Posted 6:47 PM by Gene

Long before rock mu-SIC cri-TICS, there was Professor John Alden Carpenter. And who was Prof. Carpenter? He was a highbrow American com-PO-ser whose WUHKS included "The Birthday of the Infanta, a ballet-pantomime produced...by the Chicago Opera Company", and other enduring excellences. Well, back in 1924 The Etude, a very popular, long defunct serious-music magazine, "assembled a 'Musical World Court' to determine who were the greatest composers and what their finest compositions". The results were surely predictable even for their day -- Beethoven, Wagner, Bach, Mozart (Die Meistersinger was rated the greatest by nine more of these eminences than Beethoven's Ninth, which came in fifth; Beethoven's Fifth came in third). But Prof. Carpenter must have been quite an iconoclast. Number three on his list was a masterwuhk called..."Everybody Step" -- a song by Irving Berlin! What inspires us is that this song came from Berlin's first Music Box Revue, a repository of more inane lyrics than any show before Stephen Schwartz. Leafing through Berlin's collected lyrics we find this poetry in the "Patter":

There's the instep and the doorstep,
There's the one-, two-, three- and the four-step,
My step and your step,
Steeping up the stepladder,
There's the left step and the right step,
There's the heavy step and the light step,
There's the fatal step and the stepbrother,
And the watch-your-step and the stepmother....

People make fun of The Chords and The Monotones (unjustly) but honest their work is divine art next to this (as with countless other earlier rock acts). But then this show begins with a stork descending onto the Music Box Theater's stage with a girl who turns out to be the Music Box -- the Revue, that is -- and she has in her hands "the plot", which she "deposits" into the music box (i.e., a music box in the Music Box), whereupon "nine BURGLARS" (sic) come in to snatch it and sell it to Ziegfeld, or possibly Charles Dillingham (both of whom died broke). After this the girl (who has been fortunately asleep through the BURGLARS) awakes and says it wasn't much of a plot, whereupon the Music Box Revue winds up the music box in the Music Box Revue in the Music Box and unleashes "Eight Little Notes":

Eight little notes are we,
Useful as we can be.
You know and we know
What do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do
Mean to a melody.
Eight little notes can't fail
When they are placed on sale....

as evidently they failed too seldom for Irving at this stage. But even he tops himself: he ascends to the great height of satire with his "Dining Out Scene", in which a young couple eat their dinner at a restaurant to the accompaniment of oversized oysters ("Someone awoke us and now we are cross --/Soon we'll be covered with red catsup sauce"), a chicken ("[I]n a minute I lost my head"), a mushroom and a cauliflower ("We were canned! We were canned!"), a French pastry, and a cheap cigar. Then comes -- the CHECK. And the TIPS.

Tip, tip, tip tip --
Don't forget the little
Tip, tip, tip, tip,
Never let the little
Tip
Slip
Out of your grip.
It's a total loss,
But you've got to come across
With the
Tip, tip, tip, tip.
To the bottom of your pocket
Take a dip;
Hear us holler, "Please change a dollar!"
And give us a little
Tip, tip, tip, tip.

It's enough to make one give up eating.

This is also the show that unleashed "Say It with Music" on the populace -- one of those treacly Berlin ballads so unaccountably popular the fans did not notice a last superb bit of lyric-writing:

...A melody mellow/Played on a cello....

It is impossible to behold that lyric without imagining a Jerry Colonna lookalike with a big prop moustache lugging a double-bass on stage and strumming aimlessly on it while lavishly embellishing the words at the top of his lungs again and again until he collapses in a heap of laughter. And unaccountably popular the whole first Music Box Revue shebang was; it ran 440 performances, a lifetime in the days before Branson East and Lord Lloud Wubbish.

We write this with deep regret. Berlin, needless to say, was one of the great songwriters; but he really didn't get started until about the time he met Fred and Ginger at RKO, and his true greatness didn't last all that long -- it ended with Easter Parade fifteen years later -- but it encompassed Annie Get Your Gun, a perfect score. Now to get back to Prof. Carpenter: He reveled in inanities long before the first rock cri-TIC. He demonstrated reverse snobbery before anyone invented the term. For that reason, and that reason alone, we must christen him the GODFATHER OF ROCK MU-SIC CRI-TICS, whose pioneering act eighty-five years ago says too well the decline of American culture was written in the stars, and it began long before the MLA and the deconstructionists.