Steve & Eydie

They first met on The Tonight Show when it was hosted by Steve Allen. (His composition "This Could Be the Start of Something Big" would forever after be a staple of their concert performances.) He had already made a name for himself with the 1953 single "Party Doll".

His original name was Sidney Leibowitz. He was the son of a cantor and house painter. She was born Edith Gormezano, the daughter of a Sephardic Jewish immigrant parents, her father from Sicily and her mother from Turkey. Both Spanish and English were spoken at home.

Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme were married on almost the last day of 1957. At the start of their marriage Steve's music continued to chart well in the United States: "Pretty Blue Eyes" (#9 in 1959), "Footsteps" (#7 in 1960),"Portrait of My Love" (#9 in 1961) and--his biggest hit of all--"Go Away, Little Girl" (#1 in 1962). Eydie hit the pinnacle of her solo success the same year with her song "Blame It on the Bossa Nova".

They first appeared on stage as Steve & Eydie in October of 1960. The country was about to change in deeply significant ways soon afterwards, and the music industry too. Already they must have felt the shift with the emergence of rock and roll years earlier. (Steve made a stab at appealing to the younger set in 1958 with "Uh-Huh, Oh Yeah".) They set their course and never wavered: Steve & Eydie were traditional pop entertainers, singing standards and guaranteeing a husband-wife shtick wherever they performed.

Throughout the 1960s they recorded together and separately in prodigious fashion. Their albums were well-loved but didn't sell well. Eydie had some success with her Spanish-language albums. She even hit the mark with singles like "If He Walked into My Life" (Grammy for Best Female Vocal Performance in 1967) and "What Did I Have That I Don't Have". They had success on Broadway in 1968 in a show called Golden Rainbow (which spawned the hit "I've Gotta Be Me" for Sammy Davis, Jr.)

They made regular appearances on TV variety shows during this period. But at the end of the decade this format was drying up. The 1970s found them, like most of their peers, struggling to reach an audience.

It was during this period that they reached their greatest artistic achievement with TV specials and albums dedicated to great pop songwriters like George and Ira Gershwin and Irving Berlin. Our Love Is Here to Stay: The Gershwin Years

In terms of radio play, they had long been blackballed by virtue of being associated with a dead style. In fact, they had to change their names to Parker and Penny to get airplay and chart with their last "hit", a song called "Hallelujah" in 1979.

They met with tragedy in 1986 when their 23-year old son died unexpectedly from a heart condition. (They were performing in Atlanta when it happened, and Frank Sinatra sent his private jet there to take them to New York to meet their other son.) After a year's hiatus they were back performing and reached their last peak of high visibility when they joined Frank Sinatra on his Diamond Jubilee World tour in 1990. Of them Sinatra once said, "Steve and Eydie represent all that is good about performers and the interpretation of a song."

I grew up listening to these two. I once saw them perform in the late 1980s at the Chicago Theater. Eydie had an incredible voice; Steve was more of standard-issue crooner, but he was funny. They're both still around, although Eydie no longer appears in public. Watching them on YouTube for this blog entry has been a deep pleasure.

Check out this 1967 TV appearance on the Hollywood Palace.

Also don't miss their tribute to the Gershwins.

Songwriter Bob Merrill

Among Merrill's credits: the score to Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol

When I first began developing my taste in music, I gravitated to the singer-songwriters and then simply songwriters (once I began my exploration of the Great American Songbook). It's an endlessly fascinating topic to me: the life and craft of a songwriter.

I'm a lifelong ardent reader of liner notes and song credits. Recently I was safely nestled in the dark morning with my newspapers (yep, old school, baby!) listening to a jazz vocal collection I'd recently purchased. Great music for those minutes before dawn. Anyway, a song called "Make Yourself Comfortable" had me running to the liner notes because I found it so catchy and amusing.

It was written by Bob Merrill, a prolific hit songwriter who at the time of this song (1954) was already known for Patti Page's"How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?"(1952) and "If I Knew You Were Coming I'd've a Baked a Cake"(1950).

1954 was a very good year for Merrill: that year he also penned Rosemary Clooney's "Mambo Italiano".

The other big year in Merrill's songwriting career was 1961. That's when he wrote the music for the stage version of Funny Girl. Yep, he's the guy who wrote songs like "Don't Rain on My Parade" and "People".

Back to "Make Yourself Comfortable". It's a novelty tune much like "How Much Is That Doggie" or "Baked a Cake", but it fits into a niche I've always loved--let's call it the "Why don't ya come up and see me sometime" Mae West niche. Here's some verses.

I've got some records here
to put you in the mood.
The phone is off the hook
so no one can intrude.
I feel romantic
and the record changes automatic, baby.

Sweetheart, we hurried through our dinner
hurried through the dance.
Left before the picture show was through.
Why did we hurry through the dinner
and hurry through the dance?
To leave some time for this.
To hug a hug and kiss a kiss now.

Take off your shoesies, dear,
And loosen up your tie.
I've got some records here.
Let's try one on for size.
I'll turn the lights low
While you make yourself comfortable, baby.

The most famous song in this niche has to be "Baby, It's Cold Outside". I was also remembering a song by Steve & Eydie called "Cozy".

Cozy
'Spose he wants to get cozy
'Spose he says put your head on my shoulder
and starts to get bolder
and my resistance is low?

My research on "Make Yourself Comfortable" led me to Steve Lawrence & Eydie Gormie and a flood of memories on You Tube. So let's end with my original inspiration. Check out these links pertaining to "Comfortable".

Bette Midler's doo-wop flavored rendition

Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme version

Andy Griffith parody

Helen Forrest

I've been enjoying a 2-record set on Columbia featuring Helen Forrest and her recordings with Benny Goodman in the 1940s. Out of curiosity I read her biography of Wikipedia, then I clicked on a reference to an article about her in 1972 in the Oakland Tribune. The reviewer was discussing a radio show called "40s Sounds Return to the Radio" and his dismissal of this music was abrupt and so emblematic of the time. Here's how it went.

This...visit to the 1940s might interest almost anyone. If you're of the rock generation you might want to hear the music of your parents--if nothing else for how they became the obsolete sentimentalists they are.

Yep, this attitude is what my father's generation had to endure. He would have been around my age now when he was hearing it.

Fortunately my father lived long enough to observe me fully appreciating this "sentimental" music. He'd be pleased today to learn how well it has endured.

Back to Helen Forrest. Irving Townsend in his liner notes to the album pays her a tremendous tribute.

The dream of every young singer in the late thrities and early forties was to sing with a name band...For one girl, Helen Forrest, the dream came true three times. She sang first with Shaw, then with Goodman, later with James. She must have been the luckiest girl in the world.
And yet, Helen Forrest was not the luckiest of singers after all, because it was her misfortune to make her mark as a singer before singers were in fashion. She was up there, the professional who had arrived while Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee were still dreaming the dream. She was the singer in a musicians' era, the only girl on the bus, the girl every girl envied while it seemed that Helen Forest had gone as far as a singer could hope to go. Her timing was unfortunate, for Helen Forrest, the madonna of the middle chorus, was and is one of the finest singers ever to sing a popular song. that is why she got there. But the first chorus still belonged to Benny...
These, then, are the songs and the sounds of the precarious period when the beat, the brass, and the bravura of the thirties was giving way to a time when words were to catch up with the music, when the singer took over the band.

She's completely deserving of these words. I cherish this album as much as I do my 2-record set of the recordings of Ivie Anderson and Duke Ellington.

Give Helen Forrest a listen! Here she is singing "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows" with Benny Goodman and "I Only Have Eyes for You."

Comin' Home Baby

I loved the movie An Education. Set in 1962, it captures period details in such a picture-perfect manner. What a fascinating time that was--the year before the Beatles hit America and the music landscape changed for certain!

Ray Charles's "Hit the Road Jack" won a Grammy for Best Rhythm & Blues Performance that year. It was also the year that Mel Torme recorded my favorite song on the soundtrack to An Education: "I'm Comin' Home".

"I'm Comin'Home" by Mel Torme

Hearing the organ in this song, I was reminded of how it almost instantly makes a song cool or hip. Why don't you hear it more often? Frank Sinatra got the shot of hipness he desperately needed after the Beatles landed when Nelson Riddle inserted an electric organ into the 1966 arrangement for "That's Life".

"That's Life" by Frank Sinatra

"Cmon' Home" was first a Herbie Mann instrumental. He played jazz flute--another instrument that adds a terrific flavor to a song. Sit back and enjoy his version of the song.

I'm glad that Michael Buble is around and opening the door to the Great American Songbook for generations of young listeners. Turns out he appreciates "I'm Comin' Home" too.

Michael Buble version



When I was researching this song, I came across a hilarious staging of it on TV.

Here's "Comin' Home" performed by Mel on The Judy Garland Show. Dig the boa-feathered gals on the motorcycles and the way Mel shindigs. Priceless!

Also discovered in my research was a group called The Peddlers who employed the organ in their music and interpreted standards in an original contemporary way. Check out their version of "What'll I Do".

Mining a song is fun! I'm grateful to collections like The Leopard Lounge: Swinging Lounge Tunes from The Atlantic and Warner Vaults that inspire searches like I've just done. Consider buying it!

C'mon and Hear!

I've resisted listening to Michael Feinstein for years. You'd think I would love him. Over the years he's released songbook albums dedicated to the masters like Gershwin and Porter and lesser-appreciated talents such as Ray Evans and Jay Livingstone. My sister loves him, and she'd openly wonder why I didn't listen to him, especially given my long-standing admiration for Bobby Short.

It's just that whereas Short was always effervescent and passionate when he sang, Feinstein always seemed to me to be cool and highly mannered. He'd sit at the piano with this constant angelic grin on his face and listening to him I felt nothing. So the guy helped the Gershwins' work, gaining the confidence of Ira in the late 1970s. It's a nice story. But he's still boring!

I warmed up to him,though,when he released a collection of Jimmy Webb songs. The sweeping orchestrations lifted Feinstein's vocals and brought a hyper-dramatic tone to Webb's lyrics. I was starting to be moved by what I was hearing.

Feinstein further gained my respect with the 3-part series, Michael Feinstein's American Songbook, which aired recently on PBS. If you love the history of popular music as much as I do, this is a DVD that you may have to put on your Christmas wish list. It's on mine!

What makes the series so remarkable is its clarification of Feinstein's life mission: to preserve the popular music of yesteryear through fastidious archival work and to insure its vitality through performance.

So we're treated to the sight of Michael Feinstein with a mask and rubber gloves on as he rummages through the mold-ridden garage of a sheet-music collector. We shake our heads in amazement as he visits Joe Franklin, New York's longtime late-night talk show host. Hey, most people would call Franklin's surroundings a shining example of the hoarding illness depicted on TLC. But that's all about saving things that aren't essential. Franklin's digs are a gold-mine to any music or pop-culture lover. Hope you got Joe to sign over his belongings to you like Ira did, Michael!

We see Feinstein in the basement of his home, digitizing old tapes and discs of radio shows that he's acquired by visiting "hoarders" like Joe Franklin. An especially moving moment is when he visits an elderly Margaret Whiting and plays her an old radio show on which she appeared. Looking into her eyes as she listens, we can only imagine what she is feeling, but we know it must be deeply pleasurable.

The series also tells the history of twentieth-century popular song. We learn that the invention of amplified sound in the form of the microphone was a watershed event, and we're treated to outtakes of many great performers like Al Jolson, Lena Horne, Bing Crosby, and Frank Sinatra. Figures such as Ethel Waters (who Feinstein posits was more influential on singers than Louie Armstrong) and Alice Faye (who introduced much of the popular songbook in film) are also given their due.

A rich calvacade of musicians--Paul Whiteman, Mitch Miller, Duke Ellington and man more--are placed in historical context by Feinstein. I was furiously taking notes.

I can't wait to get this DVD on my shelf next to the books in my musical history library. Rent it on NetFlix and get hooked like me!

Is the Hit Parade Over?

"The reliance on album sales is very 20th century."
--Cliff Chenfeld, owner of indie label Razor & Tie

I remember when I was in fifth grade my friend and I used to quiz one another on the top 10 hits of the week. We'd list them on a blackboard down in her basement. Guessing the label the single was on was part of our game.

Of course, this is back in the day when I probably also carried around my 45s in a neat plastic canister or carrying case. Ah, such innocence!

I'm sorry in a way that my children will not have the same pleasure. As an article in The New York Times made resoundingly clear, there are many revenue streams to consider before you can honestly declare a single a hit. It's all very complicated. I imagine Billboard Magazine has expanded their lists to accomodate every scenario.

It's funny, though, that vestiges of the 20th century metric still remain. According to the Times article, album sales are still an industry shorthand for success. Makes me think about what I read about the movie business in the paper this morning. It's another industry that is too heavily wedded to the old metric. Films like Kick-Ass are declared flops based upon their opening weekend box-office take, when in reality if you look over the long-term they return handsomely on their investment.

Also, in today's Times is an article about a song introduced on YouTube that's racking up sales as a single.

It's a fascinating time for the music business. I marvel at how quickly someone can now have a "hit". I wonder openly how much longer anyone can have something even remotely able to be called a career.

Glen Campbell: A Voice I Can't Forget

Glen Campbell has always been one of my favorite pop singers. He delivers a lyric with such clarity and authority. Recently I've been revisiting a 1974 album he did of mostly Jimmy Webb songs. It's a majestic collection, and there's something about his voice that is timeless. I've been thinking about his career lately.

Many people first got to know Campbell through his first hit, "Gentle on My Mind" (written by John Hartford). Once he'd scored with that song, the hits just kept on coming from 1967 to 1969: "By the Time I Get to Phoenix", "Galveston" and "Wichita Lineman" (all Webb songs). Let's not forget "Dreams of the Everyday Housewife" either, or his wonderful album of duets with Bobbie Gentry. (Check out "Little Green Apples)".

As these hits rolled out, Campbell also had a successful variety show, The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour. He also co-starred with John Wayne in True Grit. Quite a heady time!

In the 1970s Glen Campbell managed to record two best-selling singles: "Rhinestone Cowboy" and "Southern Nights". As the decade closed, though, it was clear that his 15 minutes had passed.

Somewhere around this time I heard of Glen Campbell in the tabloids--mainly about his troubled relationship with Tanya Tucker. Apparently Glen had abused alcohol and drugs. Looking up his biography on Wikipedia, it's clear that his personal life was a royal mess. He's been married four times. (He's been with his current wife for the last 28 years.)

Glen Campbell recorded many terrific albums for Capitol, but he left the label after a disagreement over Jimmy Webb's "The Highwayman", a song he recorded and thought (quite rightly) should have been released as a single. Several years later he put out an album of Jimmy Webb songs on Universal that I adore. If you want to revisit Glen Campbell, I cannot recommend enough Still Within the Sound of My Voice.



He returned to Capitol in the late 1980s and put out a string of wonderful albums. You can't go wrong purchasing any of them. But somewhere in the mid-1990s he seemed to have dropped out. I don't know, maybe he was recording for the Christian market, or maybe he was working hard at his theater in Branson, but I didn't hear of him.
I did get to see him, though, at Foxwoods Casino. (That's as close to New England as he'll probably get!)

A couple of years ago Glen Campbell put out a new album of material, Meet Glen Campbell. It was a stellar collection of songs by rockers such as Tom Petty, Jackson Browne, and Travis. At 72 he was still in superior voice. I hope the release met his expectations, and that he'll record again.

So here's to Glen Campbell! An incredible singer and guitar player with a storied career that dates back to rock's early days. Lend him your ear once again!

Click here for Glen's interview with Terry Gross on "Fresh Air".