Will & Grace & Caitlin & John
Last night I received a text message from Caitlin, who was my assistant for a couple of years, advising me that I should discuss the new Will & Grace trailer. Let me confess right up front that I have seen exactly one episode of Will & Grace in my life. It was on the air between 1998 and 2006 and I was so busy during those years I honestly didn't have time to watch TV, and that was back when you really had to watch shows at the time they came on and sit through the commercials and everything. Well apparently NBC is bringing it back this fall, so now I find out I'm going to have to binge-watch 8 seasons or be hopelessly behind the curve. So I found the trailer and watched it, and listened to the song parody that inspired Caitlin to tell me about all this. I texted back, "I didn't recognize the tune. Thought it was an original number which I thought wasn't very snappy. But the words were good." Well, please don't tell The Right Honourable The Lord Andrew Lloyd-Webber I said that, because Caitlin immediately texted back that he had written the music and it is from Sunset Boulevard. Then she added, "HOW I know this song and you don't, I'll never know." Caitlin, I completely agree, and this underlines the point I have been trying to make about knowing your audience when you pick the song to parody. My guess is that fewer than 20% of the people who watch that trailer know the parodied song comes from Sunset Boulevard. Feel free to debate me on this in the comments section below. Seriously. I would love to know if anyone other than rabid fans of Glenn Close (if there is such a thing) recognize that not-very-snappy number.
The great thing that came out of that dialog with my former assistant, whom I once described as "a clever girl who can do many things well," is the memory of an unforgettable song parody that I had, nevertheless, forgotten about. It was written to celebrate Caitlin's marriage to John a couple of years ago and was performed at a party we gave in their honor.
How I made it
The fact that the groom's name was John made it oh-so-easy, as I am a big fan of the song, "Big Bad John" by Jimmy Dean and Roy Acuff and had parodied it once before to high acclaim. I find it hard to believe there are people on this planet who are not familiar with this song but, if you are one of them, here's a YouTube version of Jimmy D. himself singing it. I have been cogitating over whether this could be considered a precursor to rap, but I think not. It's sort of talk-singing, like Rex Harrison does in "Why Can't a Woman Be More LIke a Man?" from My Fair Lady.
Percussion is important. Choose the instruments carefully.
When you sit opposite someone at a desk for 2 years, as Caitlin and I had, you get to know them pretty well, so coming up with content for this song was no huge feat. The key points are that John has a PhD in history, they met when she was an undergrad and he was her graduate teaching assistant, she is tall and strong willed and has been known to use colorful language, and he has a beard. I got lucky when it came to the actual performance. Caitlin had invited a number of really talented musicians to this party, including Lauren, my son Taylor and my friends Amy and Debbie, who sing in an a cappella group with me. Amy had memorably played the salad tongs in the earlier parody I had done to this same tune but I was looking for a different vibe with this performance. I went around my kitchen banging various tools against each other until I found the sound I was looking for - a knife handle against a glass measuring cup. My son Taylor has a Bachelor of Music from JMU so I knew he could handle it. Lauren, also a classically trained musician, rocked it with an egg shaker made by LP Rhythmix. At the last minute we enlisted the help of some other JMU Music grads who added the leg clapping that pulled it all together. The resulting performance was pretty raucus so I added captions to the video. But if you want to read the words or download them to save forever, click here.