It is the wedding day of
little Jennie Saucepan. Rik and Gik, whom we have met
before, picnicking on a superhighway ("What's that sign
say?" "Speed limit seventy-five miles per hour." "Wonder
what that means?"), are ambling down a country lane.
"Doesn't seem possibly Jenny Saucepan's old enough already
to be gettin' married," says Gik.
"Aaah," says Rik, "she
must be eight, eight and a half."
"I hear she's going to
wear a wedding cake on her head – to make her look
taller."
Rik suddenly realizes they
lack a wedding gift; casting around for possibilities (Gik
suggests a rock, or a fence post), the pair finally settle
on a bullfrog ("And if she's already got one, she can
exchange it"). But in attempting to catch the frog, Rik
falls into Bottomless Pool and disappears – and so begins
the saga of "The Wedding of Jennie Saucepan," the
climactic tale on Schoolmates,
eight in a series of nine singular, sometimes bizarre,
you-could-almost-say "auteurist" children's records that
were written, recorded, spoken, sung, played, designed and
independently marketed between 1958 and 1971 by the team
of Jim Copp and Ed Brown, a.k.a. Playhouse Records. (Rik,
who has passed through the Earth, eventually telegraphs
from China – pronounced "Chiny" – while riding in a "gin
rickey-shaw.")
Originally available
exclusively from selected "smart stores" – I. Magnin,
Neiman-Marcus, F.A.O. Schwartz, Bloomingdale's, and so on
– the albums are now unaggressively vended only by mail
from the stacks of remaining inventory stashed in Copp's
garage next to his master tapes and a few boxes of old
press handouts. The notices these releases reprint are
impressive, both for their substance and their sources:
raves from Time, The New Yorker, Saturday Review
and the New York Times, as well as from Redbook
and Parents. "Copp and Brown," avers the Time
review of Thimble Corner, "are to Kidiscs what the early
UPA [creators of Gerald McBoing-Boing and Mr. Magoo] was
to film cartooning," a sentiment echoed to the letter by
the Times in its piece lauding Gumdrop Follies. The point is that these
LPs represented – and represent now – an oasis of
"intelligence" in the arid wasteland of children's
entertainments.
Copp and Brown, though
they strive always for clarity – speeches and songs are
pronounced with the deliberate precision of a Rotarian
orator – never talk down to their wee audience. Words such
as bagatelle, bedraggled, burlesque, gauche, precipice,
velocipede and inauspicious are freely dispensed, and with
some relish. A toy soldier in one story is made French
just for the sake of rhyming "sewer" with "Au secours."
Much of their work merits comparison to the verse of
Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll and A.A. Milne and to the
Rootabaga Stories of Carl Sandburg. But the attitude is
less gee-whiz, less reverential of capital-C Childhood –
closer really to Rocky and Bullwinkle or to Roald Dahl,
who did not scruple to let a little boy's parents be eaten
by a rhinoceros on the first page of his James and the
Giant Peach. And though the albums contain some
lovely word/soundscapes – a cloudy afternoon in the park
turning to rain, an alphabetical drive in the country, a
child trying to stay awake until dawn – the proceedings
are generally antic (which is not to say "frantic"). And
occasionally they are gruesome, as in the story of Little
Claude, whose parents lock him in the attic and leave for
the Caribbean (and drown), or when the Glup Family visit
the Chicago stockyards, where they see and we hear the
decapitation (by "slicer") of pigs and sheep and cows
heading for slaughter on an "endless belt." ("But think
what nice meat they'll make," says Mrs. Glup to little
Glue.)
"We got awful criticism
from people who didn't approve of the records," says Jim
Copp, who wrote the stories, scripts and songs, composed
and performed the incidental music and captured or created
the many and myriad sound effects. (Co-performer and
business partner Ed Brown, who died in 1978, designed the
album jackets, a few of which can double as a board game
or as a toy theater.) "There were the Christian
Scientists, who didn't like any mention of sickness or
death. There were people who thought it was terrible that
Kate Higgins kicked her mother in the knee. And one group
didn't like any mention of fires. But I don't think
anything we did ever hurt anybody."
Copp began as a nightclub
comic in the early 1940s, splitting bills at Manhattan's
Cafe Society with the likes of Art Tatum and Billie
Holiday, playing piano and telling "crazy stories," some
of which later found their way onto the Playhouse discs.
After a hitch fighting in the Second World War, he worked
briefly again in New York, then returned to his native Los
Angeles, where, for several years, he wrote and
illustrated for the Los Angeles Times a snappy
society column entitled "Skylarking with James Copp."
Finally, with his friend Mr. Brown, he began to assemble
the LPs that would occupy him full-time for more than a
decade.
Working at home with three
Ampex tape machines, a piano, pump organ and celeste,
Copp, with Brown, conjured an improbably plausible,
oddball version of Anywhere, USA, stretching from Thimble
Croner to Somewhere East of Flumdiddle. Among the
citizenry: the Dog Who Went To Yale (where he died of the
croup); the Man in the Union Suit (a recurring deus ex
machina); the Hen with the Low IQ; Mr. and Mrs. Destitute;
the forgetful Martha Matilda O'Toole (whose adventure
became a picture book in the late '60s); Miss Goggins, a
shrieking, despotic fourth-grade teacher with a fetish for
group singing, who appears on four of the nine LPs and
stands as the most subversive of Copp's creations; and the
terminally provincial Glups ("I thought all planes fly to
Maine"), who rate two albums all their own, Journey to
San Francisco with the Glups and Sea of Glup
– my favorites. In the midst of all this there are
frequent exhortations to "dance, come on, everybody
dance... and bark like dogs."
To shop for children's
records in the late '80s is, with few exceptions, to face
a choice between the meretricious and the insipid: dull
vinyl adventures of cartoon characters that should never
have even reached television, on the one hand;
too-well-intentioned troubadours singing bland songs of
brotherly love and service industries, on the other (with
second-rate retellings of the hoariest of fairy tales
hanging in between). In most cases, the Mark of the
Grown-Up is heavily apparent, for even the shoddiest of
the toy/TV/film tie-ins tend to posit the rather mundane,
orderly, morally cogent and perfectly unreal world parents
would like their children to inhabit, rather than the
world they actually do: a world of random mayhem, easy
surrealism and sensory excitement. It's the difference,
essentially, between "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood" and "Pee
Wee's Playhouse," that bright anomaly in a field now
dominated by psychologists, PACs and market researchers.
Copp and Brown likewise steer the unpredictable, the
zigzag course: They point their characters in the wrong
direction, given them useless baggage, trap them in
garbage, throw them off cliffs, off trains, feed them to
cannibals; they call forth freak storms, floods and flat
tires; they sink ocean liners; they set father against son
and mother against daughter, then they stand back and
watch the ruckus. And they do not always bother to smooth
the waters afterward.
This rings true in a way
that the too-careful, over-considered offerings of the
present child-proof era cannot. Maybe that's one reason
why these records are available only through the mail.
Nearly 30 years after the first Playhouse release, and
more than 15 after the last, Copp's creations remain
potent and peculiar: "It seemed to me that when you do
adult records they're going to be popular for a little
while and then they're dead; [I thought] maybe if I did
children's records, they'd go on and on."
And the orders continue,
slowly but steadily to arrive.
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