Mark Herman Shines in Two Concerts at Balboa Park’s Organ Pavilion

Stunning Musical Performances Overwhelm the Silent Films He was Accompanying

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles and I just returned from the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in San Diego’s Balboa Park, where for the last two days a quite spectacular theatre organist named Mark Herman has been performing. On Saturday, October 30 he closed out this year’s Monday night organ festival concert – though this one was moved to Saturday, October 30 so it would take place before Hallowe’en instead of afterwards – which was the venue’s traditional “Movie Night,” an annual event in which they show either a silent feature or (as this year) a program of silent shorts, with the organist supplying live musical accompaniment. This, mind you, is how silent films were shown “in the day”: the very largest theatres had full orchestras, the next rung down had organs, the theatres below them had string trios (piano, violin and cello) and the cheapest theatres just had a piano. Major films – the blockbusters of the silent era, like D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation and Allan Dwan’s Robin Hood (1922, starring Douglas Fairbanks) – not only had elaborately prepared scores, they were sent out with the movie in various arrangements so that whatever the number and caliber of the musicians that theatre could afford, they would have the correct music. DWan recalled that when Robin Hood played in its first-run showings, he would go to the theatre and arrive a day ahead of time so he could rehearse with the orchestra and make sure they got all the sound effects called for in the score right. Indeed, when sound came in to movies in the late 1920’s, a number of critics said audiences would be disappointed because they were used to hearing live music with their movies and they would soon get tired of the music being recorded and played on a soundtrack instead.

As things turned out this year, the organist was considerably more interesting than the movies: Mark Herman is based in Los Angeles and often performs both as a live accompanist to silent films and as a concert artist. He’s still a relatively young man, and in 2012 he became the youngest winner of the American Guild of Theatre Organists’ Organist of the Year Award. The tradition at the Organ Pavilion’s silent-movie nights has been that the organist plays a short set (about half an hour) of concert selections, mostly light music or pop songs from the silent-movie era, but Herman broke the mold. He played three pieces at the start of the show, then ran the first movie, then played a medley mostly of TV themes, played the second movie, and opened the second set after the intermission with two more songs, ran the third and last film, and then played what amounted to an encore, the “Television March” by the British light-music composer Eric Coates (1886-1957). Intriguingly, he repeated the “Television March” at today’s Hallowe’en concert, opening a set that included some of the same music he’d played the night before but also some different and, in some cases, unusual repertoire for someone billed as a theatre organist. The biggest thing I like about Mark Herman is that he has a real feel for jazz: he began his October 30 program with Duke Ellington’s “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing),” and instead of playing with the big, heavy, corny voicings most theatre organists use when they play pop songs, he really swung. What’s more, he was able to use the organ’s cymbal gadget – a cymbal struck with a mechanically operated stick that’s supposed to duplicate the sound of a real jazz drummer playing a ride cymbal – and came close to the model. (Some musicians who’ve attempted jazz on the Spreckels organ have attacked this device with all the subtlety of a blacksmith hammering out a horseshoe on an anvil.) After doing justice to Duke’s piece Herman played a novelty from the 1920’s called “Poodle in the Park” by Dutch composer Jack Trombey (1927-2017), which he may have been inspired to play by the sheer number of dogs in general, and poodles in particular, in the park that night. (I was sitting next to a party of three quite charming women and two poodles, Sequoia and Poppy.) His third piece was “Pure Imagination” from the score of the 1971 movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory by composer Anthony Newley and lyricist Leslie Bricusse – though for some reason, both last night and when he repeated it in this afternoon’s concert, he credited only Bricusse, not Newley.

After the first film – a silly but still very funny spoof of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde called Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pryde made by Stan Laurel (before he teamed up with Oliver Hardy) in 1925 for independent producer Joe Rock, releasing through Universal and therefore getting to use their elaborate sets (notably for the 1923 film The Hunchback of Notre Dame) – Herman played a seven-song medley that included themes from the TV shows The Addams Family, Tales from the Crypt and The Munsters as well as several songs from Walt Disney movies (“real” Walt Disney movies, produced while Disney was still alive and creating them himself before he died in 1966 and his name became a brand): Leigh Harline’s and Ned Washington’s “Hi-Diddle-De-Dee” and “When You Wish Upon a Star” from Pinocchio (1940) and “Heigh-Ho, Heigh-Ho” from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Then he ran the second movie, Habeas Corpus, a Laurel and Hardy silent short from 1928. Dr. Pyckie and Mr. Pryde was actually better – though Oliver Hardy wasn’t in it (and it would have been even funnier if Hardy had appeared and played a parody of Mr. Utterson, Jekyll’s attorney, who unravels the story of Jekyll’s chemical transformation into Hyde), Laurel plays Jekyll as the same prim, impossibly stuck-up upper-class British twit he would play as Lord Paddington in the late Laurel and Hardy film A Chump at Oxford (1940). What’s most amusing about this movie is the sheer banality of Hyde’s “evil,” including stealing an ice-cream cone from a kid and getting into a fight with the cops using pea-shooters. Herman upset me a bit when he made a nasty comment about the film Laurel was parodying – the big-budget 1920 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from Paramount starring John Barrymore. After today’s concert he explained it a bit to me – he said he’s had to play live for the Barrymore Jekyll and Hyde many times and it’s a hard film to accompany because it has so many dull stretches when nothing particularly interesting (or inspiring to him at the organ bench) is happening. I looked up my moviemagg comments on it, https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2021/03/dr-jekyll-and-mr-hyde-paramount.html, and I found I called it “a good movie but not a great one” and wished it had had a more inspiring director than John S. Robertson (like D. W. Griffith, Rex Ingram or Erich von Stroheim – indeed that started one of my Hollywood never-was fantasies: a Jekyll and Hyde with Stroheim as both director and star … ). It’s certainly not in a league with the true classics of silent horror, like the German films The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or The Golem, or the Lon Chaney, Sr. vehicles The Hunchback of Notre Dame or The Phantom of the Opera. Herman said he’s played Phantom many times and it and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis are his all-time favorite silent films – but he’s never performed Metropolis because he hasn’t had the chance to learn the original score Lang commissioned from composer Gottfried Hüppertz and he wouldn’t want to perform it with any other music.

Alas, Habeas Corpus, the second film on the program of vaguely Hallowe’en-themed short comedies was the weakest, even though it had Laurel and Hardy as stars and some pretty major talents behind the camera as well – the writer was H. M. “Beanie” Walker, the director was James Parrott (brother of Charley Parrott, who was a major comedy star at the Hal Roach studio in his own right – he directed his own films and starred as Charley Chase but took his directing credits under his real name, much like such later music stars as McKinley Morganfield, Chester Alan Arthur Burnett and Declan Patrick Aloysius MacManus – you know them better as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Elvis Costello) and under his credit it says, “Supervised by Leo McCarey.” McCarey was the Hal Roach producer/director who first thought of teaming Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy and worked out they uniquely slow approach to slapstick in general and fight scenes in particular, and he would later direct the Marx Brothers’ greatest film, Duck Soup, along with the 1937 screwball comedy classic The Awful Truth and Bing Crosby’s priest movies Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary’s. Alas, these talents came together for a reasonably funny but rather lame movie with a simple plot – a mad scientist (Richard Carle) hires Laurel and Hardy to steal a body for him from a graveyard (anticipating the 1931 Frankenstein by three years) and offers him $500, while a cop (Charles Rogers, later a Roach director) tries to arrest them. There are some brilliantly funny bits in the movie but none of them have much to do with horror, even comic horror; the best gag in the movie is the one in which Laurel and Hardy try to climb a street sign to see where they are, and it’s only after they’ve got to the top and made messes of themselves that both they and we see the “Wet Paint” sign on the signpole. For some reason Rogers the cop wears a white cloak to the cemetery, and naturally Laurel and Hardy mistake him for a ghost and tie him inside a knapsack, hoping to deliver him to the professor and get their $500. But he’s able to escape, and the three of them end up in a giant well-sized sinkhole that must have been a fixture on the Roach lot, because it was also used in several other Laurel and Hardy movies (including their first one, Putting Pants on Philip).

After the Laurel and Hardy film there was an intermission, and then Herman played two more songs – “Put On a Happy Face” from the musical Bye, Bye, Birdie (and I was startled to learn that the songwriters from that show, Charles Strouse and Lee Adams, are both still alive – Strouse was born in 1928 and Adams in 1924) and “Smile,” composed by Charlie Chaplin as an instrumental for his 1936 film Modern Times (he insisted on making it silent, not speaking until he does a vocal number in the last scene, but writing an elaborate and quite beautiful score that was orchestrated by future Music Man composer Meredith Willson) with an added lyric by Geoffrey Parsons in the 1950’s. Though Chaplin had nothing to do with the lyrics, they’re very much in line with his philosophy of smiling your way through adversity and not letting the catastrophes of life wear you down. Then, after a bow to one of the great auteurs of silent comedy, Herman accompanied the other, Buster Keaton, in a 1922 film called The Haunted House. It was clearly the best of the three films on the program, though it’s still not one of Keaton’s best; it begins with him arriving for work at a bank in a limo – Keaton often cast himself as an upper-class twit, I suspect deliberately to differentiate himself from Chaplin by playing at the opposite end of the class spectrum from Chaplin’s lower-class “Tramp” – only he’s really just a lowly clerk with a typically hopeless crush on the bank president’s daughter (Virginia Fox, later Mrs. Darryl F. Zanuck). Two of Keaton’s fellow bank employees have hatched a scheme to manufacture counterfeit money and substitute it for the real deal in the bank’s vaults (one wonders if Keaton had seen Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler, also made in 1922, which features a gang of counterfeiters substituting their product for real money in bank vaults as part of a sinister plan to destabilize the European economy). They’re working this scam and producing their money (though, alas, we never see the printing press in operation – which, given Keaton’s love of mechanical devices both on and off screen, would have made a great gag opportunity for him) in a deserted house.

To keep both cops and potential prying eyes away, they’ve spread the rumor that the house is haunted, and in order to ward off and frustrate anyone who tries to pursue them inside the house, they’ve hooked up a device to its central staircase so it can be turned into a slide with the pull of a lever. The big gags are Keaton’s screw-up at the bank – he grabs something he thinks is resin to lubricate his hands to make it easier to handle the bank’s money, but it turns out to be glue instead and both he and a gang of would-be robbers get money all stuck to themselves – and the big chase scene at the end in which Keaton vainly tries to outwit that unseen mechanical device that keeps turning the stairs into a slide. By far the film’s funniest and most creative gag appears at the end, in which Keaton, his girlfriend and their child die and ascend the long staircase to Heaven – only St. Peter decides Keaton is unworthy and pulls a lever that turns the stairway to Heaven (gee, somebody should write a song with that title!) into a long slide that deposits him in Hell with a grinning devil (whom we’d previously seen fleeing a ruined performance of Faust by the Daredevil Opera Company that was disrupted by the cops chasing the crooks through the theatre) licking his lips and looking like Sylvester about to gobble up Tweety. Herman’s October 30 performance ended with what amounted to an encore, Eric Coates’ “Television March,” which he repeated as the start of his Hallowe’en afternoon concert. He then followed it with “When the Saints Go Marching In,” beginning it slowly and sombrely before speeding it up to the usual jazz tempo. Then he repeated “Pure Imagination” and did an oddball riff of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor that largely turned it into a tango. Then, instead of repeating the medley from the night before, he split it into two parts, a batch of TV themes that included Bewitched as well as The Addams Family, Tales from the Crypt, and The Munsters and a later medley of Disney songs. Herman’s next item was the Rodgers and Hart song “Blue Moon” from 1935, and then a piece called “Orient Express” whose composer he didn’t identify, which was designed to allow the organ to imitate the sounds a steam train made when it was getting up pressure and setting off.

Then Herman did an expanded version of the Disney portion of his medley from the night before, beginning with “Whistle While You Work” from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, then segueing into “Cruella de Vil” from the 1960 animated version of 101 Dalmatians, “Give a Little Whistle” and “When You Wish Upon a Star” from Pinocchio, and he closed with a far more swinging version – inspired, he said, by the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s version of the song (Brubeck recorded quite a lot of Disney material, including a whole album of it called Dave Digs Disney) and, as a tag, a bit of “A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes” from the 1950 Cinderella. After that Herman played a piece by Billy Joel, a ragtime instrumental called “Root Beer Rag” from his 1974 album Streetlife Serenade. (Joel was a reasonably successful artist by then but his career didn’t really take off to superstar status until he released The Stranger three years later.) Then he apologized because, never having played an afternoon concert at the Organ Pavilion, he didn’t realize he was obliged to close with patriotic material, so he did “America, the Beautiful” and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Blessedly he did not invite the audience to sing along on the last. Mark Herman is a quite talented and capable all-around musician with a special flair for jazz – we’ve already heard one organist at the Pavilion, Michael Hey, play a transcription of one of Thomas “Fats” Waller’s original organ compositions from the late 1920’s, and I’d love to hear Herman play those pieces. What makes him special is that he has a light touch – he didn’t drown 1920’s and 1930’s songs in big, heavy, thick “theatre organ” voicings but comes closer to the style of the actual performers of the period (including the husband-and-wife team who dominated pop organ recording in the 1920’s, Jesse and Helen Crawford) – and he also plays credible jazz. And, though this weekend was his first time ever playing the Spreckels organ, he seems to have grasped the essence of the instrument, and particularly the fact that it’s broadcasting its sound into an outdoor space and therefore you can’t play it the way you play a church organ, where you can count on a vaulted ceiling giving you natural reverberation. Mark Herman is an excellent musician and I hope we’ll have a chance to hear a lot more of him!