"Living in the sunlight/Loving in the moonlight...."

"Masculine Women! Feminine Man!"

I just stumbled into this song from 1926 with lyrics like "Masculine women, feminine men/Which is the rooster, which is the hen?/It's hard to tell 'em apart today" and "Knickers and trousers, baggy and wide/Nobody knows who's walking inside!"

The audio here is the Irving Kaufman version, from 1926, and the visual is a lot of pictures from movies of the 1910s/1920s/1930s (and from "Some Like It Hot," which is set in the 1920s): 

 

I wasn't looking for transgender-adjacent popular songs. What happened was, I was reading about various 1960s pop stars and saw this about Tiny Tim:

In a 1968 interview on The Tonight Show, he described the discovery of his ability to sing in an upper register: "I was listening to the radio and singing along; as I was singing I said 'Gee, it's strange. I can go up high as well.'" In a 1969 interview he said he was listening to Rudy Vallée sing in a falsetto, and "had something of a revelation – I never knew that I had another top register," describing it as a religious experience.

Through Spotify, I found the key Rudy Vallée recording, "Deep Night." I have listened to that recording a hundred times in the last month. I'm trying to understand all the mysterious elements that make me love that song. It's because of "Deep Night" that I've been delving into 1920s playlists on Spotify. That's what put me in a position to notice "Masculine Women! Feminine Man!" And I thought you'd enjoy the diversion.

Here's an instrumental version with an excellent collection of photographs of less famous people — presumably centering on the 1920s and showing many women dressed as men and men as women (or, perhaps, transgender men and women):

Here are the full lyrics, written by Edgar Leslie/James V. Monaco:

No one loves...

 (Excellent tribute version by Tiny Tim: here.)

 

Who said "I have tremendous respect for McCain but I don’t buy the war hero thing. Anybody can be captured. I thought the idea was to capture them. As far as I’m concerned he sat out the war"?

Al Franken! Back in 2000 in a Salon thing called "What's at stake in the 2000 elections?/Rosa Parks, David Duke, Steve Wozniak, Camille Paglia, Al Franken -- and dozens more -- talk about what inspires and frightens them about the political year ahead."

I wonder how many other old jokes are woven into the oddly woven head of Donald Trump.

I found that Salon piece via "Donald Trump Uses Old Al Franken POW Joke About John McCain/Franken 15 years ago: 'I don't buy the war hero thing. Anybody can be captured'" at Reason.com, where I went because of this tweet from Penn Jillette....

Donald Trump Uses Old Al Franken POW Joke About John McCain - Hit & Run : http://t.co/FvK6AbRFkn Al Franken! http://t.co/j3rReBx5Jm

— Penn Jillette (@pennjillette) July 18, 2015

... which I got to from a Bizpac Review article titled "Penn Jillette praises Trump as genius with no filter; libs go nuts trying to spin", which I only noticed because of my Google alert on "bob dylan":



From the Bizpac thing:

“Thelonius Monk [sic], the great jazz piano player, said — and it’s not a well-known quotation, but I love it — [Jillette] said, ‘The genius is the one who is most like himself.’ That’s what I love with Bob Dylan, Lenny Bruce, Tiny Tim — they were completely like themselves. Trump, for better or worse, is in that category... I have talked one-on-one with Bob Dylan, and I have talked one-on-one with Trump, and they do not have filters. They speak honestly and from the heart.”...

I'm sure there's a joke at this point about how that thing Trump wears on his head — his hair hat — could be used as filter, but let's be serious. Trump is some kind of genius. We can grant him that. But at the same time, it's pretty obvious, we don't want a genius President! Thelonious Monk, Bob Dylan, Lenny Bruce, Tiny Tim... that's a hell of a list. Trump is flattered to be put on that list by as fine a man as Penn Jillette. But neither Thelonious Monk, Bob Dylan, Lenny Bruce, nor Tiny Tim belonged in the Presidency.

Who would have made the best President?

Thelonious Monk

Bob Dylan

Lenny Bruce

Tiny Tim

pollcode.com free polls

"The ice caps are melting, oh ho ho ho ho ho."

Hey, it's the Tiny Tim song Thomas Pynchon was talking about!



This insane song appears on Tim's 1968 album "God Bless Tiny Tim," so all that ice caps melting business has nothing to do with our present-day angst over polar bears and obeisance to the Great God Gore. Unless Tim started it all. Who are those kids anyway? And why did adults subject the youngsters to this trippy apocalyptic weirdness? Perhaps little Al is there, absorbing the crazed wisdom of Tiny. Mysteries! Wow. It's so far out!

And here's the Pynchon book, "Inherent Vice."

Living in the sunlight.

I love Tiny Tim's total commitment to his character and style, Johnny's perfect mix of niceness and sarcasm, and Tim's sweetly stated superior knowledge of music history. Here's the original that Johnny didn't know:



"Things that bother you never bother me..."

IN THE COMMENTS: Mr. Forward says:

Happy Tune from the the 30's?

Sounds like Secretary of the Treasury "Tiny Tim" Geithner.

"What bothers you doesn't bother me."

Bissage says:

My father worked with Miss Vicki's uncle and I was very young when he brought me along for a visit.

That was the first time I heard the expression "hippie weirdo freak."

In such ways are the incentives to conform made known to small children.

Miss Vicki now.

Miss Vicki has a blog!

Bob's flower theme.

Bob's theme today -- on "Theme Time Radio With Bob Dylan" -- was, officially, flowers. But nearly every song was about roses. What happened? Did he start out with roses as the theme and run short? He missed plenty of rose songs, though. He did not play "Kiss From a Rose" or "The Yellow Rose of Texas" or even "some say love, it is a river that drowns the tender reed blah blah blah in the spring becomes the rose." There's "Sally Go Round the Roses" and "Roses Are Red" and "Every Rose Has Its Thorn." There must be a thousand rose songs he didn't play.

To fill in his non-rose slots, he used two grass songs. I don't think grass ought to count as a flower. Then the only other plant/flower I remember him doing was tulips. In keeping with the first syllable of the word, he played two tulip songs. Duke Ellington, "Tulip or Turnip." And Tiny Tim, "Tiptoe Through the Tulips."

I felt that "Tiptoe Through the Tulips" was the emotional high point of the show. We know from reading "Chronicles" that Bob Dylan was friends with Tiny Tim, and introducing the song, he swept aside the superficial view of Tim as just a joke. He was a great historian of music, Dylan said. He knew a lot of songs that were available only on sheet music, and when he died, he took a lot of songs with him. It's not like Tim died in a fire of burning sheet music, so I don't really understand how the music was lost, but it felt very profound and poignant when Dylan said it.

At the end of the show last week, when this week's theme was announced, I tried to guess which songs he'd play. The first flower song that sprang to my mind was that atrocious song about going to San Francisco and making sure you show up already besprigged with flowers. Then I thought of the song that deeply enchanted me when I was a young girl: "Sweet Violets." I wrote about it back here, embedded in a long simulblog of an episode of "American Idol" where the contestants had to sing songs from the year they were born:

I start thinking about what songs would be available to me, if I could be on the show. I'm way too old and I'm a horrible singer, but still ... Here's the list from my year, and my song from that list is "Sweet Violets." I remember hearing it once. I was in bed and overheard my parents playing it. I loved it deeply and the next day asked my parents about it. They told me, it was not for children and I couldn't hear it. Was it about sex? Death? Oddly, though I've always remembered it, I have never bothered to find the song and listen to it. I can still hear it in my head from that one listen, but I've never heard it again. I rush over to iTunes. The Dinah Shore hit is not there (only a Mitch Miller version). Ah! here are the lyrics. It's a bizarrely veiled filthy song from the past! Good thing my parents protected me, or protected themselves from having to deal with my questions.

That's an unusual old song, and it has a flower other that rose, tulip, or grass. Too bad he missed it.

Next week the theme is cars. If I had to bet on one song -- taking into account that Bob likes to tell the life story of the singer -- I'd bet on "Rocket 88." But that wasn't the first car song that popped into my head when I heard the theme. (What was yours?) That was "Little GTO." Looking up the lyrics, I land right on a page of "Muscle Car Songs." Nice! I should have thought of "409" first. My office number was 409 for a long time, and I thought it was really cool that my room number was a Beach Boys song. Students would ask me what my office number was, and I liked to say "It's a Beach Boys song." No one ever said, "409!" But it would have made me happy if they had. I would have picked up good vibrations.

Having found a page of muscle car songs, I think of looking for a page of death car songs. That fateful night the car was stalled upon the railroad track... I couldn't stop, so I swerved to the right... We were buggin' each other while we sat out the light/We both popped the clutch when the light turned green/You shoulda heard the whine from my screamin' machine!... Look out! Look out! Look out! Look out!...

Wait. That last one's a motorcycle. Can motorcycles get in on the car theme -- the way grass got in on the flower theme? Or it motorcycle crashing a very special theme for Bob, due for it's own show some day.

Dylan's "Chronicles"--Chapter 1.

Bob Dylan begins his story with a scene where he meets Jack Dempsey, who, assuming this happened at all, thinks or acts like he thinks Bob Dylan is another boxer, and that scene sets the tone for the rest of the first chapter, where we see Dylan arrive in New York, interested in music, but even more interested in fighting his way to success. The first action we see him take is signing a contract with a music publishing company.

First song mentioned in the book: "Rock Around the Clock."


Most distinctive good friend in his early days in New York: Tiny Tim. "I gave the rest of my French fries to Tiny Tim."

Reason given for being outraged that Pete Seeger was blacklisted during the McCarthy Era: his ancestors came over on the Mayflower. Page 6.

Indication that the book could have been better edited: "What I did was come across the country from the Midwest ... straight out of Chicago ... eastbound through the state lines, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania ..." Page 8.

First long passage of praise for a fellow music artist: pages 13-14. The artist is Ricky Nelson. "I felt we had a lot in common." But Ricky's days were numbered--unlike Dylan's.

UPDATED to put in the links.