Steve Martin: A Wild And Crazy GuyI guess my favourite NYC purchase would be a lovely vinyl copy of Steve Martin's height-of-his-powers stand up LP, 1978's 'A Wild & Crazy Guy'. A well over-used superlative applies here: the sleeve is iconic. The bleached white silhouette of Martin vamping in his bunny ears, he appears to be alive with light, the enormous speaker stacks to the left of the image hinting at the size of the arena...this beautiful B&W photograph sums up everything one needs to know about Martin's act, the juxtaposition of goofball stupidity and genuine ART. The picture is so serious, the subject so wonderfully, knowingly daft. It's perfect. Popular culture has produced a huge back catalogue of images I marvel at; this photograph I love so much that if I had a copy small enough I'd keep it in my wallet.
Oh, and the record is pretty funny too. The A side (small San Francisco comedy club gig) is way better than the B side (mega-sized enormo-arena gig); the second half is lumbered down with catchphrases and skits re-hashed from his Saturday Night Live appearances - the audience (tens of thousands of people) have come expecting "Well excuuuusssse meeeeee!", and Martin has no choice but to lay it on 'em, and when he does the audience go predictably mondo nutso, and it's all nice & interesting pop history, but it pretty meaningless to 2010 ears, and without context just plain ain't funny. Many comedy albums suffer from this built-in obsolescence, and in Martin's case the problem is exaggerated by the fact that his act was hugely visual. Contemporary audiences would have been hugely disappointed if this stuff didn't appear on the LP, and for this reason impossible to criticise its inclusion. The one big bonus for 2010 listeners is that we close with Martin rolling out an SNL skit which remains hugely entertaining - 'King Tut', Martin's deliberately dumbo-cash-in disco track (and bone fide semi-hit single) about King Tutankhamun.
The first side of the LP is sheer brilliance, however. As 'clever', and 'highly original' as Martin's dumb-on-purpose, Vegas-entertainer-gone-haywire shtick undoubtedly was, I've always thought it would be equally accurate to simply say that at some point in his career Martin decided he was going to find it easier to adopt a persona, and the persona he chose was that of an unhinged lounge singer. He wasn't Steve Martin on stage, he was 'Steve Martin', and 'Steve Martin' was something to hide behind. Something funnier. With a funnier voice, and a cool suit. There are some great lines on the first side of this LP, and it musta been a blast live.
So the first side is really funny, and the second side can be marvelled at as a piece of comic history, but there ain't that many yocks for the modern listener. Perhaps the real value of 'A Wild and Crazy Guy' sits between the two sides, in the transition between the small gig & the enormo-dome. The LP is quite deliberately set up for the listener to 'compare & contrast' between the two sets - "wow. How did he get from there to here? What a journey!" The segue between them is cinematic in scope; Martin walks off the stage of a small club, and emerges instantaneously from the curtains of a gigantic sports arena, with tens of thousands of people screaming for him. A story is told, or at least in implied, in this brilliantly effective piece of editing. For this reason I almost don't think it matters that the second side isn't hilarious. It works conceptually. Maybe the fact that it isn't that funny is precisely the point - certainly Martin felt his act had become stale, and that playing to audiences of this size had sucked the spark and spontaneity from his act...maybe it's impossible to be truly funny in a sports arena, and maybe this is the price a comedian pays for the level of success Martin achieved. Like all of Martin's best stuff, the LP gives you something to laugh at, and something to think about, and, again, like all Martin's best stuff, the something he asks you to think about is the nature of stand-up comedy itself. I don't have many real, lasting heroes. Heroes are for kids, really. But Martin comes closer than most.
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