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Tiny Tim, the Cleveland Browns and a bear made a sword and sorcery movie
11.09.2018
08:30 am
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As an answer to “The Super Bowl Shuffle,” the 1986 Cleveland Browns released this short fantasy film on home video. It co-stars Tiny Tim and a trained bear.

Masters of the Gridiron concerns a beautiful dream Browns center Mike Baab has after sustaining a massive head injury on the field—you know, the kind that causes permanent brain damage in people who play football. After losing consciousness, Baab awakes in an enchanted realm, transformed into a sword and sorcery hero, “the Baabarian,” who must confront Tiny Tim’s evil Lord of the League in the quest for a magic ring. Hometown heroes the Michael Stanley Band provide the soundtrack for the Browns’ LARP battles with the bear and some ninjas, filmed at the local landmark Squire’s Castle.

I’m sure this movie contains a lot of inside jokes for football fans; I don’t understand the rules of football, or why it is played, or how it is watched, though I have a vague sense that the Cleveland Browns must be all right, because Pere Ubu probably roots for them. I just like Masters of the Gridiron because it contains some of Tiny Tim’s best work. He is riveting as the Lord of the League, who issues his challenge in verse.

Talking to USA Today in 2013, Baab said Tiny didn’t work with bears:

He was terrified of the bear and would not come down from the top of the Squire’s Castle until the bear was back in his trailer. He thought the bear wanted to eat him.

If you watch nothing else, skip to Tiny’s first appearance at 7:18. Tell me it isn’t one of the best things you’ve ever seen.
 

Posted by Oliver Hall
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11.09.2018
08:30 am
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Tiny Tim’s delirious covers of Bon Jovi, Pink Floyd, the Bee Gees, AC/DC, and more!
09.25.2018
01:25 pm
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Tiny Tim is one of the great eccentrics of the classic era of rock. Born Herbert Buckingham Khaury, he was a pretty dorky tween, holing up at the New York Public Library learning about the ancient heroes of the early days of recorded music and learning how to play the violin, the mandolin, and (of course) the ukulele. His first album, God Bless Tiny Tim, is a classic of a sort and featured the only song he would ever become famous for, “Tip-Toe Thru’ The Tulips With Me,” a song that dates from the 1920s.

He sang with a falsetto and for many years was pretty much the only human being actively associated with the uke. He had terrible teeth and terrible hair and never, ever seemed to lose his sunny disposition about just about everything. If you check out pictures of him online, he sure did smile a lot, and it didn’t seem remotely like a put-on.

For reasons that are impossible to reconstruct from this distance, his 1969 marriage to Victoria Budinger was a gargantuan sensation—it happened on The Tonight Show and it landed the best ratings in the history of that show—including Johnny Carson’s final show in 1992.

Tiny Tim is a picture-perfect one-hit wonder, but the issue with such figures is, what do you do for the next 30 years of your life? Various people have tackled that issue in different ways. Tiny Tim did not release a huge amount of material but did release several albums, most of which centered on renditions of decades-old curios and self-consciously odd covers of far more recent material. Interestingly, most of his covers dispense with both the falsetto and the ukulele, relying on regular rock guitar and a surprisingly rich and deep vocal style.

God Bless Tiny Tim featured a cover of Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe,” with Tiny Tim singing both parts, of course. It’s as odd a cover as you’re likely to find, but certainly not unpleasurable to listen to. Another early cover that featured a canny blending of falsetto and non-falsetto parts was his version of the Doors’ “People Are Strange,” which he recorded as a demo; it appeared on Rhino’s 3-CD reissue of God Bless Tiny Tim.
 

 
In 1980, for an album called Chameleon, Tiny Tim essayed a cover of the recent smash hit “Staying Alive” by the Bee Gees, a song that is also notable for featuring falsetto singing, which Tiny Tim didn’t use in the cover. You can find a quote online from Maurice Gibb that runs, “Tiny Tim? Anyone could sing like that. It’s atrocious. It’s hideous, really.” Ouch. I don’t know the facts of the matter, but I would imagine Maurice probably said that back when Tiny Tim was first a sensation—in any case, it’s fun to imagine Tiny Tim doing the cover as a cheeky form of revenge/solidarity.

At some point Tiny Tim perceived the tender underbelly of a certain kind of rock song that he could totally do something with. In 1993 he released an album called Rock, the second half of which is consumed mainly with jukebox hits from the 1950s. But the first half tackles three songs that might be considered classics of the arena rock era, AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell,” Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love a Bad Name,” and Billy Idol’s “Rebel Yell.” All of them are quite listenable, although the Billy Idol cover stands out for being in excess of 20 minutes long! Your imagination might be concocting some nightmarishly unlistenable track but I’ve listened to it and it’d be more accurate to say that Tiny Tim just ran with it. Indeed, you might say he was genuinely inspired by it.

In 1996 Tiny Tim had a heart attack while on stage playing his hit “Tip-Toe Thru’ The Tulips With Me” and died shortly afterward. This event led to this unusual headline:
 

 
A couple of years earlier, Tiny Tim had released an album for Seeland/Ponk called I Love Me, which featured a number of unusual tracks such as “I Saw Mr. Presley Tip-toeing Through The Tulips” and “She Left Me With The Herpes” as well as a cover of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2).” 

Listen to it all, after the jump…....
 

READ ON
Posted by Martin Schneider
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09.25.2018
01:25 pm
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When Tiny Tim met Current 93, Nurse With Wound, and ‘the Antichrist’
08.12.2016
09:24 am
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Cover art for Tiny Tim’s Songs of an Impotent Troubadour by Steven Stapleton of Nurse With Wound

Another one of those things they don’t teach you in school: Current 93 and Nurse With Wound collaborated with Tiny Tim on a song called “Just What Do You Mean by ‘Antichrist’?”

David Tibet’s Durtro label released a few Tiny Tim albums. The first of these was Songs of an Impotent Troubadour, a career-spanning collection of solid gold Tiny Tim hits like “I Used To Love Jessica Hahn, But Now I Love Stephanie Bohn,” “Santa Claus Has Got the AIDS This Year,” and “She Left Me with the Herpes.” “Just What Do You Mean by ‘Antichrist’?” ended the album; it consisted mostly of those TG-style glissandi that make your intestines cramp a bit, laid over a tape collage of Tibet and Tiny’s phone conversations about the latter’s bizarre eschatological views.
 

Cover for the Durtro release of Tiny Tim’s Christmas Album
 
The definitive book about the Coil, Current 93, and Nurse With Wound gang, England’s Hidden Reverse, reports that Tiny Tim’s crackpot opinions about gay people provided the occasion for a break between Tibet and his close friend, Douglas P. of Death in June:

Not everyone in the Current circle swooned before Tiny Tim’s bigheartedness. Douglas Pearce took his views on homosexuality as an excuse to irrevocably cut all ties with Tibet, on the grounds that friendship with both Tiny Tim and himself was incompatible.

Tibet had become obsessed with Tiny Tim in the mid-90s after listening to his work on the recommendation of Boyd Rice. And it was Rice who suggested Tibet call Tiny up:

On Rice’s suggestion, Tibet made contact through Big Bucks Burnett, who ran Tiny Tim’s fan club. To his surprise, Burnett suggested that Tibet call Tiny right away, as he loved to talk on the phone. It was the start of a beautiful long distance telephone relationship. ‘I rang up his hotel, where he had checked in under the name Peter Poker,’ Tibet recalls. ‘Straight away he was like ‘Hi, Mr. Tibet, nice to speak to you, have you got a girlfriend? What does she look like?’ His phone calls always lasted at least an hour.’ Tibet and Tiny Tim only met once, when he flew over to play at London’s Union Chapel in 1995, in a mismatched lineup that featured Red Dwarf‘s Norman Lovett and Al Murray, ‘the comedy landlord’. As a result, Time Out listed the concert in their comedy section.

 
More after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Oliver Hall
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08.12.2016
09:24 am
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Tiny Tim plays a creepy clown in the godawful ‘Blood Harvest’
08.01.2016
04:48 pm
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Bill Rebane’s Blood Harvest would be a totally unremarkable bad movie if not for the inspired casting choice of having none other than Tiny Tim play the deeply unsettling clown “Marvelous Mervo.” Made in 1987 in Wisconsin, Blood Harvest is a riot of bad dialogue, bad acting, softcore sex scenes and a bit of splatter. Rebane’s cinematic anti-style is warmed over Herschell Gordon Lewis with a topping of moldy cheese in the form of the wonderfully silly Tiny Tim.

According to IMDB:

Tiny Tim was making a personal appearance at a beer carnival in Lincoln County, Wisconsin, in 1985, and local filmmaker Bill Rebane was in the audience. He had an idea for a horror film and decided to see if Tiny Tim was interested in appearing in it. He was. This is the result.

No part of Stranger Things was inspired by this 80s atrocity. It does have a nice twist at the end but I ain’t going to spoil it for you.
 

 
This cut is comprised of all of the scenes in which Tiny Tim appears. I generally link to sites where you can buy whatever I’m reviewing but Blood Harvest is long out of print on DVD. I found a copy for $100, but as much as I do love me some Tiny Tim playing a freaky clown, I’ll wait for the Criterion release with five hours of extras.

At the 2:32 point in the video I detect an homage to The Shining. Marvelous Mervo’s “I’m here” followed by actress Itonia Salchek looking more than a little bit like Shelley Duvall.

The credit crawl is included so you can enjoy in its entirety the fab song “Marvelous Mervo” written by Tom Zang and sung by Tiny.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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08.01.2016
04:48 pm
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‘You Are What You Eat’: Bonkers hippie-era relic featuring Tiny Tim
07.28.2016
09:14 am
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Given how widely-beloved disjointed counterculture films like 200 Motels and Head are, it’s kind of surprising that Peter Yarrow’s insane You Are What You Eat has remained so tenaciously underground.

Yarrow was the “Peter” in Peter, Paul & Mary, one of the most massively successful exponents of the folk scene that appeared poised to take over ‘60s pop music before Beatlemania came along—their 1980s PBS concert still gets rerun during pledge drives, so reliably does it haul in that fat boomer cash—and in 1968 Yarrow used some of his money and pull to finance a montage film of flower children freaking out to a lot of badass music. It was directed by one Barry Feinstein, who’d also worked on that year’s Monterey Pop documentary, ostensibly to document the fragmentation and identity crisis of the American youth movement post-Summer of Love. It’s hard to tell if that was what was intended, because complete versions of the film don’t seem to exist, and even complete versions would surely be as messy and disjointed. From a 2007 entry on WFMU’s Beware of the Blog:

Contradictions abound in regards to who and what are contained in the film. This stems from very few complete prints having survived. Many have claimed that Frank Zappa, Improv maven Del Close, nor Harper’s Bizarre are[n’t] even in the film and that the assertions and apocryphal. Others can describe these scenes with precise detail. All three are listed in the closing credits. The film’s “official” VHS release of the mid-nineties disappeared into obscurity almost immediately. That release, however, was still missing several minutes. The soundtrack LP also omits the sounds of several performances that appeared in the picture. All of these factors have contributed to speculation. The only known complete print of YAWYE has been doing the tour of the Cinematheque circuit for the past couple of years and has is housed in Berkeley, California. Columbia’s soundtrack LP was re-issued on CD in 1997, but only in Japan (naturally). The album remains generally elusive in North America.

More after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Ron Kretsch
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07.28.2016
09:14 am
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‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?’: Watch Tiny Tim’s incredible late-night disco trainwreck
12.24.2015
10:20 am
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Tiny Tim was one of the great oddballs of American popular music. Though viewed by most as a ‘60s novelty act, he was well known in the Greenwich Village folk scene for his encyclopedic knowledge of music from the early 20th Century. Bob Dylan once remarked of his contemporary, “No one knew more about old music than Tiny Tim.”

The singer, ukulele player, and musical archivist discovered his falsetto in the early ‘50s and based his performing career around it and his repertoire of songs from the 1910s to 1930s.

His unusual act lead him to a career-making guest spot on Laugh-In in 1968. He was signed to Reprise records and had a surprise hit with “Tiptoe Through the Tulips,” which reached 17 on the Billboard chart.

Though his novelty seemed to wear off in terms of record sales after the release of his first album, God Bless Tiny Tim, he became a staple of TV talk shows . He was famously married to “Miss Vicki” on The Tonight Show in 1969, setting what was then a record, with 40 million viewers watching.

Tiny Tim made a return to The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in 1979 for this bizarre performance of Rod Stewart’s disco hit “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy.”

Tim sings the verses in his trademark falsetto, but switches to an Elvis-like lower register for the choruses—all the while pantomiming a neurotic nervousness. Halfway through the number, Tim loses his timing and gets ahead of himself with the vocal. Doc Severinsen and the band do their best to adjust the arrangement to the version Tim has in his head. The number devolves into a strip-tease, with Tiny Tim gyrating on the floor (years before Madonna turned heads at the MTV video awards!)

It’s absolutely bizarre and incredibly awesome. He goes from Woody Allen to Iggy Pop in the span of three minutes.

Carson looks completely befuddled by the end of the performance and fittingly quips “there’s just… there’s just… nothing… nothing to be said.”
 

Posted by Christopher Bickel
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12.24.2015
10:20 am
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‘Yellow Submarine’ style short depicts a jaunty stroll through a bad trip (set to Tiny Tim!)
06.24.2014
11:54 am
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Whether you find it nauseatingly cheerful or hyperactively sweet (and I’m partial to the latter), Tiny Tim’s “Livin’ in the Sunlight, Lovin’ in the Moonlight” is the perfect backdrop to this ironically dark piece of animation from the Layzell Bros. Our down-and-out protagonist, played by English comedian Adam Buxton, takes a huff off a cheerful cartoon pipe, and is transported to a Yellow Submarine-style wonderland where his antics are rendered childishly delightful—nevermind his wanton destruction of property and growing troubles with the local authorities.

At one point the psychedelic dreamland becomes a little too ominous for our hero, but no matter! His magical pipe friend makes quick work of the darkness! Just say no to drugs, kids! Or just say yes if that’s what you want…
 

 
Via Juxtapoz

Posted by Amber Frost
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06.24.2014
11:54 am
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Red, White and Blue Sleaze: Al Goldstein’s infamous ‘Midnight Blue’ cable access program

Al Goldstein holding a copy of Lenny Bruce's book,
 
The term “public” or “cable access” can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. For some, visions of two bewigged Aerosmith loving dudes in their basement immediately spring to mind, even though that film came out well over 20 years ago. (There’s a harrowing thought for you!)

For others, the term means a mode of truly democratic expression, free from Madison Avenue standards and middle-of-the-road network TV conventions. One cable access show that fit that bill to the extent of challenging community standards was Al Goldstein’s brilliant and often infamous Midnight Blue.
 
Midnight Blue Title Screen
 
Starting in 1974 on Manhattan cable, Midnight Blue went on to have a lifespan of over 25 years, making it more tenacious of an animal than any of its peers. Most TV shows are lucky to make it the ten-year mark, much less 25. Taking all of the cultural subversiveness and unapologetic sleaze from its progenitor, Screw magazine, Midnight Blue challenged first amendment issues, scored some brilliant interviews and featured some of the strangest commercials to have emerged in the sexual Wild Wild West era of the 70’s and early 80’s. We’re talking swingers clubs, including the notorious Plato’s Retreat, phone sex lines, some rather unfriendly looking vibrators and, my own personal favorite, synthetic cocaine. Where else were you going to see an ad for faux coke? It certainly wasn’t running during Too Close for Comfort!
 
Got a hot date? Pick up some Synth Coke!
 
The beating heart and soul of Midnight Blue was the man himself, the late, great and inimitable Al Goldstein. A larger than life figure, whose humor, rage, smarts, self-effacement and pure dedication to speaking his mind no matter what consequences may emerge, Goldstein was the living definition of brass balls. Whether it was bragging about his cunnilingus skills, ranting about any number of hypocritical politicos and Hollywood celebs, ranting about a photo lab store in Queens, ranting about the sandwich he had earlier or just ranting in general, any chance of a dull moment was neatly incinerated by the presence of Al Goldstein.
 

 
One of the hallmarks of Midnight Blue was the wild array of interviews featured on the show. Over its tenure, the guest list ranged from adult industry pioneers like Harry Reems and Georgina Spelvin to celebrities like Debbie Harry, R. Crumb and the absolute zenith, Gilbert Gottfried. The Gottfried interview is a thing of comedic divine wonder, as if the humor gods snorted a megaton of amphetamine and then touched the shoulder of the already brilliant comedian. It’s a riffing onslaught that involves oral sex and Colonel Sanders, among other topics. Seeing Goldstein laugh so hard that he can barely wheeze out a question is the proverbial cherry on that cake.
 

 
The beauty of both a publication like Screw, as well as having an access show like Midnight Blue is the proto-punk rock nature of it all. There are some that tend to write off both creatures as just another passenger car on the smut train but doing so is not only an injustice to Goldstein and company’s hard work, it is an injustice to yourself. Subversiveness and a willingness to explore sexuality as the strange, multi-faceted creature it is, ruled Goldstein’s work. The man was openly bisexual back in the 1960’s and in fact, Screw was one of the very few adult related mags that would advertise both straight and gay films. (For more information, definitely check out Mike Edison’s brilliant book, Dirty! Dirty! Dirty!) If you look at Midnight Blue et al and all you see is tits, then you are only seeing the most obvious, superficial layer.

Years later, a lot of the cultural hangups that were attacked front and center on Midnight Blue are still the same. If anything, it feels like our culture has devolved a little bit since the apex of Goldstein’s work. The communication landscape has most definitely changed. Print medium, while still existent, has become more and more overshadowed by its digital counterparts. Cable access still exists, but has dwindled significantly over the years, though its seeds have sprouted into sites like YouTube, Vimeo and millions of blogs. But no matter what, the legacy of Al Goldstein and Midnight Blue will always live on as a surely pure testament to the necessity of thumbing your nose at the status quo and creating something irreverent, id driven and occasionally really sharp. Midnight Blue might be cold in the hard ground at this point but its spirit, thanks in part to DVD companies like Blue Underground and the aforementioned YouTube, will continue to live on. And with that, so will the legacy of Al Goldstein. There will never be another.

Posted by Heather Drain
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02.10.2014
08:19 am
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It’s 1980’s trash-horror films a go-go with Bleeding Skull!
01.06.2014
11:13 am
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For those of us who grew up during the golden era of VHS, the shelves at the local Mom & Pop video store were the equivalent to visiting some king of gloriously mutated version of Disneyland. The beauty of that era was that because the format being new, all kinds of movies came out of the woodwork. Films like First Blood or E.T. had a great chance of playing in theaters ranging from the metropolitan to box-shaped bergs in the smallest of corn-town America. But what about titles like Psychos in Love, Death Spa or Black Devil Doll From Hell? Forget it, but that was the beauty of VHS is that it truly made the movie going experience more personal and democratic.
 

 
This was never more true than for the horror genre, with the 1980’s being the apex decade for some of the most lurid, grue-filled, nudity-ridden and straight up crazy films in the field. Thanks to the fine folks at Headpress, there is a funhouse ride of a book dedicated to these films. The tome in question? Bleeding Skull: A 1980’s Trash-Horror Odyssey. Originally a website started back in 2004 by Joseph A. Ziemba, who was later joined by Dan Budnik, Bleeding Skull, both as a website and book, is a compendium of all the horror films that more academically minded or overall discerning writers would quickly bolt from. This is, naturally, a highly positive thing!

That fact alone makes Bleeding Skull worth noting, but the added bonus is how entertaining both Ziemba and Budnik are to read. They both have the whole “snark with love” vibe down to a fine art. There are some incredibly funny lines in this book, but they never override the overall reviews. There’s a sensibility to the whole thing of a guy sitting next to you at a bar,  telling you about this weird movie that he just saw that was directed by the guy that made The Giant Spider Invasion and stars Tiny Tim as a sweaty and depressed clown named “The Magnificent Mervo.” (The film in question, by the way, is Blood Harvest. and yes, it exists. Glory.) Who else is going to talk about obscure, made in Wisconsin horror films with Tiny Tim as a clown in them? Not many but that right there captures the essence of Bleeding Skull.
 
Bleeding Skull Book Cover
 
Another impressive thing about this book is that Ziemba and Budnik have truly combed the depths of ultra-obscure horror films for your enjoyment. This was an area of film that before reading this book, I was fairly confident that I knew more than the average bear. Which, while I still do, compared to these guys, I AM the average bear. If it was a no-budget, shot-on-video one day wonder from two guys in Duluth, Minnesota, then dollars to donuts, it is written about in this book!

Headpress continues to cement their already solid reputation as one of the finest purveyors of fringe culture with Bleeding Skull. So crack open your favorite libation, dust off your VCR that’s been gathering dust in your attic and be prepared to read about some of the best, worst, trashiest, sleaziest and gonzo trash-horror films from one of the darkest decades in cinematic history.

Below, for your viewing pleasure (?) Blood Harvest starring Tiny Tim as “Mervo the Clown”:
 

Posted by Heather Drain
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01.06.2014
11:13 am
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Tiny Tim reissued—on Edison cylinder: Next, we clone the dodo!
09.11.2013
12:08 pm
Topics:
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tiny tim lp cover pic
 
In a wonderful bit of news for far-gone vinyl collectors looking to up the stakes on unnecessary depths of obscurantism, the Ship to Shore Phonograph Company is releasing a version of “Nobody Else Can Love Me (Like My Old Tomato Can)” cut by musician/antiquarian/delightful freakshow Tiny Tim - on the utterly obsolete Edison Cylinder format. Per Hyperallergic‘s Allison Meier:

Only 50 of the cylinders were recorded by Benjamin Canady (aka “The Victrola Guy“) who has been working with ongoing experiments of recording on old Edison cylinder phonographs. As the Vinyl Factory points out in their coverage of this momentous music resurrection, the cylinder record hasn’t totally vanished — Beck also used this tech recently as inspiration for his tracks cut into a beer bottle this year — but there’s been no wide release for the round records since the early 20th century. And if you decide to buy one of the Tiny Tim recordings for $60, it’s quite likely you’ll have no way to play it, although they each do come with a digital recording of the song blaring from some antique phonograph horns. This isn’t the analogue age, after all.

 

 
If the only bells the name “Tiny Tim” ring for you are Dickensian, he was an out-of-left-field media star in the late ‘60s. Even in a decade as indulgent of oddities as that one was, Tim’s (nee Herbert Khaury) weirdness stuck out farther than most. He was a musician of an old-timey archivalist bent, and he might have made a fine fit for the early ‘60s folk revival if that movement hadn’t been so grimly earnest. His stage presentation was disarmingly odd - coming off as a pudgy, sartorially randomized, lysergically Jewy hybrid of Carl Sagan and Danny Devito’s Penguin, he sang hits and obscurities from the turn of the 20th Century to the Depression era in an improbable falsetto. He rose to fame and had a massive hit single with “Tiptoe Through The Tulips” thanks to appearances on TV comedy/variety shows that appreciated his eccentricity, most notably Laugh-In and The Tonight Show. It was the latter program on which, at the height of his fame, Tim notoriously got married in front of an audience of over 20 million. As he was utterly genuine in his love of the music he performed, his act fell out of step in changing times, which inevitably led to his waning popularity. Though he did eventually add some modern material to his repertoire, doing so only served to underscore his diminished stature from a popular conservator to a fringe dwelling novelty act. He died in 1996 of a heart attack suffered onstage in Minneapolis.

Here’s the seldom-seen A Special Tiny Tim from 1970:
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Crystal Castles’ ‘Untrust Us’ covered by Capital Children’s Choir
Listen to Pink Floyd before they were even called Pink Floyd
Pro-marijuana ad to be shown on the large screen at NASCAR race

Posted by Ron Kretsch
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09.11.2013
12:08 pm
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From the secret life of ukuleles: David Bowie eyeballing Tiny Tim
04.26.2013
04:21 am
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Tiny Tim hobnobbing with Princess Margaret, Dusty Springfield and Lou Christie while David Bowie looks on in the background. London Palladium, 1969.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Blink & you’ll miss him: David Bowie’s 2 second cameo in ‘The Virgin Soldiers,’ 1969

Posted by Marc Campbell
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04.26.2013
04:21 am
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The agony and ecstasy of Tiny Tim: A remarkably candid interview with Morton Downey Jr.
04.12.2013
01:13 am
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image
 
Tiny Tim was born 81 years ago today.

In this clip from 1994, Morton Downey Jr. drops his usual maniacal bluster and manages to get up close and personal with Tiny Tim. The result is a compelling and at times grim interview.

Downey’s seedy bedroom manner lures Tiny into the confessional and the cuckolded singer doesn’t tiptoe through the tulips, he dives head first into the flower bed as he grapples with failed romance and fatherhood. The whole thing is more than just mildly creepy.

Two years after this was filmed, Tiny died of a heart attack at the age of 64. I doubt that he ever came to terms with the one thing that appeared to genuinely bewilder him in life: women.    
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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04.12.2013
01:13 am
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Tiny Tim and The Supremes candles by Vicki Berndt
09.19.2011
02:05 pm
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The Keene Supremes, $45.00
 
I’m digging these Supremes and Tiny Tim candles by Los Angeles-based artist and rock photographer, Vicki Berndt. They’re available for purchase on Vicki’s website or over at her Etsy page.
 

The Coronation of Tiny Tim Candle, $15.00

Posted by Tara McGinley
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09.19.2011
02:05 pm
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Cryogenics, domestic violence and Tiny Tim
08.20.2010
02:06 pm
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Dangerous Minds pal Chris Campion writes:

Cryogenics, domestic violence, a Freddie Mercury look-a-like on bongos and Tiny Tim. Tiny Tim joins the new wave half a decade too late. Someone had a lot of money to burn on Tiny in 1989.

Tiny Tim’s single and music video from 1989, “Won’t You Dance with Me?” Note presence of Laugh-In’s Judy Carne.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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08.20.2010
02:06 pm
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Man who once managed Tiny Tim hopes to open museum for 8-track tapes
03.11.2010
09:37 pm
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image
 
James “Bucks” Burnett is a “collector.” He used to write the Mr. Ed Fan Club newsletter and he managed the one and only Tiny Tim. Now he wants to open an eight-track museum.

From the WSJ:

“There are only two choices. A world with an eight-track museum and a world without an eight-track museum,” he says. “I choose with.”

Shortly after the show, the planners of a music conference in Denton, a music-loving college town about 40 miles north of Dallas, made Mr. Burnett an offer. They would find him a vacant space and pay $4,000 to build a temporary museum for a one-month run beginning Friday.

Mr. Burnett accepted and is readying his collection for another display, this time in a former lingerie factory in Denton. He plans to showcase and play a few hundred tapes, including a baby-blue copy of The Who’s “Tommy,” a copy of the “Easy Rider” soundtrack with sun-bleached cover art signed by Peter Fonda and a rare copy of Lou Reed’s 1975 avant-garde homage to noise called “Metal Machine Music.”

Play It Again: Promoter Has One-Track Mind About Eight Tracks (WSJ)

[Pleased to say I own a copy of Metal Machine Music on 8-track. Displayed proudly on my book shelf. I think it might be the first or second oldest possession I have, dating to when I was probably ten years old. I think it cost a dollar, still sealed, at a white trash department store my mother shopped at in Wheeling, WV.]

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.11.2010
09:37 pm
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