Erin Moran confers with Suzi Quatro on Happy Days.
The eternal question.
There was a time when kids supposedly dreamed of running away with the circus in order to escape the stultifying boredom of domestic life. I doubt many of them actually went through with it, though. As I understand it, circus people were traditionally born into the strange, nomadic lifestyle, indoctrinated by parents and grandparents. It's an insular, cloistered world, and it's unlikely that experienced circus performers -- hardened by years on the road -- would want to take on any inexperienced runaways. Would you? And I'm guessing that the alleged "glamour" of circus life would fade away quickly if your job were shoveling elephant shit or hosing down the sideshow freaks.
The 1950s brought a new, even wilder kind of circus called rock & roll. Now this was something that might convince a kid to run away from home. You get to travel from town to town, wear sparkly outfits, and perform for screaming crowds. And, unlike the circus, you can do all this without walking on a tightrope or sticking your head in a lion's mouth. It's a win-win, right? I would guess that rock & roll led to more runaways than the circus ever did. In the 1970s, there was literally a band called The Runaways.
In the Happy Days episode we are covering this week, "Fonzie and Leather Tuscadero: Part 2," young Joanie Cunningham (Erin Moran) seriously considers ditching her unsatisfying home life in order to join rocker Suzi Quatro on the road. It turns out she's tired of living in the shadow of goody two-shoes brother Richie (Ron Howard). This story turns into one of the more dramatic episodes that we've reviewed so far on the podcast.
Here's our take on "Fonzie and Leather Tuscadero: Part 2" (aka "Fonzie, Rock Entrepreneur: Part 2"). Enjoy it in good health.
The Shaggs: (from l to r) Betty, Helen, and Dot Wiggin
One of the great ironies/injustices of popular culture is that the music specifically marketed to teenagers is getting progressively more polished and "perfect" with each advance in technology, while the teenagers themselves remain -- as always -- bumpy, lurching, and awkward. There's an odd disconnect between the relentlessly smoothed-out, robotic, studio-crafted pop being released by a group like One Direction and the messy, utterly human vulnerability of that group's fans. Teenage music bears no resemblance whatsoever to teenage life. A yawning chasm exists between the two.
Mick: Handsomely un-handsome
This gap is nothing new, exactly. Past teen idols, like Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, must have seemed superhuman to their fans, too. But Frank and Elvis both exuded a raw, quite human sexuality that largely eludes today's teen pop stars, who are "sexy" only in quotation marks and present a only a sanitized abstraction of carnal appeal to their fans, without any of that messy fluid exchange ruining it.
It's interesting that, during the 1960s, the British Invasion allowed a new type of entertainer to capture the teenage imagination. The Beatles and The Rolling Stones were not conventionally handsome in the Sinatra/Presley tradition. They had big noses, big lips, bad teeth, and cheekbones that jutted in at odd angles. I was just watching a documentary about the Stones last night called Crossfire Hurricane, and it was fascinating to see the Stones in their 1960s prime via newsreel footage. They looked sort of gawky and malformed, with carelessly floppy hair and sallow complexions, and yet they were driving their female fans into a state of erotic frenzy. At last, the weirdos had won! But it didn't last. The 1970s brought a new generation of generically handsome, neutered teenage idols (David Cassidy, Bobby Sherman, Donny Osmond) who set the precedent for those to come. And now, I guess, we have Justin Bieber, the platonic ideal of the safe, boring, utterly harmless pop star, a kind of life-sized Ken doll for the girls of Young America to play with for a few years. Kind of a pity. All of this brings me back to the topic of the Shaggs. I couldn't possibly tell you the entire saga of this astonishing all-female 1960s singing group composed of sisters from a working class New Hampshire family. You'll have to rely on this quirky but affectionate New Yorker articleby Susan Orlean for the details. Here's an overview: in 1968, a Fremont, NH mill worker named Austin Wiggin decided to fulfill the deathbed prophecy of his mother, who proclaimed that Austin's then-teenage daughters would be famous. Austin pulled the girls out of school and forced them to become a rock band, even though the girls had no musical inclination whatsoever and definitely did not want to become performers.
Only one of the daughters, Dot, had any enthusiasm whatsoever for her dad's dream, so she was elected to be lead singer and songwriter of the resulting group, dubbed The Shaggs in honor of the Wiggin sisters' shaggy hairdos (and supposedly, the shagginess of the family dog). Despite their total lack of aptitude and success, The Shaggs soldiered on for 7 years, playing local gigs for audiences who either tolerated them politely or heckled them outright. The band finally ended in 1975 when Austin died, and the Wiggin girls -- no longer kids by then -- went on to lead very ordinary, non-musical lives.
The Shaggs' lone, infamous LP
Before the group's sad, drawn-out death, however, The Shaggs recorded and (barely) released one extraordinary album: 1969's Philosophy of the World. Though only a handful of copies were originally pressed, the utterly strange LP went on to become a cult favorite with avant garde rock musicians (including Frank Zappa and NRBQ) and influential critics who discovered it years after it was recorded. The album has been reprinted several times over the years and has also been released on CD and MP3.
For completists, there's even a collection of Shaggs rarities, live recordings, and outtakes called The Shaggs Own Thing, plus a hip indie-label tribute album called Better Than the Beatles. Even better, the strange, vaguely sad story of the Shaggs was the basis for a charming off-Broadway show, The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World, which I have seen and enjoyed. The musical tours quite a bit, and I was fortunate to catch it at Chicago's Lookinglass Theater a few years back.
But what about the original music itself? What's it like to listen to The Shaggs? Many listeners find it torturous, verging on unlistenable. For three demure New Hampshire girls, The Shaggs make a powerful racket, clanging away at their out-of-tune instruments with abandon. In particular, drummer Helen Wiggin seems to be in a world all her own. Throughout the album, there are lots of what music teachers would call "wrong notes," and the three ladies cannot seem to agree on a collective tempo, key, or time signature. Susan Orlean was right when she described their melodies as "squashed and bent." The album sounds like it was left out in the sun on a hot day and melted.
If Philosophy of the World weren't from 1969, you'd guess it to be some kind of primitive punk music, but the rawness of the music is at odds with the sweet simplicity of the lyrics. The Shaggs sing about looking for a lost cat ("My Pal Foot Foot"), the importance of obeying one's parents ("Who Are Parents?"), praising Jesus ("We Have a Savior"), and how nice it is to have a radio ("My Companion"). Austin Wiggin seems like he was a dictatorial parent who did everything in his power to keep the world away from his girls and vice-versa, so maybe the transistor radio was one of Dot Wiggin's few links to the outside world. Another recurring theme on the album is the foolishness of straying too far from one's home. "Little Sports Car" ends with Dot and her sisters singing, "I learned my lesson never to roam, never to roam, never to roam."
The late, great Crow's Nest in Crest Hill, IL
The main appeal of Philosophy of the World, to me, is that it provides a rare glimpse into the brain of a genuine teenager, without the interference of grown-up producers or executives. It's like an adolescent's diary brought to musical life, and for once the lurching, awkward bumpiness of the music matches the emotions of the singer. Nowhere is this more true than on the album's title cut, which is the first Shaggs song I ever heard.
"Philosophy of the World" was included on a 2000 compilation of so-called "outsider music" I purchased at a great, now-defunct record store called the Crow's Nest near my home in Joliet, IL. As I drove home from the Crow's Nest, I popped the disc into my car's CD player, and that song came blaring out of the speakers. I was entranced. I was hooked. I knew I had to get every last bit of Shaggs music out there. Fortunately or unfortunately, there's not much. Once you own Philosophy of the World and The Shaggs Own Thing (both of which have been combined onto a single CD simply called The Shaggs), there's not much to get, other than the tribute album. Although many people would struggle to get through even a single Shaggs song, I've listened to their entire catalog many times -- and none more so than this track:
P.S. - The rarities compilation is well worth checking out, too. It contains some later studio recordings by the group, some of which demonstrate that the Wiggins had been indeed practicing their instruments at least a little. One song in particular I love is "You're Something Special to Me," which contains a lyric that summarizes my own mindset: "Please don't speak unkind words to me. That would make me unhappy." Very simple, of course, but very true as well. If "Philosophy" was too much for you, maybe this will be more your speed.
A shot-by-shot breakdown of the You Can't Do That on Television credits.
The wonderful website Art of the Titleoffers its readers elegant and thought-provoking articles that break down and analyze the title sequences from prominent films and TV series. It's a fascinating site, and you owe it to yourself to spend some quality time there. But I figured it would be a long, long time before Art of the Title ever got around to doing You Can't Do That on Television, the decidedly lowbrow, kid-oriented Canadian sketch comedy series that aired on Nickelodeon in the 1980s. If anyone was going to analyze the show's memorable title sequence, it would have to be me.
While the series itself seemed to take most of its cues from American shows like Saturday Night Live and Rowan & Martin's Laugh In, albeit with a greater emphasis on pre-adolescent "gross out" humor, the opening title sequence of YCDTOTV is directly inspired by Monty Python's Flying Circus. Terry Gilliam's "cutout" animation, produced by taking actual cutouts (often photographs) and moving them frame by frame, became emblematic of the British sketch comedy series.
Paradoxically, Gilliam's anarchic work gave the series a sense of form and organization. A Gilliam cartoon could link two seemingly unrelated bits together, and the longer cartoons served as bits in and of themselves. Monty Python's ever-evolving title sequence, scored incongruously by Sousa's Liberty Bell March, wonderfully set the tone for each episode.
Here's how the title sequence looked during Season 2. As you can see, it's a series of non-sequitir visual jokes, with a parade of bizarre humanoid characters being mangled, reassambled, and crushed in a variety of creative ways:
The effect is manic and violent, but utterly cheerful nonetheless. The abundant silliness on display here undermines the seriousness of the often-dour source photos and the militaristic pomposity of the music. In about half a minute, we have a neat summary of the show's basic philosophy of life and its approach to comedy.
The title sequence for YCDTOTV is about the same length as the Monty Python titles, but it's more linear and narrative in the way it's laid out. Before we go any further, let me at least show you the darned thing. There were a few versions of the titles over the years, but the following clip is pretty representative:
Right away, you should see many motifs taken directly from Monty Python: factories, assembly lines, people being disassembled and reassembled, comedic subversion of familiar classical music (in this case Rossini's William Tell Overture), God-like hands reaching into the frame, "perfect" blue skies, and people's heads cracking open. And as I said before, there is something like a linear narrative here.
The credits begin with an ominous-looking building rising up against a pop-art landscape. It is the ghoulishly-named Children's Television Sausage Factory, an obvious swipe at Sesame Street's Children's Television Workshop. The building has a giant meat grinder on its roof, which suggests that the television business is brutal and impersonal and only interested in cranking out thousands upon thousands of identical copies. Inside the factory, the heads and torsos of children emerge from chutes and are carried along conveyer belts. The fully-assembled children emerge from a giant spigot that pours them directly into a school bus. It is interesting to note that Terry Gilliam's title sequence for Monty Python's the Meaning of Life also features a machine that cranks out millions of identical copies of "ideal" nuclear families.
Up to this point, the YCDTOTV credits have been fairly dark. Even the music is a little unsettling. It sounds at first like a Soviet military march punctuated with pained shrieks. But once the factory-made children are on that school bus (another symbol of childhood oppression), the music turns into a Dixieland-style gallop and the mood completely changes. For the rest of the running time, the titles are all about youth taking over adult institutions and totally overpowering the grownups who try to stop them. The school bus takes the kids to a very grim-looking building simply designated TELEVISION NETWORK, but the youngsters are not cowed one bit. They emerge joyously and chaotically from the bus. The doorman, a grouchy-looking old white guy, holds up his hands to stop them.
It's significant that this is the point at which the POV switches from objective to subjective. We are seeing this from the kids' point of view and are asked to identify with them as they trample the terrified, wide-eyed guard. Once inside the studio, the kids have seemingly seized control of the cameras. (We see one roll by of its own accord.)
The credits end with the final triumph of youth over old age and authority. A serious-looking, unsmiling man looks directly into the camera -- directly at us, in fact. He may well be the same guy who was guarding the door a few seconds ago. But he has scarcely made his presence known when a giant hand -- a kid's hand -- reaches into the frame and stamps the title of the show directly on the man's face. Totally defeated, the adult authority figure literally cracks up, and his head splits open to reveal the next scene of the show.
"You can't do that on television," say the adults.
"Just watch us," the kids respond.
And with this simple yet eloquent title sequence, YCDTOTV may well have radicalized an entire generation. Is it overreaching to suggest that the protesters currently occupying Wall Street are people who grew up watching Nickelodeon...? Perhaps it was this humble sketch comedy show that convinced them that they, not the old-school elite, were the ones with real power.
