25-Year Sleeper

Sing me a song with social significance.

All other tunes are taboo . . .

It must be tense with common sense Or I won't love you.

The curtain raiser does not even come close to reflecting the sentiments of today's musical comedy. But even in their own livelier era, the lyrics were part of one of the most improbable musical hits ever to reach the stage--the 1937 show, Pins and Needles. Produced by the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, P. & N. opened with an amateur union cast in Manhattan's 300-seat Labor Stage Theater, and to the garment workers' astonishment, it ran for four years. Now, once again, it seems to be a surprise hit. Columbia has brought out a 25th anniversary recording of the show's tunes, and the album is selling briskly (20,000 in the first three weeks) from the garment district to the Catskills--and even beyond.

The original Pins and Needles was, in fact, a product of the borscht school: Composer Harold (I Can Get It for You Wholesale} Rome, then an unknown tune peddler, was a member of the staff of a resort hotel when the I.L.G.W.U. heard of his talent for grinding out entertainment for the guests. He agreed to write songs for the union's review, and the next four years he turned out four different versions of Pins and Needles. The Columbia album is "a compendium of the best" from each edition.

To a modern listener, Composer Rome's lyrics and music remain smart, catchy and almost unfailingly appealing--but sometimes curiously askew--as if they belonged not only to a different generation but to a different age. Such songs as One Big Union for Two and It's Better with a Union Man ("Always be upon your guard/ Demand to see a union card") are almost echoes of history--as is Rome's jazzy Doing the Reactionary:

All the best dictators do it.

Millionaires keep steppin' to it.

The Four Hundred love to sing it.

Ford and Morgan swing it . . .

Much of Pins and Needles, however, is as timeless as good show music can be, and at its best Rome's 25-year-old sleeper is a match for any show album on the market. Certainly no album of the current season more tunelessly defines the Wallflower's Lament:

Nobody comes knocking at my front door.

What do they think my knocker's for? . . .

Oh, dear, what can the matter be? Nobody makes a pass at me . . .

And the College Girl's Complaint is as fresh as last June's diploma: Once they gave me the honor seal.

Now I stand up with pains in my feet ...

I used to be on the daisy chain; Now I'm a chain-store daisy . . .

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