SpimCoot reminded me of DonMusic when we were driving to MnkiFrkiWedding. Over coming weeks, I will gather everything there is to know about this underrated genius of a composer.
DonMusic is a highly-strung composer with wild, unkempt hair, who has lived on SesameStreet from 1973 onwards. His creative process involves getting upset frequently at his inability to write effective rhymes, crying out I'll never get it, never, never! and banging his head on the keys of his piano. He often wrote songs very similar to traditional nursery rhymes, but having changed a word or two in the first line, often due to over-critical analyses of the rhymes, everything took a different path, resulting in parrelel universe style lyrics. Kermit the Frog was often present, suggesting the rhymes that DonMusic couldn't think of himself.
He rewrote the lyrics to the SesameStreet theme:
Stormy Night / Not even a cloud in sight / On my way, to where the sky is dark / Can you tell me how to get, how to get to / Yellowstone Park?
His most famous song however, was Mary had a bicycle. In this post from alt.tv.sesame-street by Matt Kaiser in 2001, we get the full story. See the video at http://www.cmug.org/img/DonMusic.mov or elsewhere on the web for a few seconds of this classic skit.
- Don sings "Mary had a Little Lamb" up to the last line, "The lamb was sure to..., and after banging his head, Kermit again offers help and Don wants to complete that line.
(at this point they decide the missing word is run rather than the traditional go. It doesn't rhyme and Don is getting upset.)
- Kermit offers "Mary had a little lamb, his fleece as yellow as the sun, and everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to run."
- Don thinks it over and protests that he never heard of a yellow lamb. Kermit asks Don for a yellow animal, and Don suggests a canary, however Kermit changes the line to..
- "Mary had a little canary, his feathers as blue as the sky, and everywhere that Mary went, the bird was sure to fly"
- Don yells BUT CANARIES AREN'T BLUE!
- Kermit then suggests changing it to something else, and Don suggests a red bicycle.
- So the new lyrics became:
- Mary had a bicycle
- It's colour was red as fire
- And everywhere that Mary went
- The bicycle had a flat tyre.
DonMusic was retired from SesameStreet after it turned out that many children across America and the world were mimicing him by headbutting pianos.
Don's showbiz break came, of course, in 1954 when he appeared as proto-DonMusic songwriter Ross Bagdasarian in Hitchcock's Rear Window. Throughout the film he can be heard struggling to compose Come On-a My House (later a hit for George's aunt, Rosemary Clooney). In one particular scene he can just be heard shouting 'But orgasmic and seismic don't rhyme! Oh I'll never get it!' Look closely and you'll spot the shadow of a frog on the wall, laughing itself sick. 