Henry Gibson: ...by Henry Gibson

Between 1957 and 1962, a short, nebbishy white dude started appearing on Jack Paar’s Tonight Show, doing poetry readings that all started with the name of the poem followed by a declaratory “…by Henry Gibson”. The poems, which featured the accent and cornpone subject matter of the author’s Alabama hometown, had the carefully enunciated prose cadence of a sixth-grade school report, were structured like laundry lists, and often had a closing summary line that he’d repeat. And all of America heard this man describe counting alligators on a Saturday night and asked: Is this man really a fucking idiot? There was, of course, no Wikipedia to tell people instantly that, no, this guy was not for real: this was actor James Bateman of Philadelphia, and Henry Gibson was a character he’d been putting on for fun for years (say “A Doll’s House” and the name of this album, and you’ll get the drama-school joke behind the alias). It’s all very wholesome, friendly, and sprinkled with a lurking surrealism like an unexplained whiffle bat on the wall at the dentist’s office. What could be more fun for an actor than telling a supper club audience how to skin a polecat? Originally recorded and released in 1962 under the title The Alligator, this reissue dates from 1968 when Henry was enjoying renewed popularity thanks to his recurring walk-on appearances on Laugh-In.

How To Write A Poem
The Alligator
Why I Like Soap
The Newspaper
How To Skin A Polecat
How Now, Calpurnia
The Feather
Here Today—Gone Tomorrow
A Little Bit About Myself
How To Take Care Of The Plum Tree
Happiness Can Be Yours For Little Or No Money
Reflections Of New York
The Coyote
Two Functional Poems
Education Is Important
What Freedom Means To Me In 25 Words Or Less
Why I Like Poetry

Album audio & artwork

DISCLAIMER: To the best of my knowledge, this work is out of print and not available for purchase in any format. If you are the artist and are planning a reissue, please let me know and I’ll remove it from the blog. Also please get in touch if you’ve lost your art &/or sound masters and would like to talk with me about my restoration work.

Woody Allen: The Third Woody Allen Album

Woody Allen’s third and last album of stand-up comedy, from 1968 (now buy this CD!).

Album audio & artwork

DISCLAIMER: To the best of my knowledge, this work is out of print and not available for purchase in any format. If you are the artist and are planning a reissue, please let me know and I’ll remove it from the blog. Also please get in touch if you’ve lost your art &/or sound masters and would like to talk with me about my restoration work.

Woody Allen: Woody Allen Volume 2

Woody Allen’s second stand-up album from 1965 (again, you need to buy this ASAP).

The Moose
The Kidnapping
Superman
Science Fiction Movie
Eggs Benedict
Footnote
What's New Pussycat?
Reminiscences
Swedish Movie
Taking a Shower (A Pantomime)
Lost Generation

Album audio & artwork

DISCLAIMER: To the best of my knowledge, this work is out of print and not available for purchase in any format. If you are the artist and are planning a reissue, please let me know and I’ll remove it from the blog. Also please get in touch if you’ve lost your art &/or sound masters and would like to talk with me about my restoration work.

Woody Allen: Woody Allen

Here’s the first of Woody Allen’s albums of stand-up comedy from 1964. Honestly, this one’s for reference only. Now buy the Rhino Stand-Up Comic CD (which contains all the same material as the Stand-Up Comic double LP from Casablanca in 1979, which in turn contained the same material as the United Artists Stand-Up Comic: 1964-1968 double LP from United Artists in 1978, which in turn contained the same material as United Artists’ The Night Club Years 1964-1968 from 1972. If you ever see used copies of those collections, leave 'em in the bins and get the CD instead). The collected material is brilliant, just genius. The original LPs contain that material plus some stuff that didn’t date very well, or was about a film he was making at the time, or was kinda skeevy and misogynist. But if you’re an Allen fan, you should get a chance to make that characterization for yourself, and the original albums are pretty scarce, so here you go.

Album audio & art

DISCLAIMER: To the best of my knowledge, this work is out of print and not available for purchase in any format. If you are the artist and are planning a reissue, please let me know and I’ll remove it from the blog. Also please get in touch if you’ve lost your art &/or sound masters and would like to talk with me about my restoration work.

Firesign Theatre: Station Break / Forward Into the Past

What kind of Firesign Theatre archivist would I be if I didn’t post goodies from their archive from time to time? Here’s the complete artwork for their scarce 1969 single “Station Break” b/w “Forward Into the Past” (with the reminder that both of these cuts are available cheap from iTunes & Amazon).

7-inch artwork

Dwight Fiske: Songs His Mother Never Taught Him

 

Dwight Fiske (1892-1959) was a wildly popular night club entertainer and a prominent gay voice in comedy in the first half of the 20th century. He was a Rhode Island native who grew up in Providence and Boston, then attended Harvard and the Paris Conservatoire. When the Great War ended he found himself in Europe entertaining American socialites looking for fun overseas during Prohibition, and he developed his signature delivery of ribald stories with piano accompaniment. After Tallulah Bankhead gave him the good word, leading to a nine-month gig at the Bat Club in London, Fiske spend the last half of the 1920s and most of the 1930s bouncing between high-class joints in Europe and New York City where he entertained high society as their swishy musical mascot into the world of S-E-X. Through innuendo and witty double-entendres, he became the king of the party record, releasing no less than 30 sides on his own Fiskana imprint between 1933 and 1937. After World War II he hooked up with Gala Records, basically re-recorded his entire catalogue, and sat back as they released a flurry of brand-new songs, new versions of old songs, and straight dubs of his older records, until he eventually won an injunction against them from the New York Supreme Court for non-payment of royalties (he sued them for contempt in 1952, claiming he hadn’t been paid since 1948 and they were still selling his records). You’ll find loooots of different Fiske 78s floating around, but his LPs are more scarce – Gala released four of them; Jubilee released this one in 1955; there’s a very iffy LP on Monarch called “Song Satires”; and there’s a split LP with Fiske on one side and Nan Blackstone on the flip called Tongue With Cheek, which incidentally features one of the all-time great covers. It’s hard to get very excited about Fiske today, mainly of course because the power of innuendo has dripped away to nothing like an Italian glacier, but also because Fiske’s stories were surprisingly topical (sometimes a little TOO topical; in 1941 Fiske was successfully sued for libel by a Mr. Philip Pratt because of his song “Coney Island Honeymoon”). This LP was recorded very near the end of Fiske’s career, and if you’re a real trainspotter you get 100 points for knowing which Del Close LP cover was also designed by this LP’s designer, Burt Goldblatt.

Senorita Margarita Del Campo
Elizabeth and Raleigh
Fountain of Youth
Salome
Mrs. Pettibone
Mr. America

LP audio & artwork

DISCLAIMER: To the best of my knowledge, this work is out of print and not available for purchase in any format. If you are the artist and are planning a reissue, please let me know and I’ll remove it from the blog. Also please get in touch if you’ve lost your art &/or sound masters and would like to talk with me about my restoration work.

Warner Bros. Music Show: Monty Python Examines The Life of Brian

Here’s a terrific interview with Eric Idle, George Harrison, Terry Jones, Graham Chapman, and Michael Palin, all talking about Monty Python's most unintentionally controversial film, Life of Brian, just as the film was coming out in the United States in 1979.

LP audio & artwork

DISCLAIMER: To the best of my knowledge, this work is out of print and not available for purchase in any format. If you are the artist and are planning a reissue, please let me know and I’ll remove it from the blog. Also please get in touch if you’ve lost your art &/or sound masters and would like to talk with me about my restoration work.