Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,400
By This is the grave of Tiny Tim.
Born in New York in 1932, Herbert Khaury was half-Jewish, half-Lebanese. While we so often think of Jewish communities and Irish communities and Italian communities in the era of immigration (less Lebanese communities; usually at that time they were called “Syrian,” but today we would call those people Lebanese Christians), there was plenty of intermarriage between them as well, often to the chagrin of their families. In any case, Khaury’s mom was the daughter of a rabbi and had immigrated from modern-day Belarus in 1914 and his father was the son of a Maronite priest and was working in the garment plants. I don’t know if the mother converted or not, but he was raised Maronite.
Khaury’s parents encouraged their boy’s musical interests from the time he was a small child. He loved music and spent basically all his time listening to albums and then playing, first the violin and then the mandolin and ukulele. He was a terrible student and dropped out of high school, vastly preferring entertainment. He got a job as a messenger boy for the New York offices of MGM and met some people. He also learned to sing in the falsetto that was getting very popular in the early 1950s. But he needed a gag or something to get him to stand out from everyone else. So he decided to dress like a weirdo and that actually worked pretty well, especially when you consider the era. No man was letting his hair grow to shoulder length and wearing the kind of clothes that would later be associated with hippies. His mother was so outraged that she wanted to forcibly admit him to a psychiatric hospital, but his dad talked her down from that one.
This all set Khaury up pretty well for the folk revival in New York. He became an active participant. At this time, he was performing under the name of Larry Love, the Singing Canary. Dumb name, but there was no way “Herbert Khaury” was going to work. Now, he was actually a big guy, over six feet tall. He did play a tiny instrument, yes. And he sang in a high voice. But he was a big man. He kept changing names and by 1963, was performing as Sir Timothy Timms. He was at a club one night and the guy before him on stage was a midget doing something or another. So his manager decided to introduce him as Tiny Tim and the name stuck for the rest of his long career.
The guys who were later known as The Band agreed to record some backing work for Tim and he sang a bunch of hits of the day in his over the top falsetto. I’d like to wonder what Levon and Danko and Robbie thought of this, but hell, they needed work and saw all kinds of weird shit on the road all those years. He started to get attention and got booked on Laugh In right at its beginning in early 1968, dumbfounding Dick Martin who had no idea who the hell this weirdo was.
Now, it’s not that Tim ever got big in terms of charting albums. He was an, uh, acquired taste. But his early albums at least charted fairly low on the charts. But he was just such a weirdo that he remained somewhat in the public eye for the rest of his life. At the age of 37, he married his 17 year old girlfriend live on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. By the 70s, he was mostly playing Vegas, already a nostalgia act, though really the kind you wanted to see when you were already having a weird time out in that weird city. Like seeing Liberace, it was a “why the hell not” kind of choice to make. But then he also played at Isle of Wight in 1970 and the media wrote how he stole the show, which is saying something since The Who and Sly and Miles in the middle of his electric period were on the schedule. He was in a bunch of bad movies. He played in the 80s with Camper Van Beethoven. He and Jerry Lawler did a skit together on WWE in 1993. Just one of the classic weirdos of American life.
In 1996, Tim’s heart started giving out. He had a heart attack after doing an interview in Massachusetts in September. He was absolutely not taking care of himself–very overweight, diabetes, the whole deal. The doctors told him he needed to stop touring and take care of himself. He had no interest in that. So he died two months later while playing a benefit for the Women’s Club of Minneapolis. Another heart attack. Died on stage, the dream of many a musician. He was 64 years old.
Let’s watch some Tiny Tim.
Tiny Tim is buried in Lakewood Cemetery, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Amazing, in its own way,
There’s no one I can quite compare Tiny Tim to for further grave visits since there’s no one really like him. But if you want this series to visit other people associated with Laugh In, which was really the perfect venue for him, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Alan Sues is in Hollywood and Dennis Allen is in Kansas City. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.