It was the summer of 1968, and the hot air was turning sour.
Valeria Solanas had just attempted to assassinate Andy Warhol, and three days later, Sirhan Sirhan had shot Robert F Kennedy. The following day, on June 6th, The Beatles appeared on the radio amid an eerie atmosphere that seemed to imply that the era of peace and love had gone awry.
Nevertheless, they spoke to Kenny Everett with marked enthusiasm. They had been looking for something new, the times had decreed as much, and they found something old instead. Well, old and new simultaneously, you see, Tiny Tim is a complex breed. His antiquated style was covered in a veil of vaudeville dust, and it certainly didn’t seem destined to be a hit. It certainly hadn’t been for the first 18 years of his career.
However, in an odd stroke of serendipity, in 1968, he provided something so fresh, albeit paradoxically from 1929, that he crept towards 17th in the charts. Crept is the pertinent word, too. You’d rather accidentally knock Mike Tyson’s spliff out of his hand than hear Tiny Tim’s classic ‘Tiptoe Through the Tulips’ in the dead of night.
Yet something about that dated eerieness and his reappraisal of the past made him a cult sensation. Bob Dylan had already hailed him from years back when he was just a gangly figure haunting the basement bars of Greenwich Village with his banjo back in the day, but he was a new entity, in every which way, when John Lennon proclaimed, “Tiny Tim… he’s the greatest ever, man!”
To stunned silence, he reassured Everett that he wasn’t joking, by adding, “[he’s] the greatest fella on earth.” Clearly, Life Magazine writer Al Aronowitz was listening, because eight days later he published a piece proclaiming that God Bless Tiny Tim, the six-foot performer’s debut album, was “one of the most dazzling albums of programmed entertainment since… Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”
In truth, the dated language of “programmed entertainment” proved perfectly fitting. He was a living heirloom from weird old America, just as weird new America was stepping one toke over the line. As Dylan put it, “Tiny Tim was a character who played around Greenwich Village in the fifties and sixties. And a lot of people think that he was a joke. But no one knew more about old music than Tiny Tim did. He studied it and he lived it. He knew all the songs that only existed as sheet music. When he passed away, we lost a national treasure.”
Paul McCartney made the same point when he furthered Lennon’s pronouncement on Everett’s show. “It’s a funny joke at first, but it’s not really. It’s real and it’s true,” Macca added. And it was true, Tiny Tim was deadly serious, desperately trying to honour the arts that he adored through a new incarnation that somehow blended into the hubbub of the ‘60s.
This outlook still makes him beloved among fellow artists. When I recently spoke to the Lemon Twigs, they explained, “I think the way he presents those great 1920s songs just really appealed to me and Michael,” Brain D’Addario said. “The Richard Perry arrangements are really integral, the fact that it’s through kind of a ‘60s lens, at least with his first couple of records is initially what grabbed me.”
“Then his voice is just… he’s got one of the most unique voices ever,” he continued. “And he’s very sincere about it, obviously. I mean, people kind of think he’s funny, or they used to at least, but I think now when you hear his record, you hear a man possessed by great songs, and who resurrected all these great songs from before his time.”
That uniqueness, sincerity, semi-seriousness in times of increasing despair and dwinndling hope, and knack for revitalising the past when the present seemed to be losing sight of it, all combined to make him a hero not just to The Beatles and the greatest songwriting duo of all time, whose final works were evidently influenced by his uncanny, traditional structures, but to millions… for about five minutes.
Sadly, his time in the mainstream would be fleeting. To paraphrase Hunter S Thompson, he was simply too weird to be a major success, but too unique to be ignored – a prototype of his own making.
So, he had his moment in the sun, but then some of his stranger quirks precluded subsequent success. He’d frequently have imaginary dinner parties backstage before shows, freaking out promoters as they came to tell him he was on in five only to find him decanting nonexistent tea into the imaginary cup of a vaudeville star who had died 50 years ago.
He also developed an unhealthy penchant for pizza, and tragically, in 1999, he died on stage after suffering a ukulele-strumming heart attack. By that point, he was all but forgotten, almost fittingly so given his own musical tastes. But for a brief moment under the hot June sun as the Summer of Love was turning bittersweet, the most famous man in history crowned him the greatest fella that there ever was.
