[A note from Danny: This week’s My Week column is written by my new Deputy My-Weeker Kynan Barker. Yeah, he’s a substitute, but he’s fab, so I don’t want you kids throwing spitballs and forging hall passes just cause my back is turned. He’s brought a box full of Sesame CD’s, and he’s ready to party. You’re in good hands. ]
It wasn’t quite a bet, but it was a challenge, and one I didn’t want to back down from. I had just brought a new Sesame Street CD home, and, in a burst of misplaced Muppet enthusiasm, I tried to play it for my housemates. This is why Muppet fans shouldn’t try to live with regular people. I share a place with two others, both regular people — let’s call them “Tim” and “Helena,” because that’s what their names are (although in real life, they very rarely wear quotation marks).
Tim is a wide-eyed student of life, and also a teacher, so he’s supportive of my Muppet habit. Helena, on the other hand, like most regular grown-up people, doesn’t bother with “kiddie stuff.” Thing is, her definition of “kiddie stuff” is pretty broad, encompassing any early-morning TV show that doesn’t have a weather person and/or advertorials for hair removal cream, and extending to anything with Muppets and even the Toy Story movies. Which pretty much means she doesn’t bother with any of the things I’m interested in. (This is fine. I mean, we get along great and we still have things in common. We are all Earthlings, after all.) But it doesn’t stop me occasionally, gently, trying to coax her to open up and enjoy the wiggling dolls.
The CD I played for them was Sesame Street Platinum Too, which includes Somebody Come and Play and One Small Voice — both great, classic and evocative Sesame tunes. I figured if anything was going to help my cause, it would be this album. Tim was all smiles — he grew up watching Sesame Street, like me, and we remember the same moments, and he also sang One Small Voice with his school choir, so he was even singing along.
Helena, on the other hand, never watched the show growing up, and was unimpressed. The only song she identified with — I’m not making this up — was Oscar’s The Grouch Song. Well, that gives me something to work on, down the track. But for now, the issue is Sesame Street. “Can you imagine,” I asked her, “what it must be like for kids to hear this stuff every day? What a positive impact this music has?”
“Sure,” she said. “But the key word there was kids. Adults aren’t supposed to listen to this stuff.”
She didn’t mean anything by it, particularly, except to get me to switch the damn stereo off so she could keep watching Gilmore Girls. (You see what I’m up against?) But she did make a good point. Maybe my devotion to Muppets had caused me to lose my musical taste — maybe, just maybe, I’m really not supposed to listen to this stuff.
So, naturally enough, having had this realization, I went out and bought a few more Sesame Street albums to bolster my collection — you wouldn’t try to listen to Nirvana all week if you only had one album, would you? — and made a resolution. The challenge: to spend a whole week listening to nothing but Sesame Street music. And, preferably, to emerge with my mind, and my musical taste, intact.
Let’s get the cranky part over with.
Monday, April 22
I’ve been a Tough Pigs reader since the beginning. I was there for all the high points, and I was there for every soul-destroying day of Tomie dePaola. And I’ve noticed a pattern with Danny’s “My Week” adventures — he starts out full of enthusiasm, overjoyed with the potential of his latest Muppety task, and by about Thursday, he winds up a cranky, broken shell of a man, just flailing about wildly and striking out at whichever innocent Muppet crosses his path. It’s only natural, and I begrudge him nothing. If he didn’t do this, someone else would, and they might not be strong enough to withstand it. It’s a great service Danny performs for us — he gets cranky so we don’t have to.
But at the same time, I think it sends a bad message. Watching Muppets — even watching them every damn day for a week at a time, whether you want to or not — should be an uplifting experience. Shouldn’t it?
So I want to get the cranky part over with right now: Sesame Street Platinum Too — at least the repackaged version sold here in Australia — features the worst liner notes I have ever seen. The thing is just full of typos. I mean, some of these people simply cannot spell, and whoever’s in charge of those people cannot proof-read. This wouldn’t bother me as much as it does except that this is a SESAME STREET CD. I learned to read and write from watching a show made by these very people. That might not be ironic, but it’s certainly an embarrassing coincidence.
A few examples. The lyrics are helpfully printed in the sleeve notes so we can sing along. Let’s sing along with the Count! “I am pleased to announce / You cad add up amounts.” Yes, you certainly cad.
Should we sing along to What’s The Name of That Song? Yeah, but “I wish I rembered the words.”
You can even sing along to Caribean Amphibian, if you can figure out how to pronounce it without that pesky missing “b”.
Let’s turn to the album credits to see who’s to blame for this mess. Could it be “Emillo Delgado”? “David Langston Smyry”? Or, possibly, “Maty Robinson”?
I think the problem is the Sony Wonder people have been listening too carefully to their own album. I think someone in the production process has decided, like Kingston Livingston III, to “be original” and abandon traditional spelling. And once that happened, it only took one sub-editor to think, like Big Bird, hey, “everyone makes mistakes,” and bingo, we’ve got ourselves a CD cover riddled with Mr. Bloopers.
Everyone makes mistakes, oh yes they do!
Your sister and your brother and your dad and mother too,
Big people, small people, even Sony Wonder people,
Everyone makes mistakes, so why can’t qvzkdlgadzqs?
All right. Let’s move on.
What were we talking about? Oh, yeah. The music.
The eternal problem with compilation albums is what to include and what to leave out. You can’t please everybody, even if your target audience is three-year-olds, and the Platinum series has the added problem of being partly aimed at the nostalgia market as well. Very few people have to try to appeal to tiny tots and their world-weary parents at the same time, but producers of kids’ CDs are among those people. Forty-five minutes of Barney singing “I love you, you love me, even though I’m a guy in a costume gettin’ paid scale” might please the youngsters, but it’s a sure bet that Mom won’t be able to stand repeat listens without developing a severe allergy to the color purple.
Sesame Street Platinum does a pretty good job of pleasing everybody, with some real classics like Little Things, I Love Trash, Sing, Bein’ Green and even Bob and a couple of Jim-and-Frank Anything People singing The People In Your Neighborhood. (If you listen closely, you can actually hear what color cardigan Bob is wearing.) C Is For Cookie, Rubber Duckie, One Fine Face, Put Down The Duckie — this album really delivers. I can’t think of a better way to start off the week.
There’s very little filler amongst the hits — Happy Tappin’ with Elmo being an obvious candidate for the “skip” button, but even then, it’s only a minute and a half long. (There’s very few things in life more dull than listening to somebody tap-dance. I mean, the guy may as well be playing the spoons, you know what I’m saying?)
This album is really catchy, right from the theme song that opens it — the actual real live theme from Sesame Street (albeit not the harmonica version that I know and love), but I’ve got to question the presence of The Lambaba. It’s a neat song and all, but it’s the Count’s only number — why not, I don’t know, Counting is Wonderful, or The Batty Bat?
Gripes? I’ve gotta say, I don’t like Early Big Bird. You remember, back in the early seventies, before Big Bird grew a brain, and he had that weird twang in his voice? “Sorry, Mr. Dooperrrrrr!” No matter how much I love ABC-DEF-GHI, I regretfully have to skip this track every time. It hurts me to admit that, but it hurts more to listen to this Neanderthal, Goofy-impersonating, knuckle-dragging canary. (Does Big Bird have knuckles?) There was a newer version, recorded sometime in the eighties, that I like much better, but for some reason they’ve included the original. I don’t think it would’ve been too Rad to give us the Bird without the overhanging eyebrows.
Platinum Too suffers a little from Sequel Syndrome, but bounces back nicely. How can you open a Sesame album when you’ve already used the theme song? By cleverly holding back Somebody Come and Play, that’s how. Excellent, more classics coming my way.
But what’s this? Track two — Kingston Livingston the what now? Apparently, Kingston is Just Happy To Be Me. It’s actually a pretty catchy song, and Kevin Clash, musically, is almost always on the money, but I’m not sure I’d accord this number classic status. Unless I were, say, trying to pad out an album like this one, perhaps. But I’ll let it slide, because it’s followed up by seven certified Sesame hits in a row: What’s the Name of That Song?, Counting is Wonderful (see, I told you there was nothing wrong with it), Caribbean Amphibian, All By Myself (Prairie Dawn, you really are quite remarkable), The Word Is No (I can’t tell you how much I love this song), The Grouch Song and Imagination. This last one bothers me slightly, because it’s preceded by a full minute of seventies-style Sesame album introduction — warts and all, including that weird echo effect on Frank and Caroll’s characters that was apparently the result of them double- and triple-tracking themselves. But it’s such a sweet song that by the end of it I’ve forgiven and forgotten.
Speaking of which, I officially don’t care that the second half of the album is only so-so, with eminently skippable tracks like Believe In Yourself and Everybody Makes Mistakes (knuckle-dragging Bird warning), mixed among such worthies as Mah Na Mah Na, because the final track on the album is One Small Voice, which fills me with such joy that I think it should be mandatory for every album to finish with it. How much better would Pearl Jam’s Vitalogy be if it finished with a chorus of angelic youngsters singing one of Jeff Moss’ sweetest songs?
This is going to be a very good week indeed.
Tomorrow: Things get ugly fast with Elmo and the Orchestra.
by Kynan Barker
