I no longer recall how I became aware of the singing/performance group The Capitol Steps. It might have something on NPR back when I still listened to that on and off. It might have something else. Heck, it might even have been some odd shortwave broadcast. But sometime in the 1980’s I found out the group existed and whatever tune I first heard was good enough to get me interested enough to get one of their first tapes. Yes, tapes. This was a while ago.
The group self-described as a “Christmas Party that got out of hand.” It was various congressional staffers and such doing comedy songs… and it took off. The early stuff was generally a bit better, in my opinion, as it was more about the songs and less about the setup for them. As things went on, that changed. More setup might be great for dinner theater or the like, but is crap for entertaining recordings – at least for me.
While there was also some bias (they were DC folks, therefore some leftward pull being considered centrist is sadly normal) at least first they seemed fairly balanced and made fun, mostly, of things that just begged for such treatment – and were generally fairly gentle about it. Or least not as nasty as all too many. Again, as time went on, there seemed to an ever greater pull to the left. There were fewer general interest tunes, and more seemed rather.. pointed, at the least. Every CD (they dropped tapes… no surprise..) seemed to have fewer tune worth a repeat listen. While at first, a new album was an almost automatic Christmas present, in the later years that stopped – and the album as present wasn’t missed.
For a time, a web site offered some new and a few older tunes to fit the news of the month or week. But that faded. And then 2020 and the schlockup schlockdowns happened. With no venue (and not much history of studio recording for years and years…) the group, or what it had evolved/metastasized into, disbanded.
I suspect they started really failing during the Obama years when ‘The One’ was Above Mockery despite an endless supply of opportunities. Clinton got some zings, at least. (“A guy.. who won’t inhale is… even more… fun than Quayle is.”) And then Trump… well DC might pull Democrat/left, and tolerate RINOs and even some Republicans, but it was NOT about to put up with an Outsider who might commit reform.
One neat bit “the Steps” did was most every album ended with two or three Spoonerized stories, always titled Lirty Dies. Some were better than others, but it was at least always entertaining if only to un-scramble the words… and note where they carefully were NOT Spoonerized (lest they be more vulgar… and they played up fake vulgarity plenty[1]) and at least once where, they had been doing it for so long that the audience truly “got it” when they used a string of names and words that could NOT be Spoonerized – which was thus funny for that.
In the time they did perform they did a fair number of interesting tunes, and I could go on about perhaps at least one per album… though more in their early years and fewer in the later. Yet a few really stand out. On was their first adaptation of Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, Reagan-Packwood-Rostenkowski Tax Simplification which was impressive enough forward, but one fellow – at least – sang the title backwards. The other was about Noriega hiding out with nuns. They actually parodied Tom Lehrer’s The Vatican Rag with The Vatican Flag and did it quite well. The third… was their version of Pakistani Bang-Bang (parody of Chitty Chitty…) which – before the events of 2001 and later – mentioned the possibility of an anthrax attack as Congress and the White House were “caught with their pants down.”
[1] One bit, used more than once, was to describe a fellow (e.g. Ted Kennedy) who had a certain reputation as one “gorny huy.” In one bit they did that and then spoke of a gal with a similar reputation and led the audience… but too many didn’t make the correction and said “Gorny huy” only to be corrected, “No, she was one gorny hirl! If you can’t tell a huy from a hirl, you better never be gorny!”