Posted 5:26 PM by Gene

Today at my friendly neighborhood Mickey D's (how's your three month vacation in South Africa, DON? Noisy? Wait until July 12) the CRETINS OF FORT MILL (along with a Mickey staff that, in its argot, could care less) were playing what one might call The Will Friedwald Channel, "classic" vocal pop of the 50s and 60s with that aggressive sound people like Will Friedwald find jazzy, full of muted trumpets and doinks and boinks (AHoooooWEEawwwk!!!!!) and Billy May -- and lots of Stan Kenton just below the surface -- mostly from Capitol. That stuff killed two birds with one stone: the musical theater and decent pop tunes. Some hard-voiced singer with a persistent vibrato was emoting "All the Things You Are". Though Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw must accept the blame for trying to turn that one into a jazz tune they were only making a hit from a hit; the song's really meant for a moderate unsyncopated tempo and lush strings and a lyric soprano*, but the JAZZMEN must rend it for all sorts of rhythmic accents Jerome Kern may not have intended, and the females must sing it like a torch song.

Worse is Ol' Blue's "immortal" rendition of "Luck Be a Lady", which he recorded, aptly enough, for a miscast Guys and Dolls studio album. Anyone knowing the original cast album knows how eloquent its score can be, owing in a big way to George Bassman and Ted Royal, who gave it an occasional haunting melancholy to match its ripping bustle; instead Ol' Blue RIPS out its heart and supplants it with showy brassin' and pretentious swingin' -- all so he can shout, "Take THAT, Shmuel Gelbfisz!" In short, it was music as revenge, and his listeners were the target.

By singing and playing the songs the same way, as a doinking boinking vocal showoffing contest, the Friedwalders chased the young crowd away -- although I'm guessing they would have been proud to do so, as much of youth pop in those days was infested with "riffraff." (Friedwald tells us that when Blue recorded the piece of fake-R&B junk called "Five Hundred Guys" after the one take he unceremoniously dropped the music to the floor.) And because the singers relied so heavily on the theater for their books, in cutting off the youth audience they slowly starved it of inspiration. If good songs were being sung by such squares, in such a square manner, why bother hearing it? Or writing it? Yes for a few years the musical theater survived with new writers, but even Charles Strouse and Jerry Herman did not have the long-lived consistency of the masters; and for a few years the riffraff wrote some memorable tunes, for the old verities still permeated even their world; but then the floor fell out, and we've been largely tuneless ever since.

*Although it was introduced in Very Warm for May by a tenor.