A Roy Zimmerman concert audience always reports the same thing: What really grabs you—what sets you back on your haunches—are Zimmerman’s wildly inventive juxtapositions. Yes, the professionalism is top-drawer, the guitar-playing brilliant and the energy level sky-high, but it’s the composition itself—the prodigious range—that amazes.
Indeed, Zimmerman’s uncanny ability to blend existential seriousness with laugh-out-loud hilarity raises the obvious question: Could this brainy, satirical singer/songwriter be the long-rumored love child of Madeleine Albright and Jon Stewart? No exaggeration: Listen to him long enough and you’re convinced that this nimble man could not only make Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason comprehensible to the layman, but could render the epistemological underpinnings of German Rationalism hysterically funny.
Some years ago, in a tribute to Chuck Berry, Eric Clapton made a memorable observation about the art of song phrasing. According to Clapton, what separated Chuck Berry’s sentences from the rest of the pack’s—what made Berry’s rock lyrics truly unique—was the “crowding together” of so many words and syllables to create a “mental landscape.”
Structurally, Clapton’s comment could apply to Zimmerman as well. The difference, of course, is that it’s an intellectual landscape being laid out tantalizingly before us. As Joni Mitchell once gushed, “Roy Zimmerman’s lyrics move beyond poetry; they achieve perfection.”
Zimmerman’s range isn’t restricted to political satire; he does hilarious parody, as well. His send-up of the Beatles, for example (a medley of songs answering the question: What if the Beatles had come from Ireland instead of Liverpool?), is dead-on brilliant—a real show-stopper.
I asked him what the most “daring” or defiant thing he’d ever done on stage and, while Zim is too genteel and sophisticated a performer to ever sink to anything coarse or crude (he’d rather let his razor-honed lyrics do the cutting), his anecdote sums up the risk he takes in not catering to his audience. While still performing with The Foremen (a folk group he originated), he once appeared before an audience of graduates from the USC School of Dentistry.
“We did a couple of songs to meager applause,” he explains. “Then we did my song, ‘Ollie, Ollie, Off Scott Free,’ poking fun at Oliver North (indicted but never imprisoned for his part in the Iran-Contra scandal, during Reagan’s presidency).
We finished to absolute silence. After a pause of about 30 seconds, a guy in the front row blurts out, ‘That’s bullshit!’ For me, that’s when it started getting fun. I said, “Well, here’s another one you’re gonna hate.’” And off they went.
March 1, Cornelia Street Café, 29 Cornelia St. (betw. 6th & 7th Aves. by W. 4th St.), 212-989-9319; 8:30, $10.
