Pico & Sepulveda

As I recall from my days as a resident of the City of Los Angeles (located just south of Tarzana), the corner of Pico and Sepulveda Boulevards was fairly nondescript as intersections go: there was a lumberyard on one corner, a strip mall across the street. A doughnut shop. A generic office building. And so on. And yet, every time I drove through it, I’d get a little ping of excitement, as a kid from Milwaukee who spent too many nights listening to The Doctor Demento Show on the radio might.

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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