Groovy, yes? And quite singular, in that Judy actually sings this Dardanella. Yes, friends, the song actually has lyrics. “Dardanella” is a song which is almost always, even in its earliest recordings, played as an instrumental, but in this version, Judy sings the actual lyric, or some of it, anyway. She skips the verse in favor of the chorus, to wit:

Oh sweet Dardanella, I love your harem eyes
I’m a lucky fella to capture such a prize
Oh 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

And with this, a bit of the Dardanella mystery unravels. “Dardanella,” you discover, is a girl’s name, and you learn that that girl is beautiful, and “Oriental,” and the song contains references to Allah, and harems, and the romance of places a long ways off from here. Go back to the popular music of the early part of the 20th century, and you’ll find it rife with exotic maidens of various types — hula girls, Indian princesses, sleepy-eyed ladies in opium dens, and so on. “Dardanella” is a song of a type. But that chorus is the only glimpse we get of it, for now.

In this video, the song is essentially rewritten from this point Judy finishes that chorus. This new version then becomes an occasion for playing an old popular song in the newly popular manner, and by that, we mean Swing, baby! This Dardanella is not as an ode to an alluring princess, but an object of nostalgia recast for a new era. If Judy had two turntables and a microphone, she’d be sampling the original shellac 78s. By the time we return to the chorus, the lyrics are jazzed up, and the song is shifted to an uptempo swing rhythm. In the second chorus, we love Dardanella, not for her “harem eyes,” but for the way she “jives.” Whatever that means. And by that, I mean, like, far out, man.

Over the passage of years — and Judy’s version here is far closer in time to the original recordings than we are to Judy’s — this effort to “modernize” a song held as quaint and nostalgic has itself become such.

Nothing we can do about that. Time does its evil work, and we are all doomed to the same fate. Yes, in spite of all our striving to be hep, we will all, eventually, seem sweet and old-fashioned one day. And maybe the more so because of our striving.

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But you can help keep our streets safe for ice cream trucks and touch football. Look at the fellow sitting next to you. Is he doing something illegal, like embezzling public funds or stuffing a hamster down a funnel? Then it is your civic duty to report this heinous cad to the proper authorities!

Please be on the look-out for the following dastardly villains:

ELMO “THE AXE” NORDINE: Alias Elmo “The Hook” Nordine, alias Elmo “The Ice Pick” Nordine, alias Elmo “The Eyebrow Tweezers” Nordine, alias Elmo “The Even Sillier Alias” Nordine, alias “That Guy On All The Wanted Posters,” is wanted for armed robbery, narcotics trafficking, battery, and for letting a self-avowed spackle salesman roam freely amid a crowd of debutantes. A classically-trained noodge, Nordine was once arrested for crouching in a public bus shelter while disguised as a bowl of wheat flakes. Witnesses claim to have seen this notorious scoundrel give a spanking to a department store manikin, and he has previously served time for grooming an otter without a permit.

WILFRED HINKLE: This extremely shady character is wanted for attempted murder, grand larceny, manslaughter, assault, and for gesturing provocatively at a cardboard cut-out of Ted Koppel. A master pickpocket, Hinkle boasts that he once stole the leotard off a trapeze artist in mid-air without being detected. Criminologists have created a detailed psychological profile of this infamous bad guy, and theorize that his anti-social tendencies may be traced to his mother’s insistence that he wear scuba gear while receiving his first communion.

HENRIETTA PERCH: A former carnival barker, stable hand, cover girl, and part-time mass killer, Perch is wanted for ignoring the posted city ordinances regulating the care and feeding of ferns. She is also suspected of illegally wiping mucus on ABC News Correspondent Lynn Sherr. Perch, who displays a high degree of awkwardness in routine social situations, has a bizarre yen to sit on an ostrich while attending the opera, and has been known to carry wallet-sized photos of Japanese Emperor Akihito showing tourists how to gargle. She can be identified by the prominent tattoo of Barney Rubble on the underside of her pancreas.

RHOMBUS FIGG: Reputed to be the meanest man in America, Figg enjoys inducing cardiac arrest in dandelions by sneaking up on them and yelling “lawnmower!” He has also been caught selling wax lips with cold sores on them to the elderly. Figg is wanted for conspiring to overthrow the U.S. Government by printing nude pictures of Orrin Hatch in the Congressional Record, and was last seen near Des Moines, Iowa, taunting an emu with a feather boa.

RUDOLPH PLORTZ: Born to a family of simple yet illiterate nougat farmers in the rugged mountains of New Jersey, Plortz now leads a vast, multi-national lint smuggling cartel on five continents, two of which he carries concealed on his person. Plortz is also a notorious international weapons dealer — his despicable intrigues have made him the leading supplier of squirt guns to the Children’s Television Workshop. This arrogant scofflaw (who mocks propriety by wearing fake moose antlers while dining alfresco) vanished six weeks ago when, surrounded by police, he dove head-first into an open piano bench and pulled the lid shut behind him.

Be advised that these criminals are not only armed and dangerous, but extremely weird. Should you have any information as to the whereabouts of these fiendish outlaws, please contact your local Homeland Security office or send a self-addressed email message to Justice@I’mARatFinkSnitch.org

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Unfortunately, it seems that imeem now requires registration to hear more than a thirty-second clip of the tune. But it’s free, and I think it’s worth the trip, if you’re interested in hearing more of it — just click the “Dardanella” link in the embedded player. It’s an impeccable performance of the song — but what else would you expect from a group with Louis Armstrong’s name on it?

Since we don’t have a video Dardanella this time, let me throw in an extra treat: A video featuring Louis with Bing Crosby cutting loose in a big way. It’s a chance to see the spotlight fall on quite a few of the Armstrong group, including the aforementioned Edmond Hall. It’s a fun clip, with charisma splattering all over the place. And, being that it’s YouTube, there’s no registration required.

Click to play, dummy!

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I was thinking about Prince Charles today. You know those people who are, like, you know — British? Well, he’s like the KING of that.

My friend Chet just died. The last thing I said to him was, “You wanna know the definition of insanity? It’s when you do the same thing over and over and expect a different result.” Looking back, I’m thinking this was maybe not the smartest thing I could have said midway through a game of Russian Roulette.

True fact: Although ants are highly social insects, they almost never give each other nicknames.

My favorite part about doing the laundry? Cleaning the lint screen. True!

Moreover, both of the R’s in J. R. R. Tolkein’s name stand for “Redundant.”

My life is full of disappointments. For example, I was all excited when I started reading John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women until I realized it’s not a how-to manual.

Yes, I am outraged that The Blue Man Group has been denied membership in the NAACP. Thanks for asking.

Meanwhile, curing cancer aside, consider that if you’re already bald and sleepy, chemotherapy offers you absolutely nothing to look forward to.

Used to be, everyone knew what a Sharpie was, but nobody knew that everybody knew that. Then that football guy whips out a Sharpie in the end zone, and suddenly everybody knows that everybody knows what a Sharpie is. So that’s what real fame is — not when everybody knows you, but when everybody knows that everybody knows you. So start telling people you’ve heard of me, dammit!

By now, the more observant among you will have noted that while the title of this piece promises Thirteen Stupid Thoughts this list contains only eleven items. This can be accounted for as follows: Firstly, I’m counting the idea that I should be posting this at all as One Stupid Thought. And thirdly, I can’t count, which brings the grand total to seventeen, thereby bringing our list in line with our title (overlooking a rounding error).

Finally, if you think innovation is easy, remember that the guy who invented the pencil had to carry the idea around on a blank napkin.

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And yet he persists. I don’t know why. Except when I watch old clips of these shows (and I do watch them), I see the crowds — the old, homogenous, white, square crowds — and I’m always impressed at how much fun these people seem to be having. I guess you can do that in an era before irony was invented. And I don’t think it’s necessarily a good idea to mock that. People should enjoy their lives. Probably 95% of the people in this clip are dead now.

So enjoy this clip of our favorite song. Dig the swirling Wurlitzer. And say what you like about Mr. Welk, but the man is a freekin metronome.

Click to play, dummy!

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There is a song called “Pico and Sepulveda,” recorded but not made famous by an outfit called Felix Figueroa and His Orchestra in 1947 — not made famous because as near as I can tell, the song was never a hit, and apart from what I will shortly relate, it had only local significance. The lyric of this ditty (and, for some reason, the term “ditty” seems especially apt for this one) consists almost entirely of the names of Los Angeles streets: Doheny. Cahuenga. La Jolla. And so on. And then there’s that incessant invocation of The La Brea Tar Pits.

Here, let me point you to YouTube for the song itself, and a video which somehow captures the mood quite exactly, even while presenting very little of what the song is actually about (as if the song is actually about anything):

The singing skeletons burbling up from the dripping tar are a nice touch, yes?

Now we dig a little deeper into the pit: “Felix Figueroa” is a pseudonym. The actual band on the recording is Fred Martin’s, his being one of the more renowned acts of the Big Band era. While not on a par with the more-remembered names like Benny Goodman or the Dorsey Brothers, Martin’s band had quite a long string of hits (none of which I remember, but that was before my time, dammit). Why Mr. Martin did not want to put his own name on this fine piece of work, I don’t know. Maybe he thought it was too silly, or too trivial. (Now YOU guess!)

The only reason I know about this song at all is that decades later a fellow named Barry Hansen adopted it as his theme song. Because, you see, Mr. Hansen is the aforementioned “Doctor” Demento, who has for years been the nation’s foremost purveyor of novelty music, as well as a musical scholar and historian of no small repute.

I was a rabid Doctor Demento fan in my formative years, and he brought a lot to my awareness of the world, introducing me to the likes of Tom Lehrer and Benny Bell, not to mention Barnes & Barnes and Weird Al. Turns out that novelty music is a good channel for learning about the world you live in, and for becoming socially aware. When Tom Lehrer did a Gilbert & Sullivan parody, you had to figure out who Gilbert & Sullivan were to fully understand the joke. And so on.

“Pico & Sepulveda” was a piece of that. When I moved to Los Angeles some years later, the place names were not as foreign to me as I might have expected. I was constantly bumping into places mentioned in the song. I was connected to my new city in a way I had no real right to be.

Thing is, the version of “Pico & Sepulveda” that Dr. D used as his theme was not the Felix Figueroa version, but one offered by a 1970s novelty group called The Roto Rooter Good Time Christmas Band. Another anonymous YouTuber brings it to us here. Note that the video portion of the clip is just a static shot of — what? A bed frame? So just listen, kay?:

Somewhere in my obsolete stacks of vinyl I actually have the Roto Rooter LP version of that recording, nabbed some thirty years ago in a cutout bin in a record store, where exactly I couldn’t say. And I can’t even play it because I don’t have a turntable any more. That album, as I recall it, seemed to be an attempt to sum up whole centuries of musical absurdity in one round volume of sound. It fails in that attempt, but in a very splendid and silly way. But, I digress.

I wonder whatever happened to those guys…

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Beaconing

Batgirl

Airfish

Intrepid

You can click on these individually to see them enlarged. And you can view the entire page that they’ve been lifted from here, but be warned that it’s a pretty big download.

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Fortunately, we have the YouTube, and some anonymous person has posted it there. If you have not heard it before, you can enlighten yourself now. If you have heard it, here is your opportunity to indulge yourself again.

This “video” is a static picture, so do not be alarmed. The soundtrack is lifted from Woody’s second LP. Click to play, Chester.

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This month’s Dardanella is from someone named Tom Smith, and it’s simply his hands on a keyboard bringing this ancient and venerable song to life. There are no frills here, just Tom and his electric piano. I don’t know who he is, but something in him has brought him to YouTube to share his music, and he has posted almost three dozens songs, some with other musicians, but most with just his own good self. I like that.

Click to play, numbskull!

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