Was Tiny Tim deranged?

Married three times

Not having been around for his heyday, it absolutely baffles me how he could be so embraced by these mainstream shows like "The Tonight Show" and "Laugh-In", because I find him so off-putting and disturbing! He has this eerie presence to me that conjures up the "dark side" of long-haired hippie-dom, like a Manson Family vibe. I'm surprised that Mr. and Mrs. Middle America found him enjoyable and amusing, instead of a threatening reminder of how the American culture they knew seemed to be going off the rails in those years.

YES.

R2, Tiny Tim was considered an amusing freak in 1968.

Give him a break! He had polio or something!

Yes.. But his songs are kind of good...

Also, he had a ferocious fupa.

I was around 10 when Tiny Tim was big and I still have 2 of his vinyl LP's, inherited from my pop, who was a very straight-laced Republican. I love them.

Older folks liked Tiny's semi-authentic throwback to old-timey artists like Rudy Vallee. Younger folks grokked what was perceived as bizarre performance art.

Bowie covered Biff Rose's delightful "Fill Your Heart", but Tim did it campier, and of course, better.

Crazy smart, if you ask me.

Was Bryan Ferry imitating his style?

He was brilliant on Howard Stern. He and Stern were amazing together.

He looks evil

Tiny Tim's songs sucked, r6.

(R2) I was around during Tiny Tim's heyday and I didn 't understand his success either. He made my skin crawl. The only thing I can come up with is maybe the incongruity of his voice and appearance. Like if Kathleen Turner had James Earl Jones' voice. Oh wait, she does.

[quote]Not having been around for his heyday, it absolutely baffles me how he could be so embraced by these mainstream shows like "The Tonight Show" and "Laugh-In"

I many ways he reminds me of Susan Boyle and how they took her and turned her into a freakshow.

Both had moderate amounts of talent, and were more than willing to use their "fish out of water" status to get their 15 minutes of fame.

There were a lot of celebs like this in the 60s/70s.

I think he's tremendous.

[R8]He might be enjoyable to listen to (not my cup of tea that's for sure) but that FACE!!! The picture on your link is definitely going to give me nightmares tonight. YIKES!

He was freakshow camp, an early manifestation of the cultural niche NIN, Jim Rose Circus, X-Files, Night Stalker, etc. embodied. Keep in mind a lot of what we think of nowadays as camp wasn't considered all that campy back then (i.e. "Dark Shadows," [italic]Planet of the Apes,[/italic] etc.) You had to go full-on Adam West "Batman" to become recognizably camp, so Tiny Tim, in that cultural context, didn't seem as nuts as he does now.

Like others said, he was a callback to 1920s and 1930s entertainment. In the 1960s, there were a lot of 1920s callbacks, especially to flapper culture which was embraced by first-wave feminism. But the 1960s was also a time when being outre was frankly expected, so someone like Tiny Tim became a freakish Cliff Edwards for a new generation.

And he appealed to some people like Carson because they were more conservative than they let on, and it was their way of subtly undermining youth culture, because they knew a good chunk of their audience was middle aged Middle Americans gawking like it was a low-rent circus freakshow.

I'm a fan. I have autographed copies of his first two albums.

He was a throwback to early 20th century pop music and the stylings of Rudy Vallee in particular though Herbert (Tiny Tim) worshipped rock'n'roll too.

Rudy Vallee was the first "modern" pop star but by the time of the '60s he was practically forgotten despite his crucial contributions to popular music. Bing Crosby, for one, started out in Rudy's shadow and was very much influenced by him. Just as Rudy Vallee paved the way for Bing, later on Bing did the same for Sinatra. Each one of these legends took pop music further than their predecessors had and, coincidentally, all three of them became movie stars as well.

Tiny Tim was the genuine article: a true maverick and, while he was alive, he was a one-man Smithsonian of pop history.

R.I.P.

The Roseanne episode when TT shows David how to play the Uke was good. Dan comes in and smashes it to pieces and leaves the room. TT pulls out another uke and says, "that happens to me a lot." LOL

OMG, I remember as kid watching him on "Laugh In" play the ukulele and sing "Tip Toe Through the Tulips" and laughing my ass off. Even my dad - who hated hippies or even anyone with long hair - loved TT. In retrospect he was creepy, but as a kid, he seemed to me like a Pee Wee Herman type. Weird, but not threatening.

My mom was young during his heyday and she always thought he was on some serious drugs.

Not only was he a freak show, his age was 42 in 1968, making his dob 1926. He changed it to 1932 later -- the date Wiki uses.

good context from R18

He had little narrow shoulders and a big butt.

He was a bonafide freak who got married on TV and had a lot of weird cleansing rituals. No one took his music seriously--he was a joke.

I spent some time with him in the early 90's. I was working a tradeshow, and he was there doing his show. We hung out in the break room together a fair bit. If it was an act he kept it up even sitting in a break room drinking coffee.

I liked the guy. He lived in his own little world, but it was a happy place. The problem was that he assumed that everyone else lived there too. He had an unusual vocabulary and way of constructing sentences. It was like talking to someone from 1920, and he would jump around talking about Tom Mix one minute and Bing Crosby the next--he just assumed you were on the same wavelength, and if you gave him any indication that you were listening he would never stop talking. If there was no one there to talk to he would sit reading his bible with his ukulele in a paper shopping bag on the ground next to him. He truly was a walking encyclopedia on vaudeville, old songs, and musicals. No matter what he was doing he seemed happy and completely at peace.

Someone at the show was selling or passing out blow guns, long plastic tubes with little darts (I forget why), and someone brought one into the break room. Well, Tiny Tim was enchanted with it, and spent the last couple days sitting in the break room between shows shooting little darts at the bulletin board. He became very proficient, and I think he was quite pleased to have learned this new skill.

For what it's worth, I'm convinced he was at least 15 years older than he claimed.

Thanks R27, that was a fun read.

[quote]Rudy Vallee was the first "modern" pop star but by the time of the '60s he was practically forgotten despite his crucial contributions to popular music

Rudy Vallee wasn't as forgotten as all that. He appeared on TV and in films fairly regularly right up through the early 1980s. He co-starred in the 1961 Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning musical HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING. He toured the nation in that show and appeared in the movie in 1967.

Tiny Tim was awesome. He is in a class with Mrs. Miller, Florence Foster Jenkins, and PDQ Bach.

That was great, R27, thanks.

Between his knowledge of 1920s and 1930s culture and his health issues, he probably seemed a lot older than he was. And he WAS at least six years older than he claimed, so you were right about that.

He was "in" for the same reason straight people go to gay rights parades and laugh at the homosexual freaks and the homosexual community thinks it's a GOOD thing.

Quite possibly, OP. But I've often thought, a LOT of stars are not remotely "normal", mentally.

He was a big porn fan. He used to go to a lot of Marc Steven's parties to meet all the stars. I talked to one female star who was around back then and she said he was nice and didn't try to fuck her or any of the others, strangely enough.

The 1920s singer Tiny Tim was emulating wasn't Rudy Vallee, who had a nasally tenor voice, but rather Nick Lucas, "The Singing Troubador." Nick Lucas was the falsetto singer who made Tiptoe Through the Tulips a smash hit in the '20s. Listen to both TT's and Nick Lucas's "Tulips" versions one after the other and you'd be hard-pressed to tell the difference.

Nick Lucas partly but also others, R34. Ukelele Ike, aka Cliff Edwards, the voice of Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio (When You Wish Upon a Star), was also a major inspiration, among others. Agreed Rudy Vallee was much less of an influence.

Rudy Vallee was nice looking. The whole Tiny Tim thing started as a joke. I was around then, too. The joke was his high voice and that didn't match his looks. That why when he sang we laughed. It was not some retro cool thing that he was playing a ukulele and singing an old song. That was part of what made it funny. It was like What The Hell?

One of the most disturbing performances you'll ever see. Tiny Tim is holding his head and he is clearly not well. But listen to him switch between falsetto and baritone and the band can't keep pace with his weird musical tempos. Beware: He starts stripping at the end. Carson's look of horror is hilarious.

Mr. Tim is no longer with us.

And if I'm not mistaken, someone brought up the subject of homosexuality once, and he was VIRULENTLY anti-gay.

My sister and I would play "Daddy Daddy, What is Heaven Like?" and have amateur crying contests, see who could produce a tear first. Yes, I was already dialing with a pencil.

This is a better clip of what he initially became famous for and why people laughed at him. I think at the time everyone probably thought he was gay even if he wasn't.

In case anyone wants to play...

Pardon me for thread-jacking but it deserves mention that there was a female version of Tiny Tim who appeared on the national scene just before he did. The career of Elva Miller, better known as "Mrs. Miller," began as a "can we get away with it?" prank by announcer Gary Owens and a friend who a recording engineer. He had discovered Mrs. Miller, an enthusiastic but decidedly amateur singer, when her indulgent husband paid to let her make a vanity record.

They talked her into recording an album of contemporary pop tunes. Although she suspected (correctly) that the deal was a set-up and a put-on, she went through with it and became a tongue in cheek pop star for about eighteen months, appearing on Ed Sullivan and many other TV shows. She even appeared in a movie. Capitol released three albums including a country album before dropping her.

Her fourth record, made for a minor label, brought a swift end to her career. "Mrs. Miller Does Her Thing" is full of trippy tunes with direct or implied drug references, sung by the blissfully unaware old woman. Poor Elva was tricked into posing for the album cover in a psychedelic frock with a silver tea set and a plate of green-streaked brownies. The slightly cross-eyed expression on her face makes her look high as a kite. After its release, her horrified friends finally convinced her that she was the butt of a joke that needed to end. She went back to making vanity records, having netted about fifty thousand dollars with her flash-in-the-pan success.

Fascinating, R42 - just listened to some of Miller's recordings on Youtube. She was something special, all right.

I read somewhere that Tiny Tim would only eat potatoes in his later years.

I wish I still had his biography around. The bits and pieces that I remember:

Admitted to one gay encounter and obsessed for the rest of his life about the mortal sin he felt he committed

Wished he had been born a woman

Wore Depends as a germ barrier and bathed/showered after using the bathroom, every time

Had some weird dietary issues that are slipping my mind at the moment

Abandoned his daughter because she wasn't a boy

Used teething gel to treat his premature ejaculation problem

Was mainly attracted to young teenage girls and had a bodyguard to keep him away from them

Wouldn't use plates or cutlery in restaurants; insisted on paper/plastic

Claimed he had no idea that AIDS was serious when he wrote the Santa Claus song

There's so much more that I'm forgetting.

He was a pedophile.

What about ME?!

Here's Tim without the falsetto, doing a Rod Stewart cover.

I bet you can guess which one

He sounds autistic frankly.

I love his greatest hit

My experience with Tiny Tim was almost identical to R21's. He just induced hysteria in me for a few minutes when he first appeared on Laugh-In. The next day all my Jr. High buddies said about the same. After a little more exposure the novelty wore off.

Maybe he was really closeted. On some thread one of our resident psychologists mentioned that some of the rock stars that bedded 13 year olds could be self hating gays. He explained that there are several profiles for men attracted to young girls. Of course one profile is that they truly suffered from hebephilia , but there is another profile of these men that they are so self-hating that they are primarily sexually attracted to women before they hit puberty because they are built like young boys. When they start getting breasts and hips they got dumped. They couldn't bring themselves to have sex with men, so this was the closest they could get. Don't know if it is true, but it makes some sense. The discussion was about these young women not looking older are more mature for their age. That they looked like gangly 12 year olds. He explained it a lot better than I did, but Tiny Tim apparently had trouble getting it up with women of any age. I'll just bet he wouldn't have had the same problem with men.

I never got what the appeal was, No internet, only 13 channels on TV maybe 4 of which actually worked. Captive audience.

Whatever became of his daughter? Anyone know?

The early rumor was that he had a SON and he named him "Tulip".

Mental illness all his life.

Jeff Wald, Helen Reddy's nasty as ex-husband was his manager.

I wonder if he was aspie?

Miss Vicki and Tiny Tim had a daughter, Tulip Victoria, May 10th, 1971.

Linked is an article about "the strange sex secrets of tiny Tim"

Are we sure Tulip doesn't have a secret twin who's running for president?

Anyone think maybe Tiny Tim was a woman? Or intersex?

I just remember Miss Vicki writing a book or giving an interview saying that Tiny Tim was really difficult to deal with.

I think he was very traditionally chauvinistic and demanded that she do all the cooking and cleaning, wait on him hand and foot, etc. I’d be interested to know why she married him in the first place. Anyone with a brain would realize he was a novelty act that would soon be over.

My mom and I stayed up and watched him get married to Miss Vicki. A wonderful mother-son bonding experience. We wondered, after the ceremony was over, if the marriage was real or fake. We couldn't believe that a young girl (or any girl or woman) would marry someone like him. I recall I received his album for Christmas from my brother.

I remember TT talking about his odd diet when he was on Howard Stern's K-Rock radio show. TT told Howard he used to DRINK one jar of Aunt Millie's sauce every day.

He was a 60s version of a freak. The problem was this was all he could do and time marched on but he didn't.

Reminds me of Richard Simmons.

r65

They both remind me of JM J Bullock

He had nothing like a career for most of his life. Then he got lucky for a few years, as pertains fame and fortune. Then he was lucky to die prematurely, long before things once again became dire.

He was never taken seriously as an artist, nor as a human being.

Also Roseanne Barr. Is this a particularly Jewish way of being eccentric - shock shlock, Catskills style. Lenny Bruce, Joan Rivers, Don Rickles, Andy Kaufman, Howard Stern, Sarah Silverman, I'm sure I'm leaving some out. Clever twisting of overly-earnest "safe" whitebread goyim "humor" to startle/arouse people to pay attention?

He reminds me of the Penguin from that Batman movie in the 90s

TT and Miss Vicki sing.

Kind of reminds me of Russel Brand.

The Beatles were fans of his songwriting

When I was 11 there was an AM radio station that would ask trivia questions at night and you'd win a record. I won four records, this being one of them.

Did anyone else think this thread was going to be about the youngest Cratchit child?

I think he was a bit dense and crazy...now that he is long dead, what is his mental condition?

How does the Moldy Pop Cultural Name-Dropper still have a career?

Because idtiots on Datalounge don't realize they're being lured into the web of a bipolar loser out of desperation because he has nothing unique to offer.

Laugh-In was known for presenting the far out, whacky and outrageous and the joke was Tiny Tim was even too much for them.

Surely he had to be in on the joke by the time he did "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?" on The Tonight Show,, one of the most bizarre performances ever. Everyone was talking about it the next day. He also recorded a studio version, but it's just boring.

r78

What was he thinking recording that song

They made him out to be a joke on his first appearance on Laugh-In.

Rowan introduced Tiny Tim in the New Talent segment.

Martin spent the entire skit staring at Tiny Tim in horror. At one point, when Rowan made a comment about their commitment to finding new talent, Martin said "Yeah, you really searched hard and long for this talent."

Andy Kaufman used him as one model for his own performance art. That's all you need to know about Tiny Tim.

Some excellent observations here about Tiny Tim in context.

He checked off a lot of the right boxes for 1968: long hair...hippy-freak look....1920s nostalgia...

Remember that in 1968 the 1920s were only 40 years in the past, in other words: pretty recent history....just as the 1960s are today.

His persona was very right for the zany Laugh-In style of comedy that was happening.

And yes, it's true Elva Miller sort of paved the way...but so did Phyllis Diller with her wild clothes and hair.

*pretty recent history....just as the 1970s are today.