by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I screened a very interesting old
TV show, an episode of the Steve Allen Show from December 30, 1953 when it was still a local
production on a New York station, WNBT, airing Mondays through Fridays from
11:20 p.m. to midnight. (The odd 40-minute time slot was obviously designed to
accommodate an 11 p.m. newscast, at a time when even the network newscasts only
ran 15 minutes.) Allen begins the program with a low-keyed monologue and a
rendition of the song “Sleepy Time Gal” in which he sings as well as playing
piano — and though Nat “King” Cole wasn’t going to be kept awake nights worried
about the competition in the singing-pianist gig, Allen was a quite capable
jazz piano player (he phrases most of the song in Erroll Garner-esque block
chords) and a perfectly decent singer. One thing I hadn’t realized before is
just how sexist this song is: the singer is telling his nightclubbing
girlfriend that once they’re married, not only will she be in bed by 8 every
night, “You’ll learn to cook and to sew/What’s more, you’ll love it, I know.” I
sincerely doubt the real Steve Allen
treated his wife, actress and singer Jayne Meadows, that way! The show was
sponsored by Ruppert’s Knickerbocker Beer, complete with an actor playing
Father Knickerbocker, mythical founder of New York City, and though it is Allen
who rattles off the unique qualities of Knickerbocker Beer (in a high-speed
spot-announcer’s voice quite different from the low-keyed self-deprecating way
he hosts the actual program), including that it contains no starch (which
means, according to the pitch, that you can drink more of it and not feel
bloated — smashed out of your gills, yes, but not bloated!)
Father
Knickerbocker (neither imdb.com nor archive.org, from which I downloaded this
curio, lists the actor playing him) stops the show dead in its tracks to
deliver a public-service pitch for the Brooklyn Children’s Museum. (Doubtless
the Children’s Museum was a notable and laudable enterprise, but I still couldn’t help but ask myself just how many children they
had on exhibit and how they had been trapped.) The show features long-time Allen
regulars Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé — though only separately, not together;
Lawrence does an estimable version of Frank Sinatra’s breakthrough hit “All or
Nothing at All” in a bar set that would seem to have been more appropriate for
“One for My Baby” — and while his vocal isn’t as wrenchingly powerful as
Sinatra’s (did you really expect it would be?), he gets the message across
quite nicely. Gormé’s spot comes towards the end of the program, a novelty song
called “Gone Gone John” that sounds like a precursor to rock ’n’ roll (as I’ve
noted in previous posts, the transition of music in the 1950’s from pop to rock
was a good deal more gradual than the history books have it, and records that
today we’d consider non-rock novelties charted well until the end of the
decade, and sometimes even after that: the number one chart record in 1964 in
the U.S. was Louis Armstrong’s “Hello, Dolly!,” while slots two through six on
that same chart went to the Beatles), a silly song which she swings quite
nicely.
In between those highlights there are segments with Steve Allen
contemplating the detritus on his set — both the leftover Christmas decorations
and the shelf of books that nobody reads (one of which is a medical text on
diseases of the gallbladder and pancreas) — as well as an interview with Roger
Price, humorist and writer, inventor of “Droodles” (a compound word of
“drawings” and “doodles”) including the famous “Ship Arriving Too Late to Save
a Drowning Witch” that later became a Frank Zappa album cover. Allen also goes
into the audience and interviews some people, mostly women, and introduces Myra
Dawn Hazel of the University of Arkansas, winner of the nationwide “American
College Queen” contest (and I thought the Gay Leather community had a plethora
of silly titles!). This peculiar program was actually a precursor of The
Tonight Show, of which Allen was the
original host once NBC made it a national network show in 1954, and in its
joyous tackiness and sense that they were trying out the molds for what would
be late-night programming from then to now it’s fascinating watching. It’s also
noteworthy that Allen had a superb band, led by Bobby Byrne and featuring
trumpeters Doc Severinsen and Clark Terry, guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli and drummer
Bobby Rosengarden (of course Severinsen and Rosengarden would both go on to
lead big bands of their own on late-night shows, Severinsen for Johnny Carson
and Rosengarden for Dick Cavett), and that the very first time he hosted this
seemingly ambition-less New York local show, he opened his monologue, “In
case you're just joining us … this is Tonight … and I can’t think of too much to tell you about it, except I want to
give you the bad news first: this program is going to go on forever. I wouldn't
call it a Spectacular … you might say it’s more a Monotonous.” Little did Steve
Allen know it would go on forever
and far outlast his tenure as host of it!
