A Rare Jackie Gleason Record? (MP3)

The Actor's Prayer (12:18)

Many a digger has been lost amid the thrift-store stacks of too-common records. Nothing is more disheartening than assaulting a bin of mold-encrusted record jackets, hoping for a find, and seeing copy after copy of Ed Sullivan Presents, loose Longines Symphonette collections and Columbia Special Products Christmas collections. Jackie Gleason is another of the chief offenders, with every thrift store offering your chance to own multiple copies of Jackie Gleason Presents Music for Lovers or Jackie Gleason Presents Music for Dining or Jackie Gleason Presents Music to Make You Hate Record Collecting.

Here's one that you won't find clogging the thrift-store bins. Recorded in 1960 as a favor for The Marsalin Institute in Brookline, Massachusetts, this 10" oddity begins with Gleason reciting the Actor's Prayer, complete with organ accompaniment, then morphs into a full-on assault on your wallet. Founded in 1957 by Catholic priest and psychologist James E. Hayden, Marsalin's goal was to deal with the spiritual aspects of mental illness. This album was released as part of a fundraising drive to create a state-of-the-art hospital in Brookline. It was never built, and Marsalin eventually resettled in Holliston, Massachusetts.

Based on the thrift-store castoffs, that would make this the only Jackie Gleason album that didn't sell several million copies. Also note that Gleason's suggestion that religion and psychiatry should get together would give Tom Cruise fits.

Comments

[Jim]

If only I'd known that there was such a thing as The Actor's Prayer! Maybe it would've saved me from dropping so many lines in my kindergarten's Tom Thumb wedding.

[EH]

I'm convinced there are records that exist only in thrift-store bins.

[Listener James from Westwood]

The actor's prayer wouldn't go anything like this, would it?

"Dear Lord: May my show succeed, and may the shows of my friends fail, and yet may I still be perceived as a team player. Amen."

[hjmaiere]

Why did it sound like a fairly high-res recording of Jackie Gleason (or so we're told) with vinyl noise added on top? Very strange.

[bartleby]

What good is religion if you can't lose weight and quit smoking?

[Dale Hazelton]

Listening to the first couple of minutes (that's all I could deal with since I'm a heathen), this could have been the Mechanic's Prayer or the Cobbler's Prayer or the Hooker's Prayer. I didn't derive much acting advice from it, but maybe I should have listeneth longer.

[Hear It Wow]

Listener James,

It sounds like it does because it's ripped from vinyl. Almost 50-year-old vinyl. I try to rip everything through the master board at wee WMFO in Medford, which lets me equalize out some, but not all, of the vinyl noise.

I normally wouldn't buy, rip or post an album with this level of wear unless it was a one-of-a-kind acetate. In my 20 years of collecting, this is the only copy of this particular album I've ever seen, so I had to post it warts and all. While it's possible to remove some vinyl noise, it affects the quality of the recording. Check out a WFMU post from last year called "If Robots Had Ghosts" to see what pop correction can do if left unchecked.

[Andrew]

While we're on the subject... Exactly how much of those Jackie Gleason music LPs did The Great One himself actually compose? Steve Allen, in MORE FUNNY PEOPLE, contended that Gleason essentially noodled around at the piano until he came up with 8-16 bars of a melody, and let an orchestrator write the rest.

[Dale Hazelton]

He composed some of the stuff? I thought it was just his "interpretation" of standards, him at a podium poking out two four time at the orchestra.

I once held a 1940ish copy of an album that Milton Berle had done the same treatment with (I put it back down, stupidly perhaps). It was called "Songs for my mother" or some other such tripe, but when a man loves his mother, he'll lend his name to anything.