Saturday, January 30, 2010

Bob Newhart and Houston Lead the Way

Bob Newhart had one-of-a-kind Grammy album | Entertainment | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle: "Henry Mancini, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Lauryn Hill and Toto have one particular thing in common: a best-album Grammy. From the moment Mancini's The Music From Peter Gunn stomped all over recordings by Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Van Cliburn back in the Grammys' inaugural year of 1959, every single album of the year featured music — except one. In 1961 a full-time certified public accountant from Oak Park, Ill., won best album for The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, a stand-up comedy album recorded in Houston."

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Got the CD for Christmas; hilarious!

John D

pattinase (abbott) said...

I don't remember ever laughing harder at a comedy album-and without four-letter words. Remember the driving school routine.

Unknown said...

Everybody had that album when I was in college. And Shelley Berman and Mort Sahl soon afterward.

James Reasoner said...

One of the all-time greats!

Todd Mason said...

And, fwiw, the label has them out a bargain-basement pricepoint...I bought a copy of BEHIND THE BUTTON DOWN MIND for $5.99, along with Maria Bamford, Lewis Black, Patton Oswalr and Greg Giraldo albums for rather more (albeit the the Bamford and the Oswalt also included DVDs).

Those "outdated" institutions the public libraries helped me branch out from the Smothers Bros./Pat Paulsen records my parents had (and the Firesign Theater my father took a gamble on in the mid-'70s; I liked it better than he did) to Sahl, Berman, Nichols & May, Newhard as stand-up, and not a few others (my second high-school library [!] was my first exposure to Lenny Bruce's albums for Fantasy (however mediocre the education we--including the current US Pres--rec'd at Punahou Acad, there was no reasonable faulting of the library).

Todd Mason said...

That is, I bought those CDs to listen to on the way home from visiting my parents the other week. And, clearly, not from Amazon.

wv: shisp. Amazon is now on my shisp list for several reasons.