Note: A year or so after I ran this bit in Crank #2, the exact same gag appeared in WFMU's program guide. They did the exact same thing: they reprinted the liner notes to the below album, with little or no commentary, just as I had done in my itty, bitty zine. Now, I love WFMU as much as the next guy; I've donated money whenever I could since I was 18 years old. But c'mon guys. How long did it take the infinite number of monkeys on their infinite number of typewriters to come up with that for you??

Born Too Late to be Truly Swank

Readers of CRANK #1 already know how much I yearn to have lived in 1961, rather than 1994. Why? Shit, the Swank Man ruled the fucking world, baby. "Get me a drink, hon'." "When's supper ready, darlin'?" "Mix me 1 last highball--I've got to get back to the office." What livin'!

It pains me to have such envy weigh on me. (And sorry, gals, it wasn't exactly a liberated paradise. Tough darts.) But it sure looks like it was a swell time to have been young and devilishly handsome. I happen to be both, in case you didn't know.

Fuck Sinatra. Give me Dean Martin, toots. He was THE MAN. The Man charged with keeping the Swank Man a mass appeal. And this album drives it home in a big motherfucking way. Sure, many of the pop culture references are woefully dated, and the racist comments will offend some of you, but FUCK, man, that's why they call it "dated." Take your lumps, kids. I have marked the places [?] where I'm admittedly lost. You may catch stuff I didn't. Call me ignorant. Also note where the author was out of his mind [!] when writing.

Suck it up!

From the notes on "Happiness is Dean Martin," Reprise Records, 1962. Back cover:

Happiness is Dean Martin Singing "Lay Some Happiness on Me" And Other Selected Hoop-Las

Aesthetically, he ends up somewheres between '39's Mickey Mouse Watch and Lichtenstein's neo-heroic painting, "Take That...Pow!"

A little camp, perhaps, but too much of our current action really to rate that high on the Camp Charts. Put him more in the Hula Hoop-Silver Mini-Skirt-"Chelsea Girls"- William Manchester bag [?]. That is to say, awfully celebrated right now, not to mention being hellishly good examples at what they're driving at.

Nothing, for example, is more hula-hoop than a Pink Plastic 1960 Hula Hoop. Nothing is more Dean Martin than Dean Martin.

Of course, doing a really preposterously good job of being Dean Martin depends a lot on knowing the rules about what makes the best Dean Martin. Knowing the archetypal definition of Martinism: How is he different? Why is he individual? What is he driving at?

What Dean Martin is driving at seems to be to lead a Life Of Sloth. A Life of EPIC Sloth. Not just your common little ol' Sunday afternoon lazy Sloth, like you get with minor Erskine Caldwell Georgia darlins. [?]

No, Martin now epitomizes EPIC SLOTH. Sloth like Joseph E. Levine would come up with. In big, 3-D letters, like in those Ben Hur movie ads, with all forms of EPIC EXHAUSTION draped over the letters. "Epic Sloth," starring Dean Martin, and then running around the bottom, instead of Mongol hordes and Jack Palance you find other things, for this is "Epic Sloth." Things like deflated innertubes. Like the ears of sleeping Spaniels. Like Kleenex ashes. [?] Like all of Life's Most Unresilient Stuff.

And there, leaned up in Herculean-Scope against those giant letters, our Pop Star slumps. Dean Martin. Kind of half-eyed looking out at you, grinning "Hi ya, pally," like he hopes you haven't got anything heavy on your mind.

Dean Martin has been working at becoming an Epic Pop Art Object. He's been getting in a good deal of pop art hypnotizing. Avis knows, you don't get to be Number One by just sitting round. Some detractors have published this about Martin: that he sits round, trying to make spaghetti look tense. [!] "Pish tosh," we say, and "Yellow journalism."

You have to publicize to get to be Our National Epic Sloth. Martin has. His medium: the most popular art object of Our Times, meaning...your television set. (Breathes there a soul with fingers so dull he can't find his Vertical Knob blindfolded?) [Note similarity to remote control in 1994.-Ed.]

The mind-boggling task which DM has accomplished in his upwards surge to Number One Epic Sloth in [sic] this: he has put other would-be number one lazy slobs into limbo. "Amos 'N Andy's" Lightnin, for instance, now is largely forgot. Shiftless and No-Account has moved to Beverly Hills, where dey got no deltas, chile. [!!!-Whooee!-Ed.] The other competition--those slothy Southern belles once played by Lee Remick and Joanne Woodward--are now minor league stuff.

Martin (few people have known this until this very minute; it has been a closely kept secret) was actually only Number Two until quite recently. The spot of Number One Epic Sloth was recently held by another performer. Not a human being, but a small dog. His name: Red Dust. He is (or was, for he has largely disappeared from our scene) part of a Vaudeville turn. His master would bark out commands: "Red Dust, Roll Over! Up, Red Dust!" But Red Dust was an utterly and irrevocably sag-boned hound. Red Dust never voluntarily moved anything, least of all a paw. The pooch looked permanently pickled. It was pretty funny stuff.

Dean Martin finally won out over Red Dust. Much of his triumph has been ascribed by some scribes to his ability to project an alcoholic aura from coast-to-coast, into millions of Puritan homes. Good, Puritan, beer-drinking homes. Martin has almost by himself established Booze-o-Vision as America's new Art Populaire. It's difficult to imagine any other object that would currently be more welcome in our historic nation's thousands of beer bars and juke joints. Nothing more popular than DM, slumped there, looking for his cue card, all brung [sic] to you in NBC's surrealist color. Martin and his--dare we say it?-- goopy baritone. [??] Martin: the biggest sex symbol to hit neighborhood taverns since the heyday of The Rheingold Girl, may she in our secret imaginations requiescat in flagrante delicto.

Nothing should slow up his reign as our belov- ed epic boozer short of a sudden attack of dysphagia. --Stan Cornyn