Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
“A Welcome to Britain” (later retitled “How to Behave in Britain”), a World War II training film “presented by the War Office to U.S. Troops arriving in the United Kingdom” and shown to U.S. troops in 1943. The film, which was co-directed by Anthony Asquith and Burgess Meredith, is narrated by Meredith and also features Beatrice Lillie and Bob Hope:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“On another continent, 4,000 miles away, I became quietly seized with that nostalgia that overcomes you when you have reached the middle of your life and your father has recently died and it dawns on you that when he went he took some of you with him.”
Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America
Various forms of the records-that-changed-my-life meme have been making the rounds lately, so I came up with my own version, which I call “The Twenty-Five Record Albums That Changed My Life.” I’m writing about one of these albums each weekday in the rough order in which I first heard them.
My father didn’t care for musicals. He owned no original-cast albums, not even South Pacific, and except for The Wizard of Oz, we never watched any movie musicals on TV. As a result, I managed to graduate from high school without knowing much of anything about musicals as a theatrical genre, which is somewhat unusual for a drama critic.
To be sure, I’d appeared in three Smalltown Little Theater musical-comedy productions, once as a singer and twice as an instrumentalist, but the shows on which I worked were Oliver!, Fiddler on the Roof, and The Fantasticks, all of which I loved doing but none of which caused me to fall in love with musicals for their own sake. My high-school drama club only did plays, and the sole musical that I saw mounted professionally prior to going to college was 1776, whose road-show production I caught in St. Louis on a high-school field trip. For me, George Gershwin was the composer of Rhapsody in Blue and Cole Porter was nobody at all—until I discovered cabaret.
My Aunt Suzy, a voluntary spinster who divorced her alcoholic husband and thereafter doted on her nieces and nephews, loved to give all of us such presents as she could afford. The best gift she ever gave me was a subscription to Stereo Review, a now-defunct audio magazine with a first-rate record-review section whose critics, among them Chris Albertson, Noel Coppage, Richard Freed, David Hall, Bernard Jacobson, George Jellinek, Igor Kipnis, Irving Kolodin, Paul Kresh, Rex Reed, Peter Reilly, Steve Simels, Eric Salzman, Lester Trimble, and Joel Vance, were men of astonishingly eclectic tastes. It was in Stereo Review’s wide-ranging pages that I first read about Captain Beefheart, William Bolcom, Pierre Boulez, Company, Bill Evans, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Percy Grainger, the Grateful Dead, the Guarneri Quartet, Josef Hofmann, Hot Tuna, Jethro Tull, Scott Joplin, Leo Kottke, Joni Mitchell, the Mothers of Invention, Randy Newman, Harry Nilsson, Linda Ronstadt, Dmitri Shostakovich, Bessie Smith, George Szell, James Taylor, Johnny Winter—and Bobby Short, who until his death in 2005 was the most beloved of all New York cabaret singers.
Rex Reed, who is, amazingly, still around, wrote a piece about Short for the February 1972 issue occasioned by the release of Bobby Short Loves Cole Porter, a double album containing twenty-two of Porter’s best songs. I read it with the closest possible attention. It started out like this:
One of the measures of one kind of sophistication in New York these days is the number of late-hour visits you pay each week to the elegant Café Carlyle. It is there that the singer-pianist nightbird called Bobby Short has his grand-piano perch, from which he plays and sings all the songs worth hearing more than once, sipping champagne the while into the small hours. Everybody who is (or wants to be) anybody comes to hear Bobby harvest his organically grown crop of Tin Pan Alley history, just as if the heavily polluted contemporary musical disaster area didn’t exist.
I didn’t yet know what the phrase “cabaret music” meant, but every other word of that review rang a bell with me, since I was just barely old enough to have started to imagine what it might feel like to be—forgive me—sophisticated.
I had recently discovered a Chicago store called Rose Records that sold albums of all kinds by mail, so I sent off a check at once and, a week or two later, received in the mail a package containing Bobby Short Loves Cole Porter, which was everything Reed said it was and more. I’d never heard anything quite like the first track, “Rap Tap on Wood,” and I spent the next hour riveted by my first hearings of such Porter classics as “At Long Last Love,” “I’ve Got You on My Mind,” “Just One of Those Things,” and “Why Shouldn’t I?” Thanks to Stereo Review, I had miraculously discovered the ne plus ultra of sophistication, a singer-pianist whose arch, amused tenor was the ideal instrument for bringing Porter’s arch, amused songs to life.
It wasn’t until I went off to school in Kansas City and started seeing performances by Broadway road-show companies, however, that I discovered that the songs I had learned from Short, Mabel Mercer, and the other singers whose albums I obtained from Rose Records came from Broadway musicals and thus had theatrical contexts of which I had hitherto been innocent. In time I came to love musicals and to spend many hours seeing them in the theater, though it wasn’t until years later that writing about them, first for the Washington Post and then for The Wall Street Journal, became an important part of my professional life.
Long before then, though, I had brought off a bonafide miracle: I went on a week-long college field trip to Manhattan. My fellow students and I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, three Broadway shows, and a performance by the Metropolitan Opera, and I went to the Café Carlyle all by myself on my night off to hear Bobby Short, an adventure that I described at length a quarter-century later in a memoir of my childhood and youth:I booked a table for one and turned up half an hour before show time, blissfully ignorant of the fact that the Café Carlyle is an elegant watering hole intended for well-to-do New Yorkers, not teenage boys in ill-fitting black suits.
Not being much of a drinker, I decided to consume my minimum by having a late supper at my tiny table. I tore into my shrimp cocktail with gusto, unaware that anything was wrong until I put down my fork, looked around, and saw that no one else in the room was eating. I might well have died of embarrassment had it not been for the fact that Bobby Short, formerly of Danville, Illinois, spotted me for an out-of-towner the moment he walked through the door and came straight to my table to say hello, an act of kindness for which I am still grateful. I talked about it for weeks, though I knew only three or four people who knew who Bobby Short was, which took most of the starch out of the story after the first few tellings.
I never went back to hear Short at the Carlyle again —some memories are too perfect to be tampered with—but I still listen to his records, Bobby Short Loves Cole Porter in particular, with a mixture of pleasure and nostalgia that remains to this day as heady as a glass of very, very dry champagne.
(To be continued)
* * *
Bobby Short sings Cole Porter’s “Rap Tap on Wood,” accompanied by Beverly Peer on bass and Dick Sheridan on drums:
Bobby Short sings Cole Porter’s “I Get a Kick Out of You” live at the Café Carlyle:
* * *
To read about album #1, go here.
To read about album #2, go here.
To read about album #3, go here.
To read about album #4, go here.
To read about album #5, go here.
To read about album #6, go here.
To read about album #7, go here.
To read about album #8, go here.
To read about album #9, go here.
To read about album #10, go here.
To read about album #11, go here.
To read about album #12, go here.
To read about album #13, go here.
To read about album #14, go here.
To read about album #15, go here.
To read about album #16, go here.
To read about album #17, go here.
To read about album #18, go here.
To read about album #19, go here.
To read about album #20, go here.
From 2009:
Read the whole thing here.It is revealing that Mercer published no poetry, presumably because he felt he had no gift for writing it. Only in the crucible of collaboration did his talents manifest themselves completely.
Does this diminish the significance of his achievement? Must he necessarily be considered a lesser artist than a writer who works exclusively on his own? To make such a claim, after all, is by extension to relegate all forms of collaborative art to a lower level of excellence simply because of the process by which they came into being….
James Taylor sings his “Rainy Day Man” on the BBC. This live performance is an excerpt from an episode of In Concert, originally telecast on November 16, 1970:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“And, the conversation turning to what one [would] choose to do given another life, he said in the manner of a man who knows what he’s talking about, I shan’t be doing music. I shall be being it.”
Ralph Vaughan Williams, in conversation with Sylvia Townsend Warner, 1958 (quoted in The Element of Lavishness: Letters of William Maxwell and Sylvia Townsend Warner, 1938-1978)
Various forms of the records-that-changed-my-life meme have been making the rounds lately, so I came up with my own version, which I call “The Twenty-Five Record Albums That Changed My Life.” I’m writing about one of these albums each weekday in the rough order in which I first heard them.
Most of the twenty-five albums on this list have something important in common: with few exceptions, they’re very white. So, for the most part, were my childhood and youth.
Smalltown, U.S.A., is some twenty-odd miles from the banks of the Mississippi River. In certain ways it’s always been more southern than Midwestern: I’m just old enough to remember separate entrances and drinking fountains, and it wasn’t until I entered sixth grade in 1967 that black children started turning up in my classrooms. Blacks and whites never made friends with one another at school and rarely mingled elsewhere, and my neighborhood was lily-white long after I left Smalltown to make my way in the larger world. This sharp division of the races is easy enough to understand, for it happens that a black man was lynched in Smalltown in 1942, and there were still plenty of people around when I was a boy (including my father) who remembered that terrible day well, though I never did run into anyone who was willing to talk about it.All this notwithstanding, I’ve been fascinated by black art and culture for as long as I can remember—without, however, succumbing to the Quentin Tarantino-like temptation to pretend that I’m anything other than what I am, which is…well, very white. I’m content to be a sympathetic onlooker, and delighted when the seriousness of my interest in a culture not my own, and the modesty with which I approach the task of trying to understand it better, are acknowledged by those to whom such things come naturally. When I wrote a one-man show about Louis Armstrong, one of the actors who played the role said to me midway through a rehearsal, “I can’t believe a Caucasian wrote this.” You should have seen the smile on my face.
How could such a thing have happened? Music bridged the gap, flinging wide the door that my cloven community nailed shut for as long as it could. I loved jazz as soon as I heard it, and I was similarly excited by much of the black pop music that started to be played on our local radio station around the time I first started listening to rock and roll. Not all, though: I didn’t care for Motown, which I found too slick by half. I might have felt differently if I’d heard Marvin Gaye or Stevie Wonder, but the only Motown artists I remember hearing on the radio in Smalltown were the Supremes and the Jackson 5, who didn’t suit me at all.
So I became a Stax man, thanks mainly to Booker T. and the MG’s. In addition to serving as the house rhythm section for Memphis’ Stax Records, they cut dozens of instrumental singles on their own, some of which became modest crossover hits. One of them, “Hip Hug-Her,” came out in 1967, and it knocked me across the room when I first heard it a couple of years later. Everything about that no-nonsense record is perfect: Steve Cropper’s everybody-listen-up guitar introduction and terse background riffs, Booker T. Jones’ purring solo organ lines, Al Jackson Jr.’s hard-as-nails backbeats, “Duck” Dunn’s dirt-simple bass playing.
If you’d asked me, I suppose I would have said that “Hip Hug-Her” was “black music,” but I didn’t think of it that way. To me it was music, period. It wouldn’t have surprised me at all to learn that Cropper and Dunn were white, something I didn’t find out until much later. Rightly or wrongly, I took it for granted that their music, like jazz, belonged as much to me as it did to anyone. John Fogerty, lately of Creedence Clearwater Revival, felt the same way, and I can’t better what he wrote about Booker T. and the MG’s in Fortunate Son, his 2012 autobiography: “For years and years I have said that Booker T. & the M.G.s were the greatest rock ’n’ roll band of all time. I’m talking about soulfulness, deep feeling, the space in between the beats. How to say a lot with a little.” I would have killed to play bass in a group like that.
Not until later in life did I get to know other, older kinds of black pop music. Several more years went by before I heard and fell for Louis Jordan, Ray Charles, and B.B. King, and it wasn’t until I saw Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World eighteen years ago that I became passionately interested in country blues. I had no idea when I first heard Crosby, Stills & Nash, for instance, that the unaccompanied vocal introduction to “49 Bye-Byes” that David Crosby sings is a very close imitation of the first line of Robert Johnson’s Come On in My Kitchen. But I’ve loved soul music ever since I was a teenager, and it was Booker T. and the MG’s who first brought me the good news.(To be continued)
* * *
Booker T. and the MG’s play “Hip Hug-Her”:
Booker T. and the MG’s play “Green Onions” on stage in Norway during the 1967 Stax-Volt European tour:
Thora Birch listens to Skip James’ “Devil Got My Woman” in Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World:
* * *
To read about album #1, go here.
To read about album #2, go here.
To read about album #3, go here.
To read about album #4, go here.
To read about album #5, go here.
To read about album #6, go here.
To read about album #7, go here.
To read about album #8, go here.
To read about album #9, go here.
To read about album #10, go here.
To read about album #11, go here.
To read about album #12, go here.
To read about album #13, go here.
To read about album #14, go here.
To read about album #15, go here.
To read about album #16, go here.
To read about album #17, go here.
To read about album #18, go here.
To read about album #19, go here.
I posted this for the first time on November 11, 2008. It’s still relevant, and (I suspect) always will be.
* * *
On October 9, 1918, an HMV sound engineer named Will Gaisberg set up a primitive piece of recording equipment immediately behind a unit of the Royal Garrison Artillery stationed outside Lille and recorded a British gas-shell bombardment. His purpose in doing so was to preserve the sounds of war before the coming armistice caused them to vanish forever from the face of the earth.
According to HMV’s catalogue, the recording, which was commercially released, consisted of
the actual reproduction of the screaming and whistling of the shells previous to the entry of the British troops into Lille. It is not an imitation but was recorded on the battlefront. The report of the guns and the whistling of the shells is the actual sound of the Royal Garrison Artillery in action on October 9th, 1918. No book or picture can ever visualise the reality of modern warfare just the way this record has done…it would require only the slightest imagination for one, by means of this record, to be projected into the past, and feel that he is really present on the battlefield witnessing this historic chapter of the war.
Here is Gaisberg’s own account of the making of the recording:
Gradually we came within the sound of the guns, and eventually, when only a short distance from Lille, we pulled up at a row of ruined cottages, in one of which the heavy siege battery had made its quarters. In the wrecked kitchen we unpacked our recording machines and made our preparations before getting directly behind a battery of great 4.5′ guns and 6′ howitzers, camouflaged until they looked at close quarters like giant insects. Here the machine could well catch the finer sounds of the “singing,” the “whine,” and the “scream” of the shells, as well as the terrific reports when they left the guns.
Dusk fell, and we were obliged, very reluctantly, to pack up our recording instrument and return to Boulogne–and to England; but we brought with us a true representation of the bombardment, which will have a unique place in the history of the Great War.
This recording is one of the most haunting and disturbing documents of the past that I know—one made all the more haunting by the knowledge that Will Gaisberg accidentally inhaled some of the gas from the attack, which damaged his lungs irreparably. In London he fell victim to the international flu epidemic that was then ravaging the city, and died on November 5, just six days before World War I came to an end.
A century later, I can’t help but wonder how many Americans now understand the original meaning of what used once upon a time to be called Armistice Day. “This is either an indictment of the American public school system or my own curiosity and comprehension, but I still can’t summarize what World War I was fought for,” a well-educated friend of mine tweeted over the weekend.
What seems sadly clear, though, is that our collective awareness of that unimaginably terrible conflict is fading fast, perhaps in part because no one who served in what Woodrow Wilson called “the War to End War” is still alive. Frank Buckles, the last American veteran of World War I, died in 2011, at the age of 110.
If you think of Frank Buckles and his comrades today—and you should—take a moment to think about Will Gaisberg as well.
* * *
HMV D378, “Actual Recording of the Gas Shell Bombardment, by the Royal Garrison Artillery (9th October, 1918), preparatory to the British Troops entering Lille”:
UPDATE: Is this recording completely authentic? Read more about it here.