Within an hour, I had a tape of his tape. Soon we were comparing our original cast album collections and I was asking him, “Do you have Flahooley?” He looked very proud while reporting, “On tape.” And I didn’t blame him. Then, in August 1970, while I was in a Boston record store reading the back cover of the London cast album of The Four Musketeers, a young man saw it in my hand and decided that I was worth knowing. Do you have Greenwillow?” Sure, I did - but still no Flahooley. No record store was passed by, as proved by my stop at a West Roxbury storefront called “Soul on Wax.” (As Cole Porter said, “You never know!”)īy the late ’60s, I’d exhausted every New England haunt and had expanded my horizons to Philadelphia ( Texas, L’il Darlin’), Wilmington ( Happy Hunting), and Reisterstown, Maryland, where a woman, fingering through original cast albums in the bin next to the one I was mining breathlessly said to me, “Records are worse than heroin. Next came thrift shops, where I rummaged through records while enduring the stale smell of old clothes. I started visiting appliance and sheet music stores that looked as if they once might have carried records perhaps they still had a few hanging around.

I’d keep my eye out for the Beatles’ Butcher Cover, they’d be on the lookout for you-know-what. From then on, I only went record-hunting with friends who liked rock. “Oh,” he said, yanking it out of my hands, “I’ve always wanted that!” Because it was just a for-the-record musical rather than a produced show, I didn’t much care about it but believe me, if it had been a Flahooley album, we would have dueled to the death. Wonderful) - where a friend noticed I’d just found My Square Laddie, a parody of My Fair Lady. Once I was old enough to get my driver’s license, I turnpiked my way to Fitchburg ( The Littlest Revue), Nashua ( Mrs. “Oh, a musical,” he snorted, rolling his eyes heavenward. “Fla- HOO-ley?” the clerk scornfully asked, regarding me with suspicion. “I’m looking for Flahooley, Capitol S-284?” When I approached a record store displaying a sign that boasted, “9½ times out of 10, we have the record you want,” I knew I’d represent the store’s 5% failure rate. I took the bus to record stores in Lexington (where I found Whoop-Up), Winchester (where I found Saratoga), and Belmont (where I found Tenderloin). Thus began my safari for Capitol Records Number S-284.

One problem: It was then December, 1961 and Flahooley had been out-of-print since July, 1955.

It was, said Green, “an unappreciated score of great charm.” Considering that he’d said of Hazel Flagg, “There’s little to recommend here” - and I loved Hazel Flagg (which I snagged from underneath a counter in a record store in my home town of Arlington, Massachusetts) - I could only imagine how great Flahooley would be. They included the oddly named Flahooley, music by Sammy Fain and lyrics by E.Y. When as a teenager and I became interested in Broadway, I read Stanley Green’s The World of Musical Comedy, which listed many shows and original cast albums I hadn’t known existed.

For this record, which marked Barbara Cook’s cast album and musical theater debut, was the object of one of my greatest personal odysseys. If someone had told me in 1975 that the recording would be re-released not once (on a Capitol LP in 1977), not twice (on a 1993 Broadway Angel CD), but three times (now on a DRG CD) in 29 years, I would have never believed him. I had to shake my head and smile when I walked into Footlight Records yesterday and saw the 1951 original cast album of Flahooley prominently displayed.

Footlight records