Mr. Mike: the life and work of Michael O’Donoghue by Dennis Perrin
"Life is one big minefield, and the only place that isn't a minefield is the place they make the mines."--Michael O'Donoghue
I wrote a few detailed book reviews for the now defunct web site/app Visual Bookshelf. I have fairly eclectic reading tastes, and I tend to favor whatever everyone else ignores, and so, as a favor to the authors who have provided me with many wonderful hours, as well as Bloghead visitors looking for something different to read, I’m re-publishing some of my best reviews on this site.
Michael O’Donoghue was one of the most influential comedians of the 1970s. As one of the founding members of National Lampoon and as a head writer for the first few seasons of Saturday Night Live, O’Donoghue developed a take-no-prisoners style of comedy in which any subject matter–the Holocaust, Vietnam atrocities, hot-off-the-press murders (as you can see, he was obsessed with death)–could be used as a basis for comedy. He pushed the limits of comedy, taking material that was extremely disturbing and putting a comic spin on it.
O’Donoghue started out in the early 60′s as an avant-garde theater producer/director/actor in Rochester, NY (he dropped out of U of Rochester), including the satirical The Death of JFK produced in early 1964. A manuscript of one of his Rochester plays, the automation of caprice, attracted the attention of Evergreen Review editors with its sex, torture, random violence, bestiality, and drug-induced hallucinations. O’Donoghue moved to New York, and began becoming a regular contributor to Evergreen Review.
The comic strip he created for them, The Adventures of Phoebe Zeitgeist, became one of Evergreen Review’s most popular features. Illustrated by Frank Springer in a straight comic book style, no one had ever seen an absurd, sadistic strip like Phoebe Zeitgeist. It is certainly one of the earliest underground comics.
O’Donoghue wound up at National Lampoon, and helped shape the magazine’s groundbreaking humor. He co-wrote and produced National Lampoon’s first comedy album, Radio Dinner, and took charge of the National Lampoon Radio Hour, re-invigorating an essentially dead genre.
Viewers of Saturday Night Live may remember his character, Mr. Mike. Mr. Mike’s funniest skit (to this teenage viewer at the time) was his impersonation of Mike Douglas:
He enlisted Buck Henry to introduce him as “the king of impressionists.” After Henry’s introduction, big band music, worthy of the cheesiest variety fare, blares as O’Donoghue runs onstage. Dressed in a Vegas-style tuxedo, he snaps his fingers and smiles to the audience in “sincere” showbiz fashion.
“Thank you, thank you very very much, ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to…you know, when you’re in show business it seems you always end up at some bar at 4 o’clock in the morning arguing over who’s the best singer, who’s the best dancer, who’s the funniest comedian. But I think there’s one thing everybody agrees on and that’s who’s the nicest guy in show business and of course I’m talking about Mr. Mike Douglas…
Having recently watched Mike’s show, the “king” had a funny thought: What if someone took steel needles–say, 15, 18 inches long, with real sharp points–and plunged them into Mike’s eyes? What would his reaction be? O’Donoghue removes his glasses, turns his back to get into character, grabs his face, and screams and thrashes across the stage. At first the image seems ridiculous, but O’Donoghue pushes it and acts as though he is in serious physical pain. Audience members who line the stage watch O’Donoghue in amazement. A few laugh; the rest seem horrified and confused by the man who writhes and kicks just inches from their faces. Finally, O’Donoghue spills off the end of the stage, but his screams continue to fill the studio. Buck Henry walks on applauding. “Uncanny, isn’t it?,” he says.
After writing/directing his NBC special, Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video (which the network refused to air without cuts, so he found a movie distributor), O’Donoghue became a hot Hollywood commodity. But his refusal to dilute his vision and/or accommodate genuinely sincere collaborators resulted in a series of unfinished/unproduced screenplays, and numerous pitch sessions in Hollywood which never resulted in any green lights.
In 1981, he was called back to help resuscitate Saturday Night Live, which had gone down the tubes following Lorne Michaels’ departure. O’Donoghue was made head writer, and he hired his idol Terry Southern to work on the show. As before, his more controversial sketches never aired (including a sketch where an SS officer informs a demanding American private that the Germans had a good excuse for the Holocaust, whispering it in his ear and the ear of a concentration camp survivor and a Russian soldier–we never learn what the excuse is, because a dog runs across the stage with the script in his mouth, and Neil Simon can’t catch it). However, O’Donoghue was responsible for a live violent punk act (Fear) with skinheads in the audience and for having William Burroughs read excerpts from Naked Lunch.
O’Donoghue was known for his elaborately staged parties, and in his early New York years, for his surreally decorated loft. He had a series of ultimately unsatisfactory relationships (except for perhaps his last wife, Cheryl Hardwick, the keyboard player from SNL). This book does a good job recapturing the highs and lows of his career.
Here are some of my favorite O’Donoghue quotes from the book (and you can find more here):
- “A lot of my humor is like Christ coming down from the cross–it has no meaning until much later on.”
- “I don’t think television will ever be perfected until the viewer can press a button and cause whoever is on the screen’s head to explode.”
- “Better a daughter in a cathouse than a son writing screenplays. She’ll suck a lot less dick.”
- “Making people laugh is the lowest form of comedy.”
Looking Forward to and Looking Back at Mahlerpalooza
"Ja! Gustavo Dudamel ist Der Dude."
Over at my new publisher, the LA Weekly–my take on Gustavo Dudamel’s Mahler Project, an amazing endeavor involving 2 orchestras, 11 vocalists, and 16 choirs. The Dude played all 9 symphonies from memory, in the span of 3 weeks, an unprecedented accomplishment–and I was at every program. Read all about it here and here.
Now if I can only remove those damned Mahler earworms from my brain….
Spunk Water
"I'm gonna make me some spunk water and catch a stringerful of bullheads"
Life was much simpler in the early 20th century, when boys were satisfied with the simple pleasures of being alone outdoors. An ad in Life magazine recalls those halcyon days when a carefree lad could go out into the woods by himself and make spunk water.
From Life Magazine, Aug. 8, 1949, p. 98
A Dirty Limerick by Pablo Neruda
"I am very tired this afternoon."
La Balada del Viejo Peruano
By Pablo Neruda
There was an old man from Peru
Who fell asleep in his canoe.
"Aha! This canoe will be muy bueno for my nap"
While dreaming of Venus,
He tickled his penis
And woke up with a handful of topsoil.
¡Ay caramba!
Classical music Deathmatch: Igor Stravinsky vs. Arnold Schoenberg
"I'ma bust a cap in yo ass, Stravinsky!"--Arnold Schoenberg self-portrait
Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg: towering geniuses of classical music, pitted against each other by critics and professors as the two great rivals of the early 20th-century. But take away Arnold’s filter-tips and Igor’s pince-nez, toss them in a metal cage, and let’s see who’s the last man standing—the dour Austrian professor who emancipated dissonance, or the tiny Russian conductor who boosted other composer’s musical styles like a kleptomaniac stealing ketchup packets.
Read the full article at the LA Weekly to find out who wins!
A limerick about Peter Erskine
There was a jazz drummer named Peter
Whose timekeeping couldn’t be sweeter.
With sticks or with brushes
His playing was luscious
And his band mates weren’t chopped liver eit’er.
Originally published as part of a jazz concert review here.
What to Hear in Los Angeles Next Year
“Once upon a time all the composition teachers in the world wrote logical music that made sense when they explained it, but sounded like pulseless beeps and farts.”
Thus begins a little fairy tale I tell for the LA Weekly, including my picks for the best classical/post-classical music concerts in Los Angeles next year. The LA Weekly story is here.
Over at Sequenza21 I expanded on the list with some more information and concert-going suggestions next year. You can read that here.
Beethoven Made Me Do This
Excerpt from "It Sounds"
Yesterday was Beethoven’s birthday. I celebrated by listening to his compositions all day and evening. After the conclusion of the Pastoral Symphony, I asked myself what would Beethoven do right now? Why, compose, of course! It was 11 pm. I shut off the CD player, got out of my recliner, and headed over to the piano. I’d been working on this piece for a couple months; inspired by the industrious, painstaking example of Beethoven, I decided I could push through and finish the work.
My wife had fallen asleep on the couch, with our cat curled up on her chest. She would periodically wake up and confusedly ask, “What are you doing?” or “What’s going on?” I didn’t blame her for being so confused. Most of the chords in the piece are scalar tonal clusters, so it probably sounded to her like my fist was just dropping on keys.
“I’m composing. Do you want to go to bed?” She’d either mutter “No” or drift back to sleep without answering. Around 1:30 I helped her up off the couch so she could go to sleep. I kept going. I wasn’t really tired. By 5:30, I had pretty much completed the work. After breakfast this morning, I filled in the last few bits that I was unable to finish before I went to bed.
In honor of my inspiration last night, I grabbed the title from a program note biography of Beethoven: “It Sounds.” I had tentatively titled it “Breathoven” because each chord is played for the duration of one breath, but that looks too much like “Breath Oven” which would give listeners the wrong idea, and besides, other than inspiring me to compose, the work doesn’t really have anything else to do with Ludwig van.
Above is an excerpt from what I guess could be called a rough copy of the autograph manuscript. I still need to tweak the notation–I’ll probably use whole notes with fermatas in place of the note heads. The numbers indicate the amount (in seconds) of silence between each chord, and I’ll probably use measure rests with the numeral written above the rest in place of what I have now.
“Anything Therefore is a Delight”: Questions and Answers; plus, The Wisdom of John Cage
Pam Kragen, the arts editor and writer for the North County Times did a nice feature about the UCSD Toy Piano Festival this year, including a more detailed look at my world premiere on the festival. Anyone interested in the Festival or in my composition, Anything Therefore Is a Delight, may enjoy reading the questions Pam asked in August, and my emailed responses to them. I’ve edited out my blatant plugs for the show.
1. Is this the first time you’ve composed for the festival?
Scott Paulson, the director of the festival, has been asking me for a composition ever since he started the festival 11 years ago. For over a decade I wasn’t interested in composing any more concert music; I told myself if I really wanted to write anything, I’d make the time to do it. About a year ago I started composing again, and decided I would finally write the piece that Scott had requested. Part of my creative problem which resulted in a dry spell was resolved in abandoning my former techniques, and wholeheartedly embracing random procedures, which is one reason I dedicated the piece to Cage. I spent my youth trying to impose myself on the music, but when I let chance operations impose musical materials on me, I discovered the entire composition process was more pleasant. That was something that Cage’s music taught me to do, and I’m very happy with the results.
Next year will be Cage’s centennial, so I’ve dedicated the work to him, in part to celebrate his music, in part to acknowledge him for writing the first concert work for toy piano, and in part out of gratitude for providing me with the key to unlock my creativity after so many years of dormancy.
2. How many years have you been performing there (or will someone else play your piece)?
I may be wrong about this, but I recall performing at the first festival, and have played every year since, except for last year, when family matters required me to leave San Diego. I’ve played movements from the Cage Suite for Toy Piano, which is always fun. One of the highlights of my performance history there was premiering a duet for toy pianos composed by Pea Hicks. Scott also does a concert series at Geisel Library which predates the Toy Piano Festival. It’s the Short Attention Span Series, and I’ve been able to play a wide range of music—popular and classical from all periods—at those concerts.
I’ll play my own work for the Festival next week. Each performance will consist of different movements (there are five total); we’ll ask audience members to select movements, which I hope to shape into the most compelling interpretation I can muster on the spot.
3. Is there any special compositional technique you must use to compose for a toy piano?
From years of playing toy pianos in public, I have a strong understanding of their limitations, and I’ve tried to avoid those. First of all, the tuning from one instrument to the next is always different, so you have to accept that the E-flat you hear on a Yamaha piano will not be the same E-flat a Schoenhut toy piano produces. The toy piano has a limited dynamic range, so extreme or subtle dynamics for the instrument do not translate well. A performer has no control over cutting off a note on the toy piano, unless they reach inside the instrument and damp the metal rod to cut off the sound.
I don’t think harmonies work very well on the instrument. It’s difficult to tell the quality of a chord. If a composer wanted to exploit that, I suppose they could. I chose to write mainly in two-part textures, which I think the instrument negotiates much better than working with chords. My piece takes all of those considerations into account.
There are other ways of playing the instrument (I mentioned reaching inside to stop note), but I limited myself to writing notes played in a traditional manner on the keyboard. Someone wrote a toy piano fanfare which Scott Paulson usually plays each year, in which he lifts the piano up and shakes the whole instrument back and forth, which produces an eerie vibrato. Maybe next year, for the centennial, I’ll play Cage’s Music for Amplified Toy Pianos. It’s one of his graphically notated scores, and calls for pizzicato (plucking the metal rods with the fingers), electronic “noises” (Cage doesn’t specify what those are, so there’s leeway in interpretation), and percussive effects.
4. How many people come out for the festival each year?
Dozens. I’d guess at least a hundred. It’s always full, with people sitting on the stairs and standing in the halls because there aren’t enough chairs to accommodate everyone.
5. Tell me about your piece.
When I was a composition student 30 years ago, many young American classical musicians had no interest in playing modern music, and so I always wrote with the understanding that everything needed to be spelled out for an interpreter. These days young performers have a far greater awareness of contemporary compositional trends, so now I’m interested in giving performers less directions in my music and seeing what they come up with. If you look at Baroque music, usually there’s little more than pitches and rhythms notated. You rarely see marks to indicate phrasing and articulation or dynamics, and often there’s no tempo marking. Nevertheless, performers bring their musical instincts and apply their analytical skills to these works and produce beautiful realizations. I’m striving for the same relationship with performers. I want them to put themselves into the notes, so it will be a genuine collaboration.
Anything Therefore is a Delight is a suite composed of 5 movements. The titles of the suite and the individual movements were taken from John Cage’s first book of essays and anecdotes, Silence. There are no interpretive markings in the music except for a few places where I want the music to breathe a little, or slow down. A performer selects the movements and the order in which they are played. There are correspondences from movement to movement, so it’s important that at least two of the movements are programmed in a performance. I also allow performers to repeat one of more movements, so the overall length will be determined by the performer’s preferences.
As a young composer and listener, I was very impressed with logic and order in music. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve opened myself up to irrationality as an equally compelling force. Debussy; Satie; Cage; John Zorn; Takemitsu; Howard Skempton: these composers wrote (or write) music which resists analysis. How does Debussy take you along in his later works without ever giving you a full tune? Every time you think you’re about to get an honest-to-God melody, he lets it unravel and moves onto something else. Pop ditties interrupt classical textures in Debussy, Satie, and Zorn. Why does one chord follow another in Skempton’s music, or one musical texture follow another in Takemitsu? I can’t tell you, but there’s something magical in how these composers play with your expectations. I’m trying to discover those same kinds of fantastical connections that these composers make, musical choices that appear illogical on paper, but sound perfectly right to your ears.
Video excerpt of me premiering “Anything Therefore is a Delight”
John Cage performing his Suite for Toy Piano
I also gave Pam a bonus anecdote about John Cage:
My senior year at the University of Michigan School of Music, I took a field trip with a small group of composers to hear John Cage perform in Detroit. This was in 1983. After his performance (not really musical—he read one or more of his mesostics about Satie, Joyce, and Thoreau), he fielded questions from the audience. I stood up and asked him, “What advice would you give to a young composer?” He pondered that for at least minute, pacing back and forth on stage with his head down. After what seemed an uncomfortably long time, he stopped, looked up at me, and said, “I would tell him or her to do what they believe in.”
I was disappointed with his response. It seemed so obvious as to be above stating. I remember asking myself, “That’s all he could come up with?”
A decade later, after far too many years of sparring with my peers and navigating and negotiating from one teacher to another, winding up thoroughly confused and creatively exhausted, it dawned on me that Cage had given me the very best advice I had ever received about composing.
An earlier blog post of mine discusses how I chose the title of my toy piano suite and its movements.
Boo!
A little Halloween mischief courtesy of my cat Max and Alban Berg
