Since Ms. Dardanella is the only thing keeping this blog alive just now, let’s go with it.
Wikipedia tells us that Sascha Jacobsen lived from 1895 to “1971 or 1972.” He was a violinist, and he played with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the 1950s. And, it seems, he was a musician of sufficient skill to command a Stradivarius. An interesting story of Mr. Jacobsen and his Strad - lost in a rain storm and swept out to sea, fortunately to be recovered and restored (the violin, not Mr. Jacobsen) can be read here.
Not much else seems available for my cursory Internet researches. Perhaps someone will blunder onto this site and enlighten us. Meanwhile, his Dardanella is an interesting addition to our collection.
It’s minutes to midnight, and unexpected employment obligations have left me with almost no time to get this up before June turns into a pumpkin… But I’ll post it now and update with more thoughts later.
I’m surprised I didn’t find this one sooner, and it’s a nifty version, from a group from Budapest called Benko’s Dixieland Band. This music reaches all the world.
Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra. The single biggest recording act of the 1920s. In movies, when they want to evoke the sound of the era, this is who they play. I won’t say he was bigger than the Beatles — he was a chubby, balding, middle-aged man, so his appeal was on quite a different level — but his sound was the standard of the age, and many great names worked with him over the years, including Bix Beiderbecke and Bing Crosby.
Whiteman’s version of the song was not the biggest seller — that honor goes to Ben Selvin and His Orchestra, which made the song famous in 1920. (In those days, everyone had an orchestra. It was mandatory, like getting a Social Security Number.) Read the label on this video, and you’ll note that the song is designated as a Foxtrot. Which it was, after all. Not that anyone cares about such things these days.
Frankly, the Ben Selvin version of the song is better, and I’ll get around to posting that one one of these months. But you can hear the standard Whiteman approach, with competence oozing from every element, as the musicians swap solos in the usual jazzband style of the day.
I don’t know if many of you caught the celebrity sighting here on KillThisBlog some months ago. It came in a comment on this post, made way back when, when we were led into a discussion of the fabulously obscure musical ensemble, The Roto Rooter Good Time Christmas Band. Yes, that highly demented Rootoid, Dr. Mabuse, d.o.a., dropped by to comment:
Nice to be “re-discovered”. The RRGTCB can still be heard on the syndicated Dr. Demento show. We did his theme as discussed on this site. “Pico and Sepulveda” without the Demento references is also on the 1974 Vanguard LP. Demo version available on our self-produced CD “Retro Rooter - 1972-1976? currently available on GEMM.com. All of us are alive and (mostly) well and 5 of us still get together to jam be-bop.
Since then I’ve had occasion to re-listen to the RRGTCB’s sole album, and I’m extremely happy to say it’s better than I remembered it. Maybe my tastes have changed, or maybe my tolerance for weirdness has increased, but there’s something exciting and eclectic about it — the range of influences it draws on, from classical music to The Great American Songbook to rock and roll are impressive. And did I say weird?
We need more wind instruments in our world… where’d they all go?
Turns out, too, that the Roto Rooters have claimed some space on YouTube, and have placed therein some viddies of their vintage performances. I do not know the provenance of these clips, but it looks like they’re in a church basement somewhere, performing with all appropriate gusto. Apparently, it’s from a local public television show, circa 1975.
Here’s one of their signature songs, The Martian March. Dig the fella playing the tuba through a gas mask:
Here they are performing another favorite, The Beer Bottle Polka. That’s Dr. Mabuse, d.o.a. himself, doing the Lawrence Welk imitation:
Finally, here they are singing Happy Trails, in a performance that was aped pretty much note for note by those rascals from Van Halen a few years later:
These guys need more attention. Here are some cool RRGTCB links:
April’s Dardanella is from a group called The Jazz 4, and was posted on YouTube only weeks ago. Where they are playing, I cannot tell. The video had just 21 views on YouTube when I first looked at it today. Let’s give a listen:
Amazing how… perfunctory it all is. These gentlemen were evidently hired to provide background noise at some upscale gig. The musicians make no effort toward flash or stage presence at all, as if they were being paid to fade into the scenery. It would seem that some hotel manager instructed them, in all seriousness, to avoid arousing the notice of the patrons of the venue at all costs. Our entertainers hit the notes in a competent and able fashion while the audience murmurs away, oblivious.
We never see the crowd in our static camera viewpoint. From the evidence presented, they give no indication that they are aware of this performance of one of the great songs of the last one hundred years.
This month’s Dardanella is one of the earliest recorded, and at last we have a version that includes a full vocal performance: a duet, circa 1920, by Gladys Rice and Vernon Dalhart. Click to play, my venerable dummies:
Given that we finally have a performance that includes all the lyrics, it makes sense to post them, at last. Here you go:
Down, beside the Dardanella Bay,
Where Oriental breezes play, there lives a lonely maid, Armenian.
By, the Dardanelles with glowing eyes,
She looks across the sea and sighs, and weaves her love spell so sirenian.
Soon I shall return to Turkestan,
I will ask for her heart and hand.
Oh sweet Dardanella, I love your harem eyes.
Oh, a lucky fellow, to capture such a prize,
Allah knows my love for you, and he tells you to be true,
Dardanella, oh hear my sigh, my Oriental.
Oh sweet Dardanella, prepare the wedding wine.
There’ll be one girl in my harem when you’re mine.
We’ll build a tent, Just like the children of the Orient.
Oh sweet Dardanella, my star of love divine.
When, the Sultan saw her lovely eyes,
Oh he was taken by surprise, he said, I’ll buy her for my Harem.
I, just told the Sultan to be nice,
She can’t be bought for any price, she said to me she couldn’t bear him.
So beneath the Oriental moon,
I’ll be wooing my love real soon.
Oh sweet Dardanella, I love your harem eyes.
Oh, a lucky fellow, to capture such a prize,
Allah knows my love for you, and he tells you to be true,
Dardanella, oh hear my sigh, my Oriental.
Oh sweet Dardanella, prepare the wedding wine,
There’ll be one girl in my harem when you’re mine.
We’ll build a tent, just like the children of the Orient.
Oh sweet Dardanella, my star of love divine.
My reference books say little about Gladys Rice, but they do note one odd fact: Her father was John C. Rice, the amorous fellow in the famous 1896 silent film, “The Kiss,” which we may show in its entirety here:
Of Vernon Dalhart, more is known, especially since his “Prisoner’s Song,” recorded in 1925, was probably the most popular recording of its decade:
A rather maudlin song, that. If you register at imeem.com, you can hear the whole dreary thing. My guidebook (Joel Whitburn’s “Pop Memories, 1890-1954″) says that Dalhart began his recording career in 1916, and that it was his transformation from a light opera tenor to a singer of “mournful hillbilly ballads” that “enabled Dalhart to make music history with monumental sales on some thirty record labels under dozens of pseudonyms.” Perhaps the two songs we review today gives us an idea of the range of that transformation.
I first encountered the Rice/Dalhart Dardanella at Archive.org — a tremendous resource that is a vast online warehouse of sound recordings, videos, and other items. I encourage you to click on that link and explore. But be warned before you do: You’ll likely lose hours clicking from one fascinating artifact to another.
Back in the day - and I’m talking about 25 years ago - if you were an aspiring comedian, and you lived in Milwaukee, you didn’t have a lot of options. There was a handful of dismal open mics in the most depressing rooms you could imagine. One of these was Wimpy’s Hunt Club, which was a corner bar on North Avenue, the sort of place that retired alcoholics would go to drink up their pensions. Comics would stand on a plank set up at the end of the bar and do their bits to heckles, at best, or, more usually, indifference. There was another open mic in the decaying ballroom of the infamous old Ambassador Hotel on Wisconsin Avenue - the hotel’s claim to fame being that it was the site where serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer did in one of his first victims. There were no actual comedy clubs at all.
I was in the audience at a lot of these shows - being a big fan of comedy, but too frightened to take the stage myself, I got to live vicariously by watching a lot of very raw comics struggle to eke out some yuks in the very worst of circumstances. If I had managed to work up the nerve to get on stage then, I’d probably still be dealing with some serious post-traumatic stress issues.
Not one of the dozens of would-be comics I used to watch ever went on to make a career of comedy. Not one - except for Dobie Maxwell. Dobie was a very hungry kid at the time, growing up in some very harsh circumstances without a lot of breaks - his parents were gang members who abandoned him to be raised by his grandparents. Through sheer force of will he fashioned himself into a nationally touring headliner with an aggressive and relentless delivery and the sort of mind that knows how to turn a thought into a real joke - not a common talent. If he reminds you a little of Rodney Dangerfield, that’s not an accident - Dangerfield has been been Dobie’s comedy hero since the first days I’ve known him.
Tuesday night, Dobie gets his first national television spot. He’ll be appearing on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. It’s a break he’s earned. Nobody has paid more dues than Dobie. He’s had no shortage of hardship over the years, including two auto accidents, both of which came close to killing him - the hazards of being a touring road comic. Some of us have been following his career over the decades. Now, at last, the whole country will get its first look at him. I’m thinking that with the world in the state it’s in, he just might be the sort of comic voice we need right now.
Congratulations, Dobie. You’ve come a long way from the Wimpy’s. Tuesday night I’ll be tuning in, and rooting for you.
I’ve found a YouTube vid of one of his performances that will give you a head start on what you’re in for next Tuesday night. Also, check out Dobie’s Dented Can Diary, where he has been detailing the life of a road comic every day for the last few years.
My obsession with “Dardanella” continues, but today, in a local thrift store, my attention was momentarily arrested by a pristine 78-RPM disc of the Mills Brothers’ singing, “Paper Moon.” In retrospect, I suppose it was not all that big a deal — given that “Paper Moon” was the biggest hit the Mills Brothers had in their sixty-year career, there’s gotta be a lot of these discs floating around. But I did find myself enjoying a fleeting rush of serendipity. I’ll explain the connection to “Dardanella” in a moment, but first, hark! Let’s listen to the song…
Yes, that was an odd clip, one more to add to the endless collection of oddities you’ll find on YouTube. But it fits, because “Paper Doll” is an odd song - one of those tunes that sound nice enough when you listen to it casually, but then when you really listen to it, all kinds of oogie implications creep into your head. Think about it: “I’d rather have a paper doll to call my own,” sings the crooner, “than have a fickle-minded real live girl.”
Really?
Back to “Dardanella.” The authorship of “Dardanella” was attributed, after some dispute and at least one lawsuit, to three writers. One of them, Johnny S. Black, died in 1936 after getting knocked in the head, or so the story goes, in a night club altercation over a matter of twenty-five cents. And so it was that one of the authors of the biggest hit of 1920 never lived to see the success of his other greatest song, “Paper Doll” — the biggest hit of 1943.
“Dardanella” leads everywhere, to all things. Trust me on this, the more you look, the more you find in it.
As for the disc in the thrift store, it’s still there. I don’t own a turntable, so I didn’t buy it. Alas.
(Note: Thursday is the 200th anniversary of the births of both Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln. Yes, it’s true: They were born on the same day.)
Fourscore and several million years ago, our forebears brought forth on another continent, a new primate, conceived at random and subject to the proposition that no adaptations are created equal.
Nature is engaged in a universal war, testing whether that species, or any species so conceived and so generated can long endure. The earth is the great battlefield of that war. We have come to understand that poorly-adapted species, in this final testing-place, must here give their lives, that those who are better adapted might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that they should do this.
For in a larger sense, we cannot speculate — we cannot consecrate — we cannot hallow this ground. The brave phyla, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.
The world will little note, nor long remember, the gods to which we pray here, but the fossil record will always mark what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who evolved here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these adaptations we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this species, ruled by nature, shall have a new burst of population — and that its descendants, of the genome, by the genome, and for the genome, shall not perish from the earth.
