That pavilion in the rain

I've written before about jazz writer and lyricist Gene Lees, on the occasion of his death almost two years ago, but as I sat at the piano tonight, celebrating the strides--minor, but satisfying--I've made in the year I've been taking piano lessons as an adult--he came to mind. From the stack of fakebook pages I've accumulated over the past year I'd plucked "Early Autumn"--Johnny Mercer lyrics over music by Ralph Burns and Woody Herman--with its line about the "dance pavilion in the rain," and it brought to mind Lees's unforgettable essay of the same name name.

I quoted from that essay in my obituary post, but its sharply defined nostalgia, which it unquestionably earns, through serious analysis of all the elements that went into the big band world whose loss it's lamenting, seems worth sharing again:

On warm summer nights in that epoch between the wars and before air conditioning, the doors and wide wooden shutters would be open, and the music would drift out of the pavilion over the converging crowds of excited young people, through the parking lot glistening with cars, through the trees, and over the lake—or the river, or the sea. Sometimes Japanese lanterns hung in the trees, like moons caught in the branches, and sometimes little boys too hung there, observing the general excitement and sharing the sense of an event. And the visit of one of the big bands was indeed an event.

Which leads me back to Mercer's lyrics. By 1949, when Mercer wrote "Early Autumn," the big band era was over, even if many bands remained on the road and, presumably, told themselves that they were just struggling through a minor slump. The dance pavilions were, if not "all shuttered down," as Mercer has it, at least headed that way. Mercer's lyrics are written as a plaint from a lover looking back on what he's lost, and pleading for a future--"Darling, if you care, / please let me know. / I'll meet you anywhere. / I miss you so."--but the song overall can be read as an elegy for an era. "A town grown lonely," as streetcars give way to private cars, and nights out give way to nights in, warmed by television and cooled by air conditioning.

In this strange spring of 2012--which feels, today, like nothing so much as a gentle early autumn--we're living in the apotheosis of the era that the postwar boom was ushering in, with me sitting in my house and typing these words to all of you in your houses. It's a good thing, what we have, if we use it well, but so was what was being lost as Mercer was writing, a loss that he, with his tendency to melancholy, saw earlier than most. "I'll meet you anywhere," his speaker vows, but we don't ever learn what the answer was, or if there was ever any answer but silence, broken only by the sound of the rain.

In reality, the "anywhere" we'll meet is bound to be the future, and while it can't make good the losses of the past, perhaps its offerings will at least mitigate them. Noel Coward offers an antidote of sorts to the melancholy of "Early Autumn"--while no less aware of loss--in "Sail Away," from 1961:

A different sky,
New worlds to gaze upon,
The strange enchantment of an unfamiliar shore,
One more goodbye,
One more illusion gone,
Just cut your losses,
And begin once more.

If you're prone to nostalgia--especially for eras you weren't here to live through--I recommend you get a piano. If you're prone to nostalgia--especially for eras you weren't here to live through--I recommend you stay far away from pianos. I trust that you all are smart enough to take your pick.

R. I. P. Gene Lees (1928-2010)

Yesterday, Terry Teachout passed on the sad news of the death of songwriter Gene Lees. Lees wrote the unforgettable English-language lyrics to Antonio Carlos Jobim's "Corcovado"--

Quiet thoughts and quiet dreams, quiet walks by quiet streams,
and a window that looks out on the mountains and the sea, oh how lovely.

--which alone would be a sufficient monument for any mortal. But Lees was at least as well known as a prose writer, and if you've not read his writings on jazz, you have a treat in store.

A good place to start is with Singers and the Song II, a collection of pieces from his Jazzletter newsletter. Along with essays on Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Yip Harburg, and many more, it includes a profile of Johnny Mercer that's one of the finest pieces of biographical writing about an artist I've ever encountered, one that makes both the art and the man come to life:

I know two or three people who despised Johnny Mercer. For others, it wasn't that simple. . . . John was as generous in his praise of good songwriters as he was quietly critical of the shallower practitioners of the craft. As for me, I liked John. A lot. And we got along, perhaps because we shared the lyricist's paranoia, which John once perfectly expressed in a single line: "You get tired of being everybody's lyric boy." He was referring to all the lead sheets and demo tapes sent to you by musicians who think lyrics are dashed off in a moment from ideas picked casually out of the air. Music, as they see it, is the important art. Everybody uses words, don't they?

Set alongside sharp analyses of Mercer's lyrics--including a study of consonance in "I Thought About You" that is revelatory--Lees' descriptions of Mercer's frequent, alcohol-fueled descents into pointedly cruel verbal abuse are heartbreaking, making us ache for this man of such great talent and so little happiness. The portrait in Singers and the Song II actually outdoes Lees' later biography of Mercer, its brevity sharpening its punch.

The most memorable piece in Singers and the Song II, however, is "Pavilion in the Rain," a lyrical, detailed reconstruction and analysis of the big band era. The opening paragraph gives a sense of the tone:

On warm summer nights in that epoch between the wars and before air conditioning, the doors and wide wooden shutters would be open, and the music would drift out of the pavilion over the converging crowds of excited young people, through the parking lot glistening with cars, through the trees, and over the lake—or the river, or the sea. Sometimes Japanese lanterns hung in the trees, like moons caught in the branches, and sometimes little boys too hung there, observing the general excitement and sharing the sense of an event. And the visit of one of the big bands was indeed an event.

The note of wistfulness may seem too much at first, but by the time Lees has finished explaining the rise and fall of the big bands--having brought in copyright law, urban rail networks, remote broadcast technology, taxation, unionization, and more--it is clear what we had, temporarily, how lucky we were to have it, and how much we've lost. Lees earns that note of loss.

Terry Teachout, who knew Lees, has more at About Last Night, plus links to obituaries and some more extensive reflections. Raise a glass to Lees tonight, and if you're enjoying a quiet night of quiet stars, be grateful.

"Light up you li'l ol' bug o' lightning"

In response to my mention of Johnny Mercer's "Glow-Worm" in yesterday's post, Patrick Kurp of the wonderful Anecdotal Evidence sent me a link to this clip of the Mills Brothers performing the song on "The Nat King Cole Show":



The performance is enthusiastic, yet retaining an element of cool. The smile on Donald's face when he takes the lead seems fully genuine: these guys are having fun with this song.

Gene Lees's biography of Mercer, Portrait of Johnny (2004), offers this account of the writing of "Glow-Worm" from singer Betty Bennett:

When I was singing with the Alvino Rey band, we had a vocal group called the Blue Reys. Because we recorded for Capitol, Johnny was going to do a tune with us. He was writing special lyrics to "Glow-Worm." We met with him and rehearsed the tune, the first two choruses. But there was a chorus missing. So he said, "Wait a minute, I'll run down to my offiec, I think it's on my desk." So he was gone fifteen minutes and came back with a wonderful lyric--having just written it.

Not to question Ms. Bennett, or to criticize one of my favorite songwriters, but if the verse she's referring to is this one--

Glow little glow-worm, turn the key on
You are equipped with taillight neon
You got a cute vest-pocket Mazda
Which you can make both slow and fazda
I don't know who you took a shine to
Or who you're out to make a sign to
I got a gal that I love so
Glow little glow-worm, glow
Put on a show worm
Glow little glow-worm, glow

--well, let's just say I bet Mercer had better fifteen-minute inspirations over the years. Yet the essential silliness of the lyrics doesn't really matter: "Glow-Worm" is an utter trifle, some fun wordplay serving as an excuse to trot out a nice little jump beat, but like so many Mercer songs, once you hear it, it stays with you.

Breaking: Book Boy Blinks, Baseball Bests Blogging!

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Even though the half of this year's World Series is being played in a ballpark more suited to a spring-training split-squad scrimmage, if not tractor pulls and dental conventions, we're still watching. And between the demands of chili-making and Fox Sports-booing, my blogging time is severely constrained. So for today I'll simply share a questionable bit of natural history that I came across yesterday in James Boswell's Life of Johnson, appropriate for this time of year in that it features reflections on hibernation.

Johnson, writes Boswell,

seemed pleased to talk of natural philosophy. . . . "Swallows certainly sleep all the winter. A number of them conglobulate together, by flying round and round, and then all in a heap throw themselves under water, and lye in the bed of a river."

This next has nothing to do with the season, but I can't help but share it:

He told us, one of his first essays was a Latin poem upon the glow-worm. I am sorry I did not ask where it was to be found.

Much as I enjoy Johnson, a bit of Latin juvenilia couldn't possibly be as much fun as Johnny Mercer's take on the same animal:

Glow little glow-worm, glow and glimmer
Swim through the sea of night, little swimmer
Thou aeronautical boll weevil
Illuminate yon woods primeval
See how the shadows deep and darken
You and your chick should get to sparkin'
I got a gal that I love so
Glow little glow-worm, glow

There's more, including a rhyme so ridiculous it's charming, between "Mazda" and "fazda," here.

Ludwig Bemelmans and his bar

Within my limited circle of friends, it's well known that my bedtime is midnight. Hell, I rarely make it that late: my official bedtime is really set for parties, when I'm willing to make conscious effort to keep the pumpkins at bay for longer than I would on an ordinary night.

But sometimes, one is in New York, and midnight signals the start of one's birthday . . .

This preamble therefore is essentially a disclaimer: any thoughts I type after midnight ought to be, de facto, invalid. On top of that, tonight's post doesn't really have anything to do with what I've been reading. On the L, plane, and bus today I read Craig Nova's remarkable novel The Good Son (1982); tonight's post, if you're willing to allow me to stretch it, applies at most to Ludwig Bemelmans's wonderful Hotel Bemelmans, which I've drawn from before.

Ludwig Bemelmans, after all, was, aside from being the creator of the beloved Madeline books, a raconteur--and, of particular interest to me, as a survivor of years of retail work, a raconteur who dealt primarily in stories of customer service, most often filtered through the hotel or restaurant industry. Though I have no real right to--in part because one martini too many for me means, I shudder to admit, two martinis--I thus feel a certain kinship with Bemelmans. Therefore, when I'm in New York I look at my calendar in advance to determine what night I will have free to spend at Bemelmans Bar in the Carlyle Hotel. The bar, chock full of Bemelmans drawings--perhaps done in lieu of payment for drinks?--and therefore enchanting even before the drinks are poured, is the deep-banquetted sort of place where the staff is conditioned to treat you as if you belonged, even though you clearly do not.

Tonight, I was by myself, and I had intended to simply order a martini and continue to blaze through The Good Son. As my friends--or my wife--could surely tell you, much as I enjoy good company, I am at heart somewhat solitary, and the thought of a quiet drink in a well-apportioned bar was quite pleasant. But foiling my plans was a jazz group, the Loston Harris trio, and I found myself, as it seems always happens in Bemelmans Bar, trying to draw. I sketched the trio, poorly, enjoyed their versions of "They Can't Take That Away from Me", and "Night and Day," and was disappointed to learn (it was, after all, soon to be my birthday) that they weren't prepared to play my second-favorite Johnny Mercer song, "I Thought about You,". All in all, I generally had a one-martini-too-many good time.

While I sat in a lovely banquette and enjoyed the trio, I did experience a moment that I think would have entertained Ludwig Bemelmans. Around 11, as the band was really getting into it, a trim, good-looking brunette in a skirt and tank top strolled into the bar--with a dog. The dog was somewhere between a rat terrier and a bulldog, and, I'll admit--despite my natural dislike of dogs--that it was a nice-looking pooch. I wondered to myself, as she sashayed by me to a corner table, if she would be allowed to stay. Ten minutes later, I got my answer, as she, heading very slowly for the door, explained in an Australian accent to the obvious tourists in front of me that "they're kicking me out because they think the dog is dirty." The headwaiter was at her elbow--polite but firm, not taking his eyes off her, in a way that should be familiar to anyone who's worked retail before--and as she dithered, thrusting the dog in Loston Harris's face, the headwaiter finally was forced to take decisive action, moving swiftly to her side and taking her elbow while saying, "Ma'am, you must leave now." That restrained politeness, in the face of what was, in the headwaiter's eyes, a legitimately grievous offense, placed me squarely in Ludwig Bemelmans territory, nearly one hundred years after he'd initially plowed it.

Finally--and this is only because it's my birthday, I've had one martini too many, and I like the idea of this concept spreading through the internets, I'll leave you with a little joke--to call it a meme is to give it too much credit, I'm afraid--that my friend Bob and I came up with a few years ago. The idea was for everyone in a group of friends to write a verse to "These Foolish Things" that would apply to them.

I'll start with my verse about myself, simply because I think Bob's verse about himself--which follows--is better:

A passage long that's read aloud at parties
It's sometimes funny, but more often arty
Oh, how the words you say cling
These foolish things
Remind me of you

And here's Bob's:

The food you ate that no one else would dare to
The thing that looked like--but was not a bear suit,
Oh, how your arguments cling
These foolish things
Remind me of you

I suppose drunk blogging is a tiny bit more forgivable than drunk dialing, but, regardless, thanks for sticking it out to the end on this one. If you're feeling particularly strong, I'd welcome your verses to "These Foolish Things" in comments.