This delightful tweet from Linda Holmes sent me down the rabbit hole this afternoon exploring “Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat” and learning a little more about its composer, Frank Loesser.
“Sit Down” is a showstopper from the musical Guys & Dolls: the gambler Nicely-Nicely bullshits a temperance congregation into buying that he has been reformed after a religious epiphany in a dream. A context that isn’t as visible to today’s audiences, as both the early 1930’s in which the musical is set and the early 50’s in which it was staged blur together in the rear-view mirror, is that Dolls was a loving tribute to the outsize characters of a time past; it is a similar project to the 80’s movies/musicals that pay tribute to 50’s and 60’s styles, like Grease, Dirty Dancing, Footloose, American Graffiti, and Little Shop of Horrors. Most of Dolls is written in a sophisticated pastiche of Big Band and Swing-era jazz, and it’s a mark of success that so many songs from the musical have become standards. For story reasons, “Sit Down” also draws upon the densely chromatic close harmony choral style that you might be familiar with from Disney animated musicals like Alice in Wonderland,Peter Pan, or Dumbo, and the white gospel/tent revival style from a song like “In That Great Gettin’ Up Mornin’.”
Frank Loesser was a truly fascinating American character. His father was a pianist and made his living teaching, but for whatever reason—reading between the lines here, some tough personality clashes—his father never formally taught Loesser. He was self-taught on several instruments on the incredible strength of his ear, but seemed never to develop his musical reading or writing skills. Still, I think all of that dense European classical harmony is shot through his music.
The first song of his that really came to my attention is “Inchworm,” from the movie musical Hans Christian Andersen. It has a beautiful childlike melody, and wrings so much sensuality from small and deceptively simple harmonic movements. [In addition to the many jazz and pop artists that covered it, it was a special favorite of David Bowie, who wrote, “Ashes To Ashes wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t have been for Inchworm. There’s a nursery rhyme element in it, and there’s something so sad and mournful and poignant about it. It kept bringing me back to the feelings of those pure thoughts of sadness that you have as a child, and how they’re so identifiable even when you’re an adult.“]
Loesser was always connected to music but had to make his way in the world from a young age and made his living as a young man in various creative fields like advertising and business. His first entrance into show business was writing jokes for Borscht Belt comedians, then started writing lyrics for other composers. It is astounding to me, given how fresh and unique his musical style was, that he was well into mid-career and his forties before he was able to compose and write lyrics for his own musicals.
The lyrics are great! Steven Sondheim singled out Loesser as having virtually perfect lyric writing technique, marveling at his ability to sound both conversational and stylishly playful in verse. Just look at that line I quoted in the title: “by the sharp lapel of your checkered coat”—those marvelous assonant plosive p’s in sharp and lapel and c’s in chekered and coat (by assonant, I mean the same consonant sound is repeated, and by plosive I mean that the consonant sound is made by a sudden burst of air). Those are the kind of words that demand to be sung, even if they weren’t also funny and charming and told a story.
But it’s the music that has been stuck in my ears all day. I love the way that the sopranos in the chorus keep going up the pentatonic scale to hit the high note at 1:16 in the first video, and the way the chorus builds a chord in the phrase after at 1:23. I love the surprising cadences that lead into the verse, the chordal motion echoing church hymns. For such a big company number, the verses are surprisingly slow and its an incredible role for somebody who has the energy to ham it up.
Other notable videos…
Walter Bobbie at the 1993 (94?) Tony’s
Just a murderer’s row of early 90’s talent, including J.K. Simmons, who is dead center and looking totally committed (this was even before his breakout role on Oz as a sadistic gay neo-Nazi), Nathan Lane, and Ernie Sambella (who would voice Timon and Pumbaa a few years after this performance).
Titus Burgess at the 2009 Tony’s
This was before Burgess’ breakout performance as Titus Andromedon on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and really shows off his incredible upper range. Worth it to watch the moment when he had to roll with switching the mics due to a technical malfunction on live TV!
Justin Keyes at the Guthrie Theater
I have a secret to admit—I’m not actually much of a musicals or theater person, very much an interested casual fan—, so I didn’t know what the Guthrie Theater was. If this is representative of the average quality of productions out there in Minnesota, though, I think I need to make a visit to Minneapolis. Fantastic singing, incredible costuming and choreography.
Clive Rowe on Great Performances
Rowe has a wonderful voice for this character (he does an incredible vocal trick at 2:02 that made my jaw drop). The tempo here is a little sleepy and takes a lot of energy out of the number, imho, but the orchestration is a little less swing-band and a little more Dixieland/hot jazz, which I thought was cool.
The Cast of Glee
Given the influence of Glee on theater kids, gay boys, and future Broadway cast members of my generation, I thought it was interesting that “Sit Down” was featured on the very fist episode of the show, showing how central it is to the American songbook.
Ashton Harris & The Hillsboro High School Players
This was far and away the best high school performance I found on YouTube. Ashton Harris did a great job here. If you look through other high school performances, you can see where the trouble spots for less-trained voices are: In the narration verses, a lot of the long belted notes are high in the range, so if the young singer does not have strong pitch control it is very easy to go sharp. The choruses are very lyric-dense for the soloist, the words come fast, the tempo is fast, adrenaline is cranking your heart rate up and throwing your internal clock off, everyone around you is singing at full volume so you can’t hear the pit very well, and the line is syncopated. Almost all of the high school soloists rush through “And the devil will drag you under” and end up a full beat ahead by the end of the choruses.
Frank Loesser with Frank Loesser
Here’s the man himself. He had a perfectly serviceable voice, and it’s interesting to hear this simplified solo piano reduction by the man who wrote it, it shows what he thought was the essence of the song, and which lines he liked to mug with.
…and one orthogonal connection.
Loesser’s other big Broadway hit was How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, which also has a faux-revival big production number, “Brotherhood of Man.” NBC inexplicably chose this number for their network promo in 2012, which I was introduced to by this tweet. It feels insane to see this chosen, given NBC’s institutional problems with sexism in leadership and the no less than 4 sexual predators featured in the casts here. Every segment has something hilarious to look at. [Also it’s catchy as fuck and I will pay you $10 to tell me what that insane dance move that Ken Jeong does is.]
When you receive a gift from someone who was in your life for a brief time, your relationship to the gift will eventually eclipse your memories of the giver. A few summers ago, at party in an apartment above The Matador on West Burnside (before it closed), I met T. and M. They were a good-looking couple from Bend who would drive to Portland every weekend to go out to clubs and party. M. was a schoolteacher with a quick, jealous temper. He liked to punctuate every sentence with an Alyssa Edwards tongue pop. T. was his tall blonde German hunk of a husband. That’s not poetic license, he was literally German, like, from Germany. He seemed bored by Bend. I got into a flirty, drunken conversation with T. and said that I was a singer. He lit up and asked me to sing. I wanted to impress him, so I sang from the first song in Schumann’s Diechterliebe. I performed it in a college recital, and my singer’s German no longer flowed easily, but T. loved it. He started gushing about his favorite song ever: this song from a vampire opera. He made me swear to learn it and sing it for him, and with wholehearted drunken sincerity, I promised. That never happened because the next time I saw him, his boyfriend called me a racist slur and I was so pissed off that I never hung out with their crew again. But I am happy to report that “Die Unstillbare Gier,” the song from the vampire opera, wormed its way into my heart, and I have returned to it again and again and again as a piece of wonderful, glorious, bizarre theater.
The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967) Von Krolock (Ferdy Mayne) encounters Sarah (Sharon Tate) as she bathes.
The origin of this piece of music begins in a 1967 Roman Polanski movie called The Fearless Vampire Killers, or, Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck (no, seriously),starring Sharon Tate and Polanski before they were married. It was a swinging 60’s sexy, farcical sendup of vampire tropes, and apparently a real piece of shit. It was butchered by its USA theatrical distributors in original release. When its original cut was “rediscovered” in the 1980’s, critical opinion was revised from “one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen” to “quite bad.” Despite its TCM at 3:00 in the morning reputation, at least one person believed in the durability of the movie’s plot: in the early 1990’s, a German theater impresario recruited Michael Kunze, a successful director who was the go-to guy for adapting hit Broadway shows into German, to adapt the movie into a musical and write the book. Jim Steinman was recruited to compose. Steinman is best known as the songwriter behind Meat Loaf, he wrote all of Bat Out of Hell parts I, II, and III, as well as hits for other artists, most famously “Total Eclipse of the Heart” for Bonnie Tyler. The result was Tanz der Vampire (Dance of the Vampires). The basic plot of Tanz is: a young woman in a Jewish shtetl in the Carpathian Mountains draws the attention of the vampire Count von Krolock. He lures her to a vampire’s ball. Her young admirer and a vampire hunter go to the ball to rescue her, she escapes. Krolock pursues them into the woods, where he is torn apart by wolves.
Poster for Tanz der Vampire 20-year Anniversary production in Vienna, 2009.
Tanz is a maximalist, over-the-top, totally committed work of high Gothic camp. Roman Polanski directed and designed its opening production in Vienna in 1997. While some movies and TV shows in the 90’s like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Interview with the Vampire were deconstructing vampire iconography and adding contemporary elements, Tanz is all-in on classic visual tropes: costumes have capes and codpieces. The graveyard set is lit in purple and green. Krolock sings in an archaic poetic register. If you don’t buy into its sensibility, the whole thing is incredibly mockable, especially since—this is incredibly unfair, I know— Germans expressing themselves passionately always has an edge of silliness (not my most cosmopolitan opinion, but don’t blame me! Blame the Romantic German poets that taught German men that the best way to demonstrate your desire to a girl was to commit suicide at her).
Kevin Tarte as von Krolock singing “Die Unstillbare Gier”
“Die Unstillbare Gier” (The Insatiable Greed) is von Krolock’s big solo number before the climactic finale of the musical. It starts with a mournful oboe melody against ambiguous harmony. Von Krolock enters in a defeated whisper, the stillness and the darkness quieting everything but his agony. The strings enter, a piano ballad riff establishes a new key and a midtempo rock beat. Krolock sinks into reverie, telling the story of memorable past lovers. Every time he opens his heart, he wants to turn them so they can share in eternal life together, but they always die in his arms. He has accepted that this will never work for him—“I still believed I could win,” he remembers with bitterness, of the first time he tried—but he remains forever trapped between his twin desires for love and for blood. In the chorus, his voice soars louder and angrier as he asks for one of these masters to set him free: “I want to be an angel or a devil.” As he builds to a climactic shout of rage towards god, he turns his anger towards the audience, challenging that everything that humans put meaning into—religion, science, art, heroism, virtue—is a delusion to distract us from the ultimate power that guides us: our greed for whatever we can’t have.
Tanz der Vampire, Vienna 1997. Graveyard scene.
The reason that I return time and again to this song is that I believe Krolock. There’s a level of authenticity in song when the voice carries the emotion directly. It’s in music about joy that’s joyful, or music about anger that’s angry, or music about sorrow that’s sorrowful. This is a song about desire that wants. I am not a vampire aristocrat (although I would love to own property and a better wardrobe, so consider this an official expression of interest), but in my moments of deepest despair, I too wish that I wasn’t burdened by my own wants. I fear that I invite disaster by getting too close (“…when I reached for life, nothing remained in my grasp/I want to turn to flame and ashes, but I cannot be burned”). There is a fantasy version of myself that is better looking, richer, more charismatic, more powerful. When I let myself sink into feelings of jealousy and an angry entitlement at the world that this is it? This is all I was given?, my bitterness sounds like this song.
Songwriter Jim Steinman
Even if your tolerance for camp is lower than mine, the song itself has had a fascinating journey towards becoming itself. Jim Steinman has a method of recycling the same material over and over (others might call it creative exhaustion), and Tanz was assembled out of pieces of music used in other songs for other projects (“Total Eclipse of the Heart” has charmingly bizarre lyrics anyway, but it got much, much weirder when it was recycled into a horny vampire duet. “Die Unstillbarre Gier” had two lives before Tanz, as “Surf’s Up” on Steinman’s 1981 solo album Bad for Good, and as “Objects in the Rearview Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are” on Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell.
Jim Steinman, “Surf’s Up”
“Surf’s Up” is a terrible song. I have a bias: it comes from my least favorite era of rock and roll, when pretentious male songwriters seemed to confuse priapism with a mystical experience. The central nature metaphor is that the singer wants to give you a pounding like waves on the shore. “Surf’s up, so am I” he cries erectly. Steinman has a perfectly serviceable voice, but it’s not quite up to his music in range and power. Only a small amount of musical material survived from “Surf” to “Gier,” it’s a piano ballad with a similar build and shape, but only a fragment of the first melody phrase in the verses and some of the verse chord progression are recognizable in “Gier,” the bridge and chorus are completely unconnected. The most interesting thing about the I-vi-IV-V verse chord progression is how conventional it is. What is interesting and memorable in “Objects” and “Gier” is just one or two chords away from being foursquare and forgettable. Present from the very beginning, though, is the unexpected vi chord that delays resolution to the dominant (on “never be like this again”). That surprising suspension, over the two revisions, will expand into the dramatic climax of “Gier” (“the real power that rules is/is the shameful, infinite, consuming, destructive/insatiable greed”).
Meat Loaf, “Objects in the Rearview Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are” live in Orlando Florida, 1993.
“Objects in the Rearview Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are” is a messy failure for a different set of reasons. The verse melody and chords have been heavily rewritten; they appear more or less intact in “Gier.” Steinman upgraded the voice by giving it to Meat Loaf who has more power in his upper range and enough energy to sell the soaring climaxes. It’s not quite right, however, “Objects” fails musically and, more importantly, in emotional tone. The musical failure is in the chorus. The entire chorus is the title line repeated in two symmetrical melodies. As if the repetition wasn’t enough, it drops in volume and energy, stopping the momentum of the song cold. A bigger failure is its emotional incoherence. The central metaphor is that “if life is just a highway, then the soul is just a car;” the singer reflects on three people that haunt his past like cars in the rearview mirror. The lyrics are both lurid and superficial, about the death of a boyhood friend, abuse at the hands of his father, and, with trademark Steinman horniness, bangin’ a girl named Julie in the back of a car (this is, presumably, a different car). Despite the singer’s different attitudes toward these ghosts of the past—affection and grief for Kenny, anger at his father, nostalgia for good times with Julie—the tone doesn’t change, and none of them fits the music convincingly. If my criticism wasn’t enough to make you hate the song, listen to Steinman’s praise:
It’s a very passionate song. It’s really, I think maybe, the most passionate one on the record. I mean, I’m really proud of it because that’s really one that goes over-the-top in the sense that it’s got images – it has religious imagery of resurrection, it’s got images of fertility and rebirth, it has really very good sexual images, images of cars – which I always like.
Which brings us to “Die Unstillbare Gier.” The biggest improvement from “Objects” is that the lyrics are not written by Steinman. They are hilariously dense, but match the mournful, nostalgic, angry tone of the music perfectly. Surprisingly, one piece of syntax appears in all three versions of the song: “The grain was golden and the sky was clear” echoes “The sky is trembling and the moon is pale” in “Surf’s Up” and “The skies were pure and the fields were green” in “Objects.” Steinman made three notable musical improvements: the first is the addition of a slow, quiet introduction, which turns the entrance of the piano verse theme into a musical scene change as Krolock sinks into memory. Steinman also recognized that the two-part verse in “Objects” actually works as a verse and chorus, and cuts out the “Objects” chorus completely, which fixes the pacing. Finally, by adding a whispered, cabaret-like introduction and throwing some more hot sauce on the climax, it restructured into a much better overall shape and turned into a real showpiece for the voice. “Surfs Up” has been left far back in the rearview mirror.
Michael Crawford sings “The Insatiable Appetite” in Dance of the Vampires, original Broadway production, 2001
There is a fourth revision for this song that never quite was. You could write a book about everything went wrong with the disastrous attempt to bring Tanz to Broadway. Warring creative visions, an inexperienced director, a past-his-prime star that was preoccupied by his public image and didn’t like the campy sensibility of the show, clunky English translations, a cast that couldn’t stand each other. As if that weren’t enough, Dance of the Vampires opened the first week of September 2001. It played for three months before closing, a cast album was never even recorded. It lost $12m, one of the biggest Broadway flops ever. Tanz has been revived in Germany and Austria many times, but as far as I can tell the English adaptation has never been resurrected. There is one video of “The Insatiable Appetite” available online, you can see Michael Crawford lumber through the song, all the poetry gone from the lyrics, in a Count Chocula-esque accent.
I think that may be the final chapter in this journey. Tanz will return every now then, Dance of the Vampires will remain radioactive. Every now and then, I’ll play the video for a friend, introducing it as “a song from a German vampire opera,” and enjoy watching them put together what it is they’re watching. I can see the questions going through their heads. They are the same questions that have fueled my own obsession: This musical looks crazy, what the fuck is he wearing? Why is he so serious? Is that a boner or a part of his costume? Am I liking this? Wait, is this good? Oh my god, am I having actual feelings about this? They’re questions that one can contemplate for a lifetime, or more.
Extras
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
Jason Segal performs Dracula’s song in Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2007)
There’s a cute shout out to Tanz Der Vampire in the movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall. The brief selections we get from Peter’s puppet vampire opera lovingly spoofs the tone of Tanz, and the song “Die, I Can’t” pushes the same buttons as “Gier:” dead sincerity, total commitment to the performance, and a very silly setting.
Bisexual Vampires
Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in Interview with the Vampire (1994)
The late 80’s and early 90’s were the high water mark for the sexy bisexual villain and sexy bisexual vampire tropes. I have an ambiguous relationship to this trope. It is undeniably rooted in homophobia, treating the villain’s perverted attraction to the hero as an extra danger, with rape being the underlying threat. On the other hand, these characters are often the most charismatic and stylish characters in the movie. Tanz nods to this trope; while Krolock mostly revisits memories of lust for virginal women, he also mentions a page in Napoleon’s entourage: “I can’t forgive myself for his grief not breaking my heart.”
I mentioned that the German lyrics are dense, here’s an example of what that means. In the very first line of narration, the singer has to sing the word “eintausendsechshundertzehn” (sixteen-ten) in two beats. German is a difficult language to translate because, although its syntax and grammar are cousins to English, it has the ability to encode a lot of information in its nouns. A noun that takes a whole sentence to describe in English (“a face you’d like to slap”) can be rendered in a single word in German (“das Backpfeifengesicht”). This is a real challenge for song translators.
hammer & jack 