The first guitar hero who, I guess more than anyone, made all this rock and roll racket possible has passed on. It’s pretty much impossible to imagine post-1955 pop music without his innovations.

Best known as Louis Prima’s great saxophonist, Sam Butera was a terrific singer and bandleader in his own right and really the musical backbone of the Prima act for years as the arranger of such classic recordings as “That Old Black Magic” and “Just a Gigolo”/”I Ain’t Got Nobody.” (Apparently, he received nothing from the David Lee Roth version, which pretty much lifted his arrangement whole, that was a massive hit in 1985.)

Butera was also a credible entertainer in his own right. Sometime in the late eighties, I was fortunate enough to see him and his great band, the Wildest, performing with the wonderful Keely Smith, doing a variation on the old Prima-Smith nightclub act at, where else?, the Desert Inn in Las Vegas…and it was definitely the next best thing to actually being there during their fifties heyday. (Their onstage banter so closely followed the old Prima-Smith shows, which I knew little about at the time, that the pair actually had me convinced that they were also a couple. I also understand that “gullible” is not in the dictionary.) It was a night of truly great entertainment, all for the price of a couple of screwdrivers.

Anyhow, here’s the L.A. Times obit and another from NPR. And now a video of Sam with Louis Prima on Ed Sullivan.

When it came to TV and movies, her material was often not nearly as strong as her talents, but Beatrice Arthur, who according to the AP died today of cancer, was the kind of performer who never let anything stand in her way.  Certainly, as Maude she made TV history and brought to the screen the kind of outspoken, and charismatic woman who is beyond strong and very much a fact of daily life, particularly if you belong to any of a number of ethnic groups.

Whether it was delivering the often, at least by modern TV standards, rather contrived sitcom dialogue both on Maude and even more so on her longest running sitcom, Golden Girls,  holding her own, or even emerging triumphant during such notorious musical comedy fiascos as the ill-conceived film version of Mame (which I haven’t had the guts to see in decades) and the really ill-conceived and now legendary Star Wars Christmas Special – in which she is, actually, kind of marvelous — she was as reliable a performer as they ever come. If there was a moment to be found in material, she would find it.

Indeed, artistically she seems to have had better luck on the stage and in early television. It’s not generally known that her “big break” was as Lucy Brown in Marc Blitzstein’s groundbreaking 1954 off-Broadway version of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weil’s masterpiece, Threepenny Opera, a production that first brought original Pirate Jenny Lotte Lenya to the United States and also featured Jerry Orbach, Ed Asner, and Jerry Stiller. Clearly, the production had a great impact on Ms. Arthur, and she reportedly said that “Sid Caesar taught me the outrageous; Lee Strasberg taught me what I call reality; and Lotte Lenya, whom I adored, taught me economy.”

Anyhow, the sad news of Ms. Arthur’s  passing has really only just gotten out (I heard about it just before writing this via Pasadena public radio station KPPC), but I don’t think it too early for a sampling of how one woman could be a part of history, turn mediocre (or worse) material into a kind of poetry, and generally just be an entertainment immortal based on, among other things the outrageous, reality, and economy.

We’ll start with a moment where Bea Arthur and Maude Findlay collided with American history.

More videos, including musical highlights, after the flip…

(more…)

 
Advantage: Rockford

Thanks to BKS for forwarding me this story on the end of a sartorial era at New York’s famed 21, which I guess will soon be allowing men to turn up in the pajamas Jimmy Stewart wore as he managed to make Grace Kelly feel stupid for being so wonderful to him in Rear Window.

Some choice quotes:

“It is the final victory of Los Angeles,” Tim Zagat said….

….“Etiquette is on a downward spiral, and politeness is disappearing,” said Michael O’Keeffe, the dapper owner and proprietor of the River Café, who said that jacket and tie have been his unvarying uniform since his days at Fordham Preparatory School. “I will miss the tie policy at ‘21.’ It held up an example of what etiquette could be.”….

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After the new tie policy was announced, one blog, Lost City…asked: “Couldn’t we get the old-school La Grenouille to uphold the old ways and begin requiring ties again?”

Not likely, said Charles Masson, general manager of the 47-year-old restaurant that abandoned its tie-only policy in 2003 (but not its jacket requirement). “There used to be a time when men wore white wigs, too,” he said.

Maybe partially because I’m an L.A. native whose only observed a world where men were expected to wear neckties pretty much everywhere, except the beach and the park, via the glamor of the movies, I’ve never been all that hostile to ties. In fact, I actually kind of like wearing ties at times — but  wearing them at places where the only neckwear is on waiters makes me feel like I’m either wearing a costume, or working. It’s similar to the reason I can’t seem to find a hat, other than a baseball cap, I’m comfortable wearing…and I definitely have the kind of head that wants a hat.

Still, I guess I should be happy for my hometown’s victory. On the other hand, whenever something is gained, something is lost.

On the other hand, I’m not sure if it really makes much difference or if politeness and elegance ever truly reigned….

I don’t know what’s going on this Christmas day, but the incredibly smart and witty performer who proved that sex kittens can have brains, courage, and sharp claws when needed, has passed on at age 81.  Though a lot of us young geeks first knew Eartha Kitt as the Catwoman on the third season of the Adam West Batman television show  — where  the sudden dropping of the Bat on Cat flirtation that had flourished both with Julie Newmar on TV and Lee Meriweather in the sixties Bat-movie gave a lot of us an early education in media racial/sexual politics — she was first and foremost a live performer and an icon of the lounge era, and involved with a lot more than her once semi-obscure, now-iconic Xmas hit, “Santa Baby.”

The highlights and dramas of her career are probably well known to a lot of you — and can be read about via both Greencine and at the Huffington Post….Her comments on Vietnam in front of Lady Bird Johnson in which she experienced a harsher version of what later happened to the Dixie Chicks, and a big compliment from Orson Welles, who called her “the most exciting woman in the world,” was followed by being bitten by the ever voracious actor-director, who apparently mistook her for a blintz one night while she was playing Helen of Troy to his Faust. Whatever happened to her, she was an indomitable force who was never around enough for my taste, but who also kept working and never went away, until now.

There’s no doubt about it — she was one gutsy talent. Still, what I love about Ms. Kitt is the humor and ability to reach out to an audience as both an actress, and especially as a singer and cabaret performer. Lounges were made for the likes of her.

And we end on a slightly seasonal, slightly appropriate note. Everything really does change, but few of us hold the line better than Ms. Kitt did.

Thank you, Ms. Gale Garnett.

H/t Greencine/David Hudson.

More at Greencine.