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7. Tiny Tim, I’ve Never Seen a Straight Banana -- Rare Moments: Volume 1 (Collector’s Choice Music): The Bongos’ Richard Barone wrote in his recent autobiography, Frontman: Surviving the Rock Star Myth, of hanging with Tiny Tim in his TraveLodge motel room back in 1976 as a Tampa teenager after a show, taping an impromptu performancet, most of which makes up this labor of love. Often dismissed as a novelty artist, a one-hit wonder or a stone (not stoned) freak, Herbert Khaury was actually a deft ukulele player, encyclopedic musicologist and devoted archivist with a specific interest in the early 20th century popular songbook,. His’68 Reprise debut, God Bless Tiny Tim, was produced by Richard Perry, yielding the sensation, “Tiptoe Through the Tulips," which turned him into a mass cult figure, not to mention the butt of a million jokes, overnight. By 1969, Tim was a genuine pop star, a regular on Laugh-In, with his marriage to Miss Vicki on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show drawing a then-record 40 million viewers. In his latter years, he was always a most entertaining guest on Howard Stern’s show, revealing with good-natured candor his obsessional cleanliness, including a predilection for adult diapers, baby wipes and taking four to five showers a day. These recordings are definitely the best representation of Tiny’s diverse persona. The title track, which could have been the falsetto sequel to his biggest hit, incoproates Terre Roche, rock journo Anthony DeCurtis and his biographer Justin Martell, among others, in its overdubbed chorus, a thematic nod to Tiny’s life-long search for the inattainable, nodding to the past by lovingly creating it in the present for the future. A master of many different vocal guises, Tiny does black dialect in the Arthur Collins “Coon song,” “No One Loves a Man,"; demonstrates to Dylan—a Tim admirer—how Rudy Vallee would’ve covered “Like a Rolling Stone"; imitates Bob performing the 1927 chestnut, “My Time is Your Time"; then puts on his exagerrated, old man “grandpa” voice for the 1907 standard, “School Days,” which he once performed in character on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1968 to a puzzled audience expecting “Tulips.” The liner notes note that it was Tiny’s attempt to recreate the style of toothless 19th century crooner Bryon G. Harlan. An avid fan of movies and Hollywood gossip magazines, Tiny introduces the touching “Dear Tuesday,” his 1960 ode to Tuesday Weld, with an anecdote about Mr. Warren Beatty arranging for him to perform the song for the actress in 1968. A lovely violin line which snakes in and around the vocal, recorded earlier this year by Barone with Deni Bonet, adds the requisite tug of the heart strings. “I feel the spirits of all these souls coming into my heart right now,” he says, introducing his cover of “I Found You,” originally recorded by best-selling Victor Records recording arrist Henry Burr in 1916. By the time you get to the album-ending “When They’re Old Enough to Know Better (It’s Better to Leave Them Alone),” his ukulele-strumming homage to Eddie Cantor, one begins to understand not only how misunderstood, but how underrated, Tiny Tim really was as one of the most distinctive, instantly identifiable voices in pop history. With a new appreciation of camp and nostalgia in vogue, what better time for an aesthetic reassessment/ resurrection, and this lovingly produced album by Barone is a great place to start.

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