JERSEY CITY -- In January of 1969, Broadway audiences were still flocking to "Hello, Dolly!," the Jerry Herman musical that features store clerk Cornelius croon the sweet love song "It Only Takes a Moment" to hat shop owner Irene in the second act.
Across the country, in Las Vegas, plumbing manufacturer American-Standard that month put on its own splashy musical, "The Bathrooms are Coming!" It features a love song of a different stripe, a woman's duet with her own reflection in a mirror. The objection of her affection? Her bathroom.
My bathroom, my bathroom
Is my very special room
Where I primp and fuss and groom
Where I can get away from all
And really feel in bloom
Not your standard Great White Way fare, but composer Sid Siegel wasn't trying to win a Tony award -- he was trying to sell American-Standard's products to the distributers in the audience. "The Bathrooms are Coming!" is an industrial musical, a bizarre subset of Americana examined recently by authors Steve Young and Sport Murphy in their book, "Everything's Coming Up Profits: The Golden Age of Industrial Musicals."
The two men appeared in Jersey City Friday night to host a two-hour show at WFMU's Monty Hall featuring video clips of some of these musicals -- one a tribute to silicone, another a celebration of Kellogg's cereals -- and live performances. They also offered some behind-the-scenes tidbits about the making of these strange relics of the 20th Century.
"It's just a weird piece of America," said Young, 49, a comedy writer who worked for David Letterman. "It's crass and commercial but it's also oddly innocent and sweet and we love it for all these different levels."
'THIS SHOULDN'T WORK'
It all started in the 1990s with a regular bit on Letterman's show called Dave's Record Collection. When Young joined the writing team, he was tasked with unearthing unintentionally hilarious records that Letterman could feature. Digging in New York City record store bins, Young stumbled upon an LP called "Go Fly a Kite," the recording of an industrial musical produced at a General Electric executives conference in 1966.
Industrial musicals were corporate in-house infotainment, meant not for the public at large but for executives or salespeople. They were written to entertain, sure, but their main mission was to explain a new product or a new marketing plan. Here's the new typewriter, here's the big coupon this season, that kind of thing. One from General Motors was called "Diesel Dazzle."
The shows were produced mostly in the 1960s and '70s with lavish budgets at annual conventions, and they often came with original cast recordings distributed to employees. Top-shelf Broadway talent created some of them. John Kander and Fred Ebb, the songwriting team behind Broadway classic "Cabaret," composed the score for "Go Fly a Kite." Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock, who wrote "Fiddler on the Roof," penned "Ford-i-fy Your Future for Ford" (1959).
"The best of them are absolutely astonishing ... earworm after earworm," Young told The Jersey Journal. "You realize this shouldn't work, a song about the industrial applications of silicone General Electric is trying to promote to other businesses. This should not be a song. And if it has to be a song, it should not be a good song."
Murphy, 55, discovered industrial musicals separately, after finding "Penney Proud," the recording of a 1962 musical produced by J.C. Penney, at a thrift store. Murphy was astonished by the music - "it was like Bobby Darin" - and began to seek similar records on eBay, only to be outbid again and again by Young.
"I didn't know who this guy was," Murphy said. "So I wrote to him and we started comparing notes."
DOCUMENTARY COMING
"Everything's Coming Up Profits" was released in 2013, and focused on the original recordings made to document these strange musicals. But Young and Murphy aren't done yet. They're starting to get their hands on video clips of the musicals, footage that at first they hadn't dreamed still existed. Vinyl recordings produced in limited quantities were hard enough to dig up, but 16 mm films from 50 years ago?
They did indeed exist, buried in actors' basements or in collectors' stockpiles. There weren't many copies. The canister for a musical touting Hamm's beer, a cartoon with animation by none other than Hanna-Barbera, was labeled "print one of two," according to Young.
"The other one," he said, is "probably 1,000 feet deep down in a landfill."
Young and a team of filmmakers are now in the process of putting the clips together, along with interviews of the composers and actors behind them, for a documentary. While sifting through the footage, they discovered that the productions didn't always rise to the level of their scores.
The songs featured in "The Bathrooms are Coming!" are, Young said, "high-octane stuff" but the storyline surrounding it is "an utter train wreck." The film begins with two women unhappy about their terrible bathrooms meeting Greek goddess Femma, "the leader of all women's movement" who helps the women start a "bathroom revolution."
Some of the film remains missing.
"Unfortunately we don't know why the four outhouses have the authors of the four gospels on them," Murphy said, referring to a still from the film on the LP cover. "Some blasphemy I'm dying to know about."
It's not clear whether any of the musicals ever led to increased sales or higher productivity, Murphy said.
"We don't really know," he said. "But we're glad they tried."
Terrence T. McDonald may be reached at tmcdonald@jjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @terrencemcd. Find The Jersey Journal on Facebook.