About that terrible, horrible, no-good musical...
/NOTE: I have not posted in nearly a month for the not-so-simple reason that my Lovely First Wife had major surgery and has required an extended stay in the hospital to recover, and somehow my brain turned to mush.
Recently, as I’ve driven back and forth to my Lovely First Wife’s hospital room, I’ve had my phone playing random tracks from my music collection, which ranges from classical orchestral music through opera through show tunes through EDM through new age through my music, etc.
It was interesting to hear stuff that I hadn’t heard in years, and it was odd how often multiple tracks from an album I hadn’t listened to in a while kept popping up in one ten-minute drive.
There were two tracks from an album that jumped out at me from my past — why these two tracks out of the thousands on the phone? Let me explain.
First, a mea culpa: While it is my intent to discuss this music without any identifying information as to its composer, there is always the chance that someone reading this will recognize who I’m talking about. Let me assure you of my great affection for this music, even as I discuss its shortcomings.
So, decades ago, I hosted a chat room on America Online on Monday nights, The Stage Door, dedicated to theatre. We had all sorts to visit over the years: teens squealing about Rent, community theatre types, techies, designers, Broadway playwrights (really!), everybody. It was great fun.
As host, I would watch to see when someone new entered the room and would send them an IM to welcome them and ask for their interests, which I’d then use to introduce them to the crowd. So people generally felt very comfortable with me, and when they found out I was the artistic director of the Newnan Community Theatre Company, writers would sometimes ask if they could send me a script, and I always said yes.
We got some pretty solid scripts during that time and managed to do one or two. I wish we had been able to do more, actually.
And then one Monday, I got an IM from one of the newish regulars: Their friend had written a musical, and their gang had done a demo tape. Could they send that to me for consideration? Of course, I said.
Well.
From the very first note, it was wrong. The composer/lyricist had a story to tell but absolutely no skill in telling it. Words were tortured into place, whether they fit the meter or not. Rhyme ran amok. Vocal lines soared too high and dropped an octave, then back up (which must have required a great deal of practice to pull off). It was a complete wreck.
First of all, let me acknowledge that the accompaniment was done on some old 1980s synth and was not polished. (You should have heard some of my early MIDI trax for William Blake's Inn.) I am also aware that the singers were amateurs doing their best to help out their friend fulfill his dream. That was not a problem. I can “see it under lights,” as we say in the theatre.
Nor was the problem the idea of any of the songs. As my then-teenage son said one day as we pulled into the driveway with the cassette tape still playing, “He actually has a good idea, and all the songs are exactly where they need to be and are about the right thing in the script. It’s just that he’s no good. If he were talented, it would be a great show.” The great Lichtenbergian fear, indeed.
The kid was right. If I wrote a synopsis of the show and the songs, you’d be curious to see this show. The reality was a bit different.
For a while, the show become compulsive listening for me (and anyone in my vicinity). At first it was funny, hysterically so, as one awful lyric succeeded another. And then it became painful, sad, to think how much work went into making something this bad and how it would never ever see the light of day.
And finally, it was funny again, but in a kinder, gentler way. Those two tracks that popped up this week were just as jarring, just as inept, as they were 30+ years ago—I still cringed and howled at every note — but now I see them as a kind of miracle: Look what that composer did with absolutely no clue of how to do it — BUT LOOK AT WHAT HE DID AND I’M GLAD THAT HE DID IT.
As the great Prof. Peter Schickele always said about PDQ Bach’s era, you don’t get the Stephen Sondheims without the ecosystem of all the lesser but nevertheless competent composers that dotted the musical landscape of the Age of Enlightenment that made it possible for Mozart and Haydn, et al., to exist. [The definitive biography of P. D. Q. Bach, p.23.]
Herein lies the lesson: Go read that last paragraph again, and go make all the bad art you can! You don’t even have to be competent to dot that landscape, guys.
THE REST OF THE STORY: A few years ago I was out meditating in my labyrinth, thinking about a main theme for this orchestral suite that is probably never going to exist, a theme that had to sound more Indiana Jones than not, and the main theme from this show popped into my head. It’s a catchy little motif, for real. I mused that I could STEAL FROM THE BEST and pay a little hommage to this composer. When I looked them up on the intertubes, I discovered that they had recently died. They had continued composing, mostly new agey kinds of things, and O my children, they were actually good. And here endeth the lesson.
