“Tiny Tim: The Harry Smith of Adult-Standards Singers”

(This is a posting of a paper delivered at the Experience Music Project Pop Conference in Seattle on April 28, 2006.)

By Steven Rosen

After my first direct experience with Tiny Tim – as the guest star at a weird 1992 event in Denver called “Babyboomerama” – I and others left thinking he was an absolute freak.

Around age 60 then, he was wearing a Mickey Mouse-patterned tuxedo, had too much reddish-brown dye in his long scraggly hair and was using hideously applied makeup. He carried around his trademark ukulele in a shopping bag and sang a few rock tunes like “Highway to Hell” with shameless kitsch relish.

There were passages of that piercingly fluttering, trilling falsetto that drove Top 40 deejays crazy when “Tip-Toe Thru’ the Tulips” became a fluke hit in 1968. During a Q&A period, he ranted madly against his first wife, Miss Vicki, the 17-year-girl he married on “The Tonight Show” in 1969. I loved it, of course, as a guilty pleasure. Ah, novelty acts paying the bills after the fall!

So when Tiny Tim and Brave Combo put out a reasonably high-profile album called “Girl” on Rounder Records in 1996, I couldn’t resist interviewing him for a newspaper story. It had the kind of comeback-attempt angle that readers love. And they surely must still remember how bizarre he was back in the day.

True, I dimly remembered old stories that Tiny Tim, in his prime, was a connoisseur of pre-rock pop music and the vocalists who recorded it. I somewhat remembered that he tried to do them honor by singing in their styles. “Girl” even contained some songs that might fit that description. But that seemed such a distant part of his legacy. More important was that “Girl” contained some Beatles songs and “Stairway to Heaven.” Tiny Tim was trying to go tongue-in-cheek “lounge.”

To my surprise, during this hour and half phone interview – I had to cut it short – he revealed something I was not expecting. Sanity, yes, but also a candid integrity. He was frank about what he perceived as the record’s lack of musical quality.

He didn’t much care for “Girl.” He didn’t feel his vocals did the songs justice on most of the tracks. And he didn’t think the producer/engineer understood how to record in a way to evoke the pre-rock-era sound still so important to him. He was upset and hurt.

Here’s a sample passage from that interview: “The problem is there are many types of vocal styles I have, from Rudy Vallee to the young (Bing) Crosby to Eddie Cantor, Jolson, the rest. In my head it sounds fantastic, the heavy type voice, but it’s very difficult to get what I hear in my head onto the recorder...”

I felt a lot of my amusement with Tiny Tim dissipate. This guy, first and foremost, was being sincere. He also mentioned that he had recently made a much better album on a small label, Vinyl Retentive, called “Prisoner of Love: A Tribute to Russ Columbo.” He was proud of this nod to a singer who briefly rivaled Bing Crosby in popularity, before dying in 1934 at age 26.

“I’ve recorded some of his most famous songs, from ‘All of Me’ to ‘Prisoner of Love,’” he said. “This is the greatest album I’ve ever made. I sing in the same key mostly (of Columbo) on all these songs and you’d never believe it’s Tiny Tim.”

He sent me a copy and it was good. It’s the work of an aging crooner whose gentle tenor and creamy baritone are still in pretty good shape. He’s capable at times of a soaring, yearning quality that makes those years disappear. Paul Reller transcribed the original arrangements and used a band called Clang to record with Tiny Tim on vintage instruments.

There’s one especially sweet moment – fittingly, right at the end – when he completes a lovely, ethereal version of “Auf Wiedersehen, My Dear.” The musicians clap in appreciation of him nailing it so well. Laughing as the cut fades, he says, “That may be the million seller.” He died later in 1996.

In a recent biography about Columbo and the era of crooners called “You Call It Madness,” Lenny Kaye said this about that album: “…You begin to realize just how fine and underrated a singer Mr. Tim is, riding the inflections and curling cues that are the hallmark of late-twenties and early-thirties vocal performance, born natural within the arrangements.”

My thesis, then, is that Tiny Tim should not be remembered as a freak or novelty artist. Not even as an outsider artist, a term that carries more cachet. He was certainly unusual, especially in his dress and his ideas about matters of the heart – which I’ll save for another conference. And he played up the comic aspects of his amazingly high falsetto to his own detriment – especially after he was adopted by “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” in 1968, his breakthrough year.

But he was an artist of merit who knew what he wanted to do. I use the term “The Harry Smith of Adult-Standards Singers” to encourage a new way of thinking about him. Smith, not a singer, is now revered – a Grammy recipient – although he was personally eccentric. Both were musicologists. There was also a visionary quality to both men’s work in the arts.

The Smith-curated 1952 “Anthology of American Folk Music” helped lure gifted folk and blues performers to Greenwich Village by the early 1960s. Tiny Tim wasn’t one of them, although he played an acoustic instrument. But he was working the same clubs at the same time. And his talent was recognized and respected by his peers.

Here’s Bob Dylan on Tiny Tim, from a 1966 interview with Robert Shelton. “Tiny Tim was around...that was long before,” Dylan said. “That was around 1961 or 1962. He was very far ahead of his time. Hey, even if he's still doing today what he was doing then, he…still is ahead of his time. But he was very hung-up on his mother and stuff like that, so he couldn't get out. But he was a genius. A natural talent.”

(That quote was provided by David Hajdu, author of “Positively Fourth Street,” who discovered it in the EMP archives. He didn’t use it, but provided it to me for this paper.)

Another Tiny Tim admirer was future-Holy-Modal-Rounder Peter Stampfel, still a tradition-minded folksinger when he shared a bill with Tiny Tim in January, 1963. “Him and me and Phil Ochs were working at the Third Side, a club on Third Street. He was playing ukulele and singing all old songs with the exception of Elvis Presley’s ‘Return to Sender’ in his falsetto,” he told me.

“His feelings about it could not have been more sincere. He was absolutely in the thrall of pre-rock pop. Not a phony bone in his body. He was as sincere about what he was doing as I was about what I was doing.”

As Greil Marcus has so famously posited in “Invisible Republic,” Smith opened the door for the roots-oriented (and even secret) music of “old weird America” to sneak into post-war pop culture.

Tiny Tim, on the other hand, loved the “official” pop music of the early 20th Century – Tin Pan Alley, Broadway revues and early movie musicals, suave pop crooners and humorous vaudevillians. He made it weird through his own persona. But he wanted to save worthwhile “old music” from being forgotten.

Some of the singers Tiny Tim loved were still familiar to the public in the 1960s – Bing Crosby, Rudy Vallee, Al Jolson’s legacy. But Tiny Tim went way deeper. He idolized, for instance, Nick Lucas, who played guitar and ukulele and sang the original “Tip-Toe Thru’ the Tulips” in 1929. And Russ Columbo, Gene Austin, Henry Burr, Billy Murray and Ada Jones and Irving Kaufman, among others.

Tiny Tim’s passion for pop came from listening to music and radio shows in his family’s apartment in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood. He saw himself as a character within that world, too, in a dream-like and subconscious-tapping way. In a 1976 biography by Harry Stein called “Tiny Tim,” the singer recalls how moved he was as an only child listening to radio.

“Some nights, after I’d been reading comic books or listening to adventure shows on the radio, I’d lie awake in bed and create my own characters. I created my own radio station and I would broadcast my own shows. The most popular show I ever had was ‘The Tom Berry Show,’ which started in 1945 and lasted three years. Its theme song was the theme from ‘Christmas in Connecticut,’ a film that came around the same year.”

Incidentally, this out-of-print book has other trivia about Tiny Tim’s career. The singer says he first grew his hair long to emulate Rudolph Valentino, only kept going. The name Tiny Tim was shortened from Sir Timothy Tims – one of many stage names that he used early in a career that began in the 1950s. (He was born Herbert Khaury to a Lebanese-Catholic father and an East-European Jewish mother.) And Perry Como once told him to “Sing Up, Herb!”

Tiny Tim’s career got a critical boost from Hugh Romney – now better known as the counterculturist Wavy Gravy. And there was nothing smug or ironic about his interest. Romney, a political monologist/humorist in the Village of the early 1960s, had been wowed by Tiny Tim’s singing at a West Village lesbian club called Page 3. So he signed him up for a show with him and Moondog. (Moondog later quit because he thought Tiny Tim was too effeminate.)

The show occurred one night in 1963 at a coffeehouse called Fat Black Pussycat, earning much publicity. It also resulted in the club being shut down for back taxes, Romney recalled, so he organized a homeless “Phantom Cabaret” to continue. Julian Beck and Judith Malina offered him midnights at their Living Theatre, after performances of the groundbreaking play “The Brig.”

“At midnight, we’d gather the cast of ‘The Brig’ up and everybody would go ‘bong, bong, bong,’” Romney told me. “We’d do 20-30 of those and then Tiny would shuffle out onstage, which still had the barbed wire from ‘The Brig,’ with his tiny shopping bag. I maintain he would descend into the cathedral of an old Philco radio.

“Those old-time entertainers, he would channel them,” Romney continued. “They’d come inside him. It was the strangest thing. One time he’d come off the stage trembling. I’d say, ‘Tiny, what’s wrong?’ He’d say, ‘Oh, Mr. Rudy Vallee came inside me and he wouldn’t leave. I lost my Crosby power,’ referring to his ability to sing in Bing Crosby’s style.

“It was an honor to have shared life moments with him,” Romney said.

Lenny Bruce, Romney’s friend, eventually hired Tiny Tim to open at the April, 1964, Café A Go-Go engagement in New York for which Bruce was arrested for obscenity. It was promoted as “Lenny Bruce talks for money, Tiny Tim sings for love.”

Another of Romney’s friends, the Beat Neal Cassady, also became a fan. Romney remembers driving to New York’s Cloisters for sunrise one morning with the two in the car. “They loved singing together and they would harmonize, mostly old Bing Crosby songs,” he said.

Why is this not the Tiny Tim we remember today? His legacy has suffered, starting well before his death in late 1996, because he was misunderstood as a big goof. And he sometimes had to play up to that image to earn a living in later years. Also, his late-1960s Richard Perry-produced Reprise albums had fallen out of print by 1996.

But Rhino Handmade has slowly been rehabilitating his catalogue. Next month, it is releasing “God Bless Tiny Tim! The Complete Reprise Recordings.” “God Bless” was the title of his first Reprise album, the only one of his three that charted.

In 2000 – for the first time, amazingly – Rhino Handmade released his finest work, “Live! At the Royal Albert Hall” from 1968. He performed with Perry conducting a large orchestra and absolutely enchanted an audience. In his prime, he was a master entertainer, a spellbinding vocalist, and an educator who loved teaching his audience about the origins of his older songs.

“My goal was for people to recognize what a truly magnificent singer he was and how he sang in different voices,” Perry told me. “It was all there in the records and the in-person appearances. But unfortunately because he appeared on ‘Laugh-In’ quite a bit, which was great exposure for him, it played up the falsetto thing. So that’s what people think of him more than anything else. But he was just at the beginning.”

No less a composer than Irving Berlin was impressed by the first album’s version of his 1915 “Stay Down Here Where You Belong.” Tiny Tim told Ernie Clark in an interview for TinyTim.org: “Let me tell you the story here: Irving Berlin, when he heard in '68 that I had sung this song, actually called up Warner Brothers and wanted to know where I got it. I said that I got it from Henry Burr, and he couldn't believe that somebody knew it!”

I also might add that Tiny Tim did fit into the world of 1960s rock ‘n’ roll, too. But it was a world that accepted him for what he was. He was part of the youth revolution of the era, even if he was over 30. He played at a midtown rock club, Steve Paul’s The Scene, in the mid-1960s. And there is a handbill advertising him and the Velvet Underground together at Cheetah on April 11, 1967. While he loved material from the 1940s and earlier, he enjoyed an occasional take on a rock hit. And his use of a dramatically high voice wasn’t all that different from Del Shannon, or Frankie Valli. They aren’t considered freaks or novelty acts today – Valli’s Four Seasons are the subject of one of Broadway’s hottest musicals.

In closing, it’s not too late for us to take Tiny Tim seriously. We’re still catching up with many of the beautiful singers and songs he admired. Let’s catch up with Tiny Tim, too, and the uniquely gifted – not freakish – way he sought to make fine music.