billbeuttler.com

By Bill Beuttler (Boston Globe, January 16, 2004)

Dave Frishberg laughs when reflecting on how his tune "Peel Me a Grape" gave him a skewed perception of the songwriting business 40-odd years ago.

He hadn't yet turned 30, and was working primarily playing piano in jazz combos led by big names such as Carmen McRae and Ben Webster, when he turned in "Grape" and a handful of others to the legendary Frank Loesser ("Guys and Dolls," "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying"), hoping to get them published.

"I got a record almost immediately out of it," Frishberg, now 70, recalls via phone from his home in Portland, Ore. "Couple of records, maybe four or five. None of them big-time records, but I thought, `This is gonna be easy. Bring a song in and they get records for you.'

"Well," he says, "nothing else happened for maybe a decade."

The last laugh, certainly, has been Frishberg's. He survived that dry spell and went on to become one of the finest -- and funniest -- songwriters in existence. A four-time Grammy nominee and an outstanding pianist, Frishberg, who performs this weekend at Newton's Jewish Theatre of New England, also developed into a highly effective interpreter of his own songs.

Daniel Okrent, author and public editor of The New York Times, is among Frishberg's most fervent admirers, having first plugged his work in a jazz column for Esquire in 1989 and more recently contributing liner notes for Frishberg's 2003 CD, "Do You Miss New York?"

"For the songs that Dave performs, and the sort of slightly eyebrow-raised, ironic, talking a little bit out of the side of your mouth kind of humor that he has, the voice is perfect," Okrent says.

Singing is something that came along late for Frishberg, who grew up in St. Paul wanting to be a sideman. His loves as a teenager were bebop, baseball, and Benchley. Robert Benchley, that is, ranked by Frishberg, along with James Thurber and S.J. Perelman, as favorites from "the golden age of American humorous writing."

Frishberg graduated from the University of Minnesota with a degree in journalism (having taken as many music electives as possible), then served two years as a public affairs officer with the Air Force in Salt Lake City.

In Utah, Frishberg began writing songs, moonlighting for a company that produced radio jingles for local businesses. After leaving the Air Force, he moved to New York in 1957 and worked in advertising for about a year.

"I was trying to make up my mind whether I should play it safe on Madison Avenue or take a chance and go in the music business," he recalls. "You know, these are the kind of values that were instilled in me by my family. It was a big decision for me to forget about the security of a job."

Although there were droughts in songwriting income, Frishberg never had trouble getting work as a pianist. After his run with Webster, he had a decade-long association with a combo led by tenor saxophonists Al Cohn and Zoot Sims, performed regularly under his own name at small clubs, and generally had all the sideman work he could handle. "It was," he says, "my big chance to play with all the jazz musicians I ever dreamed of playing with."

In 1971, Frishberg moved to Los Angeles to write songs for television -- first for a short-lived comedy show featuring Gene Kelly and a bit later for the Saturday morning children's cartoon "Schoolhouse Rock." (His work included "I'm Just a Bill," which describes how legislation makes its way through Congress.) Fifteen years later he relocated to Portland, seeking someplace homier than L.A. to raise his children.

It was in L.A. that he began singing publicly. He was playing in his friend Jack Sheldon's band, and Sheldon got in the habit of announcing at some point each night, "Now Dave Frishberg is going to sing one of his songs."

"I became part of the act," says Frishberg. "Then I was doing two or three songs a set with Jack, and people were liking it. That's what shocked me. And what also surprised me is how much I was liking it. I just really enjoyed it. I found that I could actually communicate with people by singing."

When writing songs, Frishberg usually starts off with a title in mind, then adds the music and lyrics later with his witty, nostalgia-steeped sensibility. He carried the phrase "Blizzard of Lies" around in his head for years, he says, before he actually made himself sit down and write his compendium of frequently heard fibs. ("It's just a standard form, tomorrow without fail/ Pleased to meet you, thanks a lot, your check is in the mail.")

He gets his ideas from all over. "My Attorney Bernie" was written for a Twin Cities pal celebrating an anniversary at a law firm. "Sweet Kentucky Ham" is ostensibly about "just a hypothetical guy out on the road." But Frishberg says there's a bit more to it than that. "I was deeply in love at the time," he explains, "and decided to write about that, as if I were out on the road and missing something. But I didn't want to come right out and say what it was. I preferred to use a metaphor of `sweet Kentucky ham.' "

A reverence for old-time baseball led to his classic odes to ballplayers' names, "Van Lingle Mungo" and "Dodger Blue," among others. Frishberg knows Boston is a big baseball town and says he'll probably perform his baseball medley -- which includes "Matty" (for pitching great Christy Mathewson) and "The Dear Departed Past." He'll also be singing songs that people haven't heard. "I'll be doing my new [Johnny] Mandel song, `Little Did I Dream,' " he says.

The title fits Frishberg's modest views of his accomplishments. "I never took myself seriously as a singer," he says. Because of that, the laughs keep coming.

(Dave Frishberg will be at the Jewish Theatre of New England, 333 Nahanton St., Newton Center, tomorrow at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are $26 ($24 for seniors and students). For more information, call 617-965-5226.)

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© Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
© Bill Beuttler