Word: herman
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Every so often, it seems, an aggrieved composer emerges from obscurity to lay claim to a particular pop hit. More often than not, somebody is ready to believe him -- or afraid somebody else will. The melodic and rhythmic resemblance between a four-bar stretch of Jerry Herman's 1964 classic Hello Dolly ("Hello, Dolly, well, hello Dolly. It's so . . .") and Mack David's 1948 quotidian hit Sunflower ("She's a sunflower, she's my sunflower, and I . . .") cost Herman $250,000 when he indignantly settled out of court in 1966. Ten years later, former Beatle George Harrison was nicked...
...emulation or calculated rip-off? For Selle's suit against the Bee Gees, four bars of the two scores were blown up to display a suspiciously exact correspondence of notes; on the witness stand, even Bee Gee Maurice Gibb couldn't tell the two songs apart. The similarities between Herman's song and David's consisted of an identical series of ten intervals. And My Sweet Lord really does sound very much like He's So Fine, in melody and rhythm...
...that's why many students who had couch potato internships or jobs that turned out to be as exciting as recopying the yellow pages are reluctant to discuss their experiences. "I don't know how I would feel about the entire world knowing I had a boring summer," says Herman...
While some people say that answering phones all day long is the one of the most boring summer jobs you can have, Herman of New York says he found an even more uninteresting job. The summer after his freshman year, he sat behind a desk at the New York City Department of Transportation waiting for the phone to ring--which it did once an hour--then transferred the calls. The rest of the summer "I just sat at home and didn't do much," he says." But none of this was nearly as boring, says Herman, as his freshman year...
...what can be more boring than answering a phone that rings only once an hour (besides Herman's freshman year)? How about answering a phone that rings only two or three times a day? That happened to Debbie, a freshman who thought it would be interesting to work in a real estate office. "I thought I'd learn more about real estate," she says...