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Pop Rock Nation

Category: News

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  • Tom Bosley’s Singing Career! “The name’s LaGuardia…”

    Tom Bosley in Fiorello! – The Broadway Cast Album
    Yesterday, Tom Bosley passed away at the age of 83. Though Bosley is best known and celebrated as the TV actor who played Mr. Cunningham on the show Happy Days in the 70s and 80s, he was also a celebrated stage actor, and in 1960, he won a Tony Award for his portrayal of the title character of Fiorello!, a musical based on the life and loves of New York governor Fiorello “The Little Flower” LaGuardia.

    Debuting in the same season as Rodgers & Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music, Fiorello! managed to tie with that musical for Tony Awards in four categories including Best Musical. Written by the team of composer Jerry Bock and lyricist Sheldon Harnick (the team who would go on to write Fiddler on the Roof) with a book by Jerome Weidman and George Abbott, the show was also awarded the Pulitzer prize for drama, one of only a handful of Pulitzer Prize winning musicals. It ran for nearly two years, closing in October of 1961, and in those two years, Tom Bosley never missed a single performance (sucked to be his understudy).

    50 years on, the show enjoys more a cult following than actual popularity. It’s rarely produced and it’s been overshadowed by Harnick & Bock’s later successes – Fiddler on the Roof, of course, which, when it closed, was the longest running musical in Broadway history, and later She Loves Me, which actually preceded Fiddler as a Broadway disappointment in 1963, but received a celebrated Broadway revival in the 90s. Despite its relative obscurity, Capitol Records’ cast album of the show has been reissued on CD a couple of times, and it’s well worth seeking out. Not so much for Bosley’s performance: Fiorello doesn’t really sing all that much, and when he does Bosley delivers the part with the kind of gung-ho salesman’s pitch shout-singing Robert Preston brought to the part of Professor Hill in The Music Man. Here he is on the stump as a mayoral candidate with a pitch he delivers in multiple languages and dialects in the song “The Name’s LaGuardia”.

    The Name’s La Guardia snippet

    But the score itself is a lot of fun, translating the colorful goings on of a corrupt political party in peril into the language of musical comedy via songs like the barbershop style waltz “Politics and Poker” and the second act showstopper “Little Tin Box”, both of which featured Howard Da Silva in a role that delivered him and his career out of McCarthy-era blacklist hell. The opening number “On the Side of the Angels” follows LaGuardia’s idealistic campaign team through the trials of working for that rarest of beasts – the upstanding politician. But one my favorite moments is Bosley’s fiery delivery of “Unfair” in which he helps a group of mild-mannered labor ladies on strike get in touch with their outrage.

    Unfair snippet

    Anyone with a thing for classic Broadway who doesn’t already have this cast album should go out and have a look for it. It really is a great score, and it’s especially fun to listen to in the midst of a vicious off-year election cycle, especially this year’s elections which seems to have brought us enough characters to populate several great musical comedies – and that’s just the New York gubernatorial debate. (“The Rent is Too Damn High” would make a great song title.)

  • The New American Idol Judges Are …

    The new American Idol judges are … exactly who we heard they would be.

    Ryan Seacrest confirmed it on his Twitter account earlier today.

    It’s official: your new #IdolJudges panel is @yo_randyjackson, @JLo & Steven Tyler! RT!

    To me, Jennifer Lopez isn’t a surprise at all. Though not a very talented singer, she’s done more with her talent than almost anyone in the world of Hollywood and music. Did you see any other In Living Color dancers become the biggest female star in Hollywood and top the pop music charts? And, let’s not forget this; this show is in HD and Lopez still looks fantastic.

    The surprise is Steven Tyler. For one, he’s not necessarily someone who I can completely understand when he speaks. His signature wail works on records, but doesn’t necessarily work on a show when it’s his job to critique singers to an audience of some 20 million viewers. Also, he’s almost too professional for these amateur singers. It’s the same reason Michael Jordan would never be a good coach. He’d expect too much out of players who can never be nearly as good as he is. I think it’s the same deal with Tyler. Unless he has the ability to see things that Simon Cowell could see, I really wonder how long Tyler lasts.

    The last thing is that this show is still missing a Simon type of character who is the last word. It really didn’t matter what Randy, Paula, or Kara ever said. Simon had the last word and his word was the word that mattered. Who is going to be that judge this year? That’s where they are empty.

  • Awesome Free Download: Levi’s Pioneer Sessions – The 2010 Revival Recordings

    I’ll be honest: I’ve never worn a pair of Levi’s. The truth is I was such a total geek when I was in school that I didn’t wear jeans at all. I wore corduroys. Lots and lots of corduroys. Almost always: corduroys. Thankfully, I eventually grew out of that phase (though I still admire a man who can confidently rock a set of wide-wales), I never really accepted the notion of laying down respectable amounts of money for blue jeans. Count me among the Shopko shoppers in this department. Sorry Levi’s. I like their ads though. With all the Walt Whitman poetry and revolutionary youngsters running around bonfires all free and stuff.

    But it was a musical stunt they pulled this summer which landed Levi’s Jeans in my facebook news feed. Starting in May, they posted two free song downloads to their website each week until, a couple months later, they’d posted an entire album’s worth of songs – 13 in all, and all cover versions – a diverse and optimistic collection of songs performed by an equally diverse and generally unassailable roster of artists, including up-and-comers like recent Oscar-winning singer-songwriter Ryan Bingham, current hipster faves like The Dirty Projectors and Passion Pit, R&B and hip-hop veterans Raphael Saadiq and Nas, and a couple of crunchy granola adult contemporary stars Colbie Caillat and Jason Mraz, the former making a surprisingly convincing case that Blondie’s millennial-era reunion wasn’t a complete waste of our time with a cover of “Maria”, the latter enlisting a gospel choir for an unabashedly gimmicky revival of Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky”. From their introduction to the series:

    While much has changed about music over the past 50 years (artists, genres, popularity, formats, distribution, etc.), one thing remains true: The song is everything.

    The campaign (which has since ended) was called Levi’s Pioneer Sessions: The 2010 Revival Recordings, and though you can’t find it on CD, this collection is one of the best covers albums I’ve heard of late. The performances are generally casual and unfussy, but delivered with genuine affection. That part about the song being everything? It sounds like these artists’ mean it. John Legend and the Roots preview their just-released collection of vintage funk social consciousness Wake Up Everybody with a solid, horn-driven revival of the Stax/Volt obscurity “Our Generation”, while Ryan Bingham, with a courage bordering on foolhardiness, takes on a Stax/Volt classic – Otis Redding’s “That’s How Strong My Love Is” – and turns it into a devotional hymn for a whiskey-voiced loser.

    While Saadiq’s cover of the Spinners’ “It’s a Shame” is a virtual clone of the original and The Shins faithfully reproduce Chris Difford and Glenn Tillbrook’s signature at-octave “harmony” lead vocals on Squeeze’s “Goodbye Girl”, the best entries are also (no surprise) the ones that represent an actual departure in sound. In the reconstructive hands of Colombia’s dance-pop quintet Bomba Estereo, Technotronic’s house classic “Pump Up the Jam” is still a great dance song, but it’s a decidedly trippier, more disorientingly exotic (and, yes, bilingual) experience.

    Elsewhere, Passion Pit wring even more swooning starlit reverie out of Smashing Pumpkins’ “Tonight, Tonight” with their synth-spangled cover, while Glen Hansard (with Marketa Irglova as The Swell Season) sings Candi Staton’s “Young Hearts Run Free” (with gender-unadjusted lyrics) as a strummy folk admonishment – like someone played a joke on him and told him the 1976 disco hit was actually a Cat Stevens original.

    The one real bummer of the collection has nothing to do with the music, but with the cumbersome download process itself. There’s no way to download the entire 13 song “album” all at once – you have to click to each track individually, and even then, the website directs you to your e-mail inbox where each individual automatically sent e-mail re-directs you back to the site to actually complete the download. Urgh. That said, each of the tracks comes with a (pretty cool) customized thumbnail graphic, and if you’re not hot on that, each song’s webpage includes several downloadable photos of the artists, along with “liner notes” for their track. The inconvenience of the download process is easily outweighed by the quality of the music on offer – but also, duh, it’s totally free.