Lately, I’ve been making the rounds with a novelty song called “The Wreck of the Chicken Piccata”. The fact that I’m even playing it, and that it’s going over well, is a wonderful illustration of the principle that you can’t be your own critic. Here’s the story.
My good friend Jon Waterman is working on a master’s degree in, well, I suppose you can call it ethnomusicology. He’s studying the history of disaster songs. It’s actually amazingly interesting – there are all sorts of issues about authenticity and the social function of music which pop up, and I’ve enjoyed my conversations with him about it (mostly because I don’t have to write the thesis). As part of his program, Jon is supposed to do a performance of some kind, and he had the clever idea of splitting it up into a concert and a private workshop, in which a bunch of his friends get together and share disaster songs that they’ve written.
So Jon held this workshop, and, of course, I was invited. Now, Jon is a lovely man, and I think the world of him, but let’s face it: I’m a professional smartass, and the chances of my taking this writing assignment seriously were just about zero. So I asked myself: how could I best subvert the intentions of this exercise and get a laugh at the same time? And the answer was, naturally, to write a disaster song in which nothing particularly bad happens.
The title came first. I suppose I’d heard some Gordon Lightfoot in the weeks previous, and the fact that “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” was one of the only disaster songs in history to crack the Billboard Top 100 probably factored into my choice of title. Mind you, I had no idea what the song was going to be about; the fact that the title was worth a laugh was priceless to me.
At one point, I toyed with the idea of not actually writing the song. Anyone who’s heard me more than once can easily imagine what “The Wreck of the Chicken Piccata” would be about, and I fantasized about simply embarking on a shared visualization with the audience: let’s just stipulate that I wrote a song called “The Wreck of the Chicken Piccata”, and that you thought it was funny, and let’s move on. In the end, I decided that this was a bit too “meta” even for me, and got to work.
The song, of course, is in a minor key (it’s a disaster song, after all), with a very dramatic chorus that starts:
They were strong men
But they won’t dine again
You get the idea. (You can read all the lyrics on my Web site.) The whole song is completely over the top, and I was pretty pleased with the outcome.
So my plan was to go to Jon’s workshop, play the song, get a laugh, and put it away. And I would have gotten away with it, if it weren’t for those darn kids – just kidding, it was actually my pal Steve Rapson who thwarted my plans. After I played the song, he said, essentially, “You have to perform that song all the time“. I was completely thrown by this – the song was utterly preposterous, as I’ve said, and I don’t do a lot of utterly preposterous material. But Steve has given me some priceless performing advice through the years (more on that some other time), so I figured, what the heck.
So far, I’ve done this song at my last three gigs running. The first time I could barely keep a straight face. It’s by far the biggest laugh I get, and I’ve realized that I can turn it into a singalong, which makes it even funnier. I never, ever would have imagined, by myself, that this song was even worth playing in public, much less that it would be a highlight of my set. This is why you can’t work alone: you don’t necessarily hear what the world hears, and you can’t necessarily judge what’s going to work and what won’t. And sometimes you need a little push to be a bit more outrageous than you’d be on your own. So, thanks to Steve for keeping this little gem in the limelight.