Warner Bros. 1379
Producer: None listed
Track listing: Abe Lincoln vs. Madison / The Cruise of the U.S.S. Codfish / Merchandising the Wright Brothers / The Krushchev Landing Rehearsal / Driving Instructor (pilot for a new TV series) / Nobody Will Ever Play Baseball
July 25, 1960
14 weeks mono (nonconsecutive)
By 1959, Bob Newhart had served in the army, worked as an accountant and an advertising copywriter, hosted an ill-fated syndicated radio show, and written and hosted a local TV in Chicago. “It was a man-on-the-street show that was on at 8:30 in the morning and watched by no one,” Newhart says of the latter endeavor. But his luck changed, thanks to Dan Sorkin, a disc jockey heard on “Chicago’s Morning Show” on WCFL.
The Warner Bros. people were coming through Chicago,” Newhart recalls, “and Dan Sorkin said to them, ‘I have this very funny friend of mine. I would like to have you listen to some of the things he has
done.'” Sorkin telephoned his friend and told him to record some of his best comedy bits. “I recorded into a tape recorder, without audience, ‘The Submarine Commander’ [‘The Cruise of the U.S.S. Codfish’], ‘Abe Lincoln,’ and the ‘Driving Instructor,’ because those were the only routines I had at the time,” says Newhart. Sorkin and Newhart played the tape to a few Warner Bros. executives including George Avakian, head of talent for the label, who offered Newhart a contract. “To this day, I don’t know if they liked it because Dan was an important disc jockey or if they actually liked it,” says Newhart.
Once the contract was signed Avakian suggested that Newhart cut his first album live at a nightclub. The only problem was that Newhart had never played a nightclub before. “I had maybe done five or six individual appearances, but never in a nightclub,” says Newhart. That didn’t stop Warner Bros., who had the aspiring comedian’s agent Sid Bernstein book Newhart into a Houston club called the Tidelands, where he was the opening act.
“I was there for two weeks,” says Newhart. “I spent most of the time coming up with material so I could fill up the album. I had a lot of ideas, but I never bothered to expand them.” Once Newhart felt he had enough material to fill an album, it was decided that his shows on a Friday and Saturday night in February 1960 would be recorded. “The first night there was a drunken woman in the front row who kept yelling out through my entire set, ‘This is a bunch of crap,'” says Newhart. “So, it turned out that the Friday night tape was totally unusable. She was as clear or more clear than I was, so we just had the two shows on Saturday to work with.”
Once the recording was completed, Newhart found the subsequent process of turning it into an album a little strange. “I always found it jarring, because whoever edited it took out the silence,” he says. “When I would hear it, it would bother me, because it didn’t have my timing. Very often the silence was as important as the words.”
Even without Newhart’s comedic pauses, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart became a smash. The album became the first comedy album to hit the summit of the album chart, and its 14 weeks at Number One remains the longest chart-topping run of any comedy album. Its success helped pave the way for other new comedians, such as Bill Cosby, and helped save the then-floundering Warner Bros. label from closing in the early ’60s, before the Bunny discovered rock ‘n’ roll.
THE TOP FIVE
Week of July 25, 1960
1. The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, Bob Newhart
2. Sold Out, The Kingston Trio
3. Elvis Is Back, Elvis Presley
4. Can Can, Soundtrack
5. The Sound of Music, Original Cast