MR TIM'S WONDROUS VISION

In the early 1980s I was lucky enough to hang out at Martin Sharp's house and interview Tiny Tim for RAM magazine. This is the piece, exactly as it appeared at the time. Debbie Baer and I did the interview, I wrote it up and editor Anthony O'Grady added his touches later. 

(Photos by Wendy Adnam)

"I knew Jimmy Morrison and Lenny Bruce very closely. In fact Mr. Morrison, before he became a star was working at the Scene. So many young girls were lined up to see an unknown. He was one of the few unknowns that came from California to make it big in New York at the Scene. He came up to me one day and he said 'I have a song for you to do.' It was called People Are Strange and a week later Light My Fire hit the charts and he was a star already." 

That's Mr. Tiny Tim reminiscing about rock 'n' roll performers he'd encountered during his erratic career. Mr. Tim has now just left Australia after a protracted stay which included performances in most states, a movie, and a successful world continuous singing record attempt of two and a quarter hours. The tour was organised by Martin Sharp, well known Australian artist and possibly holder of Award For The World's Most Obssessional Devotion to Tiny Tim. On the face of it, Sharp's dedication (he owns and plays almost continuously, for instance, cassettes of every show Tiny did in Oz) may seem a waste of time. Tiny Tim, in the general media today, is often treated as The Oddity Who Survived. With the almost an air of surprise that this permanent adult child who scored international fame as the flower power manchild of the hippie sixties is still around today after bombing out near totally through most of the seventies. 

Sharp though sees Tiny's present status as a genuine talent emerging again after years of popularity neglect. Sharp says Tiny is the link between all forms of music both past and present. That his talent encompasses and links the musical eras of our great grandparents unto the tastes of small children today. 

And certainly the man who shrieked his version of Tip Toe Through The Tulips, The Good Ship Lollipop and Great Balls of Fire has more to offer than oddity interest. His career has spanned the forties, fifties, sixties and seventies, and he's survived when most others haven't. 

Mr. Tim says that his age is closer to fifty than forty but he'll always be sixteen. He claims that meeting youth is what keeps him youthful in attitude and outlook. Consequently the thought that RAM WAS interested in interviewing him was terribly exciting to him because "it's youth again". These days he's grossly overweight but extraordinarily clear skined and talkative. During two hours at Mr. Sharp's he ranged over morals, his career, his ex-wife Miss Vicki (they were married in front of an estimated 40 million teev viewers on The Johnny Carson Show in the U.S., and divorced in private soon afterwards), Olivia Newton-John, Australia, and rock 'n' roll. Miss Debbie and Mr. Stuart just sat and listened. It took him forty five minutes to complete his reply to Standard Question I: "Tell us about your career." 

During the forties Mr. Tim performed under various names like Judith K. Foxglove and Larry Love. The peculiar high pitched voice resulted from a frustration because "in the late forties I had a normal singing voice and couldn't get nowhere. People like it. Friends liked it but when it came to sing I sounded just like anybody else. By the early fifties I couldn't get nowhere." The 'high type of feeling of the voice' came into his soul after he'd fallen to his knees in despair one night and prayed to Jesus Christ. 

"It didn't matter if people laughed as long as they listened and that's what they did. The dangerous part was the daytime — just like any vampire. I lived in a middle class area in New York and when I walked the streets in '55 they all said 'wow, what's happening to this world?" "In 1964, I started having a following. I went to the first party for Mick Jagger in 1964 at Bob Crew's house .. . who did Walk Like A Man, Big Girls Don't Cry. . . and I sang Time Is On My Side in the high voice." At this point Tiny demonstrates in a broken high voice. (Singing for two and a half hours the night before at Luna Park had wrought temporary havoc on his vocal chords.) 

The point around which Tiny Tim's publicity (masterminded by Jeff Wald who now masterminds Helen Reddy and Chicago) resolved, was whether the singer was soooooo good 'cos he was soooooo bad, or whether he had genuine magic. Were the audience laughing because T. T. was delightful, or were they laughing at a freak, it didn't matter while the Big Bucks were coming in. Sadly precious few of them seemed to end up in Tiny's pocket. His present day supporters like Martin Sharp hold there is no question as to his musical importance, but certainly in his first days of fame he was most famous for being the homely, long haired. cosmetic wearing, bath-five-times-a-day freak the superstars liked to meet. For instance there's the saga of Tiny Tim's summit meeting with Bob Dylan.

As Tiny tells it "he invited me to Woodstock. He thought I was a scholar because, as I said, I had the underground following for years. They took me to Albert Grossman's house and then Albert Grossman put me in another car at night and took me to his place. Camouflage almost. I met him at eleven o'clock at night in February of '67. He said 'Hello Mr. Tim' and I said 'Hello Mr. Dylan'. I came inside with my cosmetics and got a room for the night. 

"Then I told him that he was to the teenagers in the folk field what Rudy Vallee was in 1929. He said 'Mr. Tim tell me about Mr. Vallee'. I took my ukelele out and I started doing a few of Mr. Vallee's numbers."

Tiny explained that after the world record attempt the previous night his voice isn't up to scratch but he tried anyway to recreate his singing on that night. First off it was Mr. Vallee's "For I'm just a vagabond lover/In search of a sweetheart it seems". Then another tune of Rudy's. "And then said, 'Mr. Dylan. supposing he was right here in your time how would he be like singing Like A Rolling Stone?' and I started doing "How does it feel to be on your own/ A complete unknown/ Like a Rolling Stone." Now Mr. Dylan heard that voice of Vallee into the period of the sixties and his eyes opened up. And then I said, 'suppose we were living in Mr. Vallee's time here's how I feel you'd be doing his theme song.' He then imitated the legendary Dylan 'cow caught in a barbed wire fence' moan perfectly singing "Your time is my time/we just seem to syncronise, and sympathise, we're harmonised ....

"All Mr. Dylan had to say was "would you like a banana before I go to bed?" Next up was the story of Mr. Tim's meeting with Mr. Harrison ... George that is if you're not up on this Mr. business. The personal meeting with Mr. Harrison was in '68 and he called Tiny to his apartment in Manhattan. Tiny "knocked on the door and four people came out of the closet. I thought it was the Beatles but it was three of his friends. He was there with Jane Asher (hmmm is this Beatle scandal? Wasn't Mr. Harrison supposedly enstrangled with Miss Boyd?). As soon as I walked in I got a little tight because it's different when you meet a person than when you think about it. I was realising that I was shaking hands with the whole industry of rock at that moment.

Then I told him, 'Mr. Harrison, back in '66 when I was with the underground in California I sang Nowhere Man to a Miss Jill who I was crazy over at the time. She was 18 years old." In the high voice he tears into "He's a real nowhere man, living in a nowhereland, making all his nowhere plans for nobody." 

"Then Mr. Harrison took out the tape recorder. He said 'I want you to say Merry Christmas To The Beatles 1968 and go right into that song' which I did. That record went out to all his Beatle fans. Millions of Beatle fans. The private Beatle record of that year, that's worth at least 75 dollars and up today." 

Whilst in Sydney Tiny had recorded an extended version of the Bee Gees' Staying Alive with a bunch of EMI session musicians which Mr. Sharp has plans for releasing. He seemed relatively confident that it would bring him to the attention of a youth audience once again. Ultimately you have to admire Tiny Tim. For thirty years he's been entertaining and it hasn't made any difference to what he dos whether the reaction has been indulgent laughter, sincere appreciation, mockery or ridicule. He's kept on doing it with the same child-like whole-heartedness that shows he wants to entertain, that he wants to be ill the public eye, that he is driven by a love for old songs and a belief in their apropriatness today. 

(Album Tiny signed for my Mother)

In doing what he wants to do, regardless of the consequences, this diminuitive, polite, overweight man measures up as one of the great surviving musical outlaws. 

At the same time, you can't help feeling a strange compassion for him. There's an air of sadness about him, an ageing manchild whose dreams bravely fly in the face of harsher realities.

The entertainment business has this uncanny knack of normalising rebels and freaks, even if the process is as obvious as turning them into wealthy people who buy all the things rich people are supposed to own, and jet set with similarly wealthy cliques. 

But Tiny Tim has never quite been assimilated. He's accepted because he's weird and you know he's always going to be that way. He lives physically in this world but his conceptions of reality are very different from yours and mine. 

But still there are times the different worlds collide. When you can agree with Martin Sharp that Tiny Tim is the most remarkable performer in the world today. Simply because he refuses to give up his dreams. 

By: Mr. Coupe, Ms Baer & Mr. Anthony