The B Side

by Ben Yagoda

  Another important figure was a delicate-voiced singer and pianist from upstate New York whose real and stage name was Blossom Dearie. In Paris, in the early fifties, she formed a vocal group called the Blue Stars of France, which included Christiane Legrand (the composer Michel Legrand’s sister) and Bob Dorough, who had found himself in the city through his job as the music manager for boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, then attempting a career as an entertainer. Norman Granz, passing through in 1956, saw Dearie perform solo and signed her to a Verve recording contract. When she returned to New York, she became a fixture at Julius Monk’s Upstairs at the Downstairs club, sometimes sharing the bill with Annie Ross, a Scottish-born singer who would eventually become one-third of Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross, masters of vocalese (most famously, “Twisted,” with lyrics by Ross) and probably the best-known singing jazz group of all time. Like Jackie and Roy, Dearie blended the standards with carefully chosen new songs, including “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most,” which became a signature number.

  On July 31, 1957, Sheldon Harnick caught Dearie’s show at Upstairs, and one of the numbers she performed impressed him so much that he was inspired to go home and write a letter to its lyricist, Carolyn Leigh:

  As you may know, Blossom Dearie has been performing. “I Walk a Little Faster” there as part of her act. I loved the song the first time I heard it, and after repeated hearings I just felt I had to write you a fan letter . . . not just for that lyric, but for all the ballad lyrics I’ve ever heard of yours. To me, they are the freshest and most moving ballad lyrics around today.

  The composer of “I Walk a Little Faster” was Leigh’s new partner, Cy Coleman. Theirs was a volatile partnership that began in 1957 and ended five years later, during the pre-Broadway Philadelphia run of their show Little Me, a Sid Caesar vehicle. According to Coleman, Leigh, who had grown more emotional over the years, tried to have director Bob Fosse arrested for cutting a lyric without her permission; for Coleman, that was the last straw. But while the collaboration lasted, it produced smart, precise, up-to-date, honest, haunting, swinging, sexy songs. “It Amazes Me,” like “I Walk a Little Faster,” was a favorite of Dearie and of Tony Bennett, two performers of impeccable taste; Sinatra, whose ears weren’t bad, either, chose “Witchcraft” and “The Best Is Yet to Come” for singles. Who would have thought that such one-off wonders could still emerge from the Brill Building? It was as if the clock had been turned back twenty years.

  Another intriguing development was bossa nova, a blend of samba and jazz that emerged in Brazil in the 1950s and came to the United States in the early sixties via jazz musicians Charlie Byrd, Dave Brubeck, and Stan Getz. In 1963, the enterprising producer Lou Levy, trawling the foreign markets for properties, came across a Brazilian track called “Garota de Ipanema.” He tracked down the composers, Antônio Carlos Jobim and Vinícius de Moraes, secured American rights, and commissioned Norman Gimbel, still patrolling the Brill Building, to write English-language lyrics. The saxophonist Stan Getz recorded the song, now called “The Girl from Ipanema,” backed by Jobim and another bossa nova songwriter, João Gilberto, with vocals by Gilberto’s wife, Astrud. She mangled some of Gimbel’s lyrics, singing, for example, “She looks straight ahead, not at he” instead of “me.” Gimbel told The Wall Street Journal in an interview marking the fiftieth anniversary of the original song, “I was tearing my hair out when I learned that later.” But his pain was eased by the fact that “The Girl from Ipanema” reached number five on the pop charts—no small feat for a jazz recording in 1964, the year of Beatlemania—and won the Grammy for Record of the Year. (Gimbel developed a specialty in putting new lyrics to international songs, including Jobim’s “How Insensitive” and “Meditation,” Marcos Valle’s “Summer Samba,” and Michel Legrand’s score for the 1964 French film The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which included “Watch What Happens” and the Oscar-nominated “I Will Wait for You.”)

  Jobim, in a peculiarly South American way, brought cool sophistication back to the pop charts. The pianist Dick Hyman (who was devoted to jazz but made ends meet by backing rock-and-roll records, making electronic easy-listening albums, and playing the piano on Sing Along with Mitch) says, “Jobim took over where Cole Porter left off, especially with the medium-tempo things. Some of his songs are very clever. All of them have harmonies that are of interest to jazz guys. And almost all of them have some kind of catchy melody.”

  Dave Frishberg feels the same way. “When Brazil entered the picture, it was a huge shot in the arm for American music,” he says. “Talk about rebirth—it was the Brazilians who introduced that.” Frishberg’s songwriting career had never gone much of anywhere by virtue of his association with Frank Loesser, and he was concentrating on the piano-playing side of his career. In 1962, he had a job as an accompanist for the nightclub act of singer Dick Haymes and his wife, Fran Jeffries. “Dick asked me to write something for Fran—a cute, sexy piece,” Frishberg remembered. He removed “Beulah” from the classic Mae West line “Beulah, peel me a grape” and emerged with a charming jazz-inflected paean to the grammatical indirect object. “Peel Me a Grape” became one of Blossom Dearie’s go-to songs, but Frishberg’s songwriting career proceeded slowly. “I tried to write for what I perceived was the market,” he recalled. “I ended up writing shit, on purpose. I was trying to sound like this writer or that. A few country songs, a few folk songs—that was big at the time. After two or three years of futility, I abandoned that. I began to write songs as if it were 1937. The music that I liked to play, the music I liked to listen to, what the jazz musicians I worked with were playing, was music from the Gershwins, from Porter. I thought to myself, ‘If that’s the stuff you love so much, that’s what you should try to write like. Pretend it’s 1937. It’s either going to be me or Johnny Mercer who writes this.’ Of course, when I said that, I abdicated from the market. But that’s when I began to enjoy songwriting more.”

  In 1964, Frishberg wrote the lyrics for an extremely funny number called “I’m Hip” that would become a minor classic. The composer was Bob Dorough, who on his own was writing words and music for some pungent jazz-influenced songs. Mel Tormé recorded his “Comin’ Home, Baby,” Carmen McRae his “Devil May Care,” and Roy Kral’s sister Irene a moody ballad called “Love Came on Stealthy Fingers.” “Not the kind of song that’s gonna be played on the jukebox,” Dorough said. “It would still be in my trunk were it not for Irene.”

  Frishberg was somewhat more prolific than Dorough, a friend and frequent collaborator. Over the next twenty-five years he produced a series of sharp and distinctive compositions, several of which became part of Dearie’s repertoire. Frishberg’s songs aren’t quite vocalese, but they are jazz to the core; for the most part, you don’t start humming them after a hearing. Some of their flavor can be sensed from their titles: “Blizzard of Lies,” “My Attorney Bernie,” “Do You Miss New York?,” “Quality Time,” “You Are There” (lyrics by Frishberg; music by Johnny Mandel), and “Van Lingle Mungo,” whose lyrics consist of the names of old-time baseball players. Frishberg’s songs in some way represented the end of the jazz-based songwriting tradition: an admirable end, but an end nonetheless.

  When he talked to me on the telephone in 2012, from his home in Portland, Oregon, he pulled out a postcard sent to him by Mercer himself, whom he’d met through their mutual friend Dearie. Frishberg estimated the year as 1969 or 1970. He read the card to me, in its entirety: “You are my favorite lyric writer at the moment. Boy, are you uncommercial!!!!”

  Epilogue

  Do You Believe in Magic?

  1957–1965

  They’re dancin’ in Chicago

  Down in New Orleans

  Up in New York City

  • “Dancing in the Street,” by Marvin Gaye, Ivy Jo Hunter, and Mickey Stevenson, 1964

  When Allen Toussaint was a kid in New Orleans, his mother bought an Emerson record player, on which he thrilled to the sounds of Paul Wes
ton’s Orchestra and Edvard Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor. In 1948, when he was ten, listening to Benny Goodman’s rendition of the Gershwins’ tune “Love Walked In,” he was knocked out by a solo for two trombones. “That was heaven,” he said more than sixty years later, in his Manhattan apartment. It inspired him to create on the family piano his first musical composition, a duet for trombone and trumpet. Not long after that, while still a teenager, the prodigiously talented Toussaint was writing songs and working as a session musician in New Orleans. He even had an album of his own in 1958; one of the songs on it, an instrumental called “Java,” was a big hit for local trumpeter Al Hirt a half-dozen years later. But the record sold next to nothing, and Toussaint concentrated his efforts on session playing, producing, and writing for the local Minit label; his nom de plume on the first batch of songs was Naomi Neville (his mother’s maiden name), a necessity because of a publishing contract he’d signed elsewhere. Toussaint turned basic chord progressions into a string of fine and distinctive songs; his secrets were a New Orleans beat that rocked even the ballads, exquisite musical and lyrical grace notes, and renditions by outstanding local artists: Irma Thomas on “It’s Raining” and “Ruler of My Heart”; Aaron Neville on “Over You,” “Wrong Number,” and “Every Day”; Benny Spellman on “Lipstick Traces (on a Cigarette)”; and Ernie K-Doe on “I’ve Cried My Last Tear.” (K-Doe’s biggest hit, and the one early Toussaint song to go national, all the way to number one, was hardly exquisite but was pretty funny and very catchy: the novelty tune “Mother-in-Law.”)

  Allen Toussaint was not a unique case, least of all in his emergence as a songwriter roughly in the year 1960. It was a moment when the tremors of Elvis and the other first-wave rock-and-rollers had quieted, and when it became apparent that a space had been cleared in which a new sort of song could emerge. These compositions had an odd relationship with the American Songbook standards (which most of their writers, like Toussaint, greatly admired). In certain respects, they were very different. Rather than jazz, they came out of folk, country, rhythm and blues, and the blues itself. The beat was right there on the surface, and inescapable. And the harmonic structures were simple, though not always simplistic. “Compared to jazz songs, which are based on 7th chords, the songs of the sixties are very triadic,” said jazz pianist Bill Charlap, son of composer Moose Charlap and singer Sandy Stewart. “There’s not as much meat on the bones.” In keeping with the post-1950 trend, the song was less an independent entity than raw material for a recording; the performance, production, and technology could make up for any lack of refinement or sophistication.

  Yet as the decade of the sixties progressed and the kids’ compositional discernment and skill evolved, it turned out that through a different route, they could achieve the classic values of melodic and lyrical sophistication, and also bring some new and intriguing qualities to the songwriter’s craft. In 2000 the music magazine Mojo asked twenty of the most respected working songwriters, including Paul McCartney, Brian Wilson, Jerry Leiber, and Hal David, to give their list of the ten best songs of the twentieth century. It doesn’t really prove anything about the quality of the songs that were emerging in the early sixties, but it’s at least noteworthy that the aggregated top-ten list included six records released between 1963 and 1965, plus one from 1966.*

  Another parallel with the older model was institutional. Toussaint and many of his contemporaries were paid small salaries against hoped-for royalties; they punched the clock at a record label or publishing company’s offices and put in a regular workday, just like a traditional Tin Pan Alley cleffer. Gone, however, was the old geographical imperative. Far from feeling compelled to leave for New York or Los Angeles, the new writers were nourished by the water and air and cadences of their hometowns. The local idiom usually had a direct or indirect southern lilt, and the songs were in the tradition of rhythm and blues or country and western. Ray Charles once said, “R&B is an adult music about adult matters.” The same was true of the best country songs, and the grown-up themes and emotions in both were appreciated more than ever in the era of bubblegum rock and roll. Charles was one of a number of writers and performers who blended country and R&B; all around, all kinds of traditions were swapping juices. In 1958, Billboard writer Bob Rolontz observed that rock was “moving closer to pop in style and content, and . . . pop is absorbing the rock and roll beat.” The year before, the magazine had coined the term “rockaballad” and subsequently applied it to such records as Ritchie Valens’s “Donna,” the Teddy Bears’ “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” and the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do Is Dream.” The subgenre had its own conventions, such as backing triplets and a I-vi-IV-V chord progression (subsequently dubbed “the Fifties Progression”), that would eventually become clichés, but at the beginning they were fresh.

  A record company about four hundred miles due north of New Orleans created another extremely tasty new recipe by combining country and R&B, then adding gospel, ending up with a riveting sound that was starting to be called “soul music.” The label, Satellite, was based in Memphis and in 1961 changed its name to Stax. House musicians (the house band would later go out on its own as Booker T. and the MGs), singers, and writers all contributed to the distinctive Stax sound. Otis Redding combined the last two roles, making his mark in 1962 with “These Arms of Mine.” The song had the same slow tempo of so many thousands of others, but with it a striking emotional rawness and intensity. The one thing dated about this track more than half a century after its release are the backing triplets, but that crutch was gone by 1964, when Redding wrote and released the momentous “Respect” and “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.”

  At the dawn of the 1960s, some ambitious young music men started an enterprise they called Florence Alabama Music Enterprises (FAME)—Florence being one of the four towns collectively known as Muscle Shoals. A lot of creative musicians, singers, and writers, also young, were drawn into FAME’s orbit, including two Caucasian Alabamans born Wallace Daniel Pennington and Dewey Lindon Oldham. As Spooner Oldham and Dan Penn, they formed a songwriting team and produced “Wish You Didn’t Have to Go,” “Let’s Do It Over” (a hit for Joe Simon), and “I’m Your Puppet.” Arthur Alexander, a stellar Alabama singer-songwriter for FAME, was African-American, but his work had a country feel. (Eventually, top singers, from Aretha Franklin to Paul Simon, would make regular journeys to Muscle Shoals to record with the crack regular session musicians—the Swampers.)

  Nashville forms the eastern point of a triangle, with Memphis to the west and Muscle Shoals to the south. Boudleaux and Felice Bryant, a husband-and-wife team, had been working songwriters in Music City since 1950, when that term was coined, but hit their stride at the end of the decade with a string of rockaballad hits for the Everly Brothers, notably “Bye Bye Love,” “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” and “Devoted to You.” In 1960, a twenty-seven-year-old Texas honky-tonk singer and guitar player moved to Nashville, determined to make it as a writer. Willie Nelson had no success at first, but Hank Cochran, the cowriter, with Harlan Howard, of the Patsy Cline hit “I Fall to Pieces,” got him a $50-a-week contract with the publishing company he was affiliated with, Pamper Music. Curley Putman, an Alabama native, was working at the time as a song plugger for Tree Records, and would later write such hits as “Green, Green Grass of Home,” “My Elusive Dreams,” and “D-I-V-O-R-C-E.” “Hank and Willie were tuned in,” he said. “The sparks were flying off of them.” Pamper had a little of the creative ferment of Max Dreyfus’s T. B. Harms decades earlier, with a downhome feel. “The office was a house in Goodlettsville [on the outskirts of Nashville],” Cochran recalled in a 1991 interview, “and out back we had turned the garage into a little ol’ bitty thing out there where me and Willie and Harlan and all of us wrote out there.” Building on the work of—and competing with—other talented young writers and writer-performers such as Johnny Cash, Roger Miller, John D. Loudermilk, Bill Anderson, and the Bryants, Nelson in short order place
d “Night Life” with Billy Walker, “Hello Walls” with Faron Young, “Funny How Time Slips Away” with Ray Price, and, most important and successful, “Crazy” with Patsy Cline. In the post–Hank Williams country music world, the idea of a performer singing songs he’d written himself was still so unusual that Nelson highlighted it in the title of his 1962 debut album, . . . And Then I Wrote.

  It would have been unthinkable for a Jack Lawrence or a Richard Rodgers to get onstage or behind the microphone and sing one of his own songs. The old-time tunesmith was a scriptwriter, fashioning notions and emotions for someone else (a singer/actor) to declaim. But people like Nelson and Redding were following a different path, one blazed by Williams, by bluesmen like Robert Johnson, by Woody Guthrie, by Chuck Berry, and by a bespectacled, guitar-playing, hiccupping kid out of Lubbock, Texas. In 1957 and 1958, before his sudden death, Buddy Holly released a series of infectious self-penned hits—“Peggy Sue,” “That’ll Be the Day,” “Oh, Boy!”—that resonated widely and deeply. The mere act of declaiming your own music and words added some exciting new elements to the musical mix, and would only gain more power with the years. After kvetching to Max Wilk about these kids today, lyricist Leo Robin acknowledged that the youngsters’ new model had some points in its favor: “The things they’re writing are at least honest expressions of how they feel, in relation to the conditions of their world, and how they react to their own lives and futures. I’m sure you cannot fault these kids for their attitudes. Not the way you could fault some hack Tin Pan Alley songwriter back in 1925 who was writing second-rate mechanical songs about how sweet it would be to be back in dear old Dixie with his dear old mammy or his lovely little tootsie-wootsie baby. Maybe he was doing a professional job, but he was peddling a totally false picture. Today these kids are, at the very least, honest.”