...wait for it...
..."Crimea River."
Thank you, I'm here all week. Try the veal. Also -- tip your waitresses and bartenders, they all have massive drug habits to support.
The recorded version of "River," which Julie is lip-synching in the movie, derives from her debut album (above), which was released in 1955 (complete with cheesecake cover photo of London, which became something of a trademark on her subsequent album releases). The song (and album) were produced by Julie's second husband (and later co-star on TV's Emergency), the great Bobby Troup (who wrote "Route 66," among other notable accomplishments).
I think it's an absolutely genius single -- a brilliantly minimalist arrangement (just guitarist Barney Kessel and acoustic bassist Ray Leatherwood), coupled with London's all-but-perfect phrasing (she had, as she famously said, "only a thimbleful of a voice," but man it sounded great and did she ever know how to use it) and then a discreet little bit of echo as the record fades out.
What I did not know until yesterday was that the song itself (which has been covered about a zillion times by everybody from Barbra Streisand to Joe Cocker) is by a songwriter named Arthur Hamilton (also hitherto unknown to me), and was originally written to be sung by Ella Fitzgerald in the 1955 movie Pete Kelly's Blues; the song was dropped before the movie was released, however. The film's star was Jack (Dragnet) Webb, who London was married to at the time; presumably she heard a demo of the song and liked it enough to claim it as her own.
I should add that The Girl Can't Help It (Troup wrote the Little Richard-sung title song, by the way), while never less than fun, has a reputation as the first great rock film which it only occasionally deserves.
Yes, the "Cry Me a River" montage with London is a great proto-rock video; the segment with a young and gorgeous Abby Lincoln...
...should probably not be witnessed by impressionable teenage boys; and the club scene featuring the aforementioned Little Richard (and his lethal road band The Upsetters) is truly jaw-dropping.
But some of the other musical performances -- notably including Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent -- are criminally truncated, and while writer/director Frank Tashlin's cynicism about the workings of the music business and the nature of pop celebrity is bracing (even today), the whole thing is obviously an outsider's satire, and as a result it often doesn't quite ring true.
Still, TGCHI is definitely worth seeing; to my surprise, you can get it over at Amazon but only as part of a Jayne Mansfield collection with The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw and the very funny Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter. Sounds like a pretty good idea, actually.
9 comments:
I've long been fond of Julie's sultry reading of "Yummy,Yummy,Yummy".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_2wH3q26EM
Always liked her, sultry cool and hot at the same time. That's a good one bbj!
Know the song well, didn't know Ms. London. Love it.
And from the same album as Yummy...
Louie, Louie!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9KBX1AEITs
something twistedly listenable about it.
Am I nuts, or does both Julie's Yummy Yummy and Louie Louie sound like Debbie Harry?
No, this time you're not nuts.
Too bad about the Cochran and Vincent performances - EC was a god...
"The Girl Can't Help It" is one of the few times you can see Eddie Cochran, as his life was cut short in a London taxi accident in which Gene Vincent was also badly hurt.
Because Elvis never toured Europe (probably because Col Tom Parker, his manager, had passport problems because he'd arrived in the U.S. under murky circumstances) Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent made a bigger impression there.
Barney Kessel never got paid for his beautiful playing on this recording...
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