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Playlist Ref. [show.track]: 4.6 ; #28
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Adolph JG Babel (whose composer credit is printed
on the label K-Tel LP as "A Barbell") was the lyricist for this song.
The voices you hear are those of
Jack and Mary Kimmel, regulars on the
song-poem circuit.
This was one of those "send in $400 and we’ll set your lyrics, however bad, to music".
There is an American Song-Poem Anthology
(on which the Kimmels appear in various guises).
Halmark
Talent Incorporated, 17 Longwood Rd., Quincy MA 02169
later: East Coast Record Productions, 299 Newport Ave., Wollaston MA 02170; 617-328-5057
currently: New World Publishing, 129 Pleasant St., Weymouth MA 02190; 781-331-8848
Halmark Of Talent by Phil Milstein
In running his Halmark label as a perverse parody of a legitimate record company,
Ted Rosen went beyond the constrained thinking of other song-poem entrepreneurs.
Lesser minds in similar positions sought to foster the illusion of legitimacy
via the inclusion of, at minimum, the recording artist's name amid the printed
information on their labels. But Rosen ignored such trifling conventions, reserving
the space instead for the listing of the song-poet's home address, an appeal to
vanity one step beyond that of his competitors.
Ted Rosen founded Halmark in 1967, by which time he'd already been in the
song-poem game for some time. Before Halmark he'd had the Grand label and the
production companies Talent Incorporated and Chapel Recording, the latter two
of which remain active to this day. Even in this early phase of his career Rosen
was already using "tracks." Back before even his time, in the days when printed
music ruled the song-poem roost, composers were notorious for their use of
readymade templates, pouring out melodies that were either tauntingly similar
to those of well-known songs or obvious recyclings of the composer's own stock.
Rosen helped usher this practice into the recording era. By endlessly reusing
tapes of prerecorded instrumental beds, adding only a fresh (to apply the word
loosely) lead vocal for each new submission, he found a novel way to outplumb the
depths of his industry's infamous meagerness. Halmark wasn't the only company
to regularly recycle tracks, but the others that did it at least recycled their
own. Halmark instead bought discarded instrumentals on the cheap from other
studios.
Rosen's selection of tapes was wholly inappropriate to the times, based as it
was on musical idioms -- overwrought parlor ballads, turgid C&W, indecorous light
opera, bombastic pseudo-classical -- already decades out of favor by the time he
used them. His tracks were full-bodied and anthemic, bloated with portentious
choirs and masses of arpeggiated strings. But the mileage on the tapes themselves
had greatly compressed the music's impact, so that when the muffled rococo of
these settings was finally overlain with the newly-sung but decidedly earthbound
lyrics of the typical Halmark customer, the incongruities can be spectacularly
disorienting.
Hewing ever so closely to the bottom line, Rosen -- who, despite the absence of
any substantiating evidence, would often refer to himself as "Talent" Ted -- maintained
an extremely limited selection of tracks, and so the same dozen or so moldy
arrangements recur again and again on Halmark's records, sometimes more than once
on the same four-song EP. Already intimately familiar with each backing tape, his
singers would usually improvise the melody on the spot, making up the tune as they
sang it. Vocalist Jack Kimmell told me that by bypassing the need for a
pre-written melody line, they could knock out 15 songs in 45 minutes. (Try that,
Fleetwood Mac!) Kimmell, who is now a music professor, continued, "It got to the
point where if somebody gave me a clipping from the newspaper, or a matchbook,
I could immediately improvise a song to it." He recalled a studio prank that
illustrates the absurd level of detachment between singer and song this process
provoked. "They played a joke on me. They knew I would sing anything that was in
front of me, so they handed me this dirty song -- a very dirty song -- and I just
picked it up and started to sing it. I hadn't looked at the lyrics. I got a couple
lines into it before I realized what it was. I said, 'Wait a minute!' Everybody
else was standing there laughing."
In addition to the weirdness of his tracks, Rosen's other ace in the hole was the
brilliance of his vocalists, with each ideally matched to a different aspect of
the Halmark style. During its prime era spanning the 1970s, Halmark relied on just
four singers: Bob Storm, Dodie Frost, and the duet of Jack Kimmell and his wife
Mary. Storm was usually assigned the C&W-oriented material. His reading of
Joseph Dzurus' "I Lost My Girl To An Argentinian Cowboy" ("A bronco buster /
a cow-punchin' gay boy ... Tall, dark and handsome / cavalier plowboy") captures
him at peak form, full of pokey insouciance and pampas bravado. "Ballad Of Johnny
Horton," a Halmark recording that saw dual release on Brosh, is another top-shelf
Storm-er.
The Kimmells, on the other hand, were Halmark's answer to Nelson Eddy and
Jeanette McDonald. Jack and Mary's ethereal, double-helixing vocals sounded as if
they were serenading one another from across a pristine Canadian glade, or leaning
from trellises of ivy. "Some are neat, some are nice, some are furious / Some I
would not want to meet at night," they wail in Elzia Allmon's "It's Not The World
It's What's In The World," wrenching every ounce of melodrama from a ponderous
lyric that supplies little of its own. In the sheer mismatch of the treatment lies
its beauty.
With uncanny regularity, the lyrics submitted by Halmark's customers were
laboriously sincere (perhaps due to his advertising in the low- to middlebrow
Writer's Digest). When set to Rosen's squalid tracks, these songs cling to the
skin like underclothing after a drenching rain. The apogee of this style is Coyte
F. Brackeen's "My Daddy He Died In 1969," a lyric even more morose than its title
suggests. Supported by a wall of strings and a heavily-reverbed choir of angels,
Kimmell steels himself, and then aims straight for the song's simpering jugular:
My daddy, he died in 1969
It would have been better
If it would have been me
For my daddy, he had more to live for
He had more to live for than me
He had a wife and children of his own
And I don't have a wife and children of my own
It would have been better if I had passed away
For my daddy, he had more to live for
Not all of Halmark's songs so engagingly miss their mark. The clunkers leave the
listener merely damp, or perhaps a bit itchy, but the best of them leave him
breathless and depleted. That such song-poem masterpieces as "The Virgin Child Of
The Universe" ("Orgasmic explosion of love / enhances the child"), "This World Is
In A Hell Of A Fix," Adolph J.G. Babel's "My Feet Start Tapping" and "Silent
Soundings Of My Music" could occasionally sneak out of such a rickety laboratory
is due, of course, to the inadvertence of the song-poem process in general,
but even moreso to the exceptionally distorted nature of that process as it was
conceived and executed by Ted Rosen. No other label, song-poem or otherwise,
could have taken these same songs and produced from them such transcendent results.
But Ted Rosen did not get where he was by investing in modernity. Indeed, the
only clue in there that it was 1997 rather than 1971 was a Dunkin' Donuts Coolatta
cup sitting on a desk in the center of the room. There was nobody around when I
arrived, and I cursed myself for not having thought to bring a camera. Just as I
was about to start poking through the index cards, a secretary, who introduced
herself as Diane, emerged from a rear office and escorted me back there to meet
the braintrust of Talent Incorporated.
Ted Rosen spoke softly but rapidly, sounding much like Vincent Van Gopher on the
old Deputy Dawg cartoon. Kimmell had told me that he is an extremely funny man,
but if so he was taking pains to hide his vast well of humor from the prospective
customer. Jeff Rosen, with his powder blue muscle T-shirt, gold chains and tinted
eyeglasses, looked like a used car salesman on his day off. I showed them the
lyrics to "California." In his most serious voice, Jeff asked me what style of
music I wanted my song recorded in. Trying to throw them off, I said, "Halfway
between hard rock and gospel, if there is such a thing." Jeff responded, this time
in an assuring, measured tone, "Oh, we can give you anything you want."
Next on the agenda was a discussion of scheduling. Taking the role of bad cop,
Ted let me down by announcing, "It'll take about three weeks" for my song to be
finished. "I was hoping to get it done today," I lied. "I'm in a real hurry." He
lied back, "Oh no, it takes time. We use a full orchestra." I pressed the issue.
Hinting that I might bring my song elsewhere, they promised they could get it done
in about a week, since their male singer, Georgie Starr, was due in for a session
in a few days. Satisfied with this arrangement, I wrapped up my business and bid
adieu to the Rosens. As I was leaving I noticed, sticking out of the bottom of a
stack of junk, a bogus poetry anthology, of the kind that is song-poem music
without the music.
True to their word, the recording of "California" arrived in a week's time, and
was every bit as great as they'd promised it would be. I loved the way Georgie
handled Brooking's fractured rhymes, and it was indeed set it in the style I'd
requested -- it really was halfway between hard rock and gospel. I especially
loved the personalized greeting Georgie recited after the fadeout: "Hi Ernie.
Ernie, this is Georgie Starr, I'm the vocalist and I really enjoyed bein' that
lead vocalist on your song ... 'California.' You did a wonderful job writing it,
and I really hope you love your recording. Ernie, I would really enjoy working
with you on more of your best material. Anyways, thanks for giving me this chance.
I wish you success. Good luck, and god bless."
A few years later I returned to the Rosen's office for an update. Jeff had added
the shaving of his dome to his sartorial repertoire, and now looked more
preposterously menacing than ever. Ted was stuffing envelopes at a desk in the
outer office, unaware of the fact that this visitor was not merely a potential
customer, but also a long-time student of his musical activities. Tossing the
pitch perhaps more out of habit than desire, he said to me, "You look like a
songwriter." Playing along, I wittily snapped back, "You look like a songwriter,
too," an observation he proudly affirmed. I then asked if he'd ever had any hits.
The question seemed to resonate with a part of him that lay just beyond the veil
of our superficial banter. Rosen stopped in his tracks, ruminated for a moment,
and then told me of having written three songs that had been successful. One,
"Herkimer The Homely Doll," was used on Captain Kangaroo, which had impressed his
children. At the mention of this Diane perked up and said she remembered the
song, bouncing in her seat to a few silent beats of it. He also recalled a song of
his that had been recorded by Rosemary Clooney, though he couldn't quite remember
its title. "What's Your Name" was (somewhat ironically) the best he could come up
with. He'd made a similar claim during my previous visit, but in researching it I
was unable to confirm any Clooney titles written or co-written by Ted Rosen. He
never did get around to telling me about his third hit.
Waiting for Jeff to arrive for our appointment, I sat quietly as Talent Ted and
Diane went about their business. Eventually I closed my eyes for a bit, afloat in
a reverie of all the wondrously bizarre song-poem music that had emerged from that
office over the years. Ted thus had no reason to be on his guard as he discussed
the morning's mail with Diane. "That last envelope was a disaster," I thought I
heard him say. "Twenty songs in it, and every single one of 'em was godawful. I
had to reject 'em all." Hearing this shocked me into a reevaluation of all of my
snide preconceptions about his business practices. Was I imagining things, or was
it possible the old song shark actually had standards? If true, it would be his
most novel concept yet.
Links ...
Halmark Records: American Song-Poem Music Archives
