[Dixielandjazz] Stan Freberg interviewed

[Don Robertson]

I totally agree with Bob.  The United States is a great production.  My 
son, who grew up hearing it played in our house, and I routinely throw 
lines from it back a forth.  The lines, the gags and the music are a 
priceless combination.  The fife player saying "man I thought this was 
like an officer's club gig, I didn't know were were going to be up with 
the cannons".  This was all too much to follow, I thought "part 2" was a 
disappointment.  I think they "jumped the shark" with that one.

Don Robertson
Napa, CA

On 4/28/2011 5:14 PM, Robert Ringwald wrote:
> 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?"
>
>
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