Disc of the day
The Hold Steady - Boys And Girls In America
Sex, drugs and transubstantiation from Brooklyn’s unlikely rock stars.
Features Disc of the day
Del Close And John Brent
How to Speak Hip
(Mercury, 1959)
Just relax, baby, Del and this cat John are gonna straighten you out.
This is the greatest comedy record ever made. Designed to resemble the late ’50s sub-genre of the “Teach Yourself…” language LP, How To Speak Hip initially appears no weirder than any other educational release of 1959. But the album was devised by a Manhattan beat poet, actor and informal chemical researcher (Brent) who ran the Fat Black Pussy Cat Café, and a Kansas-raised sci-fi nut (Close) who’d left home at 17 to join a travelling carnival (Dr. Dracula's Magic Horror Show) as fire-eater and human torch (Azrad The Incombustible). For the role of the LP “instructor”, Brent created groovy cellar-dwelling hep-cat Geets Romo, whose first words to us are “If you bought this record to learn how to speak hip – from a record, man – that is the squarest thing I ever heard!” Spurred on by Close’s button-down interrogator the two improvise and riff on everything from Basic Hip to advanced notions of Cool and Uncool, in a manner that is both immediate and complex, meaning that, unlike any other comedy album I know, *How To Speak Hip gets better with repeated listenings. Plus: I now know that it’s uncool to buddy with a known fink, or claim you used to run with Bird or that you have Bird’s axe and that it’s even less cool to ask ‘who is Bird?’
After the album Close and Brent formed improvisational Chicago comedy troupe, Second City, with Mike Nichols, Elaine May, and Joan Rivers. Close became an alcoholic, a heroin addict and a key figure in the ‘60s counterculture. He also discovered and became a mentor to John Belushi, Dan Ackroyd, Bill Murray, Gilda Radner, George Wendt, and John Candy. He died from emphysema on March 4 1999. His last words were "I’m tired of being the funniest one in the room". In his will he bequeathed his skull to Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, to be used in productions of Hamlet, for which Close would be listed in the programme as playing the part of Yorick.
Andrew Male
Posted by Danny_Eccleston at 6:00 AM GMT 25/03/2008
Further Listening
Stan Freberg – The Presents Of The United States Of America (Capitol, 1961)
The Firesign Theatre – Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers (Mobile Fidelity, 1970)
Tom Waits - Small Change (Asylum, 1976)
SUGGEST YOUR OWN DISC OF THE DAY ON OUR MESSAGE BOARD HERE, OR, MORE PRIVATELY, HERE!
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Martin Carthy - Martin Carthy
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The Copper Family - Come Write Me Down
The authentic voice of England’s rural working people reverberates across the centuries. Death, thou
3:05 PM GMT 01/05/2008
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