Paul Cezanne

The Special Guests perform a song about the Cubism artist Paul Cezanne

Category:

Music

Tags:

• Cubism
• The
• Special
• Guests
• Paul
• Cezanne
• Tom
• Meltzer

[ptrmzr]

Wow I remember this from U68 which was a low budget video station out of Newark NJ that you could pick up in Manhattan in mid-late 80's. I don't remeber if it was on cable or over the airwaves. They also played Art Of Noise, Oingo Boingo, Phil Collins - Take Me Home, Echo and the Bunnymen, Dream Academy, Bronski Beat, Fishbone - Party at Ground Zero and Max Headroom. Pretty off-the-beaten-path stuff but great music and the video images are still stuck in my head!

[Groovecat68]

"His ouvre's in the Louvre"

lmao...

Dude, I can't believe I found this... They used to play this song on a little underground radio station in St. Louis "back in the day"... Hilarious tune. I am still not convinced Cezanne was the father of cubism, however, haha. I like the provocativce nature of your statement, tho.

Thanks for posting!

[lalitisg]

cezanne was not the father of cubism!!!!

[SimonCoconino]

Steve --

you've left out one wonderful part of the song's story: the Studio 54 party to introduce the video. I still have the dark yellow sleeve 45, printed with the band's logo, that was handed out for that event (as a Jonathan Richman fan, I thought you guys out did him, even at that time, when Jojo and the rocking robbins were at the height of their powers)  to your fellow Columbia students at WKCR, you seemed to nail it -- marketing and all.

Great to see this again after all this time.

[writer1990]

@bicyclesax This song is a classic, I first heard it in the late 1990s from an art historian PhD friend from NYC area then Northwestern, I have no idea how he heard it first. Believe me, the song lives and we all know to take it as humor with a grain of salt and we love it. You guys were genius! (and my version rhymed "avocat" with "mais non pas")

[bicyclesax]

Lastly, everyone in this video is alive and well, and our chops are in reasonable condition. Paul, Tom, and I all play music regularly in our respective locales, and Mark has long been a member of the juggling troupe Flying Karamazov Brothers. Dave produces major live shows in Atlanta. Given sufficient clamor, it's not out of the question we could have a reunion...

[bicyclesax]

The 45's came in plain white sleeves. Printed jackets weren't in our budget (recording, mastering, pressing 1000 copies, and producing a 16mm film was not cheap on our mid-80s boho incomes) I created a jacket for the 45 photocopied onto blue legal-sized paper, which left exactly enough room to fold tabs at the sides, fold the paper down the middle to create the front and back, and glue the tabs together. We did that by hand 1000 times.

[bicyclesax]

I was trying to be a marketing genius. We included a press package, and even a stamped return postcard so the stations could tell us what they thought of the record, whether it was in light, medium, or heavy rotation, if it was compatible with their format, if they had a relationship with any local clubs that would like to book the band, etc. Many were returned. I probably still have them somewhere in a milk crate.

[bicyclesax]

4) If you heard this on radio, it's because we spent a small fortune and thousands of hours on mailings to college and alternative stations (back when alternative meant "other than what you hear on commercial radio all day long"). Pre-internet, this involved me going to the Columbia Business School library and finding a trade reference book listing every radio station in America and its format, and writing the ones with potential down on paper, for weeks and weeks on end.

[bicyclesax]

3) Cezanne was not a Cubist. Tom knew that. We all knew that. But in art history he's commonly referred to as the Father of Cubism or Le Pere De Cubisme) because he established certain visual principles that the cubists built upon. If you understand Spanish, the YouTube page called "Cézanne, el padre del cubismo." I'd post the link, but YouTube isn't letting me post vid links in the comments. No idea why.

[bicyclesax]

The lyric we used prior to recording the version that's on the vid was "Cezanne's father wanted him to be an avocat, but he just looked at him and said "no way, pa (sometimes "papa"). I have no idea why we went with "homme legale" and "pal" in this version. We never did it that way on stage. Maybe that's how Tom originally wrote it after the art history class that inspired the song. You can ask him.

[bicyclesax]

Thanks for comments! This is Steve, Special Guests sax player, to respond to questions. 1) 5CB was a "successor" band to us, made up of the members that existed at the time I left the band, which had Neil and Kevin from the Surreal McCoys, Wally, Mark, and Jenny having departed earlier. and rearranging its sound to be more country-ish in the absence of horns and to highlight Neil and Kevin's skills. Next post for more info.