[Dixielandjazz] Stan Freberg interviewed

[Robert Ringwald]

This article mainly talks about what I feel is the greatest comedy album ever released.  

A great Jazzy score and note the reference to Bix.  


50 Years Later, Freberg's History Lesson Still Sings
by Michael Phillips
Chicago Tribune, April 27, 2011
Fifty years ago this week, Capitol Records released an album destined to conquer
the hearts and minds of comedy nerds around this round, round world. It carried the
grandiose title "Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America, Vol. 1: The
Early Years." The label's promotional materials sold this "original musical revue
for records" as "not just another comedy record, but a whole show... the most extravagant
album ever produced."
Sound a mite overboard? Funny you should put it that way: "A little overboard" is
precisely how Ben Franklin describes the Declaration of Independence on Freberg's
album, in the lead-in to the song "A Man Can't Be Too Careful What He Signs These
Days." Played by Freberg, Franklin tells Jefferson (Byron Kane) that the petition
smells "a little pinko." No dice on the signing, Franklin concludes, just before
the downbeat. "I'm not gonna spend the rest of my life writing in Europe!"
This is the enduring glory of Freberg's achievement, still being taught at The Second
City: It is amusing on paper, but it kills out loud. The jokes work, even the topical
ones built upon common knowledge of the Communist witch hunts or National Brotherhood
Week or "Bonanza" or advertising's infiltration into mass American culture, because
"The United States of America" was the result of one man's benign but highly sophisticated
satiric vision. Freberg was (and is) witty every which way, beginning with the surety
and delight of his vocal characterizations of Franklin, George Washington, Yankee
Doodle and others.
As the cake's icing, Freberg got his radio show colleague and pal, longtime Sinatra
arranger Billy May, to deliver a big, golden-age-of-Broadway sound. And this wasn't
mere background music.
Released May 1, 1961, Freberg's fractured history lesson became a touchstone for
a weird array of celebrities and regular people. The "Sgt. Pepper of comedy albums,"
as the LA Times called it, was indeed a favorite of the Beatles.
"Well, I'm not sure about Ringo," Freberg said by phone the other day from his Cheviot
Hills home near Century City in Los Angeles. But Paul McCartney often credited Freberg's
songs as seminal influences. "Oh," Freberg added, "and George Harrison's father told
me George knew every song by heart." In the non-Beatles realm, Billy Crystal knew
'em all as well. He used to re-create the album's vignettes when performing at Sweet
16 parties.
Steven Spielberg and Richard Dreyfuss also knew the score. In a 1975 Time magazine
cover story on "Jaws," Spielberg recalled waiting for the fog to lift off Martha's
Vineyard in between camera setups. He and Dreyfuss passed the time singing "The United
States of America." Decades later, at an early 2011 event at the Directors Guild
of America, Freberg and his wife, Hunter, met Spielberg for the first time.
Freberg, now 84, said it went like this: "I said, 'Hi, Steven.' And he said, 'Hello,
Stan.' And without a second's pause he started singing 'It's a Round, Round World,'
Columbus' song. In its entirety. Without any mistakes."
Hunter added: "And I thought, where's YouTube when you need it?"
Freberg was "a key part of the new wave of comedy" to emerge in the post-World War
II era, said Anne Libera, director of comedy studies at The Second City. Her class
"History and Analysis of Modern Comedy," in association with Columbia College, pays
tribute to "Yankee Doodle Go Home," her favorite of the "United States of America"
routines (mine, too). It is 4 minutes, 4 seconds of deadpan magic, from narrator
Paul Frees' impression of Orson Welles to the central idea that the fife player in
the iconic "Spirit of '76" painting was actually a bebop jazzbo named Bix, unable
to contain his exasperation with the unbelievably "square" drummer Doodle. ("The
name says it, man.")
"Even if the students don't get every reference, they get the point of view," Libera
said. "Freberg was both a subversive comic and a popular comic. The sheer pleasure
of listening to 'The United States of America' comes from hearing something put together
this well, this tightly."
The son of a Baptist minister, Freberg ruled the 1950s airwaves with such novelties
as "St. George and the Dragonet." In that one, Freberg brilliantly reprocessed the
tale of St. George and the dragon in fluent Jack Webb-ese, fashioning a long-lost,
time-traveling episode of "Dragnet." By the late '50s he was becoming a force in
the advertising world, and by the time some of us were old enough to hum along to
the right TV ad jingle, Freberg's questions -- "Who put eight great tomatoes in that
little bitty can?" (Contadina!) -- were answered by millions.
In the '90s Freberg released "Vol. 2" of the project; he and his wife said they're
writing material for a proposed Vol. 3. There was a time when Vol. 1 was pointed
toward Broadway, thanks to an option taken out by notoriously difficult producer
David Merrick. The stage version of "United States of America" never crossed the
Delaware, as it were. But as Gerald Nachman wrote in his book "Seriously Funny: The
Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s," the sketches and songs Freberg and company
wrought back in 1961 were "so vivid that you can see them being performed in your
head, which may be where they belong."
Freberg told me: "I flunked American history (in high school) because I had such
a boring history teacher, and in order to graduate I had to make it up over the summer,
and I had the same boring teacher in summer school! And I thought: I don't ever want
to think about American history again." But he did.
"I suppose it's ageless," he said of his album's hardy reputation and widespread
influence, "because kidding American history never goes out of style."


--Bob Ringwald
www.ringwald.com
Fulton Street Jazz Band
530/ 642-9551 Office
916/ 806-9551 Cell
Amateur (Ham) Radio K6YBV

Paddy says "Mick, I'm thinking of buying a German Shepherd." 
"Are you crazy," says Mick, "Have you seen how many of their owners go blind?"