Welcome to 1957. The post war years where the US was riding a wave a earnest self reflection and egocentric self importance. It could only be during a period such as this that something as witty and mischievous as Songs of the Couch and Consultation could be born. It’s a tongue in cheek almost malicious swipe at psychoanalysis. Tom Cruise would love it. It’s from singer/ actress Katie Lee who a little later would go on to reinterpret traditional folk tunes. Yet here she plays it relatively straight, although everything else is a little bent. She has great range and a real playful quality that is reminiscent of some of the grand cinematic musicals of the period. The music is light, jazzy, orchestral with a real cheeky feel that works beautifully under Lee’s (almost) straight delivery. It would be curious to know where her skepticism comes from, particularly given her history in Jungian therapy, yet she really is quite scathing, barely concealing it under a cute playfulness, where she takes therapy to ridiculous extremes. “There must be a chump, on whom I can dump, my repressed hostility blues,” (‘Repressed Hostility Blues’) she sings, or later she analyses a gunslinger’s childhood to determine where things went wrong (‘Gunslinger: A Ballad For Adult Westerns’). This collection is combined with her less commercially successful follow up Life is Just a Bed of Neuroses from 1960 which continues a similar recipe – yet with a different arranger doesn’t seem to possess the same kind of witty zing. It is still quite debonair, bigger on the brass, still quite snappy, yet the lyrics aren’t as incisive, not so razor sharp.
It really is strange listening to this kind of music, where names like Adler, words like acrophobia, or the Id are dropped into the lyrics, and song titles include ‘I Can’t Adjust to the You Who Got Adjusted To Me’, ‘Mental Blocks’, or ‘The Insecure Tango’. Yet it’s so clever and perhaps even kitsch that you have to admire it. Then again this is just one more of the many clever and bizarre curiosities that Omni have been rediscovering lately.
Bob Baker Fish
