DOODLES WEAVER does ELEANOR RIGBY

It's an outrage...The Beatles albums have gotten re-mastered, but Doodles Weaver's "Eleanor Rigby" has been forgotten.

The dude named Doodles has been championed before at Illfolks, but obviously not enough to lead a major label into remastering and releasing his stuff.

To briefly offer the highlights of the tragic comedian's life: while his brother Sylvester "Pat" Weaver was a fairly reasonable looking guy who ended up as president of NBC, brother Winstead was so odd looking that his own mother called him "Doodle Bug," which got shortened to "Doodles." Doodles began and ended his career as a strange looking character actor getting half a minute to play someone kooky, dazed or confused.

For a few brief years, he was a successful corny comic, most notably in the Spike Jones band, and for kids, as the star of "A Day with Doodles," a low-budget series of cornball TV shorts in which he played all roles. He favored ridiculously bad jokes told with manic glee ("He said to me, 'Doodles, your hair is getting thin." I said, 'Who wants fat hair!' Haa, isn't that a killer???") He turned up on Groucho Marx's "You Bet Your Life," as a mere contestant, with Groucho asking him his profession. When Doodles admitted he was a comedian, and told a few jokes, Groucho sympathetically declared that he should be working more, because he was an amusing guy.

The last most people heard of Doodles was when he self-pressed "Feetlebaum Returns," an album that revisited some old jokes and routines, and tried to find more modern tunes to fracture.

For "Eleanor Rigby," Doodles dusts off his inimitable spooner-spazzing:

"Eleanor Rigby picks up the dice - raises the price - chops up the ice - traffics in vice- oh no no no! Kills all the mice..."

He takes a page out of the Frank Fay playbook as well. Fay, a well-loathed comedian once married to Barbara Stanwyck, used to get snickers by taking apart pop tunes and pointing out the absurdities in the lyrics. Here, Doodles sings about Father McKenzie writing the words to a sermon that no one will hear, darning his socks in the night...and stops for analysis:

"What a weirdo priest this guy is! Heh heh heh. First he writes a sermon for a bunch of deaf people, then he turns out the lights in his room and darns socks!"

Darn it, the song didn't climb the charts with a bullet, and eventually Doodles ended his spiral downward with one.
ELEANOR RIGBY by DOODLES WEAVER
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