The 'announcer's test' and the nonsense lyric

Summer is the season for silliness (and, evidently, alliteration). There is no greater place to discover purebred, 100% silliness than in novelty tunes (witness the recent welcome re-emergence of the one gent who singlehandedly has been keeping the genre alive, Weird Al). In this post I want to spotlight one piece of sheer ridiculousness and its connection to the world of “nonsense songs.”

Reportedly it was comic actor Del Moore who told Jerry Lewis about “the announcer's test,” a tongue-twisting, laundry-list recitation that was used at NBC to audition prospective radio performers. Lewis has been doing it now for more than half a century; I remember reading that at one point he recited it every night one week while guest-hosting The Tonight Show (I believe in the early Sixties).

The Wikipedia entry for “the announcer's test” indicates that Moore took the test in 1941 – at that point Jerry was a young comedian doing a record-miming act, so I doubt he stopped the records to do this crazy recitation. In any case, Jerry became identified with the piece, which starts off “One hen/one hen, two ducks/one hen, two ducks, three squawking geese...”

One has to wonder how many times Jerry rehearsed that, knowing his perfectionist, control-freak tendencies. The most curious entry in the recitation, concerning “Don Alverso's tweezers” (the name is also spelled “Alverzo”) is explained in one of the many books about Lewis, but I am damned if I can remember which book and who Alverso was – if you are in possession of such knowledge, leave it in the comments field.

People who are not Jerry fans (and I know you're out there, I can hear you audibly loathing him) might be familiar with this recitation as a silly memory test taught at scout camp or in school. I for one am always brought in mind of the “Sanzini Brothers,” the alter-egos of Flo and Eddie, who were the alter-egos of Mark Volman and Funhouse guest Howard Kaylan of the Turtles (seen right with some friends).
Howard and Mark did the announcer's test in their act as “the Tibetan Memory Trick” and included a live recording of it on their 1975 album Illegal, Immoral and Fattening.

I was unaware of the test's existence as a pop-rock single from 1962 – for this, I thank correspondent and “high”/“low” cultural connoisseur RC. The single was called “One Hen,” and it was performed by a group of studio singers named “the Blue Chips” for this project.

The men behind the single were Hugo & Luigi, two Italian-American cousins who worked in the music industry as writers, producers, and record label owners from the Fifties through the Seventies. Their careers included work with Sarah Vaughan, Jimmie Rodgers, Elvis, Sam Cooke, and Isley Brothers. One of their final hits was “The Hustle” by Van McCoy in 1975.

In the meantime, they had a little habit at one point of taking foreign melodies and writing new lyrics (with co-writer George Weiss) without ever acknowledging the source for the melody. It's not known if they did this a lot, but there were two very big hits that were examples of this tendency: The Tokens' “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” (from the South African musician Solomon Linda's song “Mbube,” better known over here thanks to Pete Seeger and the Weavers as “Wimoweh”) and Elvis's “Can't Help Falling in Love with You” (based on “Plaisr d'Amour” by Jean-Paul Egide Martini).

In this case there was no stated writer of the announcer's test, and they had to come up with the melody themselves (and it ain't much of a melody, just snippets of other tunes). It's quite a little ditty and it became the theme for radio personality Dick Summer (who I know and loved from his later days at WNBC and WYNY here in NYC) when he was on at nights on the Boston radio station WBZ. He called this crazy thing “The Nightlighter's Password.”

“One Hen” is simultaneously really catchy, very dopey, and kinda aggravating if you get it stuck in your cranium. After hearing it, I was brought in mind of the early nonsense songs that no doubt spawned it – tunes that were big hits that were also, by turns, catchy, dopey, and kinda aggravating.

Thus, I present a small handful of these suckers, since the subject of novelty tunes and nonsense songs is very wide, very broad, and most certainly deserves its own blog (it has its own podcast, on which more below; I'm sure there already is a novelty records blog – if so, lemme know in the comments field below).

These songs have existed since recording began, but they seemed to become super-popular with the advent of the big band era. In 1939, Kay Kyser had a major hit with “Three Little Fishes” (with its refrain “Boop boop dit-tem dat-tem what-tem chu!” – in looking that up, I got to see at least four distinct ways of spelling this nonsense).

The one that broke new ground by explaining its insanity was, of course, “Mairzy Doats,” the 1944 hit by the Merry Macs. The song is truly catchy as fuck, but like a lot of really good whodunits, it loses much of its allure once you've heard the “solution” (which one of the songwriters said came from his daughter's mispronunciation of something she learned in school), there's not much more to absorb.

Still, the song provides a great defense when the argument is put forth that all the music the “greatest generation” listened to was on the order of Gershwin, Porter, and Kern:
 

In the Fifties, nonsense songs exploded in the period before rock 'n' roll took hold of the mainstream. This kind of music regularly charted, was performed by name artists, and became its own subgenre throughout the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies. The forefather of the whole (WWII and after) thing is of course the god Spike Jones (not Jonze), who begat all the later great weirdo acts, from Tom Lehrer to Zappa with all the stops in between. Spike requires his own blog post, and more than likely his own fan-appreciation blog....

You can blame the emergence of a steady output of novelty 45s on the supposedly super-wholesome and anodyne nature of Fifties culture (a concept that is disproved when one actually digs into Fifties culture), or perhaps because there were more producers like Mitch Miller who put novelties in the mainstream with “How Much Is that Doggie in the Window?” and “Mule Train” (with its whipcrack); I prefer to nostalgize about the record Sinatra considered his worst, “Mama Will Bark.” 

In the early Fifties, the nonsense songs weren't as nonsensical. In fact some were was downright educational, like the Four Lads' “Istanbul (not Constantinople)” (which most likely spawned Soupy's awesome “Pachalfaka”). Younger listeners recall the 1990 cover of the song by They Might Be Giants, a band that has ventured into novelty-tune waters (and later kiddie music) at various points in their long career (the duo also has a penchant for writing earworm compositions whose lyrics cannot be dissected).

I was taught this ditty by my mother as a small child. She never embraced rock 'n' roll heavily in the Fifties, but she did fall victim to the occasional novelty ditty:

I could go on and on about novelty records, but won't (right now). I will, though, point you to an act that followed in the tradition I've been talking about, the vocal combo known as the Gaylords. They were a trio of Italian-Americans (do you sense a trend here? Another post could handle Lou Monte and nonsense deity Louis Prima!) doing songs like “The Little Shoe Maker” and “Ma-Ma-Ma-Marie.” 

But the earworms, man, the earworms... When the group performed in a distinctly non-Italian mode, they sang catchy Fifties tunes like this impossible-to-forget paean to a Chinese restaurant (which apparently has gotten a second life to a Mafia video game):

KBC – he of the Bitslap podcast – provided my intro to the music of the Gaylords. In one show he did a looooong time ago, KBC not only played “No More Chow Mein,” but the ditty below, “Papa Poppadopolis, the Happy Locksmith Man.” There is an incredible innocence at work here (the kind that was gone around the time of another song about a profession, Meri Wilson's “Telephone Man” – yes, the novelty-record trove goes deep, it goes verrrrry deep....).

And because this must end somewhere, I punctuate this discussion with a novelty/nonsense song that does actually hurt my head. It's sung by the calmest man in music, Perry Como, and is a carefully crafted tune that has a little “secret” to it... well, you'll figure it out in a line or two and you'll scream for mercy. This discussion of nonsense in music will be resumed at some point in the future.

Thanks to RC for the original “discussion” about “One Hen.” My thanks also go to the intrepid KBC, who continues to do excellent work on his weekly “Bitslap” podcast. He's currently on a short summer layoff, but has left us several years worth of old episodes and promises to be back in September!

For Philip Seymour Hoffman, patron saint of losers, on his birthday

Today Philip Seymour Hoffman would’ve been 47 years old. His loss is still acutely felt among those of us who admired his work, especially since we are running out of “final film” releases — the next two Hunger Games installments he appears in are the only items yet to come out (and those, I think it is safe to say, are not “must-see” viewing for those looking to get a final dose of his superb acting skills).

I chose not to write about Philip Seymour right after his death, because there was just so much being written about him already and because there were a number of his films I wanted to rewatch or check out for the first time. I wound up watching about 15 of his films in the ensuing weeks, yet still never wrote about him because I wanted to be removed in time from the initial outcry over the manner of his death (more on that below) and because the emotional impact of seeing his best films in a short span of time was indeed overwhelming.

From his first movie roles, he established himself as a topflight character actor who melted into the characters he was playing. Thus I thought “this Hoffman guy” was pretty sleazy and unpleasant after seeing him in Boogie Nights (1997) and Happiness (1998). It took a few years for me to realize he was just a consummate chameleon who was capable playing a wide variety of roles, most of which were broadly sympathetic. (The initial sign for me that he was not just a "creepy" character actor was David Mamet's State and Main in 2000).

He played charismatic leaders and artists beautifully, as in Capote (2005) and The Master (2012), but his most indelible performances always seemed to be as losers, outcasts, and schlemiels. Once he was able to command big salaries for appearing in blockbusters (Red Dragon, Mission: Impossible III), he continued to also take featured or starring parts in films that were virtually guaranteed to fail at the box office but were well-scripted character studies that were worthy of his time (and worthy of your viewing).

So, yeah, he appeared in a number of films that were multiplex-friendly mulch, but when he appeared in a good character study, it was usually pretty damned good, or at least had some memorably moving sequences. To cite just four titles that fit this bill and have stayed with me heavily since I saw them, I will spotlight Love Liza (2002), The Savages (2007), Sidney Lumet's terrific crime drama Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (also 2007), and Jack Goes Boating (2010), which was also the only feature he directed.

The films Philip Seymour got star billing in were uniformly challenging. Whether noble, ambitious messes (Synecdoche, New York), “prestige” Hollywood fare based on a celebrated play (Proof), or just a low-key, Canadian film about gambling addiction (Owning Mahowny), the further up his name was in the cast list, the greater the chance was that the film was worth seeing, and that you’d most likely not forget it, whether you liked or hated it. 

Following the news of Hoffman's death came a slew of condemnations of the man, with many private citizens (read: anonymous Internet nobodies) and low-level show-biz personalities weighting in on his overdose. The result was, as N.Y. Post columnist Sara Stewart accurately phrased it, an “Internet outrage factory” in which people tried to outdo each other condemning Philip Seymour for his “selfishness” in having had a drug problem when he also happened to have children.

This was infuriating and very telling, a reflection of our child-centric society that sounded as if people who were parents were in some sense not only furious at Hoffman for having “ignored” his children (these morally outraged souls have a very simplistic – more like moronic – views of addiction), but they were in fact also jealous that he got out of this existence without having to personally raise his children. The moral outrage, in essence, said more about the loud-mouths on the Internet than it did about Philip Seymour.

The Internet is nothing if not a kangaroo court made up of some of the dumbest judges imaginable. The condemnation of Hoffman ignored the fact that his addiction was clearly an extension of depression, and that both were linked to his creativity. The evidence is not just in the interviews he did, but also in the performances he gave. He touched chords that many actors can't reach – he wasn't a matinee idol to begin with, but he never shied away from altering his appearance for the worse if it benefited a performance.

He depicted suffering beautifully, but even more impressive was that he depicted people who lived with bad choices on a daily basis. It's easy to sit in judgment of such people – why can't they get their shit together? – but he offered a window onto these characters' lives that suggested that they wanted better things for themselves and those around them but were, well... misfits, schlemiels, and losers.

Whenever anyone dies at a younger age, the pundits lament “what might have been.” What's important here is that we did have Philip Seymour around acting at full blast for 23 years straight. Some of the films might be multiplex fodder or works in which his performance is the most interesting thing, hands down (among them Flawless [at right] and the otherwise unwatchable Along Came Polly; even he and a great Sixties music score can’t save Pirate Radio).

When a performer is that intense while depicting the losers and misfits, it naturally follows that they are tapping into some internal emotion. It was noted in a few obits that he fell “off the wagon” in 2012 while doing Death of a Salesman on Broadway. One could easily understand how the pressure of working on such sad, heartfelt material on both screen and stage would affect him emotionally and find him reverting back to bad habits he shed after college.

This interview from 60 Minutes is perhaps the most interesting, most intense TV talk with Hoffman. He stresses that he prefers people to remember his characters rather than him and that he doesn’t want his private life to be projected upon his acting.

He reflects on his Oscar-winning turn in Capote and how he became utterly obsessed with the part, but was able to shed Truman the minute the shoot was over. Because of a stray comment he makes — that he would probably only revert to doing his Capote impression if he went back to drinking — the interviewer asks him about his addictions.

He notes that in college he took “anything I could get my hands on,” but that he checked into rehab at 22 so that he could move on with his acting. The picture one gets of Hoffman from his interviews is that he was a consummate professional whose level of dedication — and yes, obsession — fueled his work.

A very young- and really wholesome-looking Philip Seymour waxes rhapsodic about Magnolia (1999). He speaks about how he is blessed thus far to have worked with such great actors:

I’ve talked before on this blog about my undying admiration for Lester Bangs. Hoffman didn’t look or sound like him, but he incarnated him beautifully in Almost Famous (2000). He found the essence of Bangs and honored Lester’s legacy with his performance:

The best-remembered bit of PSH as Bangs, talking about the blessings of not being cool:

A very strange and entertaining scene from a very strange movie, Punch Drunk Love (2002), the one film starring Adam Sandler that I can stomach. Here Sandler argues on the phone with a totally insane Philip Seymour, to the backdrop of a very unconventional musical score. Never let it be said that Philip Seymour didn’t know how to play comedy (and say the word “fuck” with much confidence):

There were many “best of” clip reels made after Philip Seymour’s death showing his finest moments as an actor. This montage is one of the best because it was clearly made by a diehard fan who wanted to show the range of Hoffman’s “creepiness” onscreen.

It also shows why it was difficult for casual viewers to recognize him from movie to movie, even though he rarely changed his appearance all that much. Without further ado, the “creepy, pervy” side of Philip Seymour:

One of the films starring Philip Seymour that affected me the most was The Savages, a very funny and yet painfully realistic account of two siblings (Hoffman and Laura Linney) trying to find a care facility for their demented dad. Like most art based on daily experience, it lingers with you a long time after viewing it:

Another extremely moving work is Love Liza, conscripted by Philip Seymour’s brother Gordy. PSH stars as a man whose wife has committed suicide, but who left him a note before her death, a note he does not want to read.

He escapes reading the letter in various ways, including huffing gasoline. The film is a wonderfully crafted comedy drama that can be seen here in its entirety. Here are two scenes from the film:

Given the manner of his death, the single most haunting scene to revisit is this heroin interlude from Sidney Lumet’s masterful Before The Devil Knows You're Dead. One gets the impression that the feeling of alienation that Hoffman’s character feels here is what drove him to the drug in real life.

But, just remember, he was completely sober at the moment he made this film (2007) and he’s only playing a character. Or was he?

On the lighter side, a pleasant, often silly interview with Craig Ferguson about his debut as a director, Jack Goes Boating:

His only film as a director, Jack Goes Boating is a perfect “small movie,” a character study that makes the viewer instantly identify with its leads. Sure, the plot becomes a modern update on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in its last third, but the sequences featuring the awkward, heartbreaking romance between Hoffman’s lunkheaded character and Amy Ryan’s introverted wall flower are gorgeous, as can be seen here.

As moviegoers we do miss Philip Seymour incredibly, knowing that, in spite of the Hunger Games mainstream crap, he kept coming back to small films like Love Liza, The Savages, and Jack Goes Boating. It’s a damned shame there won’t be any more small gems like these, but we do have a few dozen indelible performances from 23 years of sublime acting.

Note: Some of the images in this piece came from the Tumblr “Fuck Yeah Philip Seymour Hoffman.”