Slim Gaillard

            On Thursday morning I finished memorizing “Je suis snob” by Boris Vian. It took so long because I only allocate ten minutes every morning to my Vian projects compared to an hour for Serge Gainsbourg. I memorized the first verse of “Encore Lui” by Gainsbourg.

            I washed another section of my living room floor. This time I just extended a bit the area that I’d cleaned the day before in front of the dresser and evened it out.

            For lunch I cooked a frozen meal of Cajun chicken with pearl barley and kale that I got at the food bank several weeks ago. It came in two pouches that I had to boil for fifteen minutes. The kale was in a pouch by itself and it stuck to the inside after it was cooked and so I had to pull it out with a fork. The chicken was okay but the barley tasted like health food and the kale tasted like kale.

            I did some exercises in the afternoon and took a bike ride to Ossington and Dundas. I went south on Ossington where there's a restaurant called "Salt". I assume it's for people with a rock-based diet.

            I stopped at Freshco on my way home. I bought three bags of cherries. The black and green grapes were very cheap but there was only one bag of black ones left. The rest had been pulled out of their bags and picked over. I got a pack of strawberries, a tomato, some extra old cheddar, and a container of Greek yogourt.

            Now that I’ve finished another round of editing my manuscript, while I’m waiting for more critiques from Albert Moritz I can get back to my other projects. I’d forgotten where I’d left off with my YouTube project and it took me half an hour of looking through my journal to learn that I’d started a Movie Maker project for “Jeunes femmes et vieux messieurs” just before I got my manuscript back from Albert. After finding it I only had time to shave five minutes off the audio, but I've probably got to take another five off to get it synchronized with the video.

            I had potatoes and two drumsticks with gravy and watched a Steve Allen Show from August 15, 1962.

There were a lot more stunts than on previous shows. The first twenty minutes of the show takes place in the parking lot outside the studio and Steve is taken by crane to a platform at the top of a flagpole where he hosts the show. There’s a piano up there and a bucket of salamis, each with a parachute attached and he drops them down to the audience. The first guest is a singer named Bill Carey who sings a song called “Sophia” that Steve wrote for Sophia Loren. “Sophia, beautiful Sophia, now at last I speak of the love in my heart. Sophia, now I run to tell you that my every dream is coming true all because of you …” It goes on but it’s not a very good song. There are cards from the audience asking questions and one woman gets to do a piano duet with Steve. There’s a great performance of two songs on piano and guitar by Slim Gaillard. He had extremely long fingers and played the first piece not only hands down but also with the back of his hands, his elbows and his foot. In his second number he played guitar and sang his song "Cement Mixer (Put-Ti Put-Ti)", which also features his own constructed language which called “Vout-o-Reenee" and for which he wrote a dictionary.

His most famous song is “Flat Foot Floogie (with a Floy Floy)", which was a big hit for Cab Calloway. After writing those songs he became a bomber pilot in WWII. After leaving the army air force he released a song about nuclear war called “Atomic Cocktail”. He spent the last eight years of his life in London.

He claimed that he was born in Cuba but researchers dispute that and conclude that he was actually from Alabama. He said that while travelling with his father at the age of twelve he was accidentally left behind on Crete where he lived for four years, getting work on ships and learning Greek and Arabic. At fifteen he came to the United States. He said that during Prohibition he drove a hearse transporting booze in a coffin for the Purple Gang.

He wrote the Hipster anthem “The Groove Juice Special (Opera in Vout). 

Jack Kerouac mentions him in On the Road: “We went to see Slim Gaillard in a little Frisco nightclub. Slim Gaillard is a tall, thin Negro with big, sad eyes who's always saying ‘Right oroonie’ and 'How bout a little bourbonaroonie'. In Frisco great eager crowds of young semi-intellectuals sat at his feet and listened to him on the piano, guitar and bongo drums. When he gets warmed up he takes off his undershirt and really goes. He does and says anything that comes into his head. He’ll sing ‘Cement Mixer, Put-Ti Put-Ti' and suddenly slow down the beat and brood over his bongos with fingertips barely tapping the skin as everybody leans forward breathlessly to hear; you think he’ll do this for a minute or so, but he goes right on, for as long as an hour, making an imperceptible little noise with the tips of his fingernails, smaller and smaller all the time till you can't hear it anymore and sounds of traffic come in the open door. Then he slowly gets up and takes the mike and says, very slowly, 'Great-orooni … fine ovauti … hello-orooni … bourbon-orooni … all-orooni … How are the boys in the front row making out with their girls-orooni … orooni … vauti … oroonirooni …’ He keeps this up for fifteen minutes, his voice getting softer and softer till you can’t hear. His great sad eyes scan the audience.

“Dean stands in the back, saying, ‘God! Yes!’ – and clasping his hands in prayer and sweating. ‘Sal, Slim knows time. He knows time.’ Slim sits down at the piano and hits two notes, two Cs, then two more, then one, then two, and suddenly the big, burly bass player wakes up from a reverie and realizes slim is playing ‘C-Jam Blues’ and he slugs in his big forefinger on the string and the big, booming beat begins and everybody starts rocking and Slim looks just as sad as ever, and they blow jazz for half an hour, and then Slim goes mad and grabs the bongos and plays tremendous rapid Cubana beats and yells crazy things in Spanish, in Arabic, in Peruvian dialect, in Egyptian, in every language he knows, and he knows innumerable languages. Finally the set is over; each set takes two hours. Slim Gaillard goes and stands against a post, looking sadly over everybody’s head as people come to talk to him. A bourbon is slipped into his hand. ‘Bourbon-orooni – thank you-ovauti ...’ Nobody knows where Slim Gaillard is. Dean once had a dream that he was having a baby and his belly was all bloated up blue as he lay on the grass of a California hospital. Under a tree, with a group of coloured men, sat Slim Gaillard. Dean turned despairing eyes of a mother to him. Slim said, ‘There you go-orooni’. Now Dean approached him, he approached his god; he thought Slim was god; he shuffled and bowed in front of him and asked him to join us. 'Right-orooni' says Slim. He'll join anybody but won't guarantee to be there with you in spirit. Dean got a table, bought drinks, and sat stiffly in front of him. Slim dreamed over his head. Every time Slim said ‘Orooni’ Dean said ‘Yes!’ I sat there with these two madmen. Nothing happened. To Slim Gaillard the whole world was just one big  orooni."

The only part of “Cement Mixer” that isn’t mostly nonsense is in the middle: “First you get some gravel / pour it in the vout / To mix a mess o mortor / you add cement and water / See the mellow rooni come out / slurp slurp slurp”.

“Gaillard’s behaviour onstage was often erratic and nerve-wracking for accompanying musicians."

Gaillard had several children and one of his daughters, Janis became the second wife of Marvin Gaye. Nona Gaye is Gaillard’s granddaughter.

Back to Steve Allen, there was a demonstration of the effects of carbon dioxide and helium.

Steve played around with some Mexican jumping beans and cut one open to show the worm inside. My uncle bought me some of those when I was a kid and they were lots of fun.

Barbara McNair sang a very aggressive and percussive version of  “It’s Alright With Me" by Cole Porter. She was a popular jazz singer in the 50s and appeared on a lot of TV shows. In the 70s she got into acting and played Sidney Poitier’s wife in “They Call Me Mister Tibbs”. She got back into singing later in life.

The show finished with a guest called Miss Measure Your Mattress Month  and she was promoting mattresses with the slogan “buy bigger and sleep better”. She said that since WWII people have added four centimetres in both length and width. Several members of the crew were bouncing on the beds before it was over. Miss McGrath got to call her husband to find how he did on his law exam and then she sang an impromptu version of “Hallelujah I Just Love Him So" by Ray Charles.