News on Several Fronts

The musical toast to Jerry Scott got a remarkably warm reception last Friday, which goes to show that giving the audience what it wants always pays--Jerry Scott being nothing short of beloved, and justly so. Now, if I only had a notion of what an audience might want at other times, I'd be in like Flynn.

The CD I've been working on with Ron, my DAMP (director-arranger-manager-producer), was mastered a couple of weeks ago. We'd planned to order a kilo of copies with jewel-case inserts, lead sheets and all the rest of it, but Ron was scheduled to go to England for two weeks (where he is now), and he wanted copies to take with him, so we did a quickie run of 100 copies with a simple label on the CD itself--logo courtesy of Miss Sallie Parker, to whom many thanks. Ron kept sixty, and I've kept the other forty, of which I've handed out precisely one; to Rick Bogart, a jazz clarinetist currently knockin' 'em dead at a place called Seppi's on West 56th Street. I suppose I'll take a few with me tonight to Danny's.

Meanwhile, I seem to have temporarily misplaced my mojo in the lyric-writing department. Several half-hearted ideas, and nowhere to go with them. I thought of a hymn to smoking, set to Harry Warren's I'm Young and Healthy:

I like tobacco;
I go for weed.
Disapprove it, if you must;
Cigarettes are just
My speed.

But then what?

And yesterday, a blog I frequent posted Barbara Feldon's old Revlon ad, which so profoundly disturbed my budding libido back in 1964, when Barry Goldwater was aiming for the White House and one actually felt, in one's innocence, that America had a future. It prompted an off-the-cuff take on Stephen Foster's Old Black Joe:

Gone are the days
Of the 60-second spot;
Gone are the ads
That could get me downright hot.
Gone are my dreams
Of seducing 99;
I'm fast approaching something known as
Life's Decline.

I'm ancient, archaic,
For I'm past the big 5-0;
But I'm convinced that Barb'ra Feldon
Beats J-Lo.

Lyrics © 2006 Nathaniel DesH. Petrikov