I take enormous pride in having turned on my kids at a young age to The Marx Brothers. If memory serves, it began with Horse Feathers, featuring Groucho as Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff, the new President of Huxley University. Zeppo is Frank Wagstaff, Groucho’s son, a student at Huxley. Groucho tells him “you are a disgrace to the name of Wagstaff. If such a thing is possible.” Harpo is Pinky, the dog catcher. And Chico, he’s Baravelli, working at the local speakeasy.

Leonard Joseph CHICO Marx was born on this day in 1887 on the upper east side of New York City. It’s pronounced ‘Chick-Oh’ by the way. In the movies, he was generally the not too intelligent but sly con artist, usually trying to put one over on Groucho. He was the oldest of the Marx Brothers, though there had been one older, Manfred, who died in infancy. Chico became the de facto manager of the act after their mother Minnie’s passing. It was he that negotiated with the movie studios for the brothers to get a percentage of the film’s receipts, the first-ever such deal of it’s kind. Chico also enabled the act to be signed to MGM by Irving Thalberg after the brothers went into a slump following the film Duck Soup. Off stage, Chico was a charmer, womanizer, and gambling addict. The Brothers’ final film, A Night In Casablanca, was made to cover Chico’s gambling debts. When the film wrapped, Groucho, Harpo and Zeppo held Chico’s money in a separate account saving it for him, issuing him a monthly allowance that he remained on till the end of his life.

My kids loved Chico’s scenes playing piano. Their Dad did too.

Chico has a line in 1941’s The Big Store that gave the title to a rare Bob Dylan instrumental, Self Portrait‘s “Woogie Boogie”:

“You kids, you practice until I come back. But-a remember! No woogie-boogie!”

I started thinking about songs inspired by movies. There are loads of them. Aside from “Woogie Boogie,” Dylan has written several songs spurred by movies. “Motorpsycho Nightmare” from 1964, inspired by Psycho, even name drops Anthony Perkins and La Dolce Vita. 1986’s “Brownsville Girl” was spurred by Gregory Peck’s The Gunfighter. “Love Is Just a Four Letter Word,” made famous by Joan Baez, had it’s flashpoint from that very line spoken in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof.

Buddy Holly wrote “That’ll Be The Day” after hearing John Wayne utter the line in The Searchers. John Fogerty wrote “Bad Moon Rising” after seeing The Devil and Daniel Webster. David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” was borne from a very stoned Bowie seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey. George Harrison loved Mel Brooks movies so much that he quoted Madeline Kahn’s line “it’s t’wooo, it’s t’wooooo” from Blazing Saddles in the great “Crackerbox Palace.”

My personal favorite example birthed a classic rock staple. Aerosmith is hard at work on what would become the album Toys In The Attic. Joe Perry had a riff he knew was good. Over the course of several days, the band developed the track but had no ideas for the lyrics. They were ready to dump the track. But on a walk to get away from the studio, guitarist Brad Whitford, bassist Tom Hamilton and drummer Joey Kramer ended up in Times Square and decided to catch the just-released Young Frankenstein. They especially loved one particular scene, and told Steven Tyler about it the next day:

Today’s Playlist is a SomethingIsHappening compendium of songs inspired by films, in honor of Chico Marx and The Marx Brothers:

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