Tiny Tim - I've Never Seen a Straight Banana (Collectors' Choice)
Forget whatever you think you know about Tiny Tim. His cartoonish persona distracted from the fact that he was in fact a great musical archivist, a preserver of some of America's lost music. "Tiptoe Through the Tulips" is the beginning and end of most listeners' musical knowledge of the man born Herbert Khaury, but there's much more to him than that hit number.
A teenage Richard Barone -- years before his success leading 80s pop group the Bongos -- knew of and appreciated the work of Tiny Tim. As the story goes, in 1976 Barone and two female friends traveled to the local TraveLodge motel in Tampa Florida (February 29th, as Tiny Tim documents on a tape made that day) hoping to see Tim, who was -- oddly enough -- scheduled to play a gig there.
The under-age trio couldn't gain admission to the show, so they listened as best they could from the lobby. At the show's end, the performer came through the lobby, spied the teens and asked them how they liked the show. When they explained they didn't see it, he invited them back to his motel room for an impromptu and private performance.
Yeah, everyone to whom I've related this tale gives me a strange look: you mean he took those kids back to his room? Yikes. But there's no bizarre denouement to this story. Well, maybe there is: Barone recorded the motel session. And then this teenager actually convinced Tiny Tim to let him record an album's worth of material in a proper studio.
Tiny Tim and Richard Barone It's those two sources -- the 1980 studio session and a brief excerpt from the motel "audition" -- from which I've Never Seen a Straight Banana is compiled. The young Barone did a stellar job of producing a clean yet audio verite document of Tiny Tim when he was still at the peak of his creative powers.
Filled with brief and oddly endearing tunes, I've Never Seen a Straight Banana features Tiny Tim -- usually solo but occasionally backed by sympathetic violin and other instruments -- pulls an assortment of long-lost ancient tunes out of his mental grab-bag. And like any good archivist, he introduces each with a brief, illuminating and offen witty and off-kilter introduction. Tiny Tim's official biographer Justin A. Martell characterizes the man as "a performer of tremendous caliber and substance, but also a walking encyclopedia of popular songs spanning from the early 1800s to the year of his passing." Tiny Tim regales his audience (the kids in the motel, then the kid and fellow musicians in the studio) with back-stories for each of the songs.
A natural performer on his trademark left-handed ukulele, Tiny Tim ran through his vaudeville-styled repertoire with aplomb. His stories about some of his favorite personalities -- all of whom he refers to in formal terms, such as Mr. Dylan and Miss Tuesday Weld -- are a delight. One comes away from hearing this album wondering if perhaps Tiny Tim wasn't nearly as strange as he seemed. His persona was a two-edged sword: it got him noticed, but it may have also made him a novelty, kept from being taken seriously as an archivist along the lines of Alan Lomax. I mean, where else would you hear what Tiny Tim calls the "very first song that was ever recorded for the phonograph"? The story/medley "Tiny Meets Dylan" is delightful, and features Tiny Tim doing a spot-on piss-take impression of Dylan.
And as far as alleged creepiness, Tiny Tim's cover of "When They're Old Enough to Know Better (It's Better to Leave Them Alone)" suggests that Eddie Cantor was something of a creep himself. Tiny Tim himself was in actuality a pretty square and traditional guy, with all that that implies. But his outsider music status belied his deep, abiding love, knowledge and understanding of the American songbook. I've Never Seen a Straight Banana is a heretofore unheard document of this vastly misunderstood and underrated performer.
Give this disc a try; its charms will pry your heart open. And if you like it, note that the disc's subtitle is Rare Moments, Volume 1. Maybe there's more to this story...?
Original Article
And here is the real goodie...allmusic.com gave "I've Never Seen a Straight Banana" four stars and added the following review to Tiny's discography:
In 1976, 45-year-old Tiny Tim, who had charmed and amused a nation in the late 1960s with his ukulele and his falsetto renditions of Tin Pan Alley oldies like his signature song, "Tip-Toe Thru' the Tulips with Me," had been without a record deal for five years and was reduced to playing venues such as the TraveLodge in Tampa, FL. There, a 16-year-old fan and aspiring musician named Richard Barone tried to get in to see him, but was barred due to his youth. Nevertheless, when Tiny Tim encountered his young admirer in the lobby, he obligingly agreed to put on a private concert for Barone and two friends in his motel room. Barone brought a tape recorder and later convinced Tiny Tim to hold a follow-up session in a local recording studio. Now, fast-forward 33 years, and Barone, a former member of the Bongos and an established solo artist, has cleaned up the tapes and added instrumental and vocal overdubs on several tracks to create I've Never Seen a Straight Banana: Rare Moments, Vol. 1, enlisting the research and annotation support of Tiny Tim biographer Justin A. Martell. Barone and Martell take a different view of Tiny Tim from the one audiences did in the '60s, a view that may be easier to appreciate in the early 21st century than it was earlier. Rather than considering the singer simply a bizarre comedy act, they see him as a musical historian of the acoustic era of recording (i.e., from Edison's invention of the phonograph up to the introduction of the electrical microphone in the mid-'20s). At the time Tiny Tim earned national exposure, the stars of that era, such as Henry Burr, Arthur Collins, Byron G. Harlan, and Billy Murray, were long forgotten, making his renditions of their songs, sometimes performed in impersonations of their voices, so unfamiliar as to seem like a joke. But scholarship and CD compilations have made them more available, and on this album, with Tiny Tim singing whatever he wants, his invocations of them make more sense. He also ranges up to the '20s and the work of slightly better remembered figures like Eddie Cantor and Rudy Vallée, and even includes some of his own compositions, in the style of the Tin Pan Alley era but touching on such subjects as his admiration for the '60s starlet Tuesday Weld. Certainly, the novelty aspect of Tiny Tim is still here. His effeminate manner and tendency to warble in a vibrato-laden falsetto remain, making his overall effect humorous, especially when he introduces Vallée to Bob Dylan in a medley that combines their signature songs "Vagabond Lover" and "Like a Rolling Stone." But Barone and Martell succeed in reclaiming Tiny Tim as an exuberant performer whose love for a lost period of American popular music is at least as notable as his own ingenuous strangeness.
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