THIS ONE DOES IT
FOR ME!
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A Thought for Today
We cannot be sustained by dreams alone.
Strength is in the deed, weakness in our unwillingness to perform it.
Seems like I'm not the only
one who enjoys reading the liner notes of Rod's albums.
Dear Ken,
Lately Rod's voice can be heard coming out of several of the offices at my
place of business. I've made arrangements to take 3 of my co-workers on a
road trip with me to the Glen Ellyn concert.
Every day or so one of the younger girls will walk in and say "Who is
this Rod McKuen?" In an effort to educate them, I've been loaning out my
copy of the 1992 CD Greatest Hits of Rod McKuen. I must confess that what
he classifies as his greatest hits are not necessarily my favorites
(exceptions to that are Rock Gently, I'll Catch the Sun, & I think of You)
but the liner notes to this CD contain a wealth of information about Rod's
career and his inspiration at various times in that career.
I know you have a backlog for your Wednesday Flight Plans, but sometime
when you are looking for some inspiration why not use some of the
information from those liner notes.
Didn't you love the piece today about the Beverly Hills Rats? I laughed so
hard, I spit out my coffee. I love it when Rod throws in things like that
and it isn't even Friday yet.
Take care now and enjoy the Full Moon this weekend. They seem to be
rolling around faster and faster each month don't they?
Rita Bartlow
Nice to hear from you again
Rita and thanks for a good idea.
Of course the fact that I had no idea what Rita was talking about was just
ever so slightly inconvenient. I went through every Greatest Hits album I
had and there were no detailed notes to be found. After much to-ing and
fro-ing we established that the album in question was "Without a Worry in
the World" and that the copy I have in my possession differed from Rita's
only by the exclusion of the booklet insert.
Rita was kind enough to scan the notes and mail them to me and Jay's
database did the rest. The result of this collaborative effort is pretty
lengthy but, as usual, makes for fascinating reading. Hope you enjoy it as
much as I did.
You didn't select a poem or
song lyric, Rita, so I've gone with with of your favorites, "Rock Gently".
If you have a favorite McKuen
song, poem or story you'd like to share, drop me a line at
kenb@mckuen.com and I'll include it
in this column one Wednesday.
- Ken, Johannesburg,
October 16
A
Few More Words About My Friends in The Netherlands
This album was Bert van Breda’s idea. He’s been after me for it for
years. I said “Yes, Bert, sure you can have it", and went back to
tending my tomatoes. He wrote letters, made telephone calls and endless
faxes sputtered from his house to mine... and my house to his. He
pleaded. He threatened. He got mad and got nice and got mad again. ( in
fact, he doesn’t call me anymore and I miss his pleasant harassment. )
In desperation he sent his brother Ed all the way from Holland to Los
Angeles to pick up the tapes in person. The tapes still weren’t ready
and Ed is too nice a guy to shoot me, so he took a few tomatoes and my
Christmas album back to Holland instead. His visit did get me moving,
though. Finally I sorted through the dust and cobwebs of 30 years worth
of analogue tapes and located these tracks from at least a dozen
different sources. They were digitally mastered on July 3rd, 1992.
Now Bert has the tapes, but has been waiting a month for these notes. No
doubt he’s begun to ship this disc with blank booklets.
This CD would have come out one day, though without Bert’s badgering,
persistence and genuine interest in my work, it might not have been
issued in your lifetime or mine. Bert runs an unusual and enterprising
company. BR Music issues everything from Aznavour to Zamfir, with my
stuff somewhere in the vast in-between. I thought this might be a pretty
good place to mention how well I know and how much I appreciate Bert’s
work too. And to say this CD is dedicated to Bert and Ed with a large
amount of love, affection and admiration.
Greatest
Hits - Without a Worry in the World (BR Music)
I like singing songs as much as I like writing them. So, some of these
words and some of this music is my own. I picked up a tune or two while
traveling and several more were hits by other performers long before they
became identified with me. In one way or another these songs and others
have enabled me to travel the world and sing for my supper and breakfast
under the very best conditions. They have been my good companions, my visa
and my introduction to places and to circumstances around the globe.
Some of the records I’ve made and the songs I’ve sung have had greater
success in one country than another. Holland, where this disc is first
being issued, made my recordings of Amor, Soldiers Who Want to Be Heroes
and Without a Worry in the World their own long before any other country
heard or embraced them. South American countries will know my version of
South America Take It Away better than citizens of The Far East. In
Holland They’re Playing Our Song made the charts, but Americans will hear
it here for the first time. I Think of You topped the hit parade in Great
Britain but barely cracked the top forty in the USA. As for Jean, Seasons
in the Sun, Rock Gently, Love’s Been Good to Me and If You Go Away I’m
grateful that each has a valid international passport.
The World I Used to Know began life as Song With No Name. Randy Wood at
Dot Records suggested that if I expected them to release Jimmie Rodger’s
recording of it I’d have to come up with a better title. I arbitrarily
picked The World I Used to Know. Other artists who have recorded it
include Johnny Mathis, The Kingston Trio, Glen Campbell, Jim Nabors, Bobby
Goldsboro, Eddy Arnold & Glenn Yarbrough.
Every singer has influences and heroes. My early favorites include Frankie
Laine, Sinatra - of course, Johnny Ray, Ella, Sarah & Louis, the highly
original Jeri Southern and the brilliant Jo Stafford, who could always
sing anything and make it personal and meaningful. I love Doris Day,
Martha Raye and Petula Clark. My early influences were folk and country
singers like The Weavers, Marty Robbins, Hank Snow, Burl Ives and the
singing brakeman, Jimmie Rodgers.
For a while I gravitated to writing and performing folk songs myself.
Doesn’t Anybody Know My Name ( 2:10 - 6:18 ) is one of that genre and it
has always pleased me that country performers like Waylon Jennings, The
Kingston Trio, Vince Hill, Billy Strange and the second Jimmie Rodgers got
around to recording it. And, it was Hank William’s Jr.’s first recording
ever.
In the fifties I had a film contract with Universal - International. My
acting credits included a couple of musicals and a western... in the
former I was the hero’s best friend. In the latter, I was the good guy and
got to wear the white hat. More important than the acting roles that now
and again come back to haunt me on television were some of the friendships
I made at the studio. Producer Donna Holloway was one of them. Returning
from a film assignment in Paris, she brought me back a stack of Gilbert
Becaud albums. Years later I wrote lyrics for six of Becaud’s songs for
his first English language LP. One of them The Importance of the Rose was
used as the title and theme music for Princess Grace’s television special
‘Monaco C’est La Rose’. While lots of songs have been written advising all
of us to stop and smell the shrubbery, Becaud’s lovely melody for this one
makes the message especially easy to take.
A lot of songs I write turn out to be waltzes, I’m not sure why. I’m a
lousy dancer and even more hopeless when it comes to waltzing. Still, I’ve
heard my waltz, Jean, played as everything from a rumba to a turkey trot.
I wrote it as part of my score for Robert Fryer’s film ‘The Prime of Miss
Jean Brodie’. My inspiration for it was as much Maggie Smith, the star of
the film, as it was the character she played in it. It was a big song for
both Oliver in America and overseas, a hit for Matt Monro in Spanish and
Frederic Francoise in French, and it won me my first Oscar nomination. In
the nearly 25 years since it was first written, Jean has had many
recordings, including versions by Johnny Mathis, Bert Kaempfert, Don
Cherry, Henry Mancini, Rock Hudson, Chet Atkins, James Last, Sergio
Franchi, Peter Nero, al Martino, Jim Nabors, Percy Faith, The Mills
Brothers, Les Baxter and The London Philharmonic Orchestra.
Imagine my surprise when I turned on the radio and heard a song so similar
to my Rock Gently that it even used the same melody, not to mention nearly
all of my original words. In fact, the only measurable difference between
my song and The Other One was that The Other One had someone else’s name
on it as author. Not nice. We settled out of court and I bought my granny
a new motorized rocker. ‘Now I don’t need my grandson to rock me gently
any more’, she says.
For a long time during the late fifties and early sixties I was that rare
Southern California citizen who hadn’t yet learned how to drive. Whether
my destination was half a dozen blocks or as many miles I walked
everywhere. Because my head was more often than not starting or finishing
a song, I got lost often or wound up miles from where I’d intended to be.
If Love’s Been Good to Me has a rolling, walking rhythm to it, no doubt
it’s because it was written during one of my midnight walks to a favorite
haunt, The Red Raven. Judging from the number of songs I started and
completed going to and coming from that establishment, I’d say the
distance from my house to ‘The Raven’ must have been about thirty two
bars.
Even a songwriter is allowed to dream, and I always hoped Love’s Been Good
to Me would find its way to Frank Sinatra. Years later when Frank Sinatra
and I were working on an album together I could not resist making an old
dream come true. Frank’s recording of Love’s Been Good to Me became a
world wide hit and helped turn our ‘A Man Alone’ album to gold.
Like Amor, South America Take It Away comes from the forties. It was
written by the veteran composer Harold Rome for his Broadway musical ‘Call
Me Mister’. Bing Crosby and The Andrews Sisters had the original hit
recording and it was a major success for Xavier Cugat. It was meant to be
a conga, but I couldn’t resist spoofing the fifteen minute popularity of
the infamous Lambada with this arrangement. Mark Leggett’s Pan Americos
caught the spirit perfectly. As far as I know, they’re still dancing
cheeks to cheeks.
I wrote the English lyric, About the Time to Leo Ferre’s Avec Le Temps for
Marlene Dietrich. The older I get the more it turns out to be true. In
addition to being a first class poet and philosopher, Leo Ferre is one of
France’s true musical geniuses. Besides writing words and music to
hundreds of his own songs, he has provided beautiful and haunting musical
settings for the poems of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Apollinaire, Rimbaud &
Prevart.
The first time I heard Frank Sinatra’s rendition of Gayle Caldwell’s
Cycles I fell in love with it. This was and is one of the great marriages
of voice and song. It topped the charts for months. My own remake of
Cycles cracked the top 40 for an hour or so.
In 1968 I decided I wanted to go to Europe to muck about, do some writing
and just hang out for a while. To finance this enterprise I agreed to do
three record albums for three different record companies. The Love
Movement for Capital, Something Beyond for Liberty and for RCA Victor an
album based on a new book I’d written entitled Listen to the Warm. It
never occurred to me how I would actually write 40 or so new pieces of
material, get them arranged and recorded, do my mucking, hanging out and
writing and be home in three months. I left anyway. In London I went
looking for arrangers and didn’t find any that impressed me enough to help
out with the projects. Then Shirley Bassey’s husband and manager, Ken
Hume, introduced me to Arthur Greenslade. To anyone who knows anything
about my recordings and tours for the 20 years or so that followed, the
rest is history. A personal and musical friendship began and endured in
earnest. Arthur’s arrangements for Listen to the Warm helped earn me a
gold record and a Grammy nomination.
A Boy Named Charlie Brown, based on Charles Shultz’s enduring comic strip
Peanuts, was the first full length animated feature I was asked to write
songs for. Of the half dozen songs I contributed to the film, four made
the final cut. Champion Charlie Brown is probably the best known of the
group and this arrangement by Arthur Greenslade has all the buoyancy of a
kid’s first day at camp.
Petula Clark brought me the lovely Francis Lai melody I turned into I
Think of You and Don Costa & Nick Perito took the finished song to Perry
Como. Glenn Yarbrough, who recorded it first, has never forgiven me for
this. I still plead Not Guilty and love Glenn’s version all the same. In
England Vera Lynn made a beautiful disc of it and the great baritone Pegro
Vargas had the number one record of I Think of You in Italy.
In 1954 while I was in the army stationed in Korea, I spotted this
graffiti on a latrine wall:
“Soldiers who want to be heroes
number damn near zero
but there are god damned millions
who want to be civilians.”
Writer Norman Mailer recalls seeing the same slogan on a john wall during
World War II. No doubt our American Civil War and the Crimean conflict
found suitable places for like sentiment. I never forgot the phrase and
later put it into a song. The first recording of Soldiers Who Want to Be
Heroes was made for Capitol in the sixties by The Gateway Trio. Because of
what was termed its anti-Vietnam War sentiment it was banned by most radio
stations and sank into oblivion, though not before I made The White House
enemy list by continuing to perform it in concerts. One such performance,
a concert at The London Palladium, May 24th 1970 was recorded and released
on record.
Without my knowledge, Negrem - Delta Records in Holland took Soldiers’ off
the album and released it as a single and it had a fast climb up the
charts to number one all over Benelux. Hit status followed in England and
Australia. Les Compagnens de la Chanson recorded it in French and it
became the number one record in Germany and Israel as recorded by actress
- singer Dahlia Lavi.
Holland has been the place where many of my biggest hits took off. Amor
was number one in The Netherlands in 1972 and my same record of it with a
disco rhythm track added went to the top again all over Europe six years
later.
Georges Moustaki’s Le Metec, which I rewrote as Without a Worry in the
World was one of the biggest records I ever had in The Netherlands and on
the continent. It’s been equally successful in Greece, Italy and
throughout South America. I call Moustaki The Grande Marshall of the
Guitar. He’s a husky gentle man with a great bushel of a beard who is
every bit as adept at drawing and painting as he is at composing and
singing.
I’ve traveled to Holland off and on for thirty years. Made great
friendships and great love there. Written songs ( Solitude’s My Home was
finished on a Dutch dock and so was I’m not Afraid ); worked on books (
half of Moment to Moment was completed at Hotel de L’Europa ) and had too
many little moments and grand moments to ever remember the way they should
be remembered in this always wonderful and never less than hospitable
country. I doubt, though, that anything past or yet coming will top the
thrill of the standing ovation I received at the Concertgebouw in October
of 1971 when I started to perform ( The Port of ) Amsterdam. The track on
this album was recorded during that concert.
Like If You Go Away and Seasons in the Sun, ( The Port of ) Amsterdam is
an adaptation of the work of my favorite writer and performer, Jacques
Brel. As friends and as musical collaborators we had traveled, toured and
written - together and apart - the events of our lives as if they were
songs, and I guess they were. When news of Jacques’ death came I stayed
locked in my bedroom and drank for a week. That kind of self pity was
something he wouldn’t have approved of, but all I could do was replay our
songs ( our children ) and ruminate over our unfinished life together.
There are dozens, hundreds of recordings of If You Go Away. Sinatra, Jack
Jones, Shirley Bassey, Dusty Springfield, Norman Luboff Choir, Freda
Payne, Glen Campbell, Johnnie Ray, Julio Iglesias, The Seekers, Michelle
Lee, Scott Walker, Neil Diamond, Laine Kazan, Pearl Bailey, Nana
Mouskourie, Al Martino, Hildegarde, Arthur Prysock, Barbara Dickson, Ray
Charles, Robert Goulet and Sylvia Syms are among the artists who have
recorded it vocally. Ray Bryant, Acker Bilk, Bud Shank, Chet Baker, Al
Hirt, Wim Overgraauw, Stan Getz and Helen Merrill have done it with a jazz
feel. It is considered by the performing rights societies to be one of the
most recorded and performed standards in modern history. The original hit
was a poignant rendition by the talented vocalist Damita Jo.
Seasons in the Sun was a gold and platinum seller around the world for
Terry Jacks. It has been recorded by Ray Conniff, Andy Williams, Floyd
Cramer, Pearls Before Swine, James Last, Tommy Sand & The Kingston Trio,
among others. My own personal favorite will always be Brel’s and when I
perform it now I do it slower, more legato than on this album.
In the spring of 1965, with my old friend Ellen Ehrlich as my
pronunciation coach and John-Jacques Timmel as producer, I set out to
record some of my songs in French. Je Viens De Loin ( Frank Gerald’s
translation of I’ve Been to Town ) was one of the first results. The
arrangement is by Roland Vincent and I particularly like his use of French
horns to augment a blues piano.
I wrote And to Each Season as a fugue to be sung against Johann Pachebels
Canon in G. The idea was to see the seasons of life as a continuing round.
This arrangement is by Reg Guest and he conducts The National Philharmonic
behind me. I have yet another arrangement by Arthur Greenslade for my
Christmas album that features The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and The
Swingle Singers. And somewhere, recorded at a concert I did in Vienna with
Greta Keller but as yet unissued, is my favorite And to Each Seasons
chart. It’s very spare, with just Ondes Martenot and rhythm quartet
lending support to the vocal. Again, it was arranged by Arthur. Guess
we’ll save that version for ‘The Uncollected Rod’, or ‘Son of Greatest
Hits... or...
They’re Playing Our Song is another track that made the Dutch charts. I
can’t deny that it’s fun to sing, but I almost never do it in concert
because I usually mix up the words or lose my place in it.
There are recording engineers, musicians, music copyists and librarians,
road musicians, publishers and faithful friends who should be thanked
individually for their contributions to my recording and song writing
life, and thus to this album, but the hour is late. Anyway, you know who
you are. I do want to mention the extraordinary of the Master of
Mastering, Kevin Gray, who, despite a rough case of jet lag, stayed awake,
alert and digital to the end of the marathon session that produced the
tape for this album.
And something should be said for what’s been left out of this collection.
For a dozen years I was on and off the American, French, Japanese,
Canadian, Italian and German charts with a series of albums I co-wrote and
co-produced with the remarkable Anita Kerr. Our elements trilogy, The Sea,
The Earth and The Sky all went platinum, and for a time seemed to change
the way people perceived concept albums. No greatest anything in my life,
especially a CD like this one could be complete without representation of
our work together. Anita, whether arranging and conducting, composing her
own inventive melodies, or blending her own voice with the numerous
editions of her world famous Anita Kerr Singers is the consummate
musician. She belongs here. Our work together belongs here. But, because
the examples are so numerous, I’ve decided to save some of those for the
next collection. Along with some of the other film songs, classical works,
Sloopy, Oliver Twist and even The Mummy and In Search of Eros.
It’s been a long and happy journey and it isn’t over. Kevin & I have
already mastered 22 more tracks for ‘The Latin Album’ and another two
dozen ballads I recorded in the early sixties for a single CD to be
entitled In a Lonely Place. And in two weeks I go into a studio to start a
new album of new songs. And... yes, there will always be an end.
Rod McKuen, August 1992,
Beverly Hills, California
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(posted 09/28/2002).
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