Leaving the old world behind

Neil Young has a new album called Songs for Judy. It’s a collection of live songs from his 1976 tour and the title comes from one of Neil’s typical stoned raps from that period about running into Judy Garland that same night – keep in mind that in 1976 she’d been dead for seven years – as she asks him, “How’s the business going, Neil?”

Whether he was just trying to be ironic or acknowledging that although separated by a generation he and Judy settled on the same career choice, Young always seemed to have an affinity for old show business. On another album, Live at the Roxy, he mentions performing on the same stage where stripper Candy Barr once danced. When we saw him at the PNC Arts Center a few years back, he talked about a backstage area being named after Frank Sinatra, “where Frank, Dean and Sammy used to party their asses off,” he mused, knowing that nothing gets an old-school concert crowd cheering louder than the phrase, “partying your ass off.”

And maybe there is some unspoken, ghostly camaraderie between the generations when you consider the Rat Pack as the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young of its day, or Judy Garland’s rock star death by a barbiturate OD, or that at one point in the Seventies, Neil and Sinatra were the only two artists signed to Reprise Records.

Old show business, on the other hand, treated rock like a panhandler with leprosy. Steve Allan used to get big laughs by solemnly reciting the lyrics of songs like Get A Job (“Oh, yip, yip, yip, yip, yip, yip, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, get a job”). Peter Sellers, before he discovered acid and became friends with George Harrison, had a routine where he recited the lyrics to A Hard Day’s Night in thespian tones. In 1957, Sinatra’s over-the-top reaction to rock was to call it “the most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has been my misfortune to hear.” 

I recently watched an episode of The Judy Garland Show from January 1964 – what passed for adult entertainment one month before ground zero, the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. Judy and her guests, presidential pimp Peter Lawford and the unfunny Martha Raye, strike mock-serious poses and an academic attitude to sing silly Top 40 stuff like the Beach Boys’ Be True to Your School, a song Brian Wilson probably dashed off while waiting for a red light, and Dumb Head, a tale of teenage angst sung by a girl who thinks she’s missed her chance with a guy she likes – a dopey record, but with an emotional hook anyone could understand. The show’s dancers jump about like they’re being zapped with electric cattle prods to Shirley Ellis’ The Nitty Gritty.

Earlier in the show, Rich Little carts out fossilized imitations of Jimmy Stewart, Orson Welles, Ed Sullivan and John Wayne. In what they used to call a musical skit, Lawford, playing a smarmy playboy, attempts to bed an uncooperative Garland, who sings, “I’m just an old-fashioned girl.” The Beatles’ plane couldn’t land soon enough.