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Poetry
in motion
BY MIKE
MILIARD
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They’re ersatz and unwieldy, a bit cynical, sort of a scam.
And they’re terrific. They’re song-poems — mismatched
marriages of lyrics thunk up by Joe Q. Public to music churned
out by studio pros — and they represent the gleefully gawky
collision between commerce and the creativity of common folk,
tapping into that great triumvirate of American yearnings:
self-expression, fame, and a quick buck. In Jamie Meltzer’s
documentary Off the Charts: The Song-Poem Story, which
screens next Thursday at the Milky Way in Jamaica Plain
(followed by live renderings of songs from the film by the
Weisstronauts and Snoozer), these stupendously silly songs and
the winsomely weird folks who wrote them spring to vibrant
life.
You’ve seen the ads, tucked in the back pages of mags and
rags and comic books: SONGS WANTED FOR POEMS AND RECORDS or
YOUR SONGS OR POEMS MAY EARN MONEY FOR YOU. It’s guestimated
that since 1900, more than 200,000 song-poems have been
recorded in hundreds of small studios across the country, from
the old Five Star Music Masters on Tremont Street, to
Columbine Records in Hollywood. These places were (and are) as
much assembly lines as dens of creativity. In the film, we
meet mercurial Gene Merlino, "King of the Demo Singers," who’s
been banging ’em out since the late ’50s. He once recorded 82
songs in four hours.
Some ads promised returns of up to $50,000 in royalties per
song. But unsurprisingly, not a single song-poem ever charted.
It’s easy to see why, watching producer Art Kaufman peruse the
lyrics, scrawled on yellow legal paper, of "The Thing," a
shambling manifesto about a monster who likes to boogie. How
to make it sing? Some thoughtful hums and a few desultory
pokes at a keyboard, and Kaufman is off. Time elapsed from
first read to finished product: 48 minutes.
If the session men are a tad jaded, the songwriters
themselves are disarmingly eccentric, quintessentially
American specimens. Take prolific song-poem scribbler Caglar
Juan Singletary, a virginal nerd who sits smiling next to his
grandmother as he enumerates his lyrical preoccupations. "The
subjects I write about are martial arts ... the ladies ... and
religion. And science fiction, too." These find glorious voice
in a song like "Non-Violent Taekwondo Troopers" (which also
throws in a nod to his beloved bike, Angelaria).
"Angelariaaaaa! Show me yourself," croons mail-order maestro
David Fox over a throbbing pre-fab synth score. "Come in the
spirit of Jesus Christ. Thank Jehovah for kung fu bicycles and
Priscilla Presley."
Sometimes the song-poem process was used for less than pure
expression. In the mid ’70s, John Trubee mischievously
scribbled the most obnoxious and nonsensical lyrics he could
think of and mailed them off, expecting nothing more than a
letter of admonishment. But sure enough his song arrived, with
session pro Ramsey Kearney singing his song, "Blind Man’s
Penis," in a dulcet country twang over martial drum rolls and
weeping pedal steel: "I got high last night on LSD. My mind
was beautiful, and I was free. Warts loved my nipples, because
they are pink. Vomit on me baby, yeah yeah yeah. A blind man’s
penis is erect because he’s blind."
But most often, song-poems represent Americans’
straight-faced concerns, dressed up in an era’s pop-music
idioms. And like America itself, they’re bipartisan. An
anonymous songster’s "Richard Nixon" is a panegyric to Tricky
Dick that lays down a stirring patriotic hymn, in the vein of
"Ballad of the Green Berets," as Rod Keith — "the greatest
song-poem interpreter of all time" — intones that "God, in his
infinite wisdom, put Richard Nixon on this earth. To bring to
us his heritage, one of priceless worth." On "Jimmy Carter
Says Yes!", by Waskey Elwood Walls, interpreter Gene Marshall
re-imagines the humble peanut farmer as an ersatz Isaac Hayes.
Over bombastic bass lines and blaxploitation brass, he
talk-sings that "as your president, I, Jimmy Carter, know it
is possible to run a government efficiently, without sin or
any corruption. I will do my level best to run the government
decently, without any state of eruption."
It’s these earnest and endearing songwriters that make
Off the Charts so affecting — people such as
Tennessee’s Van Garner, who’s been writing song-poems since
the ’40s in emulation of his hero Roy Acuff, or the guileless
and gangly Gary Forney, who sets out with his son Josh to sing
songs like "Chicken Insurrection" and "Three-Eyed Boy" to
handfuls of bemused onlookers on their grandly named Iowa
Mountain Tour. (Never mind that it’s only one stop. And that
"there are no mountains in Iowa ... unless you count a few
hills and quarries.")
Just as comics writer Harvey Pekar was undeterred by his
poor draftsmanship, simply enlisting others to draw his
American Splendor strips for him, these people aren’t
afraid to contract out in order to hear their musical visions
realized. And just as Pekar’s comic book — and the critically
acclaimed film it’s spawned — finds beauty and resonance in
the quotidian, so do the peculiar musical musings of these
folks. "People are wild," says NRBQ drummer Tom Ardolino, one
of America’s premier song-poem connoisseurs. "[The songs are
about] whatever comes to their minds. Y’don’t know what it’s
gonna be!"
Jamie Meltzer’s Off the Charts: The Song-Poem
Story screens Thursday, September 4 at the Milky Way Lounge
and Lanes, 403-405 Centre Street, in Jamaica Plain. Tickets
are $5; call (617) 524-3740. For more song-poems, check out
Do You Know the Difference Between Big Wood and Brush: The
American Song-Poem Anthology (Bar/None).
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