04.23.08
New photos
Photos by Jim Newberry
07.11.07
Vernon videos
See Vernon in action on the funnyordie.com Web site. And catch this appearance in this documentary film. - Jim
04.11.07
Uncommon Ground, Friday April 20, 2007, 11:00 pm
Returning to the old hang for an 11:00 set. We’ll pass the hat. The club recommends making reservations at 773-929-3680. I am excited to announce that my pals from the old days, Twang Bang, will do a set at 9:00. Sandwiched between at 10, Doc’s Kids, from Minneapolis, will play.
Uncommon Ground is at 1214 W. Grace, corner of Clark, in the shadow of the Metro.
01.18.07
Saturday, January 20, 2007, 7:00 pm
As unlikely as it sounds, Vernon will sing the national anthem before the big roller derby match beween Chicago’s Windy City Rollers and the St. Louis Arch Rival Roller Girls. This is the first match for the WCR travel team and will be held at the Cicero Stadium, 1909 S. Laramie. Doors open at 6:00 pm and the dust-up commences at 7:00 pm.
11.27.06
Country Calendar Show: Saturday, December 2, 2006
We valiantly return for this year’s Country Calendar extravaganza. This year, Vernon will impersonate Leon Russell. To aid in perpetuating this transparent ruse, we will add pianist extraordinaire David Drazin and an all-roller derby backup chorus and whoever else we can badger into participating.
Also on this year’s docket, you can find:
Matt Miller
Robbie and Donna Fulks
The Long Gone Lonsesome Boys
The Flat Five (Hogan, Ligon, O’Connor etc)
The Gin Palace Jesters
The Lawrence Peters Outfit
Marydee Reynolds
Devil In A Woodpile
Jon Langford and Sally Timms
Joel Patterson
Jane Baxter Miller
The show starts at 9:00. Hope to see you there.
09.10.06
Sunday, October 1, 2006
On Sunday, October 1, 2006, Vernon Tonges will perform THE CORDEL SHOW, solo (I guess) and acoustic (pretty much) in an intimate and private home. This will be presented under the auspices of the 18th Annual Rhinocerous Theatre Festival, a production of the Curious Theatre Branch.
The show will start at 7:00 pm (set VCRs for Simpsons) with a suggested $15 donation (free if you’re broke!). Vernmerch will be available. It takes place at Jamie’s house, which is roughly in the Lincoln Square area. For the exact address/reservations, call (773) 539-7838 or email Vernon.
04.22.06
Saturday, May 20 HOUSE CONCERT
On Saturday evening, May 20, 2006, I will play a house concert here in Chicago. Seating is quite limited due to space. I will be swapping songs, round robin-style, with local faves Justin Roberts and Dan “Zapruder Point” Philips. If you are interested in attending, please email me at tongesnews@hotmail.com so I can try to shoehorn you in. As a further blandishment, there will be free comestibles and no set cover fee.
Saturday, April 29, 2006 at the Viaduct
SHOW PRE-EMPTED STAY TUNED FOR RESCHEDULED EVENT
12.08.05
Fitzgerald’s Sat. Dec. 10
It’s Chris Ligon & Heather McAdams’ annual Lil’ County Calendar Show! See
your favorite Chicago artists as they portray the 12 legends featured in
Heather’s 2006 calendar!
See:
Robbie & Donna Fulks as Doc Watson
Kelly Hogan as Melba Montgomery
Brigid Murphy as Milly May Smithy as Loretta Lynn
Devil in a Woodpile as Hankshaw Hawkins
Scott Ligon as Glen Campbell
Gentleman John Battles as Charlie Feathers
Gin Palace Jesters as Red Sovine
Jane Baxter Miller as Bobbie Gentry
Vernon Tonges and Stacey Earley (that’s US!) as THE KENDALLS
Whippoorwill as the Osbourne Brothers
Hardscrabble as Mel Tillis
Matt Miller as Freddie Hart
PLUS 16 mm films! Calendars and CDs available at the show! Blow off the
company Xmas party and have some REAL fun!
Saturday December 10 9pm $15
Fitzgeralds 6615 Roosevelt Rd in Berwyn
708-788-2118
Tix available from those rapscallions at Ticketmaster, too.
10.13.05
October 22, 2005 House Concert
There’s a house concert at the home of David Abbene and Geri Gibbs, at 2144 West Charleston in Chicago’s ravaged Bucktown area. The date is October 22 and the time is 8pm. Vernon will swap sets with his pal Brian Cutean, who’s visiting from Oregon. He promises that those sitting in the nearest two rows will get a free sputum sample. To make reservations, call David and Geri at (773) 342-0238 or, if that makes you too nervous, email me at vatonges@gmail.net and I’ll set it up for you.
09.27.05
Trent Lott’s Porch
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
05.18.05
Lovely cards for sale
Here are samples of Vernon’s handmade greeting cards. They are handpainted on heavy cardstock and come with a matching envelope individually packed in clear mylar sleeves. They go for $7 each which is a bargain, really, don’t you agree? You can buy individually or packs of a dozen (no two alike!) for $75. Email Vernon at vatonges@iwic.net to order!
I left my heart in Arkansas
Most sincere thanks to all in the magical land of Arkansas who made our visit so fine, and especially to Emily Kaitz for housing us, Kelly & Donna and Phil & Allison for feeding us, and Tom & Peggy Meringer for hosting such a lovely house concert. And to everyone else who came to the show, let us swim in their pool, gave good Scrabble, put chicken on the hot bar, and who always make us feel so welcome in our Ozarky home away from home. It gets harder to leave every time. Someday we just won’t. Leave, that is…
Film Review: Babes on Broadway
I will begin with the end of the film, but not just out of perversity. I expect viewers will find this sequence most offensive and perhaps rightly so. The ultimate grand finale of the film (after a steadily escalating series of showstoppers) features a massively over-produced minstrel show, yes, in blackface (gleefully singing “C’mon, New York, get out your cork”), because, gosh, everybody wants a good old-fashioned minstrel show (or so reason the kids in the film). Historically, there is a long history of American minstrelsy, which is a bizarre post-Reconstruction sentimental rejection of industrialization and yearning for the natural simplicity (utterly imaginary, of course) of the bucolic agrarian Negro. This sentiment remains so deeply ingrained its ripples still appear today, under the ongoing disguise of white hipsterism: Eric Clapton wants to be Robert Johnson; Rod Stewart wants to be Otis Redding; Sting wants to be Bob Marley; Eminem wants to be Chuck D; and so on. So, perhaps, we can charitably allow Mickey Rooney play black along with his latter-day counterparts and move on to the rest of this astonishing document.
No, excuse me, one last observation: Speaking as a banjo player, allow me to confess how reluctantly impressed I was by Mickey Rooney’s solo banjo version of “Swannee River.” It’s tempting to write off Mickey Rooney as an unbearable hyperactive douchebag because, well, that’s what he is. To give the devil his due, however, Rooney actually delivers such a Eugene Chadbourne-esque majesty to his rendition that he actually stirred my envy. Oh, and one other thing: Judy Garland’s rendition of “Franklin D. Roosevelt Jones” is one of her career highlights. Despite the handicap of being dressed as a terrifying oriental demon, she dances with a gravity-defying abandon, leading me to think, “Wow, Louis Mayer must have really tweaked her prescription that day.”
If you want to look for racially queasy moments, I would pick her between-scenes transformation from black-face comic coon to show-stopping “high yaller” (maybe octoroon beige?) to sing “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee.” It certainly raises some unsettling racial issues that the rest of the film is utterly unprepared to address. Is this why MGM kept Lena Horne on contract while Billie Holiday died in poverty?
A woefully embarassing must-fast-forward sequence precedes this grand finale, where Mickey and Judy visit a long-abandoned theater and fall into a wholly gratuitous and grating reverie on past theatrical greats. It culminates in Mickey Rooney’s drag queen impersonation of Carmen Miranda, which no one needs to witness. Ever. For any reason.
Such flaws seem almost inevitable, given the film’s overall strategy of Trying Much Too Damn Hard. In spite of these offenses, as well as a few acutely squirm-inducing scenes between Rooney and his mother, I deem this film a must-see. Historically, it bears testimony to a time of manic pathological optimism (hell, even I would be optimistic during the FDR administration), but I also endorse it for its trippy psychoactive effects. I rented this cassette hoping for some vintage MGM retina-blasting Technicolor, only to be taken aback to find it in B&W. There’s almost literally a cliché every minute and the plot logic continually and arbitrarily breaks down to allow for the inevitable and exasperating backstage musical plot twists, but it all comes on with such insane grotesque ferocity that I quickly ceased to care. In the end, I found myself hyperventilating and experiencing mild hallucinations. In fact, I heartily recommend this film for anyone having trouble getting their mail order mushrooms to grow. Even though he’s an utter doofus, you have to credit Rooney with carrying the whole shebang, in his career-long effort to prove that crazed unfocused enthusiasm can adequately substitute for lack of talent (but then again, there’s that awesome banjo solo…). There isn’t really anything appealing about him, but you have to salute his work ethic. And isn’t that what America is about, the triumph of determined mediocrity over talent?
In compensation, you can see Judy Garland at her raw speedfreak best. There were certain things Garland could do that no one else could. As high-strung as an abused Irish Setter, she could make every vagrant emotion register on film, no matter how transient or brief. Also, she had that weird spooky vibrato throb in her lower register. Impressive, but something about it makes me worry about her obvious unconcealed emotional disarray. Within her big dewy brown eyes, lust fights shame to a standoff. Watching her being steamrolled throughout the film by Rooney’s meth-head egotism is galling, but his radical extroversion better suits the mood of the film, describable as self-immolating near-toxic cheerfulness.
As an example of the insanely misdirected yet exhilarating vulgarity of BoB, one scene features British evacuee children talking to their parents via shortwave hookup at some big, uh, event of some sort. Having ruthlessly wrung every possible drop of goopy sentiment out of the situation, Garland launches into a musical tribute of the “Stout-Fellow-Keep-a-Stiff-Upper-Lip” variety while presenting horrific close-ups of each and every one of these brave little children. It was so psychedelically dumb that I nearly passed out from weeping and hooting laughter. And yet, I guess it was sort of moving, in an extremely stupid way. My breast became such a roiling kettle of unfixed emotions and anxieties that I almost found myself rolling on the floor. It’s all astoundingly embarrassing and agitating, but that’s the peculiar power of BoB.
Another big surprise is, you know, what’s her name. The charming little girl who was in The Women and Philadelphia Story. Virginia something. After a high-pressure childhood as an acting prodigy, here she experiences her awkward adolescence. She nearly succeeds in upstaging Mickey Rooney, grinning with an infectous unhinged glee and throwing her weird skinny little body all over the place in a way that made me oddly tingly. This is no small feat and is a powerful tribute to her showmanship.
And, in classic Busby Berkeley fashion, the movie ends on agonizing and unspeakably vulgar close-ups of all the principals grinning in an almost unwatchable fervid rictus, like dreadful leering skulls. I have to admit I had to cover my eyes and howl like a rabid dog on crack. You can’t imagine how my head spun and buzzed. It was awful and joyous.
One other moment should not pass unnoted. At one point, the entire film grinds to a halt as this weird-looking lumpy five-year-old kid waddles into view, jumps on a piano bench and plays an utterly awful and gratuitous three-minute-long musical number. Nothing in the film prepares us for, or justifies, this random diversion. After a few seconds of sheer bafflement, I found myself laughing hysterically until I quite nearly puked. Such is the power of Babes on Broadway.
I rented this video from Facets.
Produced by: Arthur Freed
Directed by: Busby Berkeley and (uncredited) George Sidney
Screenplay by: Fred Finklehoffe, Elaine Ryan, and (uncredited): Robert Tree West, John Monks, Ralph Spence, Gertrude Purcell, Edmund Hartman, Charles Riesner, Vincente Minnelli and Elsie Janis (Story by Fred Finklehoffe, based on an unpublished story, “Convict’s Return” by Harry Kaufman)
Music and lyrics by: Burton Lane and Ralph Freed, Roger Edens and Arthur Freed, Burton Lane and E.Y. Harburg, Harold Rome, Al Stillman, Jararaca and Vincente Paiva
Music direction: Georgie Stoll
Photography: Lester White
Editor: Frederick Y. Smith
Art Directors: Cedric Gibbons and Malcolm Brown
Set Decorator: Edwin B. Willis
Makeup: Jack Dawn
Gowns: Kalloch
Men’s Wardrobe: Gile Steele
Musical Presentation: Merrill Pye
Music Adapter: Roger Edens
Music Director: George Stoll
Orchestrators-Vocal Arrangers: Leo Arnaud, George Bassman, Conrad Salinger
Sound: Douglas Shearer
Cast
Mickey Rooney … Tommy Williams
Judy Garland … Penny Morris
Fay Bainter … Miss Jones (”Jonesy”)
Virginia Weidler … Barbara Jo Conway
Ray McDonald … Ray Lambert
Richard Quine … Morton Hammond (”Hammy”)
Donald Meek … Mr. Stone
Alexander Woollcott … Himself
Luis Alberni … Nick
James Gleason … Thornton Reed
Emma Dunn … Mrs. Williams
Frederick Burton … Mr. Morris
Cliff Clark … Inspector Moriarity
William Post, Jr. … Announcer
Anne Rooney … third girl opposite Hammy - uncredited!
Donna Reed … (debut) Jonesy’s Secretary
Joe Yule … (Mickey Rooney’s real-life father) Mason, Reed’s Aid
Margaret O’Brien … (debut) Child Auditioner
Carl Stockdale … Man
Dick Baron … Butch
Will Lee … Waiter
Stop, Look and Listen Trio … Themselves
Tom Hanlon … Radio Man
Renee Austin … Elinor
Roger Steele … Boy
Bryant Washburn … Director
Charles Wagenheim … Composer
Arthur Hoyt … Little Man Customer
Jack Lipson … Fat Man Customer
Dorothy Morris, Maxine Flores and Anne Rooney … Pit Astor Girls
Sidney Miller … Pianist
King Baggott … Man in Audience
Barbara Bedford … Matron
Shimen Ruskin … Excited Russian
Jean Porter … “Hoe Down” Dancer
Leslie Brooks … Actress-Committee Extra
Roger Moore … Bit (unconfirmed)
Ava Gardner … Bit (unconfirmed)]
Six Hits and a Miss … vocals
The Five Musical Maids … vocals
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church Choristers … vocals
The Stafford Quartet … vocals
The Debutantes … vocals
The Notables … vocals
The Uptowners … vocals
Mmm, press…
Justin Hayford of the Chicago Reader says:
…at the performance, he fired his banjo like some benevolent, all-powerful weapon. Vernon Tonges has long been the most vibrant and maniacal performer in a scene full of vibrant maniacs… [H]e chewed through his songs like some barbarous clown, bellowing with an unlikely Chaplinesque delicacy that made his dense but childlike lyrics surge… A hulking man, he seemed an immovable force who screamed [the show] thrillingly to life. Tonges was about as difficult an act to follow as there could be. –September 21, 2001
James Porter of the New City says:
A shocker…he comes out with this screaming Delta roots thing that is right in the gray area between country and blues. Not to say that he was Dock Boggs incarnated, or even a saner Hasil Adkins, but it sounded like he was headed in those general directions. Suffice it to say there was no casual conversation when Tounges (sic) was working his schtick. –Recommended, June 30, 2004
The Chicago Sun-Times says:
[G]rizzled…visceral… Vernon Tonges is an amazing player. He loses it, his eyes glow. There’s never enough compression in the room to contain him. –profile, March 25, 1994
Folk Roots says:
Vernon Tonges is possessed of a huge, booming voice, and his contributions draw musically from a variety of genres, the Tex-Mex of “The Ranch,” the jazzy “Dance Like Pud,” rockabilly in “Elaine Elaine,” and the tango of “Cadaver’s Lullaby.” His lyrics get you to the strange side of things in a hurry, and then toy with you for awhile. …In the fine demented folk tradition of Michael Hurley and the Holy Modal Rounders. –Jennifer Zogott
Dirty Linen says:
Vernon Tonges is a virtuosi, emotive guitarist with a big, often bellowing voice that supports his being the “Juggernaut of the Blues,” as his Muddy Waters-style brag song professes. –Michael Parrish, July, 1994
The Onion says:
Tackling early-20th-Century musical styles with a smirk, Vernon Tonges plays the sort of material that keeps Doctor Demento happy. –June, 2003
Ozark Gazette/The Armchair Audiofile by Anita Schnee (Fayetteville, Arkansas)
The Up-Ended Vantage-Point
Emily Kaitz brought in a friend of hers for a last-minute lunchtime concert at the co-op the other day. “Better come,” she said. “This’ll change your life.”
Thing is, I can’t publish her friend’s name. He was on the lam from a government-assistance program that, like parole, he can’t be seen to have violated: He’s not allowed to travel. So you could say that he was here, and not here.
I’ll call him FoN (for Force of Nature). On the “here” side, he’s a big, burly, all-over the place guy. Even his guitar-strings were at loose-ends, springing out from the tuning pegs every which way. But with the mostly un-governable energy he brought to bear–he played outside and no amplification was necessary; everybody from Old Main to the mall could hear him just fine when he pitched his head back and roared–he played an acoustic guitar and Bakelite banjo with the most unusual delicacy. Now and then he’d flash his amazed (not to say stricken) audience a little side-long twinkle and, given his large presence on this material plane, a surprisingly ethereal little balletic leap and spin in mid…well, song, I guess.
On the “not here” side, FoN used to play screaming electric guitar and pedal steel in a band called the Dysfunctionells. FoN is also a big fan and associate, and is himself reminiscent, of the Holy Modal Rounders.
Hands up if you’ve heard of the Holy Modal Rounders? Captain Beefheart? I thought not.
Well, oddly enough, I’ve heard of them. In the seventies, in England, my husband used to love these guys. Their wildly discorant chords, slashing attack, driving rhythm, weirdly apt but nevertheless-tripped-out lyrics–I can’t think of a single act that could touch them for their particular demented genius–wait. I take it back. Sun Ra, maybe.
That Emily on her stand-up bass could keep up with FoN I could scarcely believe, but there they both were knocking back song after crazy song. “Gumby’s Train (sic),” one about a snow goose dream sung by FoN’s new wife (they got hitched in one of those Las Vegas wedding chapels); and a number called “Charlie Horse.”
This one, done in the key of FoN’s cheerful nutsiness, was about a sore muscle, some bad bets on the track and elsewhere in life, throw in some alcoholism, and end with a funeral caisson drawn by the same bad-bet horse–all done with FoN’s sweetly engaging, tornadic energy.
You really had to be there.
The night after FoN’s show, I dreamt I saw a baby standing on her head; look ma no hands, just standing on the crown of her head, wobbling slightly on her little neck, waving at me and grinning to beat the band.
On waking, I wondered whether this might have something to do with FoN’s more-than-slightly skewed take on life and its miseries, transformed into sheer fun…or maybe because, of all the moves I learned on my way to becoming a Feldenkrais practitioner, the one I most enjoyed was standing on my head; I may have been doubled over with back pain for going on six years, but a head-stand? No problem. Just give me a level surface 2 foot square, and up I’d pop.
Or maybe this dream had to do with certain challenges life’s thrown me lately, to let go of my deepest fondest convictions about life’s miseries and to start having some fun instead.
Of the poems of Rimbaud, Robert Kelly says they “teach us to spill our private dreams into the public morning.”
Thanks to FoN and Emily Kaitz too, a very good morning to all of you. –May 20, 2002