Somehow
we got in touch with Raoul who worked with Robin during
his 1979 Tour. We asked him for info and some funny
stories, and this is what he send us. Thanks so much
for this information, Raoul!
I
was then and am still now a musician in the Bay Area
specializing in comedy. Shortly after I arrived in San
Francisco I hooked up with a comical musedy outfit called
Freaky Ralph and the Pointless Sisters. Ralph was much
more diligent about making the rounds of the comedy
clubs than I was, and one day in 1974 or 75 he told
me about this guy he'd seen at the Mustard Seed that
he predicted was going to blow the roof off of Comedy
As We Know It. Of course, Ralph was completely wrong
-- the guy he picked lost in the Comedy Competition
to Bill Farley.
But
a couple of years later The Pointless Sisters had lost
Ralph (his failure at prognostication had nothing to
do with it) and we were headlining a kinda post-modern
vaudeville show called Bowery Jack Ratigan's Something
Something Revue, and one of the many acts warming up
for us (I jest when I say we were the headliners --
we were simply last on the program, for anyone in the
audience too exhausted by the cavalcade of entertainment
that had preceded us to get out of their seats) was
that same young up-and-comer, Robin Williams, hairy
even then. His acting chops were recognizable, although
his act bore no relation to the stream-of-consciousness
free-for-all for which he later grew famous. It was
more your standard string of jokes, interspersed with
little black-out solo sketches that relied more on his
commitment than wit (the only one I remember: "Ka-ching,
ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching [the > sound -- and
appearance -- of a tough cowboy entering a saloon] ...
daquiri with lots of crushed ice [said in a very effeminate
voice]."
We got to be ... well, "friends"
is too strong a word, but I'd definitely say we were
warm acquaintances. Warm enough that when, a couple
of years later, I had defected from the Pointless Sisters
and joined a new comical musedy group, The Rick &
Ruby Show, Robin came to check us out at the Other Cafe.
At the time we were Almost Famous, at least on the local
level, and Robin was just starting to get work in Hollywood,
so we invited him to be our opening act at our first
Really Big Gig, at the Boarding House. It was during
either that run or our next Boarding House shows that
Robin became Incredibly Famous, and we had to switch
the billing, having him headline for us.
And
then, a year or so later, he went out on his first tour,
and invited us to be his opening act and, not incidentally,
form the core of his back-up band. He wanted to include
music in his show, and to that end hired his first wife's
old college buddy, Jonathan Katz (later to be widely
known as the professional therapist on the Comedy Channel
and in the Sunday funnies) to write a couple of novelty
songs. (One of them, "Born To Be Punished",
was co-written by famous playwright David Mamet.) Rounding
out the band were our old friend Scott Matthews on drums
and Brooks's NY pal "Cooker" LoPresti. Cooker,
being an old hand at this, had the presence of mind
to file a union contract listing him as "band leader",
so he got double scale. This was one band that had no
less than three leaders -- Cooker on paper, Jonathan
as composer, and me as big bossy boots who couldn't
keep his mouth shut.
We
played all the dates of the tour, which went out for
a week or so every month or so over the course of a
year. We did a week at the Boarding House, a week or
two in New York at the Copacabana, a week or so in the
midwest (Chicago, Ann Arbor, Minneapolis, Milwaukee
-- where a very young Will Durst saw his first comedy
show and said "I wanna try that!" -- "that",
he later told me, referring to Rick & Ruby's act),
a night or so in Santa Barbara and a night or so in
Boulder (Mork & Mindy's "home") and a
night or so in LA.
One night at the Copa Robin's wife
ran back to our dressing room and told me he'd just
asked me to come on stage and accompany a new piece,
"Death of A Sperm Ballet". It made it onto
the album (where pretty much all you hear is me playing
piano and the audience laughing -- all the sight gags
are sorely absent) and was the seed that eventually
grew into my current career (if you can call it a career)
of accompanying improvisation. For that and so many
other things, I am eternally grateful to Robin.
On the last night of the tour, at the Universal Amphitheater,
Mork & Mindy's producer, Dale McCraven came to see
the show, and liked our opening set quite a bit. He
invited us to pitch ideas for a guest appearance on
the show, and the hope was that would do for Rick &
Ruby what Robin's guest shot on Happy Days did for him.
After many pitches were greeted with silence, we took
our rock band, Theee STUPEDS (specializing in cover
versions of lame top 40 songs) to the Comedy Store in
LA, and Dale came to see that as well (maybe the fact
that his son was sitting in with us on drums had something
to do with it) and got the idea for the script that
became show #68."
The
following story could not be copied here exactly, so
here's a short version of it.
One time when everyone was in the Limo, they got a flat
tire in front of Jim Belushi's favorite bar. The bar
stayed open longer than usual and the musicians and
Robin made up new songs while waiting.
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