A literary burglary

Not long before Christmas 1987 I read a review of Evan Eisenberg's new book The Recording Angel and resolved to look out for it. It is just the sort of book I like, a deep and insightful history of recorded music.

This was before instant online ordering and speedy delivery of books, before you could read a new book on your Kindle a few minutes after reading a review.

I was living in Toowoomba, a provincial city where there were a couple of good bookshops, but I would also look forward to browsing the bigger bookshops in Brisbane now and then.

This was not a bestseller, it probably appealed to a limited demographic, and my feeling was that I probably wouldn't come across it locally.

So, I would look out for The Recording Angel, but it was more likely to show up in one of the Brisbane bookshops like The American Bookstore.

A couple of days after Christmas Day I went into a local second-hand bookshop and looked through the old paperbacks with their bent covers and yellowed pages. 

In amongst them I found The Recording Angel, fresh and unopened. As a second-hand bookseller would classify it, As New.

I was astounded - no - I was spooked by how unlikely and coincidental it was, but I contained myself and took it to the cash register. 

Later I thought that it must have been an unwanted Christmas gift. Pretty quick to get down to the second-hand bookshop so soon after Christmas Day, but maybe they were desperate.
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I got the Internet at home 11 years later, in 1998, and some time after that I saw a forum comment about The Recording Angel by a woman from the Toowoomba area. That was coincidental itself, on the Worldwide Web.

She had bought a copy of the book when it first came out, but it had been stolen during a burglary, swooped up with some other things before she had time to read it.

I replied to her comment and told her the story and yes, it had been in late 1987. She agreed the timing was right. I offered to give her my (her?) copy but she declined.

Yesterday's Cake, Eddie White's autobiography

As I was saying at the weekend: I have a feeling there is an interesting biography to be told about Eddie White. Maybe someone will email...

Sure enough, John Sprung emailed again to tell me about Yesterday's Cake, Eddie's autobiography that was published by Vantage Press in 1985.

The AbeBooks website lists a number of used copies. One of the booksellers quotes Joseph Heller: Eddie White's book reads like a Bronx Arabian Nights!

The title refers Eddie's time in an orphanage where the kids were given day-old cakes from the bakeries. A synopsis at AbeBooks says Yesterday's Cake is the story of a boy raised in various orphanages who became a songwriter and met the rich and famous even though his father was a small time hood.

Think I'll have to order a copy. More later...

One more thing: John Sprung, my informant on these matters, is a folk singer and music writer with an interesting resumé himself.

Follow that: reading about Tommy Cooper

In his article about Tommy Cooper in British Comedy Greats, Barry Cryer quotes Eric Morecambe:

That bugger just has to walk on and they laugh.... I have to start working. (p.56)

As Cryer observes, that was Morecambe being 'typically self-deprecating'. If ever there was a comedian who made you laugh before he opened his mouth, it was Eric Morecambe, who could get a laugh out of a line that wasn't all that funny, who could get a laugh because the line wasn't funny. Frankie Howerd was another comedian whose material could be almost irrelevant: he was just funny, and even if it was appalling material, he'd get a laugh out of his own discomfort, his awareness of how bad it was. Come to think of it, that's just why I like David Letterman.

Cryer showed me, though, that I don't even need to see Tommy Cooper to laugh. Just reading about him is enough.

Shortly after coming on stage, he would look into the wings and say, 'Come off? I've only just come on.' (p.56)

Not only did I laugh when I read that, I kept thinking about it through the day and laughing again. Of course it helps if you can picture Cooper in action. If you've seen him you don't forget him, and you can imagine his sad, startled, dismayed look as he said it.

The opening of Tom's act was unique - the band would play his signature tune 'The Sheikh of Araby' and he wouldn't come on. I repeat: he wouldn't come on. After a deathless pause, the audience would hear his voice, muttering that he was locked in his dressing room. This was, of course, Tom behind the curtain, on a microphone. I can vouch for the fact that it was one of the funniest openings if an act I have ever seen. He would then emerge, to rapturous applause. (p.56)

This is uncanny. Not only do I not need to see Tommy Cooper for him to make me laugh, but it works even if I'm reading about not seeing him...

I had to say the next one out aloud a couple of times before I realised how brilliant his thinking was. As Cryer tells it:

One of his favourite jokes was: 'A man walked into a bar and went, Ooooh! It was an iron bar.' [Cooper] put the stress on the word 'bar', not 'iron'... (p.57)

Cryer pointed out this technicality to Tommy Cooper:

He gazed at me, uncomprehendingly. 'Did they laugh?' he said. 'Yes,' I admitted. 'Shut up,' he growled. And then he laughed. (p.57)

I heard an interview with Matt Lucas of Little Britain, talking about the difficulties of being a comedian opening for Blur. He said it reminded him of when Tommy Cooper was disastrously engaged to open for The Who. After a dreadful reception from an audience that really only wanted to see The Who, he walked off and said triumphantly, 'Follow that!'

You know, I didn't even have to be there.
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Annabel Merullo and Neil Wenborn (eds), British Comedy Greats, London, Cassell Illustrated, 2003

Twenty Years on Wheels by Andy Kirk

I'm still reading bandleader Andy Kirk's memoir Twenty Years On Wheels (1989), based on conversations with the music writer Amy Lee. It's an anecdotal account of the Swing Era, all the more interesting for being told by a less familiar participant, and for its insights into working with a touring black band in the 1930s and 40s.

Of course, I opened the book near the end, to see what he had to say about Killer Diller, the film I wrote about in an earlier post:

In 1948 the band was in a movie called Killer Diller. It was a comedy, and made at Pathé studios on East 116th Street. Convenient for me, because Mary and I had moved into 555 Edgecombe several years before - 1939 - so New York had been home-base since then. I didn't see the movie. I wasn't excited about it. I never got excited about big names and all that.

Amy Lee comments:

But Andy did finally see that movie. In a phone conversation I had with him on 30 March 1980 he said he and Mary and Bernice had seen it "a couple of months ago" at the Thalia on Broadway and 95th Street, and that Butterfly McQueen was in it. They had paid regular admission to get in, but word got around that he was there, and at the end of the movie he and Miss McQueen - who apparently was there also - were called up on stage for a question-and-answer-session. "We also got our admission fee refunded," he said.

- Andy Kirk, as told to Amy Lee, Twenty Years on Wheels, University of Michigan Press, 1989.