Music: It's the Style

If you're happy and your eyes are always dry, Don't you know that it's the style to sob and sigh, Singers do it, crowds do it, even little white clouds do it. You, too, can be unhappy if you taaaa-ry!

These words of a song called Try, wildly sobbed, gulped, gurgled and wailed, last week were beginning to ooze out of radios and jukeboxes across the land at a depressing rate. In Los Angeles, one adolescent worshiper of Crooner Johnny Ray, the Mossadegh of music, hurried to a friend to confide: "The guy went clear out on this one—he sounds like he really broke up." Other devotees, sharp enough to sniff a burlesque on their idol, launched an avalanche of protests at hilarious disk jockeys and at Capitol Records.

Try, a burlesque of Johnny Ray's bestseller Cry, is the work of Stan Freberg, 25, an exponent of the Al Capp-Henry Morgan school of humor, who is otherwise known to Los Angeles' junior TV fans as Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent on the Time for Beany show.

Freberg, who first hit the satirical record big time with his John and Marsha take-off on soap operas, got the idea for Try while eating in a Hollywood restaurant. The jukebox kept droning Johnny Ray records—"and pretty soon I'm up to my hips in tears."

Composer Freberg thought to himself, "The whole [pop music] industry is turning into one big wailing wall . . . Somebody ought to do a take-out on it." He called in his collaborator, a melancholy little man named Ruby Raksin, who has contributed to the literature of music such gems as When It's Pickle Picking Time Down in Dixie, Dixie Pick a Pickle for Me!, and went to work.

Now that Try is spinning its way to momentary fame, Freberg is already at work on another situation that he believes needs some taking-off. Excerpt from his newest, Abe Snake for President:

I'll re-re-do the White House in a flowered calico, The furniture can stay, boy, but the piano's gotta go. If I don't make much salary, I'm not afraid of that 'Cause if I get elected, well, there's other ways to skin a cat.