The Cincinnati Enquirer from Cincinnati, Ohio • Page 54

mm wMmmmtTmrtrBstxsM SUNDAY, MARCH 11, 1990 SF.CTION THE CINCINNATI ENQUIRER EDITOR: MICHAEL ROBERTS, 389-1011 1 nn(S 1 I hM 4 John If iKiesewetter l. Television i if p. "-inwnu 1 I 'I it i i I Special shows many sides of Burbank You know what makes me sick? You know what makes me so mad that I want to squeeze Earl Pitts' red neck until he turns blue? It's those smart-alec TV producers who didn't understand Gary Burbank's wonderful wit and wasted his talents in awful TV programs. They'd make me so frustrated that I'd wanna shout: Wake up, Uhmerikans! Let Burbank do his thing! Well, finally someone woke up. Jim Friedman and Cheryl Jacobs, the Channel 9 producers who make the city's best TV specials Best Worst Of Cincinnati, Celebrate Cincinnati), have teamed up with Cincinnati's funniest entertainer.

The result is the 1 MV I I A I) 5 I i) rXi 1 1 if--) most inventive local TV comedy since they pulled the plug oh Bob Shreve's Past Prime Playhouse. Burbank showcases his wacky WLW-AM radio characters at 10 p.m. Monday on Channel 9 (instead of Newhart). Even if you're not a loyal Burbank listener, you'll find plenty to laugh at in the half hour. Quite possibly, you'll be won over by the opening gag about a TV show called Noriega On Ice.

What follows is pure Burbank bits and skits, and lots of bull's-eye hits (and a few misses). In SCTV style, he's created This photo from the Art Club files shows famous Cincinnati artist Frank Duveneck demonstrating portrait painting to fellow members in 1910. CLUB eiNSiNNATI AR Top: Burbank as Ranger Bob. Above: Burbank as Earl Pitts. t's not the old Art Club anymore," Norman Doane grumbles.

The days when you could drop in at the Cincinnati Art Club any evening and share a cigar with a world-famous artist or a millionaire art collector are no more, Doane says. Doane says. Among the 14 original members at the March 15, 1890, meeting were Rettig, Joseph Sharp, Matt Daly and a pet dog to avoid the unlucky number 13. Frank Duveneck, Cincinnati's best-known artist of the day, was appointed critic, to present painting demonstrations and criticize members' works. Henry Farny, famed painter of American Indians, was the second president and the creator of the club's Dragonfly trademark.

1 i Jill j-HV Other notable members included Charles Kaelin, John Twachtman, Edward Potthast, Clement Barnhorn and L.H. Meakin. Famed cartoonists Richard Outcault Yellow and Winsor McKay were also members. Many prominent New York artists also came to the club to lecture and to enjoy the notorious parties. Owen Findsen Meetings were held at various Art locations until the club bought a house on Third Street in 1 923.

Proper And the days of the costume parties, racy theatricals and riverbank shenanigans are long gone. Doane, 85, knows what he's talking about. He's been a member of the Cincinnati Art Club for 53 of its 100 years, and has gathered volumes of historical information about the club and Cincinnati artists. The club, which celebrates its centennial with a March 30 banquet and dance at the Omni Netherland Plaza Hotel, has outlasted almost all its cousins in the art world. The only one in the United States that's older is the Salmagundi Club in New York, which dates from 1870.

"Actually, ours can be considered the oldest club," vice president Tom Eckley says. "There is a gap in the history of the Salmagundi Club, so our club has the longest continuous history." It's even longer, Doane says, if you count the seven years it existed under a different name. The Cincinnati club began in 1883 as The Cincinnati Sketch Club, a group that met in John Rettig's art studio. Art schools in those days did not condone the use of undraped models, so the Sketch Club bought an advertisement in The Cincinnati Enquirer. A model was needed by the group of young artists who wished to draw from the nude.

The advertisement got only one reply from a woman who offered to pose in pink tights, trunks and a mask for $250 a session. The artists suggested that they would pay $2.50 and that she would wear only the trunks and mask. She accepted. "In 1890 they decided they should be more than a sketch group, so they got together and formed the club," Cincinnatians whispered about the goings-on in the house, where serious painting sessions were interrupted by amateur theatricals and outrageous costume parties. Duveneck was remembered each time members sang his favorite drinking song, "Schnitzelbank," and Doane can still sing the words of the naughty song that sculptor Julian Bechtold composed for one show.

The favorite fund-raiser in early years was the Tombola, an exhibition and sale that included the auction of a "tombola," a painting that included small scenes by each member of the club. Doane spent 23 years tracking down the only known surviving tombola. He found it in a (Please see CLUB, Page E-6) The Cincinnati EnquirerGary Landers Norman Doane, with many of his paintings, has been a member oj the Cincinnati Art Club for 53 of its 100 years. his own TV network with fake commercials and program parodies. His Broadbank Burbcasting Corp.

(BBC) features performances by Earl Pitts, Gilbert Gnarley, Ranger Bob, Joe Deboss, the Rev. Deuteronomy Skaggs and the Big Fat Balding Guy. (Listen closely at the very end, as the Scripps Howard lighthouse logo appears, for the Synonymous Bengal.) Judging from a studio audience preview at Channel 9 Wednesday night, most viewers will find more laughs in Burbank's 24 minutes than in Murphy Brown and the rest of the CBS line-up Monday night. They'll probably laugh harder than they do watching NBC's Thursday sitcoms, or a month of Saturday Night Live. Laugh alert It's that good.

Hold onto your chairs, or you'll fall on the floor laughing. As with SNL and SCTV, some of the funniest gags are slick TV commercial spoofs and music parodies. Burbank really nails the Nissan TV spots. Also along for the ride are singers Sandy Pinkard and Richard Bowden, sort of a modern-day Homer Jethro. Their "Somebody's Done Somebody's Song Wrong" medley is great stuff.

The BBC captures Burbank, as we know him from radio, at his best. Schtick happens, naturally. All of the material was written by his usual band of crazies Tim Mizak, Bill Brohaugh, Kevin "Doc" Wolfe and Burbank, plus Friedman and Jacobs. Burbank, who's been burned three times in five years with failed TV ventures, gives the credit this time to the Channel 9 producers. "They're aware of what I do," says Burbank, Billboard magazine's top disc jockey in medium-sized U.S.

radio markets for 1988 and 1989. "This was Jim's idea. We're just messing around. We'll see what happens." (Work starts this week on a second BBC to air April 30 on -WCPO-TV.) Friedman and Jacobs have long been Burbank fans. They've used the WLW satirist in each of their five Best Worst Of Cincinnati TV specials.

On the BBC, they bring his Ranger Bob to TV as a kiddie show host. It's a gem. So is his spoof of Calvin Klein's strange TV commercials, as well as But you know what makes Burbank sick? You know what makes him holler and shout, and turn TV columnists inside out? It's pea-brained newspaper writers who give away all his punch lines. So I'll just say his Channel 9 show is a real scream. Wake up, Uhmerikans! And watch Burbank at his best Monday night.

If no joke: Cosby turns attention to recording jazz The album Bill Cosby makes a funny jazzman. Cigar-chomping pudding-pop peddlers with the top-rated show on TV usually don't write an album of top-flight instrumentals played by heavyweight jazz musicians. But Cosby did. The result is MTiere You Lay Your Head. In stores March 20, the recording is no snoozer.

i i iS, i Bill Cosby Where You Lay Your Head, Verve. When jazzmen do Bill Cosby's music, they play beyond their means. To a man on this surprisingly vivid album, Cosby's sidemen play out of character. The guitar solo John Scofield takes on "Ursallna1' smiles. His usual moodiness Is gone.

Saxmen Odean Pope and David Murray drop their cooped up styles and adopt big roomy tones. In "Four Queens and A King" (a song Cosby wrote for his five kids) Murray lets loose with some royal honks. On the album's title cut, Pope positions his horn as if he were standing at the edge of a stage dropping water balloons of notes onto your head. Cliff Radel Exollm "Vry Good Qood Fa)r Poor. The complexity of Cosby compositions and the richness of the ad-libs he elicited from such jazz stalwarts as guitarist John Scofield and drummer Jack Dejohnette will astound people who think that all this tall comic can do is get laughs on The Cosby Show.

"But I'm not doing this to impress or astound anyone," Cosby claims. "I'm just doing it have fun." Where You Lay Your Head is unlike the four all-music records Cliff Radel Cosby made in the late '60s and early 70s. For one thing, he's not singing. There's no "Little Old Man" on this disc. From his Silverthroat album, "Little Old Man" went to number four on the charts in 1967.

For another thing, Cosby's not fooling around. True, the album does have some funny song titles, "Mouth of the Blowfish" and "Why Is It I Can Never Find Anything In The Closet." One second shy of 14 minutes in length, Cosby on jacket of Where You Lay Your Head. the latter cut has the parenthetical subtitle, "(It's Long But It's Alright)." Nevertheless, the sessions that produced these songs were not all fun and games. "When I walk into the studio, I tell the musicians exactly how I feel about each piece," Cosby says by phone from his Los Angeles office. "I also tell them: 'This is my session.

You are the musicians I've chosen to work "Then I tell them," he adds in a conspiratorial whisper peppered with dirty chuckles, 'we're going to have a good None of the musicians selected for the album had a problem with that concept. Nor did any of the players (Please see COSBY, Tage E-6).