The Private Canon: "Billy-a-Dick"

For a number of years in the pre-internet era I was the film critic for the L.A. Downtown News, and I've got only a few hard-copy clips in a folder in a cabinet somewhere to show for it. So I can't recover my appreciative if mixed review of the 1991 Bette Midler vehicle For the Boys, a gutsy retcon of her career that answered the question: What if her career had started roughly 30 years earlier than it actually did, and she'd had a chance to play in the same leagues as Doris Day, Judy Garland, Lucille Ball? (Apparently Martha Raye sued the film's producers over alleged resemblances to her own biography.) If I recall correctly I found the film about as saggy and self-aggrandizing as that concept sounds, but I did genuinely enjoy playing along, up to a point, with the imaginative exercise of conjuring a mid-century Midler—sorry, "Dixie Leonard."

A big part of the deal was closed by film's soundtrack, a multi-period sampler mostly under the supervision of musical savant Marc Shaiman. In addition to some fine renditions of well-worn standards (and obligatory ballads by Dave Grusin and Diane Warren), I particularly relish a few gems it rescued from near-obscurity: the sassy Jay Livingston/Ray Evans swinger "Stuff Like That There," with its yodel-like run-on vocals and slangy lyrics, which makes a perfect match for Midler's lusty delivery, captured in a live recording. (The song's most famous previous rendition was by Betty Hutton, and after Bette another talented blonde picked this song up and ran hard with it.)

Even better is the whip-smart album opener, a Hoagy Carmichael/Paul Francis Webster deep cut called "Billy-a-Dick," reconceived as an Andrews Sisters (or maybe Boswell Sisters?) number. Midler, alongside Patty D'Arcy and Melissa Manchester, positively slays this one; listen especially for the trombone-like slides this trio somehow pulls off, separately yet somehow together (on "say" at :24, and at both instances of "roll roll roll," at :52 and 1:11).

The song is both delicious onomatopoeia—the title line, "billy-a-dick, billy-a-dick, tick tack," is the sound of a drum kit rim, echoed in the arrangement—and an inspired bit of wartime wish fulfillment. The singer is pining for her overseas "Johnny," the "kid with the G.I. lid" whose return she awaits, so fervently that she might be hallucinating the sound of "hot licks from a set of drums upstairs." Or perhaps she's getting bored waiting for her Johnny and is feeling the sway of the drumming stranger above?

I'm not quite sure, but the song's apparent double entendres are no less eyebrow-raising for being a bit hazy: She sings that she's so weary that her "rim has even started to rust," and invites us to "look at these sticks tryin' to take out the licks/They're covered in an inch of dust." When she wonders, "When's that boy with the jumpin' joy gonna launch that last attack?" it has the sound of, um, something other than strictly battlefield contact.

Possibly I'm reading too much into it (or misreading it—perhaps the song's metaphors are more martial than conjugal, as there is a line about soon having a "Japanese derby" that can be "beat like a cymbal on a music rack"). But the song does begin with the line, "Ev'ry night when I'm undressing," and among Midler's native talents is the Mae West-ian ability to sniff out the sex in a song and joyously pounce on it. Most likely it's the mixture of both—homebound longing sharpened by home-front anxieties—that gives this song its giddy punch.

Hoagy's original gives little indication of this angle—though he's constitutionally incapable of giving a bad performance, this is pretty indifferent stuff compared to the life that Midler & co. kick into it.