba, Big Mouth Strikes Again.”: Revisits Bruce’s “To Come” routine, and references “Christ, judges, Lone Ranger … padres, pastors, popes, priests … critics, comics, you me…”

Songs Vaguely About Lenny Bruce

1. Balloon Squad, “Still Mad at That Lenny Bruce”: Plaintive pop tune off the band’s May Pangs and June Forays EP from 1994. Doesn’t directly mention Bruce; it’s about a guy whose girl’s gotten too hip and left him.
2. The Boo Radleys, “Rodney King (Song For Lenny Bruce)”: Just two lines of lyrics in the whole thing: “Do you know my name before you tear me apart? Do you care who I am?”
3. Elastic Purejoy, “If Samuel Beckett Had Met Lenny Bruce”: Speculative meeting of great modern thinkers. “A needle in the can killed the laughter.”
4. Juice Leskinen, “Lenny Bruce”: From the Finnish singer’s Grand Slam album, and all in Finnish.
5. John Mayall, “The Laws Must Change”: Lenny Bruce was trying to tell you many things before he died.”
6. Starpilot, “Lenny Bruce the Martyr”: Starpilot is a composer of electronic “chiptunes” with undecipherable lyrics which he performs live before a changing screen of projections.
7. The Heartsleeves, “Son of Lenny Bruce”: From the Peripheral People album, played in a blues/klezmer style: “I’m the tattooed Jew! I’m the son of Lenny Bruce!/Albert Einstein is my muse! Frida Kahlo cuts me loose!”

Songs Which Borrow Lenny Bruce Routines
1. Julian Cope, “Soldier Blue”: Samples routines from Lenny Bruce’s The Berkeley Concert album. The track was later remixed, with an added rap, by Michael Franti of Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy.
2. Frank Zappa. The Mothers of Invention opened for Lenny Bruce at the Fillmore West, listed him as an influence on the cover of the Freak Out! Album and referenced some of his routines in live shows.
3. Tom Russell, “Harry Partch, Jack Kerouac, Lenny Bruce”: A track from Tom Russell’s Hotwalker album, a conceptual sound collage utilizing words and sounds from a number of ‘60s beat and counterculture icons.

Songs Which Mention Lenny Bruce
1. REM, “It’s the End of the World As We Know It”: One of the best enunciated lyrics in a muddy list: “Lenny Bruce is not afraid.” Covered by Great Big Sea.
2. John Lennon & Yoko Ono, “We’re All Water”: “There may not be much difference/Between Marilyn Monroe and Lenny Bruce/If we check their coffins.”
3. Rent (the Broadway musical), “La Vie Boheme”: “Ginsberg, Dylan, Cunningham and Cage, Lenny Bruce, Langston Hughes, to the stage.”
4. Simon & Garfunkel, Seven O’Clock News/Silent Night. Lenny Bruce’s death is one of the items in the horrific newscast which serves as a counterpart to S&G’s rendition of the carol.
5. Simon & Garfunkel, “A Simple Desultory Philippic (or How I Was Robert MacNamaraed Into Submission).” “Well, I paid all the dues I want to pay/And I learned the truth from Lenny Bruce.”
6. The Stanglers, No More Heroes. “Whatever happened to dear old Lenny?” It’s presumed that this means Lenny Bruce, but I guess The Stranglers could be missing Leonard Bernstein.
7. Steve Earle, “F the CC”: “Dirty Lenny died so we could all be free.”
8. Metric, “On the Sly”: “For Halloween I want to be Lenny Bruce.”
9. Nada Surf, “Imaginary Friends.”:“Lenny Bruce’s bug eyes stare from an LP.”
10. Mighty Mighty Bosstones, “All Things Considered”: Tale of a street person who claims to have palled around with the biggest names of the 1960s, including “his closest friend, the one and only Lenny Bruce.”
11. The Auteurs, “Junk Shop Clothes”: “Lenny Bruce never walked in a dead man’s shoes even for one night. Junk shop shoes will get you nowhere.”
12. Kid Rock, “EMSP”: My name is Tino, you know, baby, let’s get funky/I’m like Lenny Bruce but I ain’t no goddamn junkie.” Bonus points for also mentioning George Raft.
13. Widespread Panic, “Tickle the Truth”: “Lenny Bruce was a prophet in the 1960s/Two shows at tonight’s inquisition.”
14. Genesis, “Broadway Melody of 1974”: “Lenny Bruce declares a truce and plays his other hand/ Marshall McLuhan, casual viewing, head buried in the sand.”
15. The Bicycle Thief, “Cereal Song”: “Being cool and looking good/Keith Richards and Lenny Bruce and all of them/Well, I give up.”
16. Nils Lofgren, “Mr. Hardcore”: “Thinks Lenny Bruce looked like Walt Disney.”

An Original Song Performed by Lenny Bruce
Lenny Bruce, “All Alone”: A stand-up routine about getting over a romantic break-up, wrapped in a lovely song about loneliness. Famously performed on The Steve Allen Show.

A Song Parodied by Lenny Bruce.
In an earlier post, I ran an excerpt from Kaye Ballard about how Lenny Bruce created a parody of “Autumn Leaves” at her request, which she recorded on her Boo-Hoo/Ha-Ha album. It’s right there in Ballard’s autobiography, but now I wonder if she got the album mixed up. I don’t own either record, but from what I’ve found online there’s no listing for “Autumn Leaves” or anything like it on Boo-Hoo/Ha-Ha, while “Autumn Leaves” is indeed listed as the lead track on the 1959 album Kaye Ballard Swings. Anybody record collectors out there able to clear this up?

http://blog.amandapalmer.net

They even used the School of Drama’s recording studio at 205 Park Street to record a cover of the Nirvana song “Polly” for a Nevermind tribute album included with the August issue of SPIN magazine. You can download that album here:

http://www.spin.com/articles/free-album-spin-tribute-nirvanas-nevermind

Long before Chad Raines and Michael McQuilken came to campus, the Yale Cabaret had a notable hit with a blending of Chekhov’s early play Ivanov and the Nirvana saga, cleverly titled Nirvanov.
Everything old is new again. And Chad Raines is still one of the simple pleasures of our existence.

The list is extensive. Highlights: 1981’s parody of 42nd Street (which featured then-SNL cast member Christine Ebersole, who 20 years later would appear in the Broadway revival of 42nd Street—in the same role she’d mocked on TV). 1994’s obscure Masters of Monologue battle between Adam Sandler as Eric Bogosian and Michael McKean as Spalding Gray. Jon Lovitz’ recurring impersonation of Harvey Fierstein. Last season’s Best of Both Worlds bit, with Hugh Jackman (Andy Samberg), Gerard Butler (Taran Killam) and Julie Andrews (Helen Mirren) boasting about their flexibility as performers. Plus numerous savagings of Cats.
Last night’s Saturday Night Live—the second episode of the new season—had no less than five stage-related routines, ranging from “very theatery” to “close enough.”
The host was Melissa McCarthy. I missed the first five minutes (caught them online today). Not having seen either the movie Bridesmaids or the TV series Mike & Molly, I didn’t know who she was when I tuned in. Turns out that before her TV and film fame, McCarthy honed her comedic talents onstage, in the Groundlings troupe.
Here’s the stagey line-up:
• McCarthy and Kristen Wiig doing a Fosse-esque dance routine, replete with sparkly black fedoras and bowties.
• One of those Andy Samberg SNL Digital Short videos that invariably bursts into song, about a savage battle between Stomp and The Blue Man Group.
• Rock’s Way, in which Chris Rock (Jay Pharaoh) is lampooned for having done Broadway. Even though he was in cutting-edge Stephen Adly Guirgis play, The Motherfucker in the Hat, SNL chooses to behave as if he’d been doing something embarrassingly commercial or uncharacteristic.

• A News Update segment about Andy Rooney leaving 60 minutes to do “a live-action version of Up,” with photoshop image of the curmudgeon dolled up as Ed Asner, holding a bunch of balloons.
• News Update again: A visit from Tyler Perry, highest-paid entertainer (who made his first fortune in live theater), impersonated by Kenan Thompson.
• McCarthy as a Mae West-like vaudeville star-turned film actress called Lulu, falling down stairs when trying to dramatize the line “Why don’t you come up there and see me sometime?” The sketch only seemed to exist in order to capitalize on Jason Sudeikis’ impersonation of American Movie Classics cable host Robert Osborne.

I have a ukulele gig tonight (Thursday, Sept. 22) at the New Haven club Café Nine. I mention it because, as part of what I laughingly call my “act,” I perform a ukulele variation on the incantation speech from Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Just the one scene so far, but I’m working on more.

My father performed Dr. Faustus with marionettes. I do it with a ukulele. That play can withstand anything.

Here’s a video I made of the bit a couple of years ago, when testing out a new Flip camera. Friendly note to those alarmed by facial imperfections: I will be wearing my fake front tooth for tonight’s performance.

Most of my other material is not as theatrical as the Faustus thing, though if theater freaks come and call out for “Comes Once in a Lifetime” from Subways Are For Sleeping, gosh, I’ll try to play it.

I did a big review/feature on Gorman Bechard’s Replacements documentary Color Me Obsessed over at my other writing place.

Got me thinking about the theater crossover potential of that hallowed sloppy-yet-savvy rock band.

1. Lead guitarist Bob Stinson often wore a tutu onstage.
2. When particularly soused, the band would cover showtunes such as “Hello Dolly.”

Would that be enough for a Million Dollar Quartet-style Broadway musical?

You haven’t missed the Color Me Obsessed screening yet. It’s 7 p.m. tonight (Saturday, Sept. 17) at Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center. Free.

David Bowie—Starman

By Paul Trynka (Little, Brown/Hachette, 2011)

This is the first Bowie bio I’ve found that gives serious attention to the erstwhile David Jones’ stage- and film-acting projects alongside his musical ones.

The book devotes over six pages just to the BBC’s 1981 TV adaptation of Brecht’s Baal, in which Bowie starred. It’s revealed that before casting Bowie as the violent poet, director Alan Clarke and writer/translator John Willett considered Stephen Berkoff and Barry “Dame Edna” Humphries for the role. Bowie apparently captivated the creative team with his intuitive understanding of Weill’s songwriting, which he likened to plainsong, and his knowledge of the Neu Sachlickeit post-Expressionist art movement.

“Baal,” writes Trynka, “was destined to become a lost artifact, often discussed by Brecht scholars.Today, only the CD remains to document what was not only one of Bowie’s bravest artistic efforts but also his final Berlin project.” In an appendix to the biography, Tryka assesses all of Bowie’s recorded works and declares of the Baal soundtrack: “The blinkered view of Bowie’s career is that his last great album was Scary Monsters, yet this contract-filler—recorded in two rushed days in Berlin—is, in its own way, a masterpiece.”

Maybe punk bands figure Buddy Hackett’s slurring, drooling, pogoing interpretation of “Shipoopi” (replete with simulated-fart dance moves) has already taken the song as far as it could ever go.

Music Man multi-threat Meredith Willson (who wrote the show’s book, lyrics and score) deserves to have more of his tunes hit the rock trail. Beyond wrote the University of Iowa football team fight son and such radio pop hits as “You and I,” “I See the Moon” and “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Chrstmas.” Willson’s mentioned in the current issue of Nostalgia Digest, a magazine devoted to the golden age of radio, as an early Music Director at the major West Coast radio station KFRC in the late 1920s and early ‘30s.

Here are some of the wilder interpretations of Music Man songs I’ve uncovered. Which, unfortunately, are about as wild as a straitlaced River City librarian.

Iowa Stubborn: Jimmy Guiffre. The jazz clarinetist (who died in 2008) did an entire album of freewheeling instrumental interpretations of Music Man tunes. He gets honors here for even bothering with the rangy, misshapen melody of “Iowa Stubborn.”

Trouble: Spanky and Our Gang, the pristine ‘60s harmony pop group beloved by those who thought the Mamas & the Papas needed one less Mama and more Papas, include Harold Hill’s pool-hall rabble-rouser on their debut album, sticking it on side one right before their pure pop singles “Sunday Will Never Be the Same.” (On side two, Spanky & Our Gang cover “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?). “Trouble” is done in a disarmingly straightforward, low-key fashion eschewing the overproduced sweetness the group became known for. It’s a solo male voice backed with the usual chorus of “townsfolk” muttering “Trouble!” The musical backing could be called unorthodox, since it’s a banjo and not an orchestra, but you do feel that an opportunity has been missed here in claiming the song more firmly for a Summer of Love rock audience. (Runners-up: Tyne Daly with Boston Pops; Seth MacFarlane’s blistering parody done for the Writers Guild of America Awards.

Goodnight My Someone: Les Paul and Mary Ford. The guitar icon plays the country-porch lament with bite, while his wife sweetens the vocals. (Runner-up: Jessica Molaskey’s contemporary pop rendition, which gives the tune more of a lonely-in-the-big-city vibe.)

76 Trombones: Dan Zanes did this and several other Music Man songs on one of his kid-friendly Dan Zanes & Friends. I interviewed Zanes about the project last year when he played the International Festival of Arts & Ideas in New Haven, for which trombonists (and other brass-players) from across the state were invited to march about the Green in a “76 Trombones” finale; far fewer than 76 showed up.
In my interview with Zanes, the former Del Fuegos frontman was refreshingly candid about where he felt the project had failed. He’d been offered unusual freedom to rearrange a slew of Broadway standards, hoping that the showtunes fit with the populist folk attitude he’d been pushing for all his family-friendly projects. Many of the songs frustrated his aims, either because they were so character- or plot-connected or because their complex arrangements didn’t strip down easily enough. It’s clear that Zanes felt comfortable with The Music Man; besides making “76 Trombones” the title track of his showtune showcase, he also covers “Goodnight, My Someone” and (as a medley) “Gary, Indiana” and “Wells Fargo Wagon.”

Pick a Little Talk a Little: Title of a Sex and the City episode.

Sadder But Wiser Girl: Again, Seth MacFarlane’s done it (on his forthcoming Music is Better Than Words big-band album).

Good Night Ladies: An arrangement for the Baby Genius series (one of those spurious attempts to stimulate intelligence through cheesy music) puts something of a disco beat to the shouty lullabye.

Shipoopi: There’s a weird, plaintive rendition by Gregg Nestor & Tommy Morgan on their eclectic album Classic Musicals for Harmonica and Guitar. Runner-up: Peter Griffin’s “This calls for a victory tune” rendition on the Patriot Games episode of Seth McFarlane’s series Family Guy, which resurfaced on the live-action Family Guy Presents: Seth & Alex’s Almost Live Comedy Show special in 2009.

Lida Rose: The only challenge in covering this barbershop quartet standard, apparently, is in upping the number of voices in it. Andy Williams performs it with four young Osmond Brothers (and, once the tune merges into “Sweet and Low”, their then-3-year-old sister Marie) on his variety show 1962. Jerold Ottley does it (and “Will I Ever Tell You”) with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

Gary Indiana: Janet Planet makes a cabaret patter song out of it, like The Waters of March flowed through there or something.

Till There Was You: Beatles, yes, but also Rod Stewart (on one of his insufferable American Songbooks), The Smithereens (on their Meet The Beatles remake Meet The Smithereens), Ray Charles…

Man, even the Leiber obit in Playbill Online sells the guy short, concentrating mainly on Smokey Joe’s Cafe while mentioning in passing that Stoller co-wrote the score for The People in the Picture and that Leiber/Stoller songs figured in jukebox or revue shows such as Dancin’, Rock ‘n’ Roll! The First 5000 Years Ring of Fire, All Shook Up, the Peggy Lee show Peg and of course Million Dollar Quartet.

Read their amazing tag-team autobiography Hound Dog and you’ll find Leiber and Stoller enthralled by live theater at a young age. When not writing million-selling pop hits, they spent untold hours trying to crack the musical theater firmament with scores for a wide variety of stage projects.

In the book, they drop theatrical references throughout the book. When they began to produce other artists, including the Greek-chorus-style pop group The Shangri-Las, Leiber and Stoller wanted to be credited not as producers but as “directors.”

Plus they approached pop songs as little plays. Here’s how Stoller describes the writing of the Peggy Lee classic “Is That All There Is?” (Lieber had crafted the song’s despondent spoken-word verses after reading Thomas Mann for the first time.):

Stoller: Jerry and I had been talking about stretching out as writers, and when he gave me these verses I saw this as the perfect vehicle to do just that. Jerry’s vignettes ached with the bittersweet irony of the German cabaret. I wrote music that I hoped caught the spirit of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht.
Then we got a call from Hilly Elkins, who was managing Georgia Brown. The English singer-actress known for “As Long as He Needs Me” was finishing her Broadway run of Oliver! and heading back to London for a TV special. She needed a song. When she heard those vignettes, she was convinced that that was it—except for one thing.
“It needs a chorus,” she said, “something for me to sing between verses. The spoken parts are beautiful, but it needs something else.”
Jerry and I agreed. We happened to have a chorus lying around, a leftover section from another song that didn’t work. It came complete with lyrics. We played it for Georgia and she loved it.

Leiber and Stoller worked hard on the score of a musical based on Mordechai Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. The show died in try-outs, the songwriters claim, because Richler wouldn’t take the time to fix his libretto. They also wrote the yet-unproduced musical Oscar, based on the Peter Finch film The Trials of Oscar Wilde, working directly with the film’s director Ken Hughes. They quote two of the songs in their Hound Dog book: a rant for Lord Queensbury, which begins “Homosexuals, oh, how I hate them, oh, how I loathe the bloody lot/ Why don’t they just exterminate them, exterminate them on the spot?” and a ballad titled “The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name.”

The Hound Dog chapter about Smokey Joe’s Café begins with mentions of much more audacious musical stage projects that never came to be:

Stoller: We weren’t thrilled that out many attempts to get a musical on Broadway had been in vain. Other efforts like The International Wrestling Match, songs we had written to turn an off-Broadway [sic] play—a Brechtian apocalyptic melodrama—into a musical, hadn’t taken off.

Yet having wanted to crack the format of book musicals for decades, when Smokey Joe’s Café began gestating, Leiber and Stoller insisted that it not have a book, that “the songs are their own stories.” They fell out with a choreographer/director over this exact point during workshops in Chicago, which led to Jerry Zaks coming in as director and agreeing that no book was needed.

AC/DC are merely following a path trodden by other one-time hellraisers. A journey from consuming substances so toxic they make lab rats go blind to marketing your own merlot is rock’n’roll’s version of Mrs. Patrick Campbell’s journey from the hurly-burly of the chaise longue to the deep deep peace of the marital double bed…

In rock’s rendering of the seven ages of Man, AC/DC have progressed from the first (“mewling and puking” after a night of hedonistic excess) to the sixth (“lean and sliuppered pantaloon,” sipping a Sancerre). All that now awaits the band is Shakespeare’s seventh age: that’s the one “sans teeth.”

—Grapes of Rock, op-ed, Wednesday, Aug. 17, Times.

My question now, is what are we supposed to do with these old AC/DC pint glasses?