Daddy, Daddy, What is Heaven Like?
Semper Herbert Butros Khaury
It’s April 12. 2025. Tiny Tim’s 93rd birthday. Had he survived, there’s no doubt he’d still be working.
Whether performing in the Times Square basement that hosted Professor Heckler's Flea Circus, on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh In or Carson’s Tonight Show, singing “The Star Spangled Banner” at Yankee Stadium to a hail of jeers, to an SRO crowd at the Royal Albert Hall with full orchestral complement, wowing 600,000 hippies at the 1970 Isle of Wight festival (where he “stole the show without a single electric instrument), in the upholstered sewers of the lounge circuit and under the circus big top, Tiny Tim never faltered.
His 1968 Richard Perry-produced debut disk God Bless Tiny Tim is an epochal, high concept masterpiece (addressing love’s poignant vagaries, the realities of Heaven and Hell, yes climate change and more) that, while disguised as a novelty item, exhibits far more depth, emotional-psychic content, craftsmanship and creative vision than either of grossly overrated contemporaneous clunkers "Pet" or "Pepper."
Fueled by a titanic repertoire, an absolutely wily gift for arresting choice of material, a kaleidoscopic spectrum of personas and matching vocals (from falsetto to basso profundo), no one could take their eyes off him.
America gorged on Tiny Tim. We chewed him up, spat him out, stomped him into the glittering Walk of Fame pavement and wandered away.
His frenzy pitch fame outpaced any pop culture contemporary. His intimate, encyclopedic knowledge of America's Tin Pan Alley canon was, and remains, matchless.
His endearing, very real lunacy and epic decline from global renown (after making, f'rinstance, television's then highest-rated ever appearance [Thanks Miss Vicki. Tramp!]) was a descent Shakespearean in scope, Flannery O'Connor-esque in its spiritual squalor and Dickensian in terms of the corkscrew twisted cast of characters—becoming party to ceaseless orgies and gunfire in that trashy Long Island mansion—whose orbit he seemed to inevitably drift into.
Peerless, authentic, passionate, and one of a very few artists one can accurately describe as unique. Hear him.