You Did What__ Mad Plans and Great Historical Disasters - Bill Fawcett [73]
For every folksy success by a TV star such as Leonard Nimoy or David Soul there were truly bad and embarrassing efforts by other TV stars such as Jack Webb and William Shatner.
Likewise the spoken-word ruminations of Richard Harris and Rod McKuen, whose heartfelt rendering of lyrics, if not melodious, were at least soulful, were countered by such truly ill-inspired executions as Sebastian Cabot’s (Mr. French of Family Affair) renditions of the lyrics of Bob Dylan.
There was even a record of Tony Randall and Jack Klugman (from TV’s Odd Couple) singing duets à la their Oscar and Felix characters, which included a comic off-key version of the Carly Simon hit “You’re So Vain.”
As singers, most of these performers were pretty good actors.
But even professional singers can occasionally make dubious decisions.
In the seventies a beer company (later followed by a soda company) sponsored a series of low-cost concerts in New York’s Central Park with a wide selection of acts, usually pairing a promising newcomer as the opener with an established crowd pleaser. Bands such as the Beach Boys and the Ojays might sometimes be on the same schedule with Leon Redbone, Johnny Cash, or Perry Como, thus offering the public a taste of something that would appeal to almost every diverse appetite.
One of the headliners one year was Canadian songbird Anne Murray, whose “Snowbird” was a top-forty standard of the AM radio set and who had already built a substantial audience among the country-and-western market as well. True, New York was not known as a C&W (or AM radio, for that matter) demographic, but nonetheless Anne was confident that her fans would follow her anywhere and turn out in droves.
As per the mix-and-match nature of the schedule, her opening act was aimed at a slightly tougher, more hip demographic, and wound up being a promising young talent from the Jersey Shore who had a couple of albums under his belt and a new one scheduled for release just prior to the concert date. Though Anne was unsure if his music would appeal to her audience, she quickly figured that no harm could be done, and if her audience knew that they didn’t like his music, they would either show up late and miss the opening act or grin and bear it until she came on.
With less than two weeks to go before the concert a strange thing happened. The rocker who was to be her opening act wound up on the cover of both Time and Newsweek with headlines proclaiming that he was the future of rock and roll, and overnight this guy from New Jersey by the name of Bruce Springsteen was to New York audiences the second coming of Elvis.
The promoters of the concert were in a quandary.
All of a sudden the opening act was bigger than the headliner.
They quickly approached Anne’s manager with a proposal: What if she was to go on first?
The manager listened to their arguments and consulted with his client, and quickly returned to them with a cordial no. Anne was the headliner, she was the draw, and that’s just the way it was.
On the night of the concert Springsteen took the stage — and wound up staying the night. Anne’s people saw the crowd had gone wild with enthusiasm for this rocker and concluded that his fans had shown up instead of hers, and rather than have her perform to a less - than - appreciative audience (if not one that might be openly hostile, having been disappointed at the curtailment of encores for the opening act), she ceded the stage to him. That discretion was probably the better part of valor.
Anne Murray quietly left the park’s backstage area without performing.
Another dubious pursuit of the musical set involves reinvention, whereby the singer-musician actively pursues a widening of audience by incorporating more diverse material in their repertoire.
Sometimes it works, such as Keith Emerson of ELP doing a classical concerto, Sinead O’Connor’s torch-song classic follow-up to her cutting-edge