| Editor’s Note: Our friend John Wooley publishes a very eclectic Substack newsletter. We thought this was a fun recollection from his very colorful life, so he’s allowed us to share it here.
*** If you weren’t around in the late 1960s, when Tiny Tim suddenly burst onto the national entertainment scene, it’s going to be pretty hard for me to explain what that was about, and how, in his very singular way, he became a symbol of the counterculture – someone the kids dug who left their parents stone-cold and baffled. There was a lot of that going on in American homes back in ‘68, when Tiny Tim not only began appearing on top TV shows like Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In and The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, but also scored his biggest hit single, a falsetto reworking of the 1920s hit “Tiptoe Through the Tulips.” The Vietnam war was raging both overseas and in America’s living rooms; FM radio was playing longer and spacier cuts from hippie musicians, providing an alternative to the Top 40 pop format; and the Democratic National Convention in Chicago would go down in history as one of the most contentious and violent ever. Every one of these things helped drive a wedge between the right and the left in America, generally represented – as is usually the case — by youngsters (and some old lefties) on one side and traditional-thinking parents and their like-minded peers on the other. Then, right in the middle of all of this, a big weird guy named after one of Charles Dickens’s most famous characters came along, singing old chestnuts like “Tulips” in a high falsetto as he accompanied himself on a ukulele (which he carried in a shopping bag), rolling his eyes and mugging and sometimes falling to the floor and kicking his legs in the air like an insecticide-doused beetle. (I remember my brother, Mark, almost giving our Aunt Alta a stroke by calling her up and excitedly telling her to tune into a certain channel, where Mr. Tim was right in the middle of what appeared to be the throes of a gigantic musical fit. It truly blew her mind.) Already in his late 30s when his big year came along, Herbert Khaury had been knocking around Greenwich Village and Times Square as a performer for a good stretch, trying out stage names like “Emmett Swink” and “Larry Love” before settling on Tiny Tim. This was also a time when the term “camp” had gotten a foothold in the American lexicon, and while its definition could be rather elastic, it often referred to something that was so bizarre or even so thoroughly bad that it was entertaining. That wasn’t really the case with Tiny Tim. He wasn’t bad at what he did – in fact, he was very good — and his song selection showed him to be something of a musicologist. It was just that his whole persona was so out there that no one really knew what to make of him. Which, of course, the kids loved. Many will say that Tim’s high point in the national consciousness occurred in 1969 when his wedding to “Miss Vicki” Budinger – he unfailingly prefaced the name of every person with an honorific — on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson became one of the most-watched television episodes in history. However, 1968 was even bigger for him: major-label Reprise Records put out his first album, God Bless Tiny Tim, which included his hit single “Tiptoe Through the Tulips,” followed a few months later by Tiny Tim’s Second Album; he was all over television; and Warren Publications – well-known to young horror fans for publishing Famous Monsters of Filmland and the black-and-white magazine-sized comics Creepy and Eerie – came out with a one-shot titled The True Fantastic Story of Tiny Tim.
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When Tiny Tim’s real last name of Khaury and his Lebanese heritage were revealed in the magazine (along with the fact that he took multiple showers every day), our neighbors Mike and Dwight Kouri were delighted, speculating that they might actually be related. Their father, the dentist in our hometown of Chelsea, Oklahoma, was not nearly as enraptured by that possibility.Although Tiny Tim’s glory days were well over by the summer of ‘88, when I met him for the first and only time, he was still working steadily and seemed quite happy with the way things had played out. He was coming to northeastern Oklahoma to do a show at the Shangri-La Resort in Afton, and I was five years into my job as an entertainment writer for the Tulsa World. By prearrangement, I met him at a Delta flight gate at Tulsa International Airport. Finding him in the emerging crowd of passengers, as you might imagine, was absolutely no problem. Even if I somehow hadn’t known what he looked like, all I would’ve had to do was follow the stares of everyone he passed – carrying, of course, his ukulele in a shopping bag.
After introductions, we began talking about his then-recent gig as an attraction with The Great American Circus, a touring outfit.
“The Wall Street Journal said, `Isn’t it terrible that he was so popular and now he’s reduced to touring with a circus?’ he said. “But it wasn’t terrible at all. Although I had to get up at 5 a.m., I only had to do 10 minutes each day for two shows. What they failed to see was that a circus is the only type of living vaudeville left, and I was the first ‘name’ performer to sing with a circus.
“I should say the first has-been name performer. Oh, yes, I’m a has-been. If you don’t have a hit record or a hit TV show, you’re a has-been in this business. So now that I’ve done it, other has-beens like Eddie Fisher and Pat Boone can run off and join the circus, too,” he added, grinning and rolling his eyes in classic Tim style.
We talked about several other things as well, including a minor country hit he’d just charted, “Leave Me Satisfied,” and his working with Gordon Stinson, the country-music figure who’d formerly managed Johnny Paycheck, an act about as far removed from Tiny Tim as you could get. On deck for Mr. Tim was a possible single release of “Tiger by the Tail,” the old Buck Owens hit, featuring Tim on both regular and falsetto vocals.
“You know,” he said, “Mr. Willie Nelson is a good friend of Mr. Stinson’s, and when Mr. Stinson told Mr. Nelson he was working with me, you know what Mr. Nelson said?”
He paused and smiled again. “He said, `I wish you luck!”
My story ran in the June 26, 1988 issue of the World. Tiny Tim said he’d like a copy, asking me to send it to “Billy Gray” – a pseudonym — at a secret New York address.
Imagine my surprise when, a couple of weeks later, I got the nice handwritten letter that’s reproduced here. It’s become one of the favorite pieces of memorabilia from what I laughingly refer to as my career.
Tiny Tim never stopped working. In fact, like the trouper he was, he suffered a heart attack on stage, playing a gala for the Women’s Club of Minneapolis in November 1996. He managed to get backstage, where he collapsed. Despite resuscitation efforts from EMTs and medical center staff, he died later that night.
God bless Tiny Tim and everything he stood for: kindness, weirdness, joy, and a great sense of humor about himself and life in general.
-John Wooley
Photo: Tiny Tim (public domain)
Great to hear this personal account of the fabulous Tiny Tim! I was a child in the late 60’s and did see him on Laugh-In, Johnny Carson, and other appearances. I loved his weirdness and humor, which was such a balm in very troubled times. Even as a kid I was well aware of the race riots in LA and the intractable Vietnam conflict, with nightly news reports from Walter Cronkite with footage of young men coming back in body bags. God bless Tiny Tim indeed!
Anyone interested in Mr. Tim should seek out his 1996 collaboration album with Brave Combo entitled “Girl” (yes, the Beatles song) on Rounder. It’s actually very good, spanning a century of eclectic song choices, with Tiny backed by the irreverently hip and Grammy winning band from Denton, TX.