Joel
Grey talks about his father,
By
Geo. Stewart
“Bartender
why you holler?
Oh,
I owe you 16 dollar!
Turn
on the water in the sink.
Everybody
have a drink!’
-
Jones Polka
The
Yiddish Spike Jones, that’s what many consider him. And like Spike, Mickey Katz
was a master of his instrument. Just as Spike could play the drums in the best
of the big bands, Mickey Katz was a much sought-after virtuoso on the
clarinet. He was born on June 15, 1909,
and had a long career that started in amateur nights when he was 12 and lasted
for the next sixty-some years.
In
January 1992, I had the occasion to talk with his son, his son being the
multi-talented Joel Grey. Born Joel Katz on April 11, 1932 in Cleveland, Ohio,
Grey has had a long and interesting career in the theater, movies and Tv. He is
probably best known for the role of the Master of Ceremonies in the Broadway
musical Cabaret for which he won the
Tony Award in 1966. Additional Broadway credits include Come Blow Your Horn (1961),
Stop the World - I Want to Get Off (1962), Half a Sixpence (1965),
Goodtime Charley (1975), The Grand
Tour (1979), Chicago (1996), and
most recently, in the hit, Wicked
(2003), a deconstruction of the MGM film version of “The Wizard of Oz”. Joel’s other notable performances included
George M. Cohan in George M! (1970
and 1992), and as Joey Evans in a 1983 revival of Pal Joey (1983).
In
1972, Bob Fosse captured Grey’s definitive interpretation of the role of the
Master of Ceremonies in his film version of Cabaret. And was once again
Grey was recognized for the brilliance of his interpretation when he received
an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. His victory was part of a Cabaret
near-sweep, which saw Liza Minnelli win Best Actress and Bob Fosse win as Best
Director and Grey beat front-runner Al Pacino for Best Supporting Actor,
though, the film itself lost the Best Picture Oscar to Francis Ford Coppola’s The
Godfather. Grey was a frequent
panelist on the 1968 revival of the TV game show What's My Line? In 2000,
Grey essayed the role of Oldrich Novy in the film Dancer in the Dark and
had recurring roles on both Buffy the Vampire Slayer (2001) and Alias (2005). The final episode of Dallas found him playing a demon. Grey's talents as a photographer are the
equal of his dramatic skills and he is the father of actress Jennifer Grey,
best known, perhaps, for her performance in Dirty
Dancing.
All
those achievements could make for a very interesting interview, but it was
about his father for which we were scheduled to talk. What attracted Mickey Katz to Spike Jones were probably two
things, his swinging clarinet playing and his amazing ability at
"glugging,” a vocal sound used in such City Slicker classics as “Holiday
for Strings” and "Cocktails for Two" (Spike was a pretty mean
“glugger” himself and it seems this talent has been passed on from performer to
performer as part of their oral tradition.)
Katz
learned to play on a used clarinet when he was just a kid of 11. Soon he was
playing amateur nights, winning first prize once for his energetic take on 'St.
Louis Blues.' After leaving high school he played at a local Chinese
restaurant, which broadcasted their performances over the local radio station.
At the age of 17 he joined up with bandleader Phil Spitalny before forming his
own comedy band, Mickey Katz and his Komedy Kittens. He spend most of World war
Two entertaining the troupes in the USO and right after he was hired by
pistol-packing bandleader Spike Jones to replace Carl Grayson, whose alcoholism
was making him unreliable.
He
only stayed with the Slickers for about a year and a half, quitting because the
touring was too grueling and Spike too difficult. Katz can be heard to full
effect on many Spike Jones classics, including "Laura" and "Love
in Bloom," but he was best represented by his one and only composition for
the band, a great B Side called, "The Jones Polka." Once again out on
his own, he began recording parodies of popular tunes by interoperating into
them in a ebullient klezmer sound and a mix of Goyum puns and Yiddish
non-secretors. Over the next 15 years he would record sixteen 10-inch and 12-inch albums nearly a 100
singles with such titles as “Duvid Crockett, Borsch Riders in the Sky, Herring
Boats are Coming” and “Shell be Coming ’Round the Katzkills.” This mix was so
popular that he began touring with his own variety show. Only Allan Sherman
would eclipse Katz at his own game over a decade later by making his Yiddish
parodies even more accessible to non-Jewish communities.
Mickey
Katz’s Klezmer style of clarinet
playing is unmistakable, and no matter how silly the song, you could always
count on a beautiful solo from Katz before the three minutes were up. Katz and
his group can be seen, ever so briefly in the movie Thoroughly Modern
Millie, where they accompany Julie Andrews as she sings at a Jewish
wedding. In 1977, Katz told the story of his life in his autobiography called Papa
Play for Me, still available in paperback from Wesleyan University Press
and essential for anyone interested in his history. Eight years later he died
of Kidney failure in Los Angeles at the age of 75 . Though his clarinet was
stilled, his music continued to live on, culminating in 1993 when jazz musician
Don Byron recorded a tribute CD to Mickey Katz entitled straightforward enough,
“Don Byron Plays The Music of Mickey Katz.”
GEO:
Mickey Katz was born in Cleveland on June 15, 1909.
JOEL GREY: It was a very rich mix in Cleveland at that time.
His parents had come over from Russia. His mother was a would-be actress and
his father was a tailor and he was one of four children. When my dad was about
twelve or thirteen he began playing clarinet and saxophone professionally. It
was during the depression and he was the only one in the family who made good
money. It kept them going.
>GEO: During the Second World War, Mickey Katz joined the
USO and accompanied Betty Hutton on her show.
GREY: That’s true.
>GEO: After the war, in 1947, he joined up with Spike
Jones and the City Slickers, starting out at $175 a week. Not only was he
glugging and playing the clarinet, he conducted the orchestra when Spike was
off stage.
GREY: Spike Jones had really excellent players. You had to
play really well to play that badly. He
was hired to play clarinet and he happened to also be a good glugger. So he
substituted on “Cocktails for Two.”
>GEO: Rumor has it you’ve inherited this talent.
GREY: Yes, I can glug with the best of them. It was only a
couple of years that he was with Spike. And then one day at a recording session
with Spike he was lying on the floor singing a parody of “Teco, Teco” or “Home
often Range” and someone in the control room had the mic open and started
laughing, which was a little odd because he was not Jewish and didn’t
understand it but he still thought it was hilarious. And the next thing you
know dad had a recording date and a contract with RCA Victor.
>GEO: I think one could argue that your father was to
klezmer music what Spike Jones was to popular music.
Grey: That’s on the money. He had his own novelty band
Mickey Katz and his Krazy Kittens around Cleveland before the war and after, in
1946, he went with Spike Jones.
>GEO: How many albums did your father put out over the
years?
GREY: Ten or twelve, I think, not counting the serious
musical albums, but of the essential parody albums there are about ten of them.
>GEO: It’s amazing how tight Spike Jones’ band and your
father’s band were, considering they were just parodying popular songs. They
never were playing sloppily and your father’s clarinet solos are always just
gorgeous.
GREY: Yes and he’s had a wonderful influence that’s still
being felt today on a contemporary musicians like Don Byron. Byron’s an
avante-guard clarinetist and he’s created a band of his own doing the music of
Mickey Katz. He’s played my dad’s music at the Knitting Factory in New York
city and then later at Michael’s Pub where I joined him and did some for the
vocals.
>GEO: After leaving Spike’s band in 1948 over a
disagreement over his salary (he want a raise to $350 a week), your father
began touring again with a show he created called Borscht Capades, which you
yourself have now revived. What was that show like?
Grey: It was a Yiddish vaudeville show with terrific
comedians and singers and dancers. It started off playing in all the cities
outside of New York where many New Yorkers had left, cities like to Tucson or
Florida where they didn’t have a Catskill to got to for Yiddish-based
entertainment. So he filled that need of those people who were really hungry
for the stuff of home. And my dad would be the M.C. and he would wear these
orange cowboy chaps and a cowboy shirt that said “The Bar Mitzvah Ranch” across
it. And he would open the show with a thing called the “Yiddish Square Dance,
which was a square dance with a klezmer caller, which was my dad. A lot of his
lyrics, as funny as they are, have an edge to them; they’re pointed and reflect
the emigrant experience.
>GEO: I just wish I could understand them; all the punch
lines are in Yiddish. I’ve heard you say that your father was quit the family
man.
Grey: He was really sweet, compassionate, smart, and very
funny. He loved his family more than his work.
>GEO: I read in his autobiography Papa Play for Me, that one of the reasons that he chose not to
tour a lot was that he missed his family too much when he was away on the road.
Grey: Yes. He was wildly in love with my mother; that was a
great romance. And they were married for over fifty years. He also loved all
his musician friends. They were the ones who played on those albums they were
all his buddies. They would almost do it as a labor of love. The thing that I
think is so amazing is that the jokes that he wrote over forty years ago play
so well today; they still make people laugh.
“Born in the wilds of Delancey Street,
Home of gefilta fish and kosher meat.
Handy wid a knife, O herzach tzi!
He flicked him a chicken when he was only three.
Duvid, Duvid Crocket, King of Delancey Street.”