Turning Siamese Would Have Been Quite the Coup d'Etat for All in the Family

Amid the current political upheaval in Thailand, capped by the military coup d’etat of May 22, this is the optimal time to examine why Chang and Eng Bunker, the original Siamese twins, would have made an even better Archie Bunker than Carroll O’Connor. Sure, O’Connor earned four Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe for his timeless and beloved portrayal of Archie Bunker, who, in turn, helped make All in the Family one of the most culturally significant programs in television history. America laughed for a decade at Archie’s convoluted logic, malapropos and mannerisms, his equal-opportunity bigotry, and his big-hearted narrow-mindedness—all of which mirrored a nation struggling with its own hypocrisy and neuroses by finding the right way to reflect all that was wrong with America.

Still, Chang and Eng Bunker, twin brothers conjoined at the chest by a large segment of cartilage, seem even better suited to the role. Born to Chinese parents in Siam (present-day Thailand), in 1811, the brothers found worldwide celebrity exhibiting themselves on tour as the “Siamese twins” (even rating a mention in the Guinness Book of World Records a century later as the source of the term). The Bunker twins later immigrated to antebellum North Carolina, becoming successful plantation owners—and slave owners, oddly enough, in view of the similarly low status of “Orientals” in that age—as well as naturalized U.S. citizens. Proving more desirable than many “single” men, they fathered twenty-one children between them—literally between them, considering the logistics involved—and died in 1874.

For a show called All in the Family, what could have been more familial than conjoined twins sharing the lead role? Especially with the ability to call Edith a dingbat and Mike a meathead simultaneously? Perhaps even opting for the comedic drama of one brother a hard-line, war-hawk conservative and the other a bleeding-heart, pinko-commie liberal, verbally battling each other between orders to Stifle yourself! and moans of Aw, geez, huh? (Their inevitable problems with American enunciation hardly would have been worse than Archie’s butchering of the English language.) I don’t know if the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences would have awarded each brother his own Emmy, presented the two of them with a single prize, or, most likely, bestowed the twins with two individual statuettes soldered together, but Chang and Eng surely would have carted off during the series’ run an armful of them—carried with each lending one arm, of course.

During that narrow, 100-year window between Chang and Eng’s death and the mastering of special effects that now might allow twin Thai actors as talented and charismatic as Carroll O’Connor to appear conjoined—or, in lieu of expensive technical wizardry, at least have them share an XXXXXXXXXXXXL shirt—we certainly were fortunate that O’Connor gave the world Archie. But in a medium in which twins have long been prized both as a source of comedy and conflict, Change and Eng Bunker—the first of their kind, on the first show of its kind—would have yielded twice the laughs.

Boy, the way Yul Brynner played

Years on Broadway Mongkut stayed

Thais like us, double we weighed

Those were the days

And you knew Siamese twins

Didn't quite move like Errol Flynn

Messrs., we could use a man
Like Naresuan the Great again

Didn't need no coup d'etat

Everybody smiled through Buddha

Gee, Bangkok was Shangri-La

Those...were...the...dayssssss!

(Chang puts stogie to mouth with available hand as Eng leans head on Chang’s shoulder)

(Image of Archie Bunker copyright CBS.)

Deep Purple's Deepest Puzzle Solved...Thanks to Judith Owen

Okay, this is a seriously overdue discovery, but you, too, may have been unaware of this: Welsh-born singer-songwriter Judith Owen has righted one of the great wrongs in the history of popular music. Not widely known in pop or rock circles, the velvet-voiced pianist—and wife of humor mainstay Harry Shearer—devotes much of her musical career to jazz and Celtic material that you wouldn’t normally hear in the mainstream…and certainly not on rock stations, despite Owen covering songs by The Kinks, James Taylor, The Police, Mungo Jerry, Shearer’s own Spinal Tap, and Deep Purple.

In 2005, Owen’s Lost and Found album led off with a cover of Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water.” Despite being pretty well versed in contemporary music, I never heard her version—which also served as bumper music for the Coast to Coast AM radio show—until this morning. Owen’s wistful and, yes, smoky rendition of the 1972 hard-rock classic—complete with alluring uh-uh-uhh’s in place of Ritchie Blackmore’s immortal riff—adds an extra word to Ian Gillan’s original lyric.

A word that corrects perhaps the most brazen grammatical neglect since December 7th, 1941—a date that will live in infamy (neglect that, in turn, stood as the most egregious transgression in human communication until the 1976 debut of the sitcom What’s Happening!!—with its two vexing exclamation points yet no trace of a question mark).

Even as a six-year-old I was perplexed by “Smoke on the Water”’s Some stupid with a flare gun. Sure, I had yet to embark on the great endeavor of kindergarten, but even though basic grammar, syntax, and parts of speech lay in my future, I recognized—as surely did most adults—something horribly amiss with that line. “What’s a stupid?” I asked myself every time I heard the instantly anthemic tune crackling out of Dad’s car radio. I didn’t yet know what a noun was—but I instinctively knew stupid wasn’t one. In a perversely psychotic twist of poetic license, Ian Gillan, one of the very greatest vocalists in rock music, had forced the square peg into the round hole by singing an adjective as a noun. Somehow, the FCC had done nothing—both it and the BBC couldn’t censor or ban songs containing a drug reference or anything deemed even mildly “subversive” quickly enough in those days, yet they sat on their collective hands as “Smoke on the Water” raced up the charts and addled a generation of preschool minds with grammatical nonsense.

   

Confused and losing alarming amounts of sleep as “Smoke on the Water” saturated the airwaves—and, consequently, my cerebrum—I eventually made excuses for Ian Gillan…

“It was done for meter—following stupid with a noun would have made the couplet too long,” I sometimes placated myself.

Other times—questioning my own rationalism—I fell back to no one in particular on the all-healing mantra, “It’s rock ‘n’ roll, man!”

Yet why didn’t Gillan use a noun in place of stupid? Okay, he might have been lured by the alliteration of some stupid—even at the risk of creating one of the all-time asinine lines—but Gillan still could have achieved this lyrical device by opting for an “s-noun.” Some sod with a flare gun would have worked smashingly. Or if the young bloke from Hounslow had managed in his youth to pick up any Yiddish from the approximately 0.25% of Jewish citizens living in that London suburb (based on 2011 U.K. Census data), even some schmuck with a flare gun.

It might be too cynical to believe that Gillan planned this lyrical faux pas to garner attention—after all, the band self-admittedly operated in a constant whirlwind of sex, booze, and drugs that likely left minds too fogged to know that A is for apple, let alone articulate simple sentence structure. Then again, Deep Purple hadn’t made an impact where the money was—the American singles chart—in nearly four years, when it was essentially an entirely different musical entity. And even though “Smoke on the Water” wasn’t officially released as a single for nearly a year, this signature-tune-in-the-making, with its haunting imagery and relentless crunch, was chiefly responsible for propelling Machine Head into the Top 10 in the United States and breaking Deep Purple as a major force in rock. As far as I was concerned, the song seemed just as provocative because of what was wrong about it as what was right about it. (Not even the hopelessly straight-laced Pat Boone bothered to correct the line in his infamous 1997 lounge-metal cover, probably with the aim of augmenting his pathetically disingenuous attempt at the bad-boy image—so maybe I’m not being too cynical after all.)

Perhaps Ian Gillan’s carelessness even served as the subconscious impetus for me to become an editor all those years later, sowing in my young mind a need to make sense of a bewildering rock ‘n’ roll landscape—a need that I carried into adulthood and from which I have made my living ever since.*

* Not long before “Smoke on the Water”’s release, I had already become well acquainted with another radio hit, America’s “A Horse With No Name,” whose lyrical minefield of a chorus quickly became legend; however, that song lacked the monolithic majesty of Jon Lord’s distorted Hammond C3 organ to produce the same editorial consternation in my young logic center.

Forty-three years later, along comes Judith Owen, like an angel of grammar out of the Welsh mist, not only to cover this most iconic of rock songs, but to fix it, by adding the noun it so dearly lacked lo these many years.

Some stupid fool with a flare gun/Burned the place to the ground  

Hallelujah, Judith. After more than four decades, we finally know who was responsible for starting the fire that destroyed Montreux Casino: A fool. A stupid fool. This information likely came too late to amend the fire-insurance claim filed by Groupe Lucien Barrière execs sifting through the cinders of their gutted casino, but it does mercifully provide grammatical closure for Deep Purple fans such as me, disillusioned casualties of the 1970s, and those who value the English language.

Now if Judith Owen only would cover Jimi Hendrix so that castles made of sand can melt and slip into the sea—properly... 

(Image of Ian Gillan copyright Rolling Stone.)