Oklahoma Toad

Dave Frishberg was already established as a sideman pianist (Gene Krupa, Kai Winding, et. al) and accompanist (most notably to Carmen McRae) when he began to branch out into songwriting.

Interestingly, a pair of his very earliest works remain among his most popular: 1962’s “Peel Me a Grape,” written for singer Fran Jeffries, and “I’m Hip,” co-written with Bob Dorough shortly thereafter, and recorded most famously by Blossom Dearie in 1966.

“Grape,” first recorded by singer Nikki Price, was published by Frank Music, owned by legendary songwriter Frank Loesser. But it wasn’t until a short while later that Frishberg actually came face-to-face with the man he describes as “My hero.”

In 1963, he sent his “Wallflower Lonely, Cornflower Blue” to Loesser and later recalled to jazz journalist Whitney Balliett, “He called me in and talked to me for a couple of hours, showing me what was right, what was wrong. For me, it was like talking to Babe Ruth.” (Baseball, as most Frishberg listeners know, looms large in his legend.)

It’s hard to imagine now, but even after Frishberg had begun writing songs in the early 1960s, it never dawned on him that he would ever sing them in public himself. But the unthinkable finally happened in 1969 when he recorded—and sang—an album’s worth of his songs for his first album Oklahoma Toad.

Here’s how it came about: It was co-produced by David Rosner and Margo Guryan, soon to be husband-and-wife.

Guryan knew Frishberg first: “I met Dave when I was married to trombonist Bob Brookmeyer and he played at the [New York Club] the Half Note frequently, and Dave very often played piano there with Al Cohn and Zoot Sims. I thought he was an amazing jazz pianist and we’ve been friends ever since that time. He had just begun to write pop material and I had started a small publishing company and did some demos of Dave’s songs. ‘Sweet Lover No More’ was one of them. He sang; I was a non-singer at that point.”

Next, Rosner enters the picture when he signed Guryan as a songwriter to a publishing wing of Columbia Records. “Then,” Rosner recalls, “Margo came in one day and told me that she wanted to introduce me to someone whose music she thought I would like. I ended up publishing just one of his songs, ‘Oklahoma Toad,’ and had him make a demo [recording] of it. I then left that publishing company and went into independent production, and a recording Margo and I subsequently made of Dave [which came to be Oklahoma Toad] ended up being released by Creed Taylor’s CTI Records. He wanted to remix it, though, and I agreed.”

Looking back, Rosner remembers that initially Frishberg was not entirely satisfied with the release: “He always thought of this as his rock and roll album. There’s a lot of overdubbing. As a purist jazz musician, this is anathema to him. But after hearing this new master, he phoned me last week [in June 2010] and told me how much he was enjoying it.” Guryan adds that Frishberg was wildly enthusiastic and creative during the making of the recording: “It was a kind of rock and roll energy,” she says.

Even after Oklahoma Toad, Frishberg didn’t begin vocalizing in public for several more years, by which time he had relocated from New York to Los Angeles…directly as a result of that ’70 release. For in 1971, the producers of a new network TV show, The Funny Side, invited him to come to L.A. to write for them, he pulled up stakes and moved west.

Of the ten songs on that ’70 release, four of them (Mungo, One Horse, Oklahoma, Nasty) have remained in the Frishberg canon sufficiently enough to have been re-recorded by him in later years. But of the quartet of tunes, the one that attracted the most attention at the time was unquestionably “Van Lingle Mungo.”

Rosner tells an interesting story about the writing of the song: “When Dave first presented the Mungo song to us, it was entitled ‘Don’t Look Behind You.’ I told Dave, ‘the lyric doesn’t do the music justice.’ He then wrote ‘Farther And Farther,’ and my reaction was the same. Dave then came up with the Mungo lyric. I felt it, too, was not equal to the music. But Margo said, ‘hey, listen to what he’s done, it’s brilliant(!).’ I listened – and the rest is history.”

That final lyric, set to a bossa nova beat, consisted almost exclusively of the names of beloved baseball players of Frishberg’s youth, one of whom happened to be Brooklyn Dodgers (1931-41) pitcher Mungo, whose name is a recurring motif throughout the song. The tune was released as the album’s single, many copies of which were sent to sports writers, Rosner recalls.

After Oklahoma Toad came out and Frishberg’s baseball laundry list attracted attention via the title tune single, he even got a chance to meet the ballplayer. And in the most public of places… on TV. The two men came together on the nationally-televised Dick Cavett Show. Later, Frishberg recalled to a journalist that backstage, “(Mungo) asked me when he would see some remuneration for the song. When he heard my explanation about how there was unlikely to be any remuneration for anyone connected with the song, least of all him, he was genuinely downcast. ‘But it’s my name,’ he said. I told him, ‘The only way you can get even is to go home and write a song called Dave Frishberg.'” To the best of the musician’s knowledge, Mungo never got around to penning that effort. Ironically, today the player is perhaps best remembered because of a song that has since become a signature tune for his songwriting fan.

As with most English-language vocal albums, the original Japanese issue of Oklahoma Toad contained a lyric sheet purported to be a transcription of the lyrics Frishberg sings. But many of these monikers were so exotic as to fall unpronounceable even on most western ears, and so, understandably, approximately half the names Frishberg intoned were left out and of those that made the cut only Mungo and Roy Campanella were spelled correctly. Perhaps that is why, for this new issue, Frishberg’s music publisher, David Rosner (and the original record co-producer!) was insistent that only the official versions of the lyrics be published in this insert.

Gigging around LA and touring after moving to Southern California, in ’71, Frishberg (who now resides in Portland, Oregon) did not record under his own name for a second time until 1973 (Solo and Trio) and then it was an entirely instrumental affair. He did not test out his vocal chops until 1977 and then it was only a few of the tracks on Getting Some Fun Out of Life, with only one song being his, Dear Bix.

By the early 1980s, though, Frishberg was well on his way to becoming the prolific, renowned pianist-singer-songwriter he has since become. In all likelihood, none of this would have come to pass—at least not in the way that it did—were it not for the seminal ’70 work, Oklahoma Toad.

–Bill Reed