God Bless Tiny Tim is more than a tiptoe through the tulips

Let's get this out of the way: yes, this is the 'Tip-Toe Thru' The Tulips' guy. The falsetto, the ukulele, the long curly hair, the blown kisses. If that's all you know about Tiny Tim, I get it. But 'God Bless Tiny Tim' deserves a lot more than a punchline. Put it on and give it a whole side. It's one of the strangest, sweetest and most lovingly made records of 1968.

Tiny Tim was born Herbert Khaury in Manhattan in 1932 and grew up in Washington Heights. When he was five, his dad brought home a wind-up gramophone and a 78, and that pretty much set the course for the rest of his life. He spent hours at the New York Public Library digging through old sheet music and the history of the record business, and he fell hard for the songs of the 1900s through the 1930s. That's not a gimmick. That's a record collector. He just happened to sing what he found.

Getting noticed took a while. He worked Times Square as 'Larry Love the Singing Canary,' tried out names like Darry Dover and Sir Timothy Tims, and played the Greenwich Village clubs through the early and mid 60s. In 1967 Mo Ostin saw him perform and signed him to Reprise. Then television did the rest. Early in 1968 he turned up on 'Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In,' and by spring he was on 'The Tonight Show' with Johnny Carson, the first of a couple dozen visits. Almost overnight, a guy who had spent years singing for tips was one of the most talked-about performers in America.

And the song that did it was 'Tip-Toe Thru' The Tulips With Me.' It was already almost 40 years old by then. Al Dubin and Joe Burke wrote it for the 1929 movie musical 'Gold Diggers of Broadway,' and Nick Lucas took it to No. 1 that year. Tiny Tim made it his. Reprise put it out as a single in April 1968 with 'Fill Your Heart' on the flip, and it climbed to No. 17 on the Billboard Hot 100. It's light as a feather and a little odd, and you can't get it out of your head. It stayed his signature song for the rest of his life.

The album came out the same month, and it went higher than anybody expected. 'God Bless Tiny Tim' reached No. 7 on the Billboard album chart and spent 32 weeks there. Producer Richard Perry, who had just worked on Captain Beefheart's 'Safe as Milk,' and arranger Artie Butler recorded it in Los Angeles over the winter of 1967 and 1968. They could have made a cheap novelty LP. Instead, they surrounded Tiny with strings, horns, a full band, sound effects and little spoken bits that make the whole thing play like an old radio show drifting in from another decade.

The big surprise for first-time listeners is that voice. Most people only know the falsetto, but he also had a rich, deep baritone, and he switches between the two all over this record. On Irving Berlin's 'Stay Down Here Where You Belong' he sings low and serious, and it's genuinely beautiful. On 'I Got You, Babe' he turns the Sonny & Cher hit into a duet with himself, high voice versus low voice, until both of them sing the final words together. It's funny, it's a little unsettling and it's completely brilliant.

The rest of the record is all over the map in the best way. 'Welcome To My Dream' opens the show, 'Livin' In The Sunlight, Lovin' In The Moonlight' and 'On The Old Front Porch' are pure sunshine, and George M. Cohan's 'Then I'd Be Satisfied With Life' gets a rowdy, honky-tonk treatment. 'Strawberry Tea' and 'The Coming Home Party' are great late-60s pop songs that any band on the Sunset Strip would have been happy to have. 'Daddy, Daddy, What Is Heaven Like?' is the eerie one, and it works because he sings it with total sincerity. Then there's 'Fill Your Heart,' written by Biff Rose and Paul Williams. A few years later David Bowie covered it on 'Hunky Dory.'

Here's what I find interesting about how the record has been received. Back in 1968 it actually got good reviews, but a lot of the talk around Tiny Tim was about whether he was for real or putting everybody on. Over the years, writers and collectors have kept coming back and landing in the same spot: it was marketed like a joke, but the arrangements are lush, the song choices are smart and he means every note. Some people still find it a little creepy. Plenty more have come around to hearing it as a sincere love letter to American popular song, with a sense of humor he was clearly in on.

The fame came fast and so did the spectacle. In December 1969 he married Miss Vicki on 'The Tonight Show,' and tens of millions of people tuned in. In 1970 he played the Isle of Wight Festival in front of an enormous crowd. The hits didn't last, but he never stopped performing. He passed away in November 1996 in Minneapolis after suffering a heart attack on stage at a benefit concert. The song he was singing was 'Tip-Toe Thru' The Tulips.' He was still sharing the old songs he loved right up to the end.

My take: 'God Bless Tiny Tim' is a one-of-a-kind record, and I mean that as a compliment. Original 1968 Reprise copies still turn up in the bins, and for its 50th anniversary in 2018 it got a limited pink vinyl reissue. Skip the jokes you think you already know. Play it start to finish, let the baritone surprise you and save room in your heart for the tulips.