Street Gang (29 page)

Whedon was a senior at Harvard working on the student-written and performed Hasty Pudding Theatricals when he met freshman Raposo. “We learned right away he was an extraordinary musician, and we used him in the show under an assumed name,” as freshmen were then ineligible to participate in the annual burlesque.“Eventually we became friends, and when I got out of the army and was living in New York, I’d visit him in Boston. He was married—with a child—and doing three jobs at once to make a living, maybe netting two hundred fifty dollars a week. Once when he was totally out of work, he listed his occupation as ‘conductor.’ Unemployment people offered him a job on the trolley cars.

“I finally said to him, ‘A piano player always works in New York. They’re needed at auditions and dance rehearsals. There are so many clubs and you could play lounge piano and sing. We have some extra rooms in our apartment, why don’t you stay with us and [look] around? Bring the family down.”

Raposo accepted the offer, and fortune soon smiled. “A talented composer friend named Sam Pottle had just taken what he thought would be a one-month thing as musical director of a theater production called
The Mad Show,
a revue based on
Mad
magazine. He thought it was going to fall flat on its ass because it was a disaster in previews. But it got fixed in the final week of previews and became a huge hit. Sam, however, wanted out, and he gave the job to Joe, who had only been in town for two weeks. Suddenly he was making seven hundred dollars a week, and from then on he just sailed.”

Raposo quickly gained a reputation in Manhattan as a kind of ambidextrous showman-virtuoso. On the one hand, he was a classically trained pianist who never failed to point out that he had studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, the influential composer-conductor whose pupils included Philip Glass, Virgil Thomson, and Quincy Jones. On the other hand, Raposo was an unabashed populist who reveled in Tin Pan Alley, ragtime, Broadway, and standards from the American songbook. He was an exuberant blend of Chopin and showbiz. “Joe was many things,” Stone said. “He was a singularly gifted composer and songwriter, and a remarkably facile pianist.”

But Raposo was a curious, complex specimen. Gregariously entering a room with a flourish, he’d embrace friends and colleagues, even the ones who seemed unhuggable. He could entertain like nobody’s business, dropping down onto the piano stool at a party and filling the room with music that was sumptuous and sophisticated. At his best moments, he was irresistible.

Whenever people praised his gifts, though, they inevitably followed their assessment of him with a “but,” almost to balance out his foibles, quirks, and irritating habits. “He was a lazy last-minute worker who often would be scribbling arrangements on scraps of old envelopes as he taxied to a recording session,” Stone said. “Joe hated editing. If he didn’t get it right the first time, it would stay unright. I often pleaded with him that with just the slightest additional effort, significant improvements could be made, but Joe was always in a rush to get on to the next challenge. Redoubtable Joe was the most talented, infuriating, charming, lazy, prolific, unpredictable genius I had the happy fortune to work with.”

Raposo, who had a quicksilver temper, could be petty and egocentric, cutting and conceited, withering and caustic, greedy and ungracious. To underlings he could be domineering; to the famous, obsequious. “Somebody said to me that when you’re with Joe, you are his very best and only friend in the world, until he meets somebody else,” Whedon said.

Raposo’s bombast and braggadocio bespoke insecurity and fears of being unworthy. “He could never get over the fact that a poor kid from New Bedford, Massachusetts, could grow up to rub elbows with the rich and famous,” Stone said. Friends and coworkers alternately forgave, mocked, accepted, or abhorred his name-dropping, an unnecessary effort to impress. Joan Cooney, who had abundant fondness for Raposo, described his juvenile desire to be stroked and adored as “pathetic.”

Though Raposo’s talent and fire were undeniable, Dave Connell and Sam Gibbon wanted him to audition for the job as
Sesame Street
’s music director, after Jon Stone had all but handed it to him. “Raposo said, ‘I audition for no one,’ ” Gibbon recalled. Raposo had marked his turf.

To Stone’s relief, Connell and Gibbon backed off, and Raposo was reunited with his
Hey, Cinderella
colleagues Stone, Henson, Frank Oz, puppeteer Jerry Nelson, and set designer Charles Rosen. “I was both astounded and deliriously happy at his commitment,” Stone said.

For those keeping track of names beginning with
J, Sesame Street
now had a Joan, a Jon, a Jim, a Jerry, and a Joe.

 

The jaunty, deceptively simple
Sesame Street
theme song has a complicated, contentious backstory, one that brings to mind more visions of stormy temperaments than sunny days.

At issue in 1969, however, was not Raposo’s composition in F, but the song’s lyrics, which fell flat.

“Joe’s music was just plain brilliant,” said Jon Stone. “It was melodic and simple enough for a child to recognize and even sing along to, but still had a musical sophistication. It gave the whole show a sound and an attitude, and it underscored the footage of joyful children running to the recurring line, ‘Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street?’ There was no other sound like it on television, and once the child learned to identify it with
Sesame Street,
the first few notes would bring her running from wherever she might be at the moment.”

As much as Stone embraced the melody and orchestration, he derided the rhyming lines that had inspired it. In his memoir, Stone explained that he turned to Bruce Hart to fashion the lyrics, but before he sent Hart off to work on them, he provided a list of “musts” to weave in. “An integral part of Charlie Rosen’s set was a wall of doors, much like the ones construction crews used to put up to seal a building site,” Stone said.“I wanted to use those doors as transition gateways from the reality of the street to our puppet or animation pieces. I told Bruce to include ‘Every door will open wide.’ This was also an oblique reference to the title of the program, embodying the idea of ‘Open Sesame,’ or the opening of the minds. More important, I insisted that the recurring theme in the lyric be ‘Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street?’ The opening I envisioned was one of children—real peer-group children—running happily, tumbling, playing along the way, but always intent on getting to Sesame Street, perhaps occasionally pausing to ask an adult this recurring question.

“The result was a musical masterpiece and a lyrical embarrassment,” Stone said. “Trite and thoughtless” was how he described Hart’s work on the assignment, resulting in “platitudinous kiddie-show lyrics.” While Stone acknowledged that Hart had followed his basic instructions, he bitterly complained the writer “surrounded those elements with happy little clichés.” Stone especially disliked the phrases “sweeping the clouds away,” “where the air is sweet,” and “everything’s A-OK,” which he described as “astronaut slang [that] would become obsolete.”

Stone said, “I kept thinking that in a week or so I’d get around to getting rid of such hackneyed phrases as ‘It’s a magic carpet ride,’ but I never did, and once it aired there was no way to go back and make repairs.”

At some point in the song’s gestation, Stone added his own name below Hart’s on Raposo’s original music composition paper. It may be that upon reflection, Stone concluded the best lines of the lyric were his, and that he should share in any royalties generated by the song. In the arcane algebra known only to the accountants at ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers), revenues from song royalties are split between the composer (or composers) and the lyricist (or lyricists). Raposo complicated things further by adding
his
name to the lyric credit line, after making a slight adjustment in a musical phrase, thus diverting another slice of the royalty pie to himself.

 

Sesame Street
’s signature sound grew out of sessions with a seven-piece band that Raposo wrangled for the occasion. On most of the recordings there was a keyboardist, drummer, electric bass player, guitarist, trumpeter, a winds instrumentalist on flute or piccolo, and a percussionist on vibraphone, xylophone, or bells. Some arrangements called for an old-timey tack piano, the kind someone in a bowler hat played during saloon scenes in Westerns.

On the day the ensemble recorded the opening and closing themes, Raposo asked percussionist Epstein, a product of the Juilliard conservatory and the newly installed music coordinator of
Sesame Street
, to find a harmonica player to add a “strolling” dimension to the closing. Epstein lined up Jean-Baptiste Frédéric Isidor “Toots” Thielemans, a Belgian-born jazzman then living in Yonkers, New York. Thielemans, who had emigrated to the United States in 1952, was an internationally regarded guitarist and chromatic harmonicist who had toured Europe with Benny Goodman and performed with Charlie Parker’s All Stars. But when Epstein called, he was grateful for the session work, even at thirty-seven dollars an hour. “In those days, I was just a guy in New York you could hire for scale, doing anything and everything, including jingles and anonymous club dates.
⁸
I’d play a bar mitzvah on a Saturday and fly off on Sunday to play the Montreux Jazz Festival.”

The session lasted less than ninety minutes, from rehearsal to completed tracks. “A recording session with Joe was an on-the-fly, off-the-cuff experience,” Jon Stone said. “He would circle the room addressing each of the musicians in turn, saying to Bobby Cranshaw, the bass player, ‘Give me a kind of
boom-ticky-sha, boom-ticky-sha . . .’
Then, to Jimmy Mitchell on guitar, ‘Why don’t you try it on banjo this time? It’s so crazy it might work.’ There was always a plan in mind, and nearly always the result was just what he wanted.”

This is especially true of
Sesame
’s opening theme. The frolicsome sound of the first two measures came from an Epstein experiment, striking the vibraphone bars not with standard fabric mallets but instead with ones made for xylophone or bells, with harder plastic heads. Raposo loved it, and he added his own touches of mirth and modernity by choosing an electric keyboard—the then revolutionary Fender Rhodes—over acoustic piano.

A mixed choir of children singing in unison joined in on the first beat of the third measure. “They were called the Wee Willie Winter Singers,” Epstein said, “just a group of kids—six, seven, eight years old—rounded up by the Lois Winter Agency.” They, too, worked for scale.

Through the years, the theme became a siren song for preschoolers and a source of high amusement for Thielemans, who, at the age of eighty-six, still plays to packed houses throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas. “When I play the United States I often will include the
Sesame Street
theme in my concerts,” he said. “People are surprised. They say, ‘That was
you
, Toots?’ ” I laugh and say, ‘That was me, back when I was a session musician.’”

In 2001, King Albert II of Belgium ennobled Thielemans with the title of baron. “I may be quite famous now, but I don’t let it get to my head,” he said during a phone interview from Belgium in 2008.

“My playing on the
Sesame Street
theme has always been an important little reward on my lapel.”

 

Raposo was so inspired by the goals of
Sesame Street
that he composed a stack of curriculum-inspired songs and soundtracks in the weeks leading to launch. He worked in a creative frenzy, vast in its scope and range.

His new forte became songs about the alphabet. “You name the letter, he had a song in five minutes,” said Epstein. For Big Bird, Raposo wrote a bouncy tune in 6/8 time that turned all twenty-six consonants and vowels into one multisyllabic, perplexing word. Collaborating with Stone, who provided lyrics, Raposo also set to music one of the concepts first mentioned in Cooney’s series proposal. Entitled “One of These Things,” it asked children to assess a group of items (a banana, an orange, an apple, and a shoe, for instance) and identify which did not fit, a classification task. It went like this:

 

Viewers were given an eight-measure interlude to answer the musical question. The song would then resume.

 

In the early days of production, nobody “got” the gestalt of
Sesame Street
faster or better than Raposo. For a good long while, he might have been America’s most educational entertainer.

 

Jim Henson earned his stripes as an entertaining educator as well, venturing well beyond puppetry. “From the moment he signed on, Jim channeled his huge creative input into our project,” said Stone.

Henson produced a series of short live-action and animated films to “sell” numbers, a catalogue of work that producers used as mortar to connect and reinforce the live-action content. As had Raposo, Henson rose to the challenge of translating sometimes arcane academic goals into effective and pleasurable viewing, “He would work an entire weekend and come in with a film on Monday,” recalled Henson’s oldest son, Brian, now co-chief executive officer of the Jim Henson Company in Los Angeles. “He would do all of the soundtracks on them with a Moog synthesizer that he set up in the back of his workshop. It was one of the first privately owned Moogs available and was the size of a Ford Econoline van.”

From a small animation studio built within the workshop, Henson, Frank Oz, and designer Don Sahlin adapted stop-action techniques—using an array of media, including cut paper, pastels, and clay—for the number commercials. Perhaps best remembered are the combination live-action and animation pieces. They began with counting from one to ten, then counting down back to one, and built to a slapstick finale. A stunt man dressed as a baker and carrying a proscribed number of desserts would sing out, “Five chocolate cream pies!” before tumbling down a flight of stairs. Henson provided the voice of the pratfall-prone pastry chef.