Drip Song

Seeping in from the West Coast, a jangling jingle known as Bloop, Bleep* the song of the leaky faucet, was beginning to inundate the nation. Modeled on the ancient Chinese water torture, it had a similar effect on its hearers. Half a dozen bands had already rushed to market with recordings of it:

Bloop, bleep, bloop, bleep, bloop, bleep,

The faucet keeps a-dripping and I can't sleep.

Bleep, bloop, bleep, bloop, bleep, bloop . . .

I wonder where to go to buy a car cheap.

The creator of this latter day Water Music is a short, jumpy Tin Pan Alleyite named Frank Loesser, who has a remarkable talent for tunes that at first attract and then nauseate. His biggest hit was Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition; another song of his, Tallahassee, is climbing on the hit parade.

Born in Manhattan, Loesser was a fast man with a rhyme when he was ten, but had to wait 17 years for his first successes. Among them: the lyrics for Hoagy Carmichael's Small Fry and Two Sleepy People. In Hollywood, he has made big money writing movie music.

As a Pfc. at Santa Ana (Calif.) Air Base, he was the nearest thing to an Irving Berlin or George M. Cohan of World War II. Loesser ground out some 200 service songs, including a slap at 4-Fs, They're Either Too Young or Too Old, a parade tune called What Do You Do in the Infantry, and one for the WACs: First Class Private Mary Brown.

Songsmith Loesser thinks of himself as a kind of folk musician of the jukebox, capturing "topical feelings." He likes to think that he avoids "idealizing the romantic. Of course, I slip every now and then, and turn out something like Moon of Manakoora."

He finished Bloop, Bleep last December, but kept it in his pocket until Open the Door Richard had died down, on the theory that the U.S. could not stand two such songs at the same time.

*Copyright Paramount Music Corp.

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