Welcome to this week's edition of Mark Steyn on the Town. I'm weekending in Kiev, and so I thought we'd enjoy a bevy of blasts from oblasts - that's to say, an hour of hits by some of the many Ukrainian contributers to the American and British songbooks. Mostly by Jews, for the usual reasons, but not exclusively so. You'll know the songs, as performed by a diverse range of artistes from Eddie Cantor to Tanya Tucker, but did you know their Ukrainian roots?
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~Thank you for all your kind comments on last week's show. Teresa Maupin, a California member of The Mark Steyn Club, says:
Listening to On the Town makes mundane household chores enjoyable!!
Thank you, Teresa. Enjoy it while you can. In the obsession with technical "perfection", all the artistry is dying. Wes Whitten, a Georgia Steyn Clubber, writes:
Great show, Mark. A nice change for my brain, as the 21st century has left it atrophied with 3 chord, 4/4 timed, pitch corrected and auto-tuned "product". Perhaps you could do a show on how companies even pitch correct classic performances to make them as soulless as what they're currently manufacturing?
That last is really disturbing, Wes: I heard a Judy Garland track the other day that some bozo back at the label had run through the auto-tuner. Michael Bublé told me twenty years ago that the record company had done that to him not because he required it - he knows how to centre a note - but to make the sound a little more "contemporary".
For Michael Seth, a First Quarter Founding Member of The Mark Steyn Club, the highlight was Julie London:
Hope Mark's playing that 15-second snippet of classic Louie Louie didn't trigger any cardiac palpatations! (Mark let it play 10 seconds longer than I expected.) As for Julie London, she'll always be Nurse Dixie McCall of "Emergency!" to me, from the fevered dreams of my youth. Great show!
Mr Bradley, an Oregon Steyn Clubber, also enjoyed Miss London:
Now that was an entertaining hour of music! Loved the Louie Louie mini-celebration. You can never go wrong with Julie London and I had totally forgotten about Rene Touzet's El Loco Cha Cha being the root source of the Richard Berry original. Regular Serenade Radio listeners are probably aware of The Sandpipers lush Top 30 version of LL from 1966 but if not it's worth hearing as well.
As the hour drew to a close, I thought for sure you would acknowledge your stay in Hungary this weekend by playing something from the classical music field, in particular Johannes Brahms Hungarian Dance No 5. Then when the banana medley started with Mighty Sparrow and Edric Connor, it hit me you were going even deeper and would end the show with Allan Sherman's hilarious Hungarian Goulash No 5 but, alas, it was not to be. Maybe next time.
As it is, I don't know how you found the energy amid your travels this weekend to put together another memorable episode of On The Town but many thanks for doing so. Made my day, for sure.
For Tom, a Mark Steyn Club member from Guernsey in the Channel Islands, the experience is enhanced by headphones:
I often find myself plugged into my headphones listening to this show when I am doing the gardening at this time of the year. It makes me focus on the show word for word and song by song, unlike having it on in the background. It is an excellent production and must take a lot of work to put together, so thank you very much.
As an aside, it always amuses me when Cindy Kent trails the show in her own show immediately preceding it because I imagine her doing so through gritted teeth. She gives me the impression of someone whose politics might be rather left of centre and thus someone who might not ordinarily wish to give the likes of Mark Steyn a platform, even a musical one. Perhaps, though, I have her completely wrong.
Well, these days Cindy's a lady vicar, so you can make of that what you will.But I first met her half-a-century ago at Capital Radio in its Golden Age, and I must say she's always been very nice to me.
For Nicola Timmerman, a Steyn Clubber in francophone Eastern Ontario, it was all about the Bananen:
Yes, we gotta no bananas today. Well actually you do!
Your German is sehr gut. Did you take it at school with French and Latin.
Good luck with Hungarian and Ukrainian!
I'd hardly say my German is "sehr gut". My late producer Brian Savin, who spoke excellent German, never asked me to retake anything ...except my occasional renderings of Teutonic text, and then we'd be there till after midnight. Since Brian died, I think of a Cologne pharmacist preyed on by "Syrian" "refugees" who enjoyed me just winging it in Kraut and imagine I'm pitching it at her.
For our West Coast music maven Gary Alexander, "Louie Louie" brought back too many youthful memories:
The Sinatra Sextet was a welcome relief after hearing "Louie Louie" again, as it was a song drummed into my young head hundreds of times when growing up in the rock-and-roll combo scene in Seattle, 1957-63. In those days, my combo tried to play swing and jazz but any honker playing those three repetitive notes in "Louie" whipped my rear end in any "battle of the bands" -- the crowd loves the honkers -- verifying the old cliche, "Rock musicians play three chords for 3,000 people, while Jazz guys play 3,000 chords for three people."
As it turns out, a great sax player in my high school band, Neil Rush, made two recordings of that song in the 1960s, first with the Fabulous Wailers, then with his wife, "Merilee (Rush) and the Turnabouts." He also played Louie Louie with the Fabulous Wailers at our 40th class reunion, but that's probably Too Much Information. I much preferred it when Neil played lead alto sax solo in our high school 'stage band.' I love those 3,000 (or so) chords in Stardust, not those three tenor sax honks dominating Louie.
For Jake, a member of The Mark Steyn Club in the English West Country, "El Loco Cha Cha" was a revelation:
Understandable to spin a brief clip of Louie Louie but damn right to play all of El Loco Cha Cha. What a terrific recording! Kettle drums, cow bells, bongos and those glorious horns - nirvana! And still sounding mint fresh as though recorded this morning. Surely the royalty lawyers got involved on Mr Touzet's behalf?
It was interesting to read a Steyn Clubber write that while Mark is prepared to play the most appalling German Schlager slop, a real piece of songwriting finery, namely Three Coins In a Fountain, is denounced as 'boring'. I can respect that viewpoint.
Like Mark, I love the Calypso King. When our King Charles addresses the nation to commemorate Queen Elizabeth's birth he should play Mighty Sparrow's Philip, My Dear in her honour.
Just to pick up on your question, Jake, "El Loco Cha-Cha" is not René Touzet's composition but merely his arrangement. And it's very difficult to enforce copyright in an arrangement when the alleged plagiarism doesn't appear anywhere in the printed sheet music. Sam Butera was mad that the rocker David Lee Roth had a big hit by stealing Sam's very particular arrangement of "Just a Gigolo", but he couldn't do anything about it. Same with the vamp that kicks off Gene Kelly's version of "Singin' in the Rain".
For Stefan Bucek, another Steyn Clubber in the Golden State, Sinatra's "Strangers in the Night" sounded stranger than it should have:
I hate to say this about any Sinatra song, much less a number one hit, but I've always felt there was something off in the recording of "Strangers in the Night." It just seems to me like he didn't quite hit the right note after the key change on the phrase, "in love forever." I've always thought the high note was just a bit flat. But what I never knew before you played the Sextette intro was that he hated the "g-d song." That was quite a revelation! Now, I'm not going to accuse Frank of sabotaging that recording because he hated the song, but is it possible that he knew he didn't reach that top note and just felt, the hell with it, I'm not doing it over just for that? Mark, perhaps you've spoken with one of his bandmates about it? Because save for such an interview, we might never know.
Well, he did have trouble with that key change, Stefan. And he was in a hurry: he had Mia Farrow in the studio with him and they were anxious to hit the road, and I'm unable to check the track because the blackout at my hotel has just kicked in, but I know Jimmy Bowen, as is his wont, was punctilious enough to attend to the key-change problems, so... I tell the story about that difficult night on Steyn's Song of the Week.
~On the Town is my weekly music show on Serenade Radio every Saturday at 5pm Greenwich Mean Time - that's 6pm in western and central Europe or 12 noon North American Eastern. You can listen from almost anywhere in the world by clicking the button at top right here. We also post On the Town at SteynOnline every weekend as a bonus for Mark Steyn Club members. You can find all our previous shows here.
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Mark Steyn on the Town can be heard on Serenade Radio at its regular times:
Saturday 5pm London time/12 noon New York
Sunday 5am London time/9am Los Angeles