It’s early October, the leaves and the pages of the calendar are turning. Here in our little corner of the world it’s the New Year, a time for some sober and somber thoughts about whither we are tending. April may be the cruelest month, but September is hands-down the most reflective one.
My wife, my best friend and severest critic, is my first reader of these blogs. She catches my spelling errors, my typos and my incomprehenibilities. She doesn’t care too much for most of my kinds of music, but over these many years she’s learned to put up with it (at reasonable volumes). She often asks me why I can’t every write about a nice song.
Here goes, Sports Fans – a great nice song about September and life and reflection, Frank Sinatra’s ‘It Was a Very Good Year’.
I’m not going to try to analyze Old Blue Eyes’ career. I have neither the tools nor the inclination. To tell you the truth, I’ve never been a great fan. I’ve always felt he was a very good singer of standards, even an excellent one, but with really nothing of significance to add artistically. Perhaps some of that negative bias is an arrested-adolescent reaction to my mother’s bobby-sox utter flutteration about him.
Ervin Drake
Sinatra’s contribution to our music can’t be overstated. He took the work of great theater composers of the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s –Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Richard Rodgers – and recreated their songs in the 1950s and ‘60s as The Great American Songbook.
But us jazz snobs like to maintain that he’s not a jazz singer, certainly not in the sense that Ella and Louis were. He certainly swung, but improvisation wasn’t part of his musical vocabulary. The jazz singers I most admire praise him without reservation for being The Master of breath, phrasing, repertoire and attitude, but that sounds like damning with faint praise if you’re arguing that he’s an artist.
But I’m thinking that maybe I’m letting some old prejudices unfairly color my listening habits over the years. Not that Frankie needs my approbation. But maybe I have been missing some very obvious qualities that trillions of other people have been enjoying since 1939.
Mallard Drake
I have indeed always been a fan of ‘It Was a Very Good Year’. Yeah, the strings are a bit over the top, but what the heck, it’s September, life is passing by, one wants to indulge in a bit of gooey reflection.
I got very nervous when I saw that the song was written by one Ervin Drake, but a quick check showed that his parents were Max Druckman and Pearl Cohen, so I calmed down. He also penned classics such as ‘Perdido’ (great performances here by Duke Ellington and here by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie), Frankie Laine’s inspiring ‘I Believe’ (recorded also by both Barbra Streisand and Elvis Presley), and ‘I Wuv A Rabbit’ (you don’t want to miss this video).
Kingston Trio
In 1961, his agent asked him to write a song for the mega-popular Kingston Trio. He obliged by knocking out overnight ‘It Was a Very Good Year’, here in the original version, the lead sung by Bob Shane. A couple of years later Sinatra heard it on his car radio, and thought it would fit perfectly in the album of melancholy and introspective songs he was assembling at the time.
That album, “September of My Years”, thirteen songs on the theme of aging and reflection, won the Grammy in 1965 as Album of the Year. It beat out the soundtracks for “Mary Poppins“, “My Fair Lady“, “Fiddler on the Roof“, “The Sound of Music“ and “Hello, Dolly“ – talk about a bumper crop!; as well as Barbra Streisand’s “People”, The Tijuana Brass’s “Whipped Cream & Other Delights”, Dylan’s “Bringing It All Back Home”, and “Beatles ‘65’, “Hard Day’s Night” and ‘Beatles VI”. The song ‘It Was a Very Good Year’ won the Grammy as Best Male Vocal Performance.
The speaker recalls his life in terms of his loves, at the ages of 17, 21 and 35. Now (at 50, in Sinatra’s case), he remembers it all as sweet and clear vintage wine. I suppose many of us would like to reflect back on our lives in similar terms. The Turtles, Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass, William Shatner, Boris Karloff, Michael Jackson, Statler & Waldorf (the two old geezers in the opera box in The Muppets), Robbie Williams (dueting posthumously with Old Blue Eyes), Homer Simpson, Ray Charles with Willie Nelson – they all did so, some reverent, some as parodies.
I never had a very high opinion of Sinatra as a person. I recently rewatched “The Godfather” (the First), in which ‘they say’ the singer Johnny Fontane (Al Martino) was modeled on Sinatra. If you remember, Johnny’s floundering career was resurrected by a horse’s head getting him cast in a major Hollywood role. In 1952, Sinatra’s floundering career recharged was by his performance in “From Here to Eternity”. I wasn’t there personally, so I don’t know how he really got the part.
I would have expected Sinatra in the studio to be glib, self-satisfied, strutting and vain. The truth is very far from that. He’s all business, deadly serious, and palpably engaged in the very evocative material. Just at the end of the ‘When I was 21’ verse, you see a thought pass across his face, a very serious memory I suppose, and he’s visibly moved by it. He turns to the page, checking the score.
As anyone who’s been on stage knows, there’s no alternative to emotional commitment. You want to convey an emotion, you gotta experience the emotion. It’s gotta be real. What’s going on in Frank’s mind seems very, very real to me, thoroughly convincing. He’s thinking about the passage of his life. Every one of us thinks about that in September. Every one of us is mortal, every one of us has one year less left in his life. That’s pretty harrowing.
Then check out his face on ‘When I was 35, it was a very good year’ and on ‘When I was 35’ at the beginning and at the end of the third verse. He smiles slyly. It’s not a glib smile, it’s the smile someone who had a memorable experience years ago and has just relived it in his mind. I don’t know what Frank was doing when he was 35, but it looks like he is viscerally recollecting a very good time indeed.
And then in the final bars, after he’s finished singing, he’s listening to that army of violins conclude the story, he’s visibly moved. It’s over, and boom, “What was the time on that?” He just won my heart, Frank did. 100% passion, 100% technique. 200% artistry.
Sinatra died in 1998 at the age of 82. Gordon Jenkins died in 1984 at the age of 74. Ervin Drake turned 93 in April. We’d like to take this opportunity to wish Ervin, and all of you, A Very Good Year.
When I was seventeen, it was a very good year.
It was a very good year for small town girls and soft summer nights.
We’d hide from the lights on the village green when I was seventeen.
When I was twenty one, it was a very good year.
It was a very good year for city girls who lived up the stairs,
With all that perfumed hair and it came undone when I was twenty one
Then I was thirty five it was a very good year.
It was a very good year for blue-blooded girls of independent means.
We’d ride in limousines, their chauffeurs would drive when I was thirty five.
But now the days grow short, I’m in the autumn of the year.
And now I think of my life as vintage wine from fine old kegs.
From the brim to the dregs, it poured sweet and clear, it was a very good year.
In 1945 at 26, my father returned from the war, settled into family life with my mother and the 2-year old daughter he didn’t know, in the small New Jersey town where I’d be born three years later. He went to work in his father’s store. A war of wills ensued between my mother and her father-in-law. My mother won, and they had to leave.
My mother had a romantic predilection for Ohio, where she’d gone to college for a year. She sent my father to drive through Ohio till he found a town that looked like it could use a children’s clothing store. He found Lima (Lye-ma, like the bean, not like the one in Peru).
Young me
They were penniless. The first year we lived in a brand-new tract housing street, a slum even while it was being built. I attended second grade, my 13-year old sister raised me. The second year we moved to a very basic triplex in a mixed neighborhood with a decent school. After a year or two we moved into a house in the same neighborhood (reasonable except for the occasional rats and bats and the coal furnace that needed to be stoked every day–by me), where we lived through my 7th grade, till we moved to a Big City. Classmates included Charley Thomas, a black kid who lived in a shanty town; and Kathy Schoonover, whose father owned a bank and whose mansion had an elevator. All within a five-minute bike ride from my house and my school.
My buddies were Bill and Scott. I went to church for their confirmations, they came to Temple for my Bar Mitzvah. In between, we tried to get into as much trouble as possible. Soaping windows, stealing gas caps, shoplifting, exploring homes when the residents were away. A childhood I’m not proud of, not thankful for, a model devoutly avoided in raising my own kids.
Photo by Anton Corbijn
My sister graduated from high school in Lima, a full couple of generations before it would serve as the setting for Glee. Back then, in real life, Lima was not where one would choose to grow up. More pipelines ran under Lima than any other place in the world (big Standard Oil refinery). There was a factory for making yellow school buses. Phyllis Diller, Hugh Downs and Joe Henderson were born there. There was a school for disabled children named for Roy Rogers’ and Dale Evans’ Downs Syndrome daughter, Robin. John Dillinger had escaped from jail in Lima. I knew I had a chance.
But, oh, that feeling of liberation—a Schwinn bike painted powder-blue with pink polkadots. (What on earth was I thinking?) It could, and did, go everywhere. Through every lane and cranny and backyard of the neighborhood, out to the first shop(lift)ing center, the trampoline place next to the Hires Root Beer stand, the dairy where we gorged on defective Heath Bar ice cream bars, and on out past eternity, all the way to the limits of our imagination, as far as our bikes would carry us.
935 State Street, Lima Ohio
Through the kind offices of Google Maps’ Street View, I’m able to see what 935 State Street looks like today. I don’t recognize much. But I don’t need a computer program to climb up on Rickie Rocky’s garage roof. To browse surreptitiously through the soda fountain and the candy counter (and of course those magazines) at Matthew’s Drug Store. To bike down to the Saturday morning cartoon marathon at the Sigma Theater. They’re all hardwired.
Kentucky Avenue, Whittier California
Tom Waits was born a year after me and grew up on Kentucky Avenue in Whittier, California. He wrote a very beautiful song about a very sordid place and time. The details are different, but the principle is the same.
Joey Navinski, the one who bragged about French-kissing Hilda the strip poker player, was a neighborhood kid who played the trombone. Dicky Faulkner, who’s “got a switchblade and some gooseneck risers,” (condoms) was known for always having a runny nose. “Mrs. Storm will stab you with a steak knife if you step on her lawn” – the real Mrs. Storm lived with her sister and would sit by her kitchen window armed with a 12-gauge shotgun.
Young Tom
Waits’ best friend was a boy named Kipper who had polio.
“I didn’t understand what polio was. I just knew it took him longer to get to the bus stop than me. I dunno. Sometimes I think kids know more than anybody. I rode a train once to Santa Barbara with this kid and it almost seemed like he lived a life somewhere before he was born and he brought what he knew with him into this world and so – it’s what you don’t know that’s usually more interesting. Things you wonder about.”
Things you wonder about at 12. The last verse of ‘Kentucky Avenue’, tying the spokes of his wheelchair and a magpie’s wings to Kipper’s shoulders and feet so that he can fly, fly away. Just like Aretha sings, in another context. Airborne by wonder, lifted on the wings of imagination, from Lima or from Whittier all the way to New Orleans and on to places we couldn’t yet even dream of.
Eddie Grace’s Buick got four bullet holes in the side.
Charlie DeLisle is sitting at the top of an avocado tree.
Mrs. Storm will stab you with a steak knife if you step on her lawn.
I got a half a pack of Lucky Strikes, man, so come along with me.
Let’s fill our pockets with Macadamia nuts
And go over to Bobby Goodmanson’s and jump off the roof.
Photo by Anton Corbijn
Hilda plays strip poker when her mama’s ‘cross the street.
Joey Navinski says she put her tongue in his mouth.
Dicky Faulkner’s got a switchblade and some gooseneck risers
That Eucalyptus is a hunchback, there’s a wind down from the south.
So let me tie you up with kite string, I’ll show you the scabs on my knee.
Watch out for the broken glass, put your shoes and socks on
And come along with me.
Let’s follow that fire truck I think your house is burnin’ down
And go down to the hobo jungle and kill some rattlesnakes with a trowel.
We’ll break all the windows in the old Anderson place
and we’ll steal a bunch of boysenberries and I’ll smear ‘em on your face.
I’ll get a dollar from my mama’s purse and buy that skull and crossbones ring
And you can wear it round your neck on an old piece of string.
Then we’ll spit on Ronnie Arnold and flip him the bird
And slash the tires on the school bus now, don’t say a word.
I’ll take a rusty nail and scratch your initials in my arm.
I’ll show you how to sneak up on the roof of the drugstore.
I’ll take the spokes from your wheelchair and a magpie’s wings,
And I’ll tie ‘em to your shoulders and your feet.
I’ll steal a hacksaw from my dad and cut the braces off your legs
And we’ll bury them tonight out in the cornfield.
Just put a church key in your pocket, we’ll hop that freight train in the hall.
We’ll slide all the way down the drain to New Orleans in the fall.
We here at SoTW love getting readers’ letters. Well, usually we do. Last week we received one which we didn’t make us feel too good:
“Dear SoTW, Jeez, you know dude, you can really be a pain in the butt with all your talk and ideas and analyzing and history and shit. I mean, you know a lot of stuff and all, and it can even be a little interesting on occasion, but what happened to the music? You’re so heavy, man. Can’t you ever just kick off your shoes, lean back, and enjoy some music? And your choices? Where do you live? Don’t you get it that not everyone is into Bulgarian women’s choirs or albino Brazilian mystics or WWII contortionists? How about some NICE music for a change? Just something PLEASANT? Do you even know those words? How the hell do the people around you put up with you? Yours truly, F.Y.”
Ok, granted, F.Y. has a point or two there, although I don’t think he really needed to get that abusive or personal. But we really do take seriously what our loyal readers have to say, and F.Y. seems to be one of them. So, F. (you don’t mind if I call you that?), this week we’re going for NICE.
And there’s nothing NICEr than a pretty girl singing a pretty song, right? And there’s definitely no one prettier than the very lovely Miss Norah Jones (b. 1979).
Everyone says so. She’s a really big star, and justifiably so. Her first album, 2001’s “Come Away With Me” won all the Grammies in the world and remains the Blue Note label’s biggest-selling album. It includes the megahit ‘Don’t Know Why‘, as well as a whole bunch of other fine songs, and is probably the best ultrapopular and most listenable album by an intelligent female artist since Carol King’s “Tapestry”.
Norah Jones often sounds familiar, a refugee of the 70s, but she’s only 31, and her style really is her own—country jazz, with a twist of blues and an ample dose of pop hooks. Ear candy that doesn’t insult the brain. Not to mention a pair of lips and a pair of eyes and a figure and an attitude that can make a man lose sleep at night. A fetching beauty with a catchy song. What more could one ask for?
Here’s a video clip of the song ‘Sunrise’ that I for one would certainly prefer watching a whole lot more than reading what I have to say about her. I think it’s witty and charming and she’s breathtakingly sexy. It’s from her second album, “Feels Like Home,” which was just as successful as the first.
Who is this Norah Jones? Well, surprisingly, she’s not just a pretty face. For one, she was raised in Texas by her dancer/nurse/concert promoter mother, Sue, who had had a nine-year relationship with Ravi Shankar, towards the end of which Norah was born.
Ravi Shankar (b. 1920), of course, introduced classical Indian sitar music to Yehudi Menuhin, John Coltrane, George Harrison, and the rest of the Western world. He was one of the stars of the Woodstock Festival (I’m not imagining that, I saw him there). Norah was born Geethali Norah Jones Shankar (or in the original Bengali: গীথালি নরাহ জন্স শঙ্কর)). She only saw her father a few times a year until she was nine, and then not until she was 18, when he introduced her to her 16-year-old half-sister Anoushka, now a successful Shankar-trained sitar player.
Norah plays down the father connection, but she has pursued lots of other musical directions. She recorded “The Fall” at home in 2009, a darker, more personal, laid-back album, including ‘Chasing Pirates‘. Last month (Nov 2010) she released ” …Featuring Norah Jones,” a collection of 18 duets she’s made over the last few years with artists such as Ray Charles, Dolly Parton, Herbie Hancock, Foo Fighters and Q-Tip. That’s one eclectic broad.
She’s even starred in a very respectable movie, “My Blueberry Nights,” directed by Wong Kar-Wai with supporting roles from Jude Law, Natalie Portman, Rachel Weisz. And with all of that, Norah Jones seems determined to avoid the pitfalls of celebrity and stardom. In spite of her incredible box office and cash register appeal, she consistently involves herself in small, personal, quality projects. Well, more power to you Norah. Not only an eclectic broad, but apparently a very spiffy and tasteful one.
For our SoTW, we’re going to a pretty obscure cut of hers, a collaboration that didn’t even make it onto her collaboration CD. But to get there, we’re going to have to go on a little detour (okay, FY, F.Y.).
Tim Ries (b. circa 1959) is a very respectable jazz soprano saxophonist who’s studied under Michael Brecker, Dave Liebman and Bob Brookmeyer. He’s played with everyone from Steely Dan to Stevie Wonder to Paul Simon, as well as one of my very favorite musicians, Maria Schneider. He’s currently a professor of jazz at the University of Toronto. In 1999 he gigged in the horn section (and occasional keyboards) on The Rolling Stones No Security tour. After the tour, he recorded three Stones’ songs to see how they’d sound in a jazz context. He gave them the demo. Keith Richards:
I thought what Tim recorded was amazing, and I’m sort of jealous of him. When we wrote those songs, there was a lot of pressure on us to keep them as short as possible for the singles market. With what Tim does, he has the luxury to stretch out the melodies and play with the different chords and harmonies. Instead of the sketches that we basically recorded, Tim’s versions are more like fully finished things. The playing is beautiful too. Tim always has such a beautiful sound.
The Stones enthusiastically supported the project, which gave birth to 2 CDs, “The Rolling Stones Project” (2005) and the double-CD “Stones World” (2008). Pitching in were Bill Frisell, Milton Nascimento, Eddie Palmieri, Jack DeJohnette, Bill Frisell, Bernard Fowler, the divine Luciana Souza, Sheryl Crow, John Scofield, and Wayne Shorter’s bass-drum team John Patitucci and Brian Blade. Oh, and The Rolling Stones themselves. Here’s Watts/Wood/Richards and Sheryl Crow helping Tim Ries out on ‘Slipping Away.’
And here’s Bernard Fowler singing ‘Wild Horses’ live on a Tim Ries tour, a bit overdone for my tastes. Here’s a better clip, Tim Ries talking about the project and the recording session from the studio of a flamenco-informed ‘Jumping Jack Flash’. Fellas, if you’ve ever taken my advice about anything, watch this clip. If it doesn’t make your blood boil, you’re probably dead. And here’s Tim Ries recorded version of ‘Paint It Black’, and you’ll find lots more live performances from the project on YouTube. Here’s ‘Salt of the Earth’, sung in a number of languages and styles by a number of singers, one of whom is Ahinoam Nini’s sister Odeya doing Stones in Hebrew!
And here’s my pick of the lot, Norah Jones singing ‘Wild Horses’, backed by Bill Frisell and the whole Tim Ries crew. It’s not the best cut from Tim Ries’ Rolling Stones Project, and it’s not Norah Jones’ best cut. But it’s a really, really NICE cut, and I hope F.Y. and everyone else out there enjoys it as much as I do. So there!
Childhood living is easy to do
The things you want
ed I bought them for you
Graceless lady, you know who I am
You know I can’t let you slide through my hands
Wild horses couldn’t drag me away.
I watched you suffer a dull aching pain
Now you’ve decided to show me the same
But no sweet, vain exits or offstage lines
Could make me feel bitter or treat you unkind
Wild horses couldn’t drag me away.
I know I dreamed you a sin and a lie
I have my freedom, but I don’t have much time
Faith has been broken, tears must be cried
Let’s do some living after love dies
Wild horses couldn’t drag me away.
It’s that month. Time to repent. Some people get up before before dawn to fervently recite indecipherable poetry written in a long-dead language in the Middle Ages.
Me, I’ll just recite a litany of all the music I’ve ever been enthralled with and am now embarrassed to have done so.
A high school buddy, AB, sent me a couple of record reviews I wrote for the Bulldog Barks in 1965. “Rubber Soul” and Barbra Streisand. I blushed a bit at the callowness of the style, but the musical observations themselves? Spot on.
I think back primarily to the pre-Beatles era. After they Sullivaned into our lives, we had great stuff to listen to, and our tastes evolved as we grew into college. So what if there was an occasional rave to Sam & Dave’s ‘Hold On, I’m Coming’? I’d had a couple of pre-legal beers, and Sam & Dave are nothing to be ashamed of.
Back in junior high, the radio was playing Rex Allen’s “Son Don’t Go Near the Indians” and Lawrence Welk’s ‘Calcutta’, but we got that they were crap. We even knew how to take Chubby Checker’s ‘Let’s Twist Again’ and Connie Francis’s ‘Where the Boys Are’ with a grain of salt; and were even then aware of the difference between all of them and The Shirelles’ ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow’ and Del Shannon’s ‘Runaway’.
So I’m surprisingly comfortable with what enraptured me back then. My perspicaciousness, in retrospect, stands me in good stead.
But we’re here to talk about the trespasses. That stuff I’m embarrassed to admit that I loved once upon a pimply time.
C’mon, Jeff. You want expiation? Give ‘em up.
Okay, okay. Here goes:
Eddie Fisher, ‘Around the World’ b/w ‘Cindy, Oh Cindy’.
My defence? I was 11, it (they) were the first 45 I ever listened to (when my sister wasn’t in her room). The fact that the second 45 I stole a listen to was Sam Cooke’s ‘You Send Me’ is apparently no defense. Mea culpa. x2.
Martin Denny, ‘The Enchanted Sea’.
Okay, okay, full disclosure: and a half dozen LPs of same.
But I had this discussion one night with a cool jazz pianist (with a pencil moustache), and he concurred that those were indeed the most exotic sounds around. Well, for 13 year-olds. Coltrane’s sheets of sound were from another universe.
Simon and Garfunkel, ‘For Emily, Wherever I May Find Her’.
I’m just too embarrassed to reveal what that song did to me back then. I don’t care, let me rot in hell. You’re not going to hear about it.
But the Ultimate Tresspass?
Johnny Mathis.
And oh, what a sin it was.
“Johnny’s Greatest Hits”. “Johnny’s Greatest Hits Vol II”. Heavenly”. “Faithfully”. “Wonderful, Wonderful.” “I’ll Buy You a Star”. It was 1957-1961 by the Gregorian calendar, 8th-10th grade by mine.
I squirm to think of those albums. I squirm to think of how those albums made me squirm.
There are skeletons banging on that closet door. Let ‘em out, Jeff.
Johnny Mathis was a distinctive crooner. All the traditional MOR crooners of the late 50s/early 60s — the Sinatras and Ecksteins and Martins and Bennets and King Coles and Belafontes – were real, ordinary male Homo sapiens. Johnny Mathis was, is, will always be – how shall I put this when I no longer talk the talk of PC nuance? – other.
His voice is freakishly sensuous and gooey. A vibrato that can whip cream. That did, actually.
Tons of tomes have been written about prepubescent girls and androgynous pop idols. Tweenie boys have been markedly neglected. Perhaps it’s better that way.
Getting ready do my homework, my finger reaches to click on ‘Chances Are’, the first and quintessential track on the ultimate album, “Johnny’s Greatest Hits”. The album spent 491 consecutive weeks (nine-and-a-half fucking years!!) in the Billboard top 100.
I reach to click on the track, but there’s no need. It’s hardwired. That red button is a permanent nodule in the juke box of my mind. Columbia 1133. Just as much as Capitol 2047 (“Meet The Beatles!” for you Martians).
I can play ‘Chances Are’ in my mind at the flick of a synapse. But I can’t really hear it any more than I can hear ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ today. The groove is worn out.
Photo by Richard Avedon
I’m not going to make excuses, even though it was 1961 and I was 13. Know what it was? It was makeout music, perfected. It was the soundtrack of my hormonal life; i.e., my life. Every time I was alone with a girl in high school in reality or in my imagination, it was playing on my Victrola or in the heavens.
I’m guessing there were a lot more misses than hits there, but I wouldn’t count on the accuracy of that memory—in either direction. That groove is worn out as well.
But now, threescore years on, the setting has changed. Or has it? “What shall I do with this absurdity—/O heart, O troubled heart—this caricature,/Decrepit age that has been tied to me/As to a dog’s tail?”
Enough. I come to bury Johnny, not to praise him. Let’s just SoTW him and be done with it.
John Royce Mathis (b. 1935) was a high school high jump and hurdles star (he was asked to try out for the US Olympic team) who studied voice, including opera, for years before becoming a professional singer. He was one of the first musicians to focus on selling albums rather than singles. He’s sold well over 350 million of them, and still lives in a house built by Howard Hughes.
The song was written and recorded by pianist Erroll Garner in 1954, but remained unknown. Johnny: “I heard Erroll Garner play it when I was in my teens. I was frequenting the Black Hawk, where Erroll played three or four times a year. One night, he played the tune. There were no lyrics yet. I liked it a lot. I blurted out, ‘Mr. Garner, I am going to record your song if I ever make a record.’ Several years later, Johnny Burke [ ‘Here’s That Rainy Day’, ‘Imagination’, ‘It Could Happen to You’, ‘Like Someone in Love’, ‘Moonlight Becomes You’, ‘Pennies from Heaven’, ‘Polka dots and Moonbeams’, almost all with Jimmy Van Heusen–JM] had written lyrics to it, and I had fallen in love with Sarah Vaughan’s version.”
It might just be the most romantic recording ever. Johnny’s ‘on my own’ falsetto fade-in entry after the instrumental break (a B-flat) might just be the single most romantic moment ever put to tape.
I don’t know how many back-seat assignations were played out to its strains. Let’s tryst again, like we did last summer. But most of the couples we know owe a very certain debt to that singer and that song. And for that – thanks, Johnny.
It’s early October, the leaves and the pages of the calendar are turning. Here in our little corner of the world it’s the New Year, a time for some sober and somber thoughts about whither we are tending. April may be the cruelest month, but September is hands-down the most reflective one.
The speaker recalls his life in terms of his loves, at the ages of 17, 21 and 35. Now (at 50, in Sinatra’s case), he remembers it all as sweet and clear vintage wine. I suppose many of us would like to reflect back on our lives in similar terms. The Turtles, Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass, William Shatner, Boris Karloff, Michael Jackson, Statler & Waldorf (the two old geezers in the opera box in The Muppets), Robbie Williams (dueting posthumously with Old Blue Eyes), Homer Simpson, Ray Charles with Willie Nelson – they all did so, some reverent, some as parodies.
