My wife and I found a photo of Sean Connery in an antique shop in the West Village years ago. We are both Sean Connery fans and had to buy it. It always struck me as funny that Sean seemed a little delicate the way his fists were raised. His expression looks like “Eeek, I’m caught.” So suddenly this epitome of masculinity looked vulnerable.
He’s also having a pampering bubble bath, as he’s lounging about reading a magazine with Sammy Davis Jr. on the cover. Eventually, we found out that the photo was from Diamonds Are Forever. I liked that, while Sean Connery was certainly in shape, the standard for buff was different back in 1971. He is in shape, but he’s not insanely chiseled like Daniel Craig. Sean’s physique is almost attainable.
We framed the photo and put it in our bathroom. But we liked it so much that we made copies and framed several more and put them in many other rooms in the house. Anywhere you looked around, there was Sean Connery in the bathtub. So an obsession grew over this photo and I had to write a song about it.
The song is coming from the voice of a person who is obsessed with a photo of Sean Connery. The song works live because I sing about the image before anyone sees the photo. The audience hears a description and imagines what the photo looks like, and then I hold up the photo. For some reason, hearing about the photo in detail first and then seeing it gets a huge reaction. I think telling them about the image first is like foreplay and then seeing it for real causes the audience to explode.
Photo of Don Ralph by Monique Vescia
Then after I show the photo to the audience I usually tear it to shreds, disgusted with my own obsession. By the end, the lyrics are just ”You should see Sean Connery” over and over again.
The music is a basic folk song at first and then the middle evokes a Bond like theme with the horn section (Jackie Coleman, Kevin Moehringer, and Gavin Smith), strings (Dave Moody and Rebecca Weiner Tompkins), and Ed Pastorini on piano. Ken Meyer provided the pounding drums and Mark Lerner fingered the saucy bass lines. Our guitarist and producer, Al Houghton of Dubway Studios, made sure it would all sound perfect. Mark Lerner arranged the horns and strings to really bring that Bond feel, and Jane Young of The Cheesebeads provides some sexy backup vocals.
Comments