In his practical hat, Peter managed to convince me that we had better first record an album with the more contemporary music my audience had come to expect from me. I quickly began to gather material for a new record, Get Closer. Our regular engineer, Val Garay, wasn’t available, so I suggested to Peter that we try George Massenburg, the engineer I had recorded with in Maryland. Peter had never worked with George before, but he liked the Complex, a new studio that George had recently built in West Los Angeles.
In the industry, George was regarded as one of the great pioneers of computer-automated mixing, and he was the inventor of modern equalization, which he’d developed as a teenager in his garage in Baltimore. He wore a look of quizzical befuddlement resembling the glassy-eyed stare of a stuffed animal. He didn’t dress like a rock and roller, wearing instead a standard boy’s haircut, crewneck sweaters, and chinos. Handsome and awkward, self-effacing and shy, George was able to run simultaneous functions in his brain, ranging from a volcanic level of creativity to a cosmic snooze. While working with him day after day in front of the enormous recording console he had designed, I sometimes felt I was sitting next to an unattended steam boiler that was overheating and dangerously close to exploding. The atmosphere in his studio reminded me of the Japanese anime classic Howl’s Moving Castle, every track on the console a doorway into a different world of its own. What I was able to learn from him fundamentally changed the way I approached singing, recording, and listening.
I made my first digital album, Mad Love, in 1980. Because digital recording was a new technology then, Peter and I had not fully explored the broad range of possibilities that it offered. For instance, with analog recording, we had never developed a very sophisticated way to improve my vocal performances. As a result, most of my vocal tracks up until then had stayed exactly as I had sung them while we were recording the basic track. As we often worked on one song for hours, I would have to hold back to save my voice. Also, I was less inclined to take chances, because I was afraid I would be stuck with an idea that hadn’t turned out right. The new technology greatly enhanced the ability to switch among many takes of different vocal approaches and edit together the best bits. We could drop in the most microscopic segments: a breath, a final consonant, a syllable that had wavered out of tune. A brilliant engineer like George, with his ability to hear sound in tremendous detail, knew how to match the pieces so that the edits were invisible and the singing sounded completely natural. This freed me to relax and sing anything that I wanted without having to worry that I would be stuck with something I didn’t like. It also gave me a way to study the way my voice interfaced with the instrumental track, and I learned to phrase better and refine and develop new vocal textures. In short, what George had presented to me was a way to learn how to sing. We continued to work together for many years, and the learning never stopped. Peter worked beautifully with George, and the three of us became a comfortable team.
16
Nelson Riddle
Photo by Robert Blakeman.
In concert with Nelson Riddle in Santa Barbara.
I WOKE UP IN the bedroom of my house on Rockingham Drive thinking, “Today Nelson Riddle is coming to my house, and I am going to sing Irving Berlin’s beautiful song ‘What’ll I Do?’ ” A big smile spread across my face. I sank deeper into the covers and ran through the song in my mind: “What’ll I do? / When you are faaar … away …” The song unspooled its loveliness in spare poetry and three-quarter time.
I jumped out of bed and hurried to take a bath and dress. I had waited so long for this. I didn’t want to be the cause for any more delays.
I had decided that I would like to make my standards record with an orchestra instead of a horn band. I’d complained to Pete Hamill that I wanted the orchestrations to sound like Nelson Riddle but didn’t know of any arranger who could write like him. He suggested sensibly, “Why don’t you just call Nelson Riddle?” The idea hadn’t occurred to me. There were several reasons:
a. I didn’t know if he was still alive. (Easy enough to check.)
b. I didn’t know if he knew I was alive, or cared.
c. I imagined that he didn’t like music with rock underpinnings and would not be interested in working with a singer from that genre.
When Peter Asher called him, it turned out that Nelson, then sixty, didn’t really know who I was. He asked his daughter, Rosemary, if she thought he should work with me. “Well, Dad, the check won’t bounce,” was her reply. She urged him to consider it. Despite the fact that he had written arrangements for some of the greatest singers in popular music, including Nat “King” Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, Rosemary Clooney, and of course, Sinatra, Nelson’s phone hadn’t been ringing that much in the past several years. The rock-and-roll revolution had swept away most of his employment, and he had been surviving by writing TV music and the occasional film score.
He met us at the Complex, where Peter, George, and I were working on the final mixes for Get Closer. I told him how much I admired his work on Sinatra’s Only the Lonely and what it had meant to me over the years. We played him our mix of “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress,” one of the songs on Get Closer. I told him that my mother had died very recently, and the song made me think of her, because when I was a little girl, I had always seen her face in the moon. He replied that his mother had died while he was working on Only the Lonely, and there was a lot of her in those arrangements. I asked him timidly if he would consider arranging a few tracks for me on my upcoming standards record. To ask for more seemed presumptuous. Nelson replied that the Beatles had once asked him to write an orchestral arrangement for a track on one of their albums. He had firmly declined, saying that he didn’t do tracks, only albums. I whipped out the list of songs I had chosen. “Could you do all these?” I asked. He said he could.
We raced over to the piano. The first song on the list was “Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out to Dry.” Nelson fished around in his briefcase and produced the original sketch of the orchestration he had done for Sinatra. Of course, it wouldn’t be the right key. We experimented a little and found the one that worked for me. He crossed out Sinatra’s key and wrote in mine. Our work had begun. Nelson took the sketch home to start a new arrangement in the new key. I was floored by the experience.
I told Nelson that I liked a very custom fit for my arrangements and liked to be involved from the beginning. He welcomed the idea. The morning he came to my house, lugging the heavy briefcase, we worked at the piano for a few hours, mostly choosing keys and tempos. I gave him general guidelines, leaving the musical intricacies of the orchestrations up to him. To do more was far beyond my capability. Sometimes I suggested where I wanted a rubato feeling with only strings and woodwinds here, bring the rhythm section back in there. While we were working out “Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out to Dry,” I asked for a modulation to a higher key, to give the arrangement a lift. Nelson surprised me by showing me a way to modulate to a lower key, providing an elegant shift of mood.
When we had finished rehearsing, we sat together on the sofa and chatted about our lives. I told him about an unrequited crush I had on a composer we both knew; he told me about the great love he’d had for singer Rosemary Clooney and the torch he had carried for many years. He told me about Irving Berlin proposing to the girl he loved, and the marriage being forbidden by her father, breaking his heart and inspiring him to write “What’ll I Do?” Happily, they later married. We became friends.
Before we started to record What’s New, Joe Smith came to my house to make one final attempt to talk me out of it. He was genuinely concerned that my audience wouldn’t like it and that my career would never recover from the damage. He felt that I was throwing away my professional life with both hands. By all reasonable means to assess the situation, he was right. Joe Smith was a great record man. He was a person I respected, admired, and trusted. Ordinarily I would have been inclined to listen to him. Fortunately, I had the songs of the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hart, and Irving Berli
n blaring in my head and couldn’t hear a word he said.
He could see that his argument was having no effect on me. I said to him, “I have Nelson Riddle on board, you know. He has agreed to write my arrangements.” Smith just sighed, then he asked if he could come to the recording sessions. He loved Nelson Riddle.
We began recording on June 30, 1982. I was nervous—and had good reason to be. The enormous cost of working with a forty-piece orchestra meant that I wouldn’t be able to rehearse with it beforehand, and we wouldn’t be able to spend hours working on one song, building it a few tracks at a time the way we had recorded “You’re No Good.” It would be the first time I had actually heard the arrangements that Nelson had created for me. We would make three or four passes on each tune, and move to the next one, expecting to get three or four tunes recorded in a three-hour session. I wouldn’t have time to become comfortable with the arrangements or refine them to match my vocal idiosyncrasies. Also, Nelson’s intricate compositions required the ability to stretch and breathe, moving freely through time, making it, in many cases, too difficult to redo the vocals later. I was going to be stuck with my live vocals again.
We started with “What’s New.” First we ran through the arrangement for the benefit of the orchestra. We started recording, and I sang it three times. We used the first take and kept the vocal. This meant that what wound up on the record was me singing the song for the first time ever with that arrangement, and in that key.
My guitar-playing ability being limited to three-chord songs, I was not capable of accompanying myself on such sophisticated material. In order to practice it before the session, I had to sing along with someone else’s recording, with a different arrangement and not in my key. No wonder Joe Smith had been worried. Fortunately, I was sufficiently distracted by how much I loved the music to stop worrying and just sing. Singing with Nelson’s sumptuous arrangements was like swimming in cream.
Eventually, with the clock spilling money and the need to race through the songs pressing on me, my courage began to fail. John David Souther came by the studio, listened to several tracks, and gave us an enthusiastic response. I suppose he could have been just trying to be nice, but I knew that he loved the material and Nelson’s work as much as I did and would know if we were not handling it with the respect and care it deserved. John David’s vote of confidence was also reassuring to Peter Asher, who, being British, was not as familiar with the material and had experienced it mostly in elevators. This had placed Peter in the uncomfortable position of having to work tremendously hard to help me do something that he didn’t think was a good idea to start with, while working in an unfamiliar context. He didn’t complain about it and did his usual meticulous job.
Now, if by chance I’m in a store or a restaurant and hear one of those vocals that I sang in such a rush, it sounds like a sketch. I wish I’d had the luxury of performing them onstage for a few weeks before recording them, so that I could have fleshed out my phrasing ideas and sung them with more confidence, but it was not to be, and I have to accept that.
The next hurdle was figuring out how to convince my concert audience to buy tickets for a show that wouldn’t include any of my previous hits and featured music of an entirely different style and generation. I hired a group of seven excellent—in some cases, legendary (bass player Ray Brown, sax player Plas Johnson)—jazz musicians to replace my regular touring band, keeping only the extraordinarily versatile keyboard player, Don Grolnick. I felt honored to play with these guys and more than a little intimidated. I added a forties-style vocal group called the Step Sisters. The nine songs I had recorded with Nelson weren’t enough to fill out a whole concert. Also, singing with the Step Sisters added a section of uptempo songs to make the show a bit livelier.
My sister, Suzy, had gone to high school in the fifties. Being a pretty and popular girl, she had attended the senior prom three years of the four. She wore beautiful waltz-length “formals” with fitted strapless bodices and full skirts constructed of many layers of tulle. I loved those dresses, but by the time I got to high school in the sixties, we wore sleeveless brocade Jackie Kennedy dresses to the prom. I felt I had missed out. I hired a stylist, Jenny Shore, to hunt through the secondhand stores to find old fifties tulle prom dresses. The Step Sisters and I wore them in the show.
We opened the first performance at New York’s Radio City Music Hall on September 24, 1983. Wearing my fluffy-skirted vintage prom dress, I stood in the wings holding Nelson’s hand. Nelson, normally sanguine, was as nervous as I was. He squeezed my hand. “Don’t let me down tonight, baby,” he said. Then he pulled up the sleeve of his jacket, to show me the cuff links he wore. “You see these?” he said. “Rosemary [Clooney] gave them to me, and I always wear them when I need some luck.”
We began the show with me onstage with a piano only. I sang the verse to “I’ve Got a Crush on You,” and then Nelson and the orchestra rose from the pit on a hydraulic platform and joined me for the refrain: “I’ve got a crush on you, sweetie-pie / All the day and nighttime, hear me sigh.”
The audience loved it, but I was unable to tell.
Peter, realizing that I was in a state of nervousness that bordered on the psychedelic, came back during the intermission to tell me we were a success. Nerves are something most performers deal with every night. I remember only the extreme cases, where time is distorted and I feel like I am standing next to my body. This was one of those times. As the old saying goes, I was beside myself.
I got through the second half of the show and went home to the little apartment I had lived in during Pirates. I climbed into the window seat in my tiny living room, where I could see over the Museum of Natural History to Central Park beyond. I knew that having success with the orchestra show meant that I would no longer be confined to the monotony of singing the same old songs. I had new old songs now, and the mother lode of the Great American Songbook to mine. I had chewed my way out of the trap. I smiled.
What’s New, released the same month, sold over three million copies, spending eighty-one weeks on the Billboard album chart. Rock-and-roll diehards in the music press wondered why I had abandoned Buddy Holly for the Gershwins. The answer is that there was so much more room for me to stretch and sing. Working in Pirates had developed my head voice; singing standards gave me a way to marry it to my chest voice to form what voice teachers call singing in a “mix.” This gave me a tremendous vocal flexibility that I hadn’t had before, and I felt I was finally learning to sing. The sophisticated sweep of melody and complex layers of meaning in the lyrics meant that I could tell a richer and more nuanced story—and the story wasn’t stranded in the passions of adolescence. Besides, I couldn’t bear the idea that such beautifully crafted songs would be condemned to riding up and down in elevators.
There was another reason I embraced standards with such fervor. I never felt that rock and roll defined me. There was an unyielding attitude that came with the music that involved being confrontational, dismissive, and aggressive—or, as my mother would say, ungracious. These attitudes came at a time when the culture was in a profoundly dynamic state. Kids were coming of age, searching for an identity, and casting off many of the values and customs embraced by previous generations. This wasn’t all bad; many of these things needed changing. (I was particularly glad to see panty girdles hit the trash heap.) Like the girls in the Weimar Republic of the 1920s who were liberated by their lack of dowries, I am happier to live in a world where birth control is readily available and a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy vigorously protected. Still, I cringe when I think of some of the times I was less than gracious. It wasn’t how I was brought up, and I didn’t wear the attitude well. Being considered, for a period in the seventies, as the Queen of Rock made me uneasy, as my musical devotions often lay elsewhere.
My candidate for consideration as the first fully realized female rocker is Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders. She has the musicianship, originality, seductively cool attitude, and guitar chops
to secure her place in the tradition. My crown, however tenuously it hovered above my head, is off to her. Singing standards gave me the flexibility to explore my mother’s gentler nature, just as singing traditional Mexican music allowed me to explore my father’s passionate, romantic side.
Nelson and I made two more records together, Lush Life and For Sentimental Reasons, but as we were finishing the third one, we discovered that he was going outside to lie down in his car during the breaks. He had become seriously ill with a liver disease and died after completing the arrangements, in October 1985. We did the final recording session without him. Some of the musicians were in tears, including his son, Christopher, who played trombone in the horn section.
Listening to the last arrangements Nelson wrote before he died, I have no doubt that he was staring at his approaching demise and trying to fortify himself with the best weapon he had, which was his music. Nelson often said that an arranger had only a few bars in which to tell his own story: usually during the intro and sometimes a section at the end. The rest of the time, he was supporting the singer’s story or fleshing out the songwriter’s ideas. The beginning and ending of the arrangement for the song “ ’Round Midnight” hold clues to what was on Nelson’s mind in those final days.
Shortly after he died, I received a letter from Rosemary Clooney inviting me to sing at a benefit concert she put on in Los Angeles every year. I sent her a note that I had written with my fountain pen saying I would love to do it, and that Nelson had spoken of her often and fondly. She replied with a handwritten note inviting me to dinner at her house, saying she would love to hear about Nelson.
Simple Dreams ~ A Musical Memoir Page 14