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About The daily Nebraskan. ([Lincoln, Neb.) 1901-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 2, 1996)
' ->••• I M I Heart failure takes the life ofT yTim MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Tiny Tim, the scraggly haired singer with the falsetto warble and ukulele who crooned “Tiptoe Through the Tu lips” into a 1960s counter-culture classic, has died. He was 66. He died at the Hennepin County Medical Center Saturday night af ter apparent cardiac arrest, nursing supervisor Ellen Lafans said. Tiny Tim already suffered from congestive heart failure, diabetes and other problems. He collapsed and fell off the stage Sept. 28 after a heart attack at a ukulele festival in western Massachusetts. “If I live 10 years, it’s a miracle. Five years, it’s even more of a miracle,” Tiny Tim said after an 11 - day hospital stay that followed the collapse. , “I am ready for anything that happens,” he said. “Death is never polite, even when we expect it. The only thing I pray for is the strength to go out without complaining.” Bom Herbert Khpury, Tiny Tim built an unusual career as an enter tainer on his single hit song in 1968, his stratospheric falsetto, an asexual and childlike stage persona, and a shy man’s uncanny flair for self-pro motion. His 1969 marriage to Miss Vicki Budinger on Johnny Carson’s “The Tonight Show” attracted a television audience of 40 million yie^rerS;,. Tiny Tim later managed to parlay his momeaf ffif<p0p 3hfrie hit# ah' enduring career of concerts, albums and seemingly endless appearances at festivals, fairs and nightclubs. Sometimes, he seem surprised himself. “In this business, you’re as good as your last hit record, and mine was more than 26 years ago,” he said in an interview with the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “Next year will be my 27th comeback.” A native of New York City, he grew up listening to his parents’ 78 rpm records and fell under the sway pf Bing Cro^ilfei o&er crooners :-l of the, early and”mi(Hle 20ffi cen - iwy; Hfeeveutually started singing - popular tunes in small public set tings and took various stage names, including Larry Love. T_ 1 A/A il_/ X*_a. 1 *_I_-a_ ui i 7uv/, ult iriuui-i-uitti tuiti - tainer was given his ultimate stage name by an agent who had worked with midget acts. He made his first national television appearance on “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-in.” While the music of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Led Zep pelin laid siege to the sensibilities of middle America, the older Tmy Tim seemed to offer a benign, comic foil. “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” dates from the late ’20s, but Tiny Tim appropriated the song in the collective memory of the flower generation. “He would sing in this very high voice and play his ukulele and act like a child almost. If we had ren egade rockers on one side, he was the other side,” said T. Dennis Brown, a historian of American popular music at the University of . Massachusetts. He later cleaved to his stage per sona so consistently that he almost found authenticity on the far side of camp. Fans wondered where Tiny Tim ended and Herbert Khaury be gan—or ifthey did at all anymore. “It’s a question as to how much is Tiny Tim and how much he has created a character/’ saidTenee ‘; Please see TDK on 14 Tear and Loathing’ on tape By Ann Stack \ Book Critic Hunter S. Thompson, cult icon and father of gon^o journalism, has re leased a dramatic adaptation of his in famous novel “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” Celebrating 25 years of “strange and terrible craziness,” Margaritaville Records released an audio version oi the book, which was originally pub lished serially in Rolling Stone Maga zine Nov. 11 and Nov. 25,1971, under the pseudonym Raoul Duke, Thompson’suiter ago. The book chronicles Thompson’s drug-induced pilgrimage through the heart of rank American materialism and excess in the city that gives that notion its life breath. Itfs an escape from, and, ultimately to, the sweaty, Writhing, stoned chassis of the Ameri can Dream. With an intro and “outro” by Th ompson, and narrated by Harry Dean Stanton, the recording features Jim Jarmusch as the voice of Duke the pro tagonist, and Maury Chaykin as his “300-pound Samoan attorney,” known in the book as “Doctor Gonzo” (in real life, he is Oscar Zeta Acosta, a radical Chicano attorney). The cast of characters also includes Rolling Stone editor and publisher Janr Warner (playing a Rolling Stone edi tor) “Roseanne’s” Laurie Metcalf, “Saturday Night Live’s” Joan Cusack, Buck Henry and Harry Shearer, and Thompson’s personal friend, singer Jimmy Buffett. 7 So, armed with a fed convertible aptly named “The Great Red. Shark,” and “two bags of grass, 75 pellets of mescaline, five sheets qfhigh-pqjtfered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of uppers, downers, screamers, laughers.,.a q^art qf tequila, a quart of nun, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls,” Duke and Gonzo set out on assignment. Yes, assignment — to cover the Mint400 motorcycle and dune buggy off-road race and later^thc National District Attorney Association’s Drugs and Narcotics Conference. “Our trip was different,” Duke says of the mission, “ft was a classic afflr- \ mation of everything right and true and decent in the national character. It was a gross, physical salute to the fantastic possibilities of life in this country — Please see THOMPSON on 14 7 \r', l v-;..77 * j 3? j I