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Friday, February 19th, 2021
| Time | Event |
| 9:00a | Paul Simon Deconstructs “Mrs. Robinson” (1970)
There’s nothing like having a deadline. When Simon and Garfunkel were called on by director Mike Nichols to provide music for his 1967 comedy The Graduate, the film was already being edited, and the duo were working on the movie studio clock. To hear Simon tell it in this interview with Dick Cavett (from the same interview we featured earlier this week), it was that crunch time that produced one of their best songs, and their biggest hit, “Mrs. Robinson.” In fact, the song stitched together two unrelated sketches. The first was the guitar fill that starts the song, which was Simon just riffing over a chase scene. “But it wasn’t working,” he says. The other, the chorus, was a fragment: “And here’s to you Mrs. Robinson, Jesus loves you more than you will know.” “For no particular reason, the words just came into my head,” Simon tells Cavett. The next line mentioned Mrs. Roosevelt, and who knows where Simon might have gone with the song if Mike Nichols hadn’t told him to ditch anything political and keep with just the one character. If you have the soundtrack to The Graduate, you’ll notice that the version of “Mrs. Robinson” only has scat singing in the verses, just making it up as they went along. There was no time to flesh out the track, and it fit in the movie better than any of the songs Mike Nichols had licensed already from the duo. It would be one of many prescient choices for the classic comedy, including casting the unknown Jewish 30-year-old Dustin Hoffman for the main role instead of the very white choices the studio was trying to push on the director.
It was only three months after the film came out that Simon and Garfunkel recorded the full version with the lyrics in the verses. It became their second number one single in 1968 and was the first rock song to win a Grammy for Record of the Year. But true to the original soundtrack version, it keeps its opening verse word-free. And it’s an odd song. Simon describes the writing as stream of consciousness. Though Mrs. Robinson is indeed a character in the film, played by Anne Bancroft, the lyrics rarely reference the film, except for “It’s a little secret just the Robinson’s affair/Most of all you’ve got to hide it from the kids.” (And even here Simon seems to be singing about hiding prescription drugs). Instead Simon creates an elliptical narrative for Mrs. Robinson, placing her at the center of a story set…at a sanitarium, perhaps? The story jumps all around, but Mrs. Robinson remains confused, out of sorts, suffering the alienation of the suburban wife, nostalgic for an imaginary past. It’s where Joe DiMaggio comes in, called out like a savior (“a nation turns its lonely eyes to you”) when the “Jesus loves you” exhortations don’t work. Later, Simon would explain the DiMaggio reference as, “I thought of him as an American hero and that genuine heroes were in short supply.” (Simon was more of a Mickey Mantle fan, but DiMaggio had better syllables). The good thing about writing in this stream of consciousness, Simon tells Cavett, is “You find out what was in your mind was relevant even though at the time it didn’t seem so.” The song sounds chipper, but those lyrics are the story of a society about to come apart, which it would do several months later in 1968. Like The Graduate, with its satire about suburbia, loosening morals, hypocrisy, and “plastics” both as a career choice and a way of describing society, the song is a revelation of a world to come. Related Content: Art Garfunkel Lists 1195 Books He Read Over 45 Years, Plus His 157 Favorites (Many Free) Paul Simon Tells the Story of How He Wrote “Bridge Over Troubled Water” (1970) Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here. Paul Simon Deconstructs “Mrs. Robinson” (1970) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.  |
| 12:00p | Witness the Birth of Kermit the Frog in Jim Henson’s Live TV Show, Sam and Friends (1955)
Long before “green” became synonymous with eco-friendly products and production, an 18-year-old Jim Henson created a puppet who would go on to become the color’s most celebrated face from his mother’s cast-off green felt coat and a single ping pong ball. Kermit debuted in black and white in the spring of 1955 as an ensemble member of Sam and Friends, a live television show comprised of five-minute episodes that the talented Henson had been tapped to write and perform, following some earlier success as a teen puppeteer. Airing on the Washington DC-area NBC affiliate between the evening news and The Tonight Show, Sam and Friends was an immediate hit with viewers, even if they ranked Kermit, originally more lizard than frog, fourth in terms of popularity. (Top spot went to a skull puppet named Yorick.) Watching the surviving clips of Sam and Friends, it’s easy to catch glimpses of where both Kermit and Henson were headed.
While Henson voiced Sam and all of his puppet friends, Kermit wound up sounding the closest to Henson himself. Kermit’s signature face-crumpling reactions were by design. Whereas other puppets of the period, like the titular Sam, had stiff heads with the occasional moving jaw, Kermit’s was as soft as a footless sock, allowing for far greater expressiveness.
Henson honed Kermit’s expressions by placing live feed monitors on the floor so he and his puppeteer bride-to-be Jane, could see the puppets from the audience perspective. Unlike previously televised puppet performances, which preserved the existing prosceniums of the theaters to which the players had always been confined, Henson considered the TV set frame enough. Liberating the puppets thusly gave more of a sketch comedy feel to the proceedings, something that would carry over to Sesame Street and later, The Muppet Show.
By the 12th episode, Kermit has found a niche as wry straight man for wackier characters like jazz aficionado Harry the Hipster who introduced an element of musical notation to the animated letters and numbers that would become a Sesame Street staple.
And surely we’re not the only ones who think the Muppets’ recent appearance in a Super Bowl ad pales in comparison to Kermit and Harry’s live commercial for Sam and Friends’ sponsor, a regional brand of bacon and lunch meat.
Sam and Friends ran from 1955 to 1961, but Kermit’s first performance on The Tonight Show in 1956, lip syncing to Rosemary Clooney’s recording of “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Your Face” and mugging in a blonde braided wig, hinted that he and Henson would soon outgrow the local television pond.
Related Content: Jim Henson Creates an Experimental Animation Explaining How We Get Ideas (1966) The Creative Life of Jim Henson Explored in a Six-Part Documentary Series Watch The Surreal 1960s Films and Commercials of Jim Henson Jim Henson Teaches You How to Make Puppets in Vintage Primer From 1969 Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine, current issue #63. Follow her @AyunHalliday. Witness the Birth of Kermit the Frog in Jim Henson’s Live TV Show, Sam and Friends (1955) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
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