Music: Stay as Sick as You Are

The mood is hushed. A guitar is strummed lightly, and as the lullaby begins, a young mother sings in sweet, loving tones to her helpless child:

Hush little sibling, close your eyes.

Mummy will have you analyzed.

Daddy found something very new,

We’re gonna try it out on you.

The lullaby is one of a dozen Songs of Couch and Consultation (Commentary Records) beguilingly warbled over her own guitar playing by blonde Nightclub Singer Katie Lee. With lyrics by Bud Freeman, a sometime movie press-agent and independent recordmaker, the disk is an eminently amusing spoof of the nation’s taste in song and psychoanalysis. As the album opens, Katie is heard applying to a head-shrinker:

Shrinker man, shrinker man,

Set me right if you can.

Align me, tune me, normalize me,

Clean me up and Simoniz me.

It soon becomes plain that her beloved is in need of treatment, too, but Katie is afraid he may never be the same again. To a romantic tango tune, she sings:

I love your streak of cruelty, your

psychopathic lies, The homicidal tendencies shining in

your eyes.

Don’t change your psychic structure,

Weird as it may be . . .

Stay darling, stay, way under par . . .

Stay as sick as you are.

And when the boy friend does emerge from analysis. Katie is reduced to complaining: ”I can’t get adjusted to the you that got adjusted to me.” From here on, she bounces all over the Freudian landscape, sometimes backed by a hot sax (Repressed Hostility Blues), sometimes by a relaxed trumpet (Real Sick Sounds). In a childhood memoir called The Guilty . Rag, she combines a brassy red-hot mamma complex with a mocking, rocking bit of father asphyxiation:

I’m thrilled when I recall that I have

fulfilled

Those death wishes that I had

For my dear old dad.

The slight but properly parodistic music for all this is provided by Composer Leon Pober and Arranger Bob Thompson. As of now, Thompson is the only Couch collaborator who has been analyzed, but, says Lyricist Freeman, “If we sell 100,000 albums, I will owe it to the analytic profession to be analyzed myself.”