A five-minute stop at James Lileks' "Bleat" wins you a bit of history and a wry anecdote from an inimitable author. Just yesterday he took comic offense at the cartoon likes of Bugs Bunny and King Leonardo being considered peers, concluding, "nothing says kid-fun like a theme song scored for six barroom harmonizers and one oboe."
Less barroom beverages, more practice. And it's too long. Just for that, I feel obligated to remind the world how unique arrangements for three-minute ditties can be done right. Two summers ago my father and I converted a stock of fifty-year-old 78-RPM records, one of them being a double-sided single of ragtime maven Crazy Otto. "12th Street Rag," apparently a tried-and-true ragtime standby, stole my heart; I keep a copy on my rig and occasionally give it a listen to introduce a little emergency levity to my day. If you took a piano's honky-tonk conversion to a level of necromancy, you'd have Crazy Otto's instrument. His hammers sound like they're ball peens. As pianist friend Jonn said to me after I played the rag to him for the first time, "What was that?" But we played it again and again.