Modernism Week is back, and the Coachella Valley will be celebrating midcentury modern design, architecture and … musicals written for corporations?
Yes! From Feb. 12-22, Modernism Week allows fans of the midcentury modern era to step back in time and immerse themselves in beautifully designed homes—while revisiting the arts of the era. While many events feature DJs or tribute bands performing classic songs, one special show offers examples of midcentury culture that are anything but classic.
The Weird and Wonderful World of Industrial Musicals, a live show hosted by Late Show With David Letterman and The Simpsons writer Steve Young, will explore an intriguing niche—musicals written for corporations. Young will show video clips and share stories about the industrial side of musical theater, with songs about everything from Coca-Cola bottlers to Bic Pen makers.
You can catch the show at 3:30 p.m., Friday, Feb. 13, and Saturday, Feb. 14, hosted at the Modernism Week Theater at CAMP, located inside the Hyatt Palm Springs.
“This is the latest iteration of a long-running collecting and historian passion of mine,” Young said during a recent interview. His obsession with these strange works of art began during his time working for David Letterman.
“One thing that I was tasked with doing was going out and looking for strange vinyl records we could use in a bit on the show called ‘Dave’s Record Collection,’” Young said. “We’d find unintentionally funny, weird record albums that we’d hear a little sample of, and Dave Letterman would have a funny blow-off line. I would go to thrift shops and used record stores, and later eBay and places like that, just looking for anything that I thought we could get a funny clip out of, and get a laugh and move on.”
In the process, Young kept coming across industrial musical records.
“I began finding these very mysterious, corporate, souvenir, private-pressing record albums from conventions and sales meetings,” he said. “You would think, ‘Oh, well, it must be just horrifyingly dull speeches,’ but they were original musicals—and Broadway-level, in many cases. They were full-fledged musical shows performed for the private audiences at these meetings—the corporate insiders, the dealers, the salesmen, distributors and managers. As I got more, and these records were slowly accumulating, I started realizing that, apparently, it’s a genre that, from what I can tell, no one has ever heard of before.”
Young was amazed at the variety of releases—products of a unique era in history.
“There is a wide range of quality ones; there are some OK ones; and there are some pretty dismal, desperate, sweaty little ones, but the top level galvanized me with how well done they were at catchy melodies and clever lyrics and production value that clearly smelled like post-war America—corporate money at its most flush-feeling,” he said.
Young collaborated with Sport Murphy to write and compile the bookEverything’s Coming Up Profits: The Golden Age of Industrial Musicals. After the release of the book, Young took his talents to the screen.
“I became the subject of a documentary called Bathtubs Over Broadway,” which premiered in 2018, he said. “I now intermittently go around the country presenting a 90-minute show where I talk about how I accidentally fell down this rabbit hole, which I describe as the largest chunk of 20th-century American culture that had never really been noticed before, because it was, by design, off the grid, where the public could not see it. You could only go into these shows if you were a John Deere tractor salesman or a Coca-Cola bottler or you managed a Kinney shoe store or whatever.”
Young’s book, movie and live show all go further than anyone else has gone into the world of industrial musicals.
“There were a few people who had some of these records, but I was the first one who ever started tracking down the composers and the performers and learning about it from the inside out,” he said. “I do a show now that’s loaded with film clips that only I have, because people who I’ve met have given me things out of their basements and personal archives, and it’s deeply hilarious, as you would expect. There’s no way there should be an actual musical about selling Purina Dog Chow, or the American Standard bathroom fixtures being promoted in song and dance to plumbing-fixture distributors.”
These strange selections of corporate musical theater can be downright hilarious, but Young transcends the wacky to find the human, serious side of these productions.
“It’s crazy on the face of it, but then all of these other layers start to emerge about, not only the people I met—who became like second families to me, and I ended up speaking at the funerals of some of these people—but what it meant in 20th-century America to be part of a big company,” Young said. “… Did companies actually feel like they could and wanted to value the people in their organization? Throw them a big wingding and say, ‘Oh, you’re going to sell a lot next year, but by the way, we want you to listen carefully to this show, because this show is about how what you do actually matters. You’re helping humanity rise to a better state of civilization with the things you sell and the work you do.’ It was very powerful, if it was done right, and at the same time, we can … fall over laughing at the General Electric silicones musical or the Hiram Walker liquor company sales meeting song and dance. It’s such a bizarre combination of powerful and sincere things to think about, and the most crazy stuff seems like it must have been made up by comedy writers, but it’s real.”
Some of these musicals were developed and performed by Broadway’s biggest talents.
“I remember some performers telling me, ‘At some level, we knew that this stuff was not what you got into show business to do,’” he said. “It was bizarre, because (these musicals were) loaded with jargon … but I talked to people like Chita Rivera and Florence Henderson, who said you had to be able to immerse yourself in it enough to believe it, because then you could sell the performance to the audience. Other people have told me, writers of this stuff, about watching managers and salesmen in the audience get choked up and tears rolling down their faces, because they felt like somebody actually understands ‘what we’re up against out there, and that what we do has meaning and value, if we’ll only pause a minute to remember that.’”
Some creatives involved in these musicals struggled to find meaning in their work, something with which Young can relate.
“As I talk about in my show, at the Letterman show every day, I was writing material, most of which wasn’t used, or even if it was used, it was quickly forgotten. Sometimes I had to grapple with, ‘How do I value what I’m even trying to do?’” he said. “Then I talked to these people whose work, by design, was never supposed to be known about by the public, and was ephemeral and supposed to be thrown away. Your best work of your career might have been for a floor-tile company at a hotel ballroom that played once at 8 in the morning—and then I show up late in these people’s lives and say, ‘Guess what? I know exactly who you are. I have several of your shows that survived on vinyl record, and we’re going to talk about it, and I’m going to tell people about it.’ It was a wild left turn for some of these people.”
Even though the success of Young’s work once led to the writer being invited to do a corporate gig where he was “writing lyrics for a big opening number for a pharmaceutical company’s event,” Young said industrial musicals will almost certainly never make a comeback.
“Maybe the pendulum swings a little bit back, but we’ll never be back in the golden age, with a vast amount of money being spent on original book musicals with a 40-piece orchestra and sets and choreography and all that,” he said.
The Weird and Wonderful World of Industrial Musicals will take place at 3:30 p.m., Friday, Feb. 13, and Saturday, Feb. 14, at the Modernism Week Theater at CAMP, located inside the Hyatt Palm Springs, at 285 N. Palm Canyon Drive. Tickets are $25. For tickets and more information, visit modernismweek.com.