Ian Whitcomb is a highly respected performer, composer, and music historian. You can find all of his CD's, DVD's, Books, and
Songbooks by clicking here, or by going to ianwhitcomb.com

The Troubadour of Lost Time

Published on 12-19-2008
Arroyo Monthly

Onetime British Invader Ian Whitcomb and his Bungalow Boys spread the gospel of turn-of-the-20th-century music.

By KIRK SILSBEE

“A city either wants you or it doesn’t.” – L.A. poet Holly Prado

Ian Whitcomb was a Dublin history student with a passion for pop music when he arrived in Los Angeles in 1965. On a lark, he’d recorded a song that had become a national hit: “You Turn Me On” was a rock number sung in a panting falsetto, and it turned Whitcomb into British rock royalty. Naturally, Southern California threw its arms around Whitcomb, blanketing him in invitations to appear on “Shindig” and “American Bandstand.” He was booked all over town, from the Troubadour to the Hollywood Bowl, where he appeared in concert with the Beach Boys, the Kinks and the Byrds. He hobnobbed with the likes of pop gods Sonny & Cher, who shared a limo ride to the Bowl with Whitcomb and his date from “The Dating Game.” He also socialized with members of the expatriate British artistic elite, including Christopher Isherwood, Don Bachardy and David Hockney.

That heady summer planted the seeds of Whitcomb’s enduring romance with Southern California, where he evolved into a popular vintage dance band leader, musicologist and champion of the ukulele. As a boy, he’d known the deprivations of postwar England. In L.A., Whitcomb must have felt as though he’d fallen down a rabbit hole. The excesses of the entertainment industry conspired with the sun and the beach to create an irresistible lure.

Over the years, Whitcomb’s fortunes have waxed and waned, but he has remained here and, in his own way, thrived. At 67, he’s still a singer and songwriter as well as a multi-instrumentalist (piano, ukulele, accordion), musical and cultural historian, author, broadcaster, essayist and blogger. And he does it all from the modest Altadena home base he shares with his wife of 19 years, Regina, an accomplished social dancer and singer who performs with his bands.

The assembled ’60s TV clips from his current DVD compilation on ITW Records, “Ian Whitcomb: The Rock & Roll Years” (available at Picklehead.com), reveal how he won the town over. As a young man, Whitcomb liked to play to the camera, mugging, dancing around the piano and catting about with the go-go girls. He’s still irrepressibly entertaining, but now he speaks a different dialect: the more genteel language of ragtime, Tin Pan Alley, English music hall and early musical Americana. Indeed, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more knowledgeable authority on early 20th-century American and English popular music. Whitcomb has a detailed knowledge of songwriters and performers from a century ago, and he mines it for his pithy introductions to their music before performing it for contemporary audiences. He’s a serious historian who makes arcane music fun, tossing out surprising factoids like this one: A ballad Elvis Presley made famous — “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” — was actually written in the 1920s.

Call it edutainment. That’s what his fans come to hear when Ian Whitcomb & His Bungalow Boys ride the benefit circuit and appear at other gigs in the area. And that’s what his team of expert Bungalow Boys are uniquely equipped to help him provide. (Guitarist Fred Sokolow is an authority on classic guitar styles, and violinist Bobby Bruce is a World War II veteran who played with Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys.)

“The best of the old songs are the best of Western music, because they have the basics of music: melody, harmony and rhythm,” Whitcomb says. “Those songs are the culmination of 400 years of Western civilization. And in this age of looping and rapping — really just circular rhythms and changing textures — they’re far more interesting to me.”

On a recent afternoon in Santa Monica, Whitcomb stopped for a bite at a Mexican restaurant before performing for a group of schoolchildren at the nearby National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences building, home of the Grammy Awards. (Whitcomb’s 1997 album, “Titanic: Music as Heard on the Fateful Voyage,” won grammy for package design and a nomination for his liner notes; Whitcomb also served as a consultant on the James Cameron film.) He’s tall, still slender and, though his hair is graying, he has a boyish grin. Asked about his presentation later that day, he brightens. “I’m teaching them the story of America through its songs,” he says. The irony of a British expatriate teaching Americans about their country is not lost on him. “It’s an honor to do this, actually. I’m a troubadour in the historic sense, carrying news and information through songs.”

Whitcomb laid the groundwork for his current gigs back in the mid-’60s, then a history student touring with “The Dick Clark Caravan of Stars.” While others on the bus played cards and rehearsed their vocal harmonies, Whitcomb usually had his nose in a book. And when he wasn’t performing at the tour’s stops around the country, he would track down and interview the last of the old tunesmiths and ragtime pianists. The first of his half-dozen cultural histories and memoirs, “After the Ball: Pop Music from Rag to Rock” (Simon & Shuster; 1972), came out of that period. In it, he took a long view of American pop, which helped him find his own place in the music spectrum.

He needed it: Whitcomb’s tumble from the Top 10 to playing ukulele in a pizza restaurant two years later had been dizzying. He’d followed “You Turn Me On” with a recording of a 1916 British music hall ditty: “Where Did Robinson Crusoe Go With Friday on Saturday Night?” It was a modest hit on Pasadena station KRLA, but it was a bridge to nowhere. Novelty songs didn’t make for career longevity in the age of protest songs. He produced Mae West’s “Great Balls of Fire” album, which MGM Records released in 1972, then left the pop music business.

By 1979, Whitcomb was returning to his native England less and less. A friend showed him a house for sale in Altadena and he fell for it on the spot. “I love Altadena,” he says. “We’re close to Pasadena, but it’s removed; those lovely hills are right there.” Perhaps even lovelier, L.A. offered a bigger audience for his obsessions — 1950s rhythm ’n’ blues, ragtime songs, Hawaiian-themed tunes from the 1920s, early cowboy songs and the like.

Then, with his ambitious 1983 book, “Rock Odyssey: A Musician’s Chronicle of the ’60s” (Dolphin/Doubleday), Whitcomb staked his claim as a premier music historian. In this entertaining and incisive tome, he fused his diary entries as a young British Invader with cultural and historic context. The result was a particularly literate and jaundiced appraisal of the gathering renaissance. “The American people elevated me to fame with a trifle, a piece of piffle knocked off in a fit of absence of mind,’’ he wrote of his brush with fame. New York Times critic Stephen Holden praised the book, calling it “the best-written personal chronicle we have of the period.”

These days, Whitcomb’s writings range from scholarly pieces on turn-of-the-20th-century music, which he produces for obscure publications from his desk at the Huntington Research Library, to wide-ranging musings on life that he records in his Letters from Lotusland blog at picklehead.com. Whitcomb also presides over an informal Monday night salon at Conrad’s Coffee Shop in Pasadena, where music experts like author Jim Dawson (“The History, Heroes & Villains of a Pop Music Revolution” [Backbeat; 2003]) and rockabilly singer Ray Campi share their insights.

His well-regarded radio show on KPCC, 89.3 FM, was canceled when the station switched to a talk format a few years ago, but he can still be heard at Luxuriamusic.com. In a typically eclectic show, he might pay tribute to the popular ’50s vocal group the Ames Brothers, then sample his collection of Vitaphone transcription discs from the ’30s, move into a Hawaiian slack-key and ukulele set and end with records by his many musical friends — holding it all together with trenchant commentary.

This month, Whitcomb shoots a TV pilot for “Altadena Lane,” a variety show with local performers at Altadena’s Coffee Gallery for broadcast on Pasadena’s Public Access Cable Channel 56. “It’s kind of like ‘The Tonight Show,’ but with a much smaller budget, of course,” he says. He also serves as musical director of “The Jazz Age,” Allan Knee’s new play about F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, opening at the Blank Theatre Company in Hollywood on Jan. 30.

Aside from his own gigs (the Bungalow Boys play every Sunday at Cantalini’s Ristorante in Marina Del Rey), Whitcomb performs as a sideman with Janet Klein & Her Parlor Boys, strumming the uke he bought for $25 at a New Orleans pawnshop 45 years ago. (Dubbed the “ukulele chanteuse,” Klein is a combination of Betty Boop and Fanny Brice who sings naughty songs like “Banana in Your Fruit Basket.”) With so much going on, Whitcomb finds little time to stay connected with his place of birth, even though he still has siblings on the other side of the Atlantic. “This is my home now,” he says. “I have absolutely no audience in England.” Pausing for a moment, Whitcomb continues: “This country gave me a chance and I took it. I can do what I do here. Americans seem to like me, and I like them for it.”

 Ian Whitcomb is a highly respected performer, composer, and music historian. You can find all of his CD's, DVD's, Books, and
Songbooks by clicking here, or by going to ianwhitcomb.com