Here is my retyped transcription of the liner notes from the back of the LP. I hope they are fun for you too:
High Anxiety notes transcription
This record constitutes a celebration and a chronicle … a celebration of the creative collaboration of two of America’s finest talents: comic filmmaker Mel Brooks and screen composer John Morris -- and a chronicle of the history of their inspired achievement. Beyond that, the disc’s an unmitigated joy.
Mel and John had already known each other for some years (they’d first met in 1956 when they were both brought on to lend their special expertises to the salvaging of a quickly expiring Broadway show) when one morning in 1967 John received a curious phone call. “It was Mel,” recalls Morris, “and he said, ‘I’ve just written a song called “Springtime for Hitler.” I want to use it in this picture I’m preparing, The Producers, and I want you to do the dance arrangement.’ ‘Springtime for Hitler,’ right? Well, I’ve learned one thing about Mel; you’ve got to trust him. So I said okay. He brought over this song, I read the lyrics, and I said, ‘Mel, I’m gonna do this for you, but it will either be a classic -- a classic picture and a classic number -- or we will both be exiled from the country and never allowed to work again.’ Because it was right on the edge of disaster, that idea.”
Ten years have now passed, and if “Right on the Edge of Disaster” is a place Mel and John have continued to mine, classics are the bounty they continue to extract. Far from constituting grounds for exclusion, “Springtime for Hitler” has established itself as a standard; you’ll even pick it out occasionally as the Muzak wafting through elevator walls. In the film The Producers (1968), “Springtime for Hitler” was the title song of the demented musical on whose failure Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder so confidently banked and schemed. Its unexpected success landed the felonious pair in jail. But they could lock them up, throw away the key, hearts in love they’d always be. “Prisoners of Love” was the title song of the musical with which our delicious heroes were already plotting their comeback as the curtain fell.
John Morris received his musical training at the Juilliard School of Music in New York. “I thought I wanted to be a concert pianist,” he recalls. “I didn’t like practicing, and that should have been a clue that I was wrong. I hated the repetition. But then I began to do some composing and arranging on Broadway and I soon realized that I had found my true vocation.”
Mel came to the partnership, as most of his fans know, by way of television writing, most notoriously as the most crazed of Sid Caesar’s band of merry madmen. Less well known, however, is the fact that Mel first forged into show business as a drummer, snaring out summers in the Catskills. When he was still a wee maniac, back in his Brooklyn neighborhood of Brighton Beach, young Mel became fascinated with the rat-tat-tat drifting out from one of the windows in the neighborhood. Transfixed, he pressed his face to the window until, finally, the young drummer noticed the urchin and let him in. That teenage drummer was Buddy Rich and Mel was one of his first worshippers.
For Brooks, the process of creating a film is entirely one of orchestration; it is almost as if the audience itself is now the instrument Brooks seeks to play, and he is a craftsman of response. Mel displays an uncanny sense not only only of what will make an audience laugh, but in what way it will make them laugh, how long the laughter will be, and what kind of breathing space it will require. His directing metaphors are almost always musical; he inserts rests, changes keys.
Given such an intensely musical sense of the craft of comedy, it is in turn not surprising to learn that Mel plays particular attention to the music in his films. That fact was once again made evident in the superb collaboration of the director and his composer on their next film, The Twelve Chairs, Mel’s 1970 adaptation of the Ilf and Petrov novel. Ordinarily Mel contrives both the melody and the lyrics of his songs, leaving the orchestration to Morris. The title song here proved an exception: “I heard a Hungarian folk song one afternoon,” recalls Mel, “and I wrote ‘Hope for the Best, Expect the Worst’ based on it. Later, I found out that Brahms also based a piece on the very same tune. Of course, I went somewhere else with it, probably the wrong place -- Brahms probably went to the right place. But anyway, one day this guy comes up to me and accuses me of plagiarizing Brahms. And I said, ‘No, no, not true. Brahms and I both stole from some poor Hungarian peasant.’ I guess we both had good musical taste. My favorite lyric in that is ‘Hope for the best, expect the worst; you could be Tolstoy or Fanny Hurst, no way of knowing, no way of showing; hope for the best, expect the worst.’ … John did some wonderful things with that, arranged it for a huge beautiful orchestra, just great.” In addition to the whimsical arrangements, The Twelve Chairs provided Morris with an occasion to display his extraordinary range as a composer of sensitive and sometimes haunting lyricism. Sample on this recording, for example, the delicately nostalgic “Vorobyaninov’s Theme,.”
Four years later, Brooks and Morris were back in action with their resounding triumph, Blazing Saddles. Credit Morris with the music on the title song (“He just came up with such a good idea I had to give up,” concedes Brooks). The preposterous whip scores the first laugh at every screening. The lyrics, belted out by Frankie Lane, are pure Brooks: They sound like they’re making sense, but then you listen: “He made his blazing saddle a torch to light the way.” (wha?) The musical highlight of the film, however, was reserved for the famous scene in the saloon and its centerpiece, “I’m Tired.” An exquisitely fashioned melody juxtaposed to a devastingly lascivious lyric, all housed in John Morris’s splendidly appropriate 1920s Berlinische arrangement.
Also included from Blazing Saddles is the almost unknown but profoundly inventive Brooksian insanity, “The French Mistake.” It occurs right after the penultimate obligatory western good-guy, bad-guy fight as the cowboys of Blazing Saddles mix it up with a series of movie sets as they crash through to a happy ending.
“Mel understands music,” comments Morris. “He’s conversant with it and it doesn’t frighten him. In theater and film, music is like a Chinese menu. If you know all the dishes, you know what to order, and if you don’t, it’s hopeless. I can always tell. I ask a director, ‘What do you want the music to do here?’ It’s all information, and if they’re conversant with it, they know what to say -- because I can set up anything. And there are some very famous directors who couldn’t begin to answer that. Mel always nails it.”
Morris summons the example of Young Frankenstein, their next film (late 1974). “I said to Mel, ‘What do you want from me?’ He said, ‘Write a beautiful middle European lullaby.’ And I said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Because it’s the monster’s past.’ And I said, ‘Perfect.’ But you see what it did for that picture: To just write spooky cues would have been entirely different. Anyone could have done it. But giving it that emotional underlayer was just brilliant. And it freed me, because I didn’t have to worry about writing spooky cues. I could go after the relationships, and it warmed up the whole movie. Mel knows all that stuff, and he’s absolutely clear.” The resultant monster’s theme is one of the finest achievements of Morris’s career. It starts out like a parody of romanticism but quickly transcends that narrow reading, staking out an integrity of its own. Suddenly you realize the music is lovely on its own terms. The parody and the purity play off against each other in a fetching counterpoint. The other musical triumph of that picture occurs when, before a boisterous music hall audience, Gene Wilder unveils his daemonic creation, the hulking monster played by Peter Boyle, all decked out in tux and top hat for a stylishly snappy rendition of that old Astaire and Rogers favorite, “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” Of course, the lyrics in this new context seem utterly transformed -- “Dressed up like a million dollar trouper, trying mighty hard to look like Gary Cooper” -- and Boyle’s bloodcurdling refrain has a poignant charm all its own.
Brooks and Morris next set themselves an extremely demanding task in their collaboration on Silent Movie (1976). They were trying to resurrect an old genre without falling back on any of its clich�s. “Silent Movie was especially challenging,” recalls Morris, “because since there was no dialogue in the film, the music became the rhythm of the picture. There was no verbal rhythm to play against or into. The music had to be handled extremely carefully. I guess my only rule with that picture was that I didn’t want to hear a single note of that inevitable silent movie piano in the score. So it’s all big orchestra in playful combinations.” Big orchestra in a big score; indeed, more original music was composed for Silent Movie than for any other film in history. John’s exuberant score complemented the almost na�ve good cheer and pure hearts of Mel’s protagonists: three unstoppable innocents in pursuit of a vision and the box-office stars with which to populate it. Morris’s music is an essay in deft timing and vivid clarity. Just listen to the frolicking upbeat of the luminous “Silent Movie March” or the slapdash slapstick from the encounter “At Burt Reynolds’ House” (with its narcissistic Hollywood theme) and the whole film will recompose itself before your eyes.
And now comes their latest smash, High Anxiety (1978). Mel’s tribute to Alfred Hitchcock and therefore, axiomatically, John’s tribute to Bernard Hermann, Mikl�s R�zsa, and the other screen composers in Hitchcock’s repertory. “The audience,” Morris assures, “will definitely recognize the terrain, the ambience.” The song, “High Anxiety,” like most of the songs on this album, is entirely Mel’s. That is, after he concocted the lyrics, he huddled with a tape recorder for several hours until he had spawned the appropriate melody. As Mel recalls, “I knew right from the start it was going to be Nelson Riddle-Sinatraesque, just that title -- ‘High Anxiety’ -- and I also realized right away that it had to go ‘An-Xiety,’ that ‘Xiety’ was the kicker. The rest was just following through.” Mel then gave the tape to Morris who transcribed the music and arranged orchestration. It is yet another testimony to Morris’s wizardry to gauge the transformation of Mel’s simple melody into the full-blown dynamics of the “High Anxiety Theme.” Mel is especially proud of this song because it is the first one he himself sings. His irrepressible voice has intruded in earlier songs (“Don’t be stupid, be a schmarty, come and join the Nazi Party,” in The Producers) but here, for the first time, in one of the most startling and entertaining moments of the film, Mel Brooks as Professor Richard H Thorndyke is suddenly electrifying the patrons at a cocktail lounge with his dazzling rendition of the theme song. “I’ve always been a closet singer,” Mel confesses. “With this film I just come out of the shower.”
This record therefore bears hearty witness to the remarkable contribution of two of America’s finest. Brooks is already quite famous; with this album, Morris will be receiving some well-deserved and long overdue attention. “John is a master of music,” exults Mel. “There’s not one piece of music I can refer to that he doesn’t know. Berlin, Porter, Gershwin, Bartok, Berlioz -- he just loves music. He’s a very bright man, and his brilliance and his kindness do not stop with his specialty. So I like to bring John in from the very start of each film and keep referring back to him at every stage.” John for his part asserts, “There is no doubt in my mind that more than anything else, Mel would have liked to be a composer.” And indeed, throughout the course of his film music, Mel has always found a way of being entirely deranged and utterly composed, both at the same time.
Mark
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