The Naked Truth About
Tiny Tim's Weird Weird World

Dressed in a brown-on-brown, short-sleeved shirt, a 1940s brown jacket, a shocking pink, green- scalloped necktie, long gray slacks and black dress shoes, Tiny Tim is the product of an indeterminate past. When he walks on stage he is greeted by laughter, a kind of patronizing, elbow-in-the-ribs attitude, and a few quick verbal jibes. While the audience waits breathlessly, he reaches into his brown paper shopping bag. He removes ukulele wrapped carefully in an old cardigan. On the back of the uke are the words that crystallize his whole message-SOUL. And the audience is prepared to love him now, to hurl kisses, and applause his way.
    Tiny Tim is where it's at. He's the holy freak. More than The Beatles, The Lovin' Spoonful, or The Stones, Tiny Tim has caught the mood of the sixties - the bizarre, naked world on the periphery of society-the need to make the ugly duckling a heroic figure.
    When you first encounter his long beak, his piano key-length teeth, and his wayward forelock, you think you are in the undiscovered country between B-horror films and Dickensian characters. Not so. Tiny Tim is beautiful! Purity, gaiety and innocence are what he is all about. The American Past is "his bag." Perhaps that is why he chooses nondescript fashions. People can identify with him any fond memories of the past they want to recall.
    "Hel-loooo, my dear friends," he remarks blowing kisses in the direction of his fans. His voice sounds like the rounded grooves on a record. Plink-a-plank-a-plink goes the uke. Then, in a falsetto voice, he begins "Come tiptoe through the tulips . . ." His repertoire is a reincarnation of the America of Vocalian records, of Rudy Vallee, of the young Bing Crosby and the Rhythm Boys. He is Billy Murray, circa 1913, singing On The Old Front Porch.
    When you listen to him, you do not hear an "impression" of these old singers. You hear a precise rendering of the sound as it was. Tiny is like a minstrel who has been recalled from his wanderings in the nether regions. A critic has described him as "a light show," and he is. Everyone has a different vision of him, as almost everyone has a preferred "rendering" of his songs.
    In an interview with a Newsweek reporter, Tiny Tim said: "I dont try to imitate anyone, I just try to bring back their voices. Their spirits live within me."
    Because Tiny is trying to establish an image of timelessness, he is reluctant to discuss his background. He is probably somewhere between 35-and-45-years-old. He is also a native New Yorker, the son of a Lebanese tailor. And his career, which has blossomed within the past six months, was unsuccessful for many, many years.
    After he graduated from high school he ran the gauntlet of amateur pitch shows, and was the victim of shoe-throwing. He remembers that, in some of these places, a bouncer would set off the fire alarm to shut him up. "But I always finished the song," he recalls. "I was booed for years and years. I went from dive to dive and from bar to bar all over New York and New Jersey."
    When the public wouldn't have any part of him, Tim volunteered his services to the veterans' hospitals and to any music-loving passerby who would listen in the slum areas of New York. He even serenaded in back alleys where his music sometimes turned over more flower pots than it turned on listeners. He tried to become an entertainer in the Army in World War II but was rejected no less than eight times. "I couldn't pass the tests," Tim says. "There was a square and you had to decide which other square looked most like it. Well, all the other squares looked like it to me." Such endearing dumbness keeps Tim the friend of the "don't trust the intellectuals" school.
    By the latter part of the 50s Tim was singing in a Times Square freak show as"Larry Love, The Singing Canary." In the early 60s he moved downtown to New York's Greenwich Village, where he played in small, underground-type nightclubs: The Fat Black Pussy Cat Page Three and The Third Side. Finally, in 1965, he got his big break in a New York discotheque-The Scene.
    "When I came in, they said 'Out'," he remembers. "Then, a fellow from the Village yelled, 'Hey, Tiny, do a set,' and they hired me."
    Since then, Tiny Tim, has scored on nationwide TV shows, like the Johnny Carson Tonight show. He has recorded an album for Reprise records called God Bless Tiny Tim, which is reported to he selling very, very well. On the cover, Tim is smiling ecstatically, standing stiffly on a mound of Easter grass with his eyes focused towards heaven. He obviously has a lot to smile about, and his favorite slogan, taken from the song of the same name, sums it up, "Things that bother you never bother me.
    Tim says that there are three main reasons why he sings: "The first is to give thanks to God for the gift he gave me. Number two is to cheer people whether they are young or old, with a song of the past or present. And number three, perhaps above all, is because of all the lovely women who, because of their beauty, cause my heart to overflow with joy."
    Yes, there is a kind of pietistic sense that makes music the panacea of his life. That is another obvious factor in his popularity-he is completely a product of the mass media. One can almost imagine that, if all the subtle outpourings of nostalgia, ricky-tick, pop culture could be fused into a new dimension, their product would be Tiny Tim. Maybe that is what happened. He likes to spend his free time listening to old 78's on his wind-up phonograph. He confesses that he wishes he were the RCA Victor dog listening to His Master's Voice.
    His habits, too, reflect an overwhelming desire for cleanliness, for what Freudian psychiatrists would interpret as a need to be purified, a purification wish. This desire is symptomatic of our time, but Tim would seem to be already the personification of purity. He bathes every day with Packer's Pear Soap; he brushes his teeth with papaya powder; he has daily anointments with Elizabeth Arden Blue Grass Hand Lotion, Faberge and Maja body creams. He takes as many as five showers daily, including a "big shower" which lasts all of 90 minutes.
    Even his conversation is a conscious attempt to avoid anything "ugly." For example, he insists on spelling, not saying, the words SEX and KISS. When dealing with the fair sex, he speaks with an aura of romanticism. "When I'm with girls they are always the essence of purity," he says. He calls children "blessed events."
    It is just because all this is entirely too much that Tiny Tim is the celebrity he is today: "What do I feel I'm trying to do in my music? Well, I'm trying to bring back the happiness that was a part of the beautiful tunes that were sung in the days of the past...the lovely days. Now as I hear these songs I believe that they can thrill the people of today just as they thrilled the people of yesterday. I'm appealing to something in the hearts of men."
    Tiny Tim, phenomenon of the closing years of the 1960s, may be right in his personal assessment. If he is, what does that say about the society? If our heroes look like characters from Grimm's Fairy Tales, what does that mean? In the more and more complex pattern of life in our time we are turning to a simplified past for reassurance; to a world of dream-image that does not have to be interpreted.

Source: Undetermined
Reproduced according to "Fair Use"