STRANGERS IN THE NIGHT

http://www.steynonline.com/content/view/3899/28

Monday, 04 April 2011

Song of the Week #181
by Bert Kaempfert, Eddie Snyder and Charles Singleton

   Blue Spanish Eyes
   Teardrops are falling from your Spanish Eyes... 

That was our Song of the Week #143 way back when, written by Bert Kaempfert, Charles Singleton and Eddie Snyder. Mr Snyder died last month at the grand old age of 92. And, given that we've already saluted his second biggest hit, it seems appropriate that we should mark his passing with a tip of the hat to the very biggest of all:

   Strangers In The Night
   Exchanging glances
   Wond'ring in the night
   What were the chances...

"Spanish Eyes" was a worldwide hit for Al Martino in 1973, and Martino loved it and was enormously grateful to it. "Strangers In The Night" was a worldwide hit for Frank Sinatra in 1966, and Sinatra hated it. Maybe Eddie Snyder improved between 1966 and 1973? In fact, "Eyes" pre-dates "Strangers", written by the same trio in 1965. Kaempfert, Snyder and Singleton aren't exactly a famous team like Rodgers & Hammerstein or Gilbert & Sullivan, but they were on a kind of roll in '65-66. Bert Kaempfert had written a typical Kaempfert melody - two phrases, two chords, nothing fancy. He called it "Moon Over Naples". Hey, why not? It's more beguiling than "Moon Over Winnipeg". And it did okay for him, a modest hit on the Continent. Enter Al Martino, who chanced to hear it on the radio. In The Italian Crooners' Bedside Companion, he takes up the story:

   It had been released in America, and I had a copy of it, but I didn't know there were lyrics written to it.

   Then somebody wrote a lyric, I heard it on the radio, and I didn't like it at all. So I called the publisher and said, 'If you dump that record that's out there right now, I'll give you an exclusive on a new and much better lyric.' I had alternate lyrics written for the song by Ted Snider and Larry McCousick.

Almost right. "Ted Snider" is not the Ted Snyder who gave Irving Berlin his first break and wrote our Song of the Week #23, "The Sheik Of Araby". He is, in fact, a man called Eddie Snyder. As for "Larry McCousick", that's not even close: Kaempfert's instrumental "Moon Over Naples" was turned into a song by Eddie Snyder and Charles Singleton, and it's not clear they were acting on orders from Al Martino. At any rate, Snyder and Singleton took the old "Moon Over Naples" and shipped it west:

   Blue Spanish Eyes
   Prettiest eyes in all of Mexico…

For a while, that was what Eddie Snyder specialized in: Take a European tune and figure out how to make it work in English. And so a Neapolitan tune by a German bandleader became a Mexican song for an Italian-American crooner, and a global smash. Everyone agrees on the story behind "Spanish Eyes". But, if you ever bring up the subject of "Strangers In The Night", you notice the strangers start exchanging glances. It has a murkier history.

Officially, it began with Bert Kaempfert, the Teutonic kaiser of kitsch who somewhat improbably managed to play a critical role in the careers of three of the biggest Anglophone pop acts of the 20th century: He produced the Beatles' very first recording session; he wrote "Wooden Heart" (based on an old German folk tune) for Elvis in his first post-Army film GI Blues (1961); ...and he gave Frank Sinatra his biggest Number One hit of the rock era. A year or two back, I was at the Angel Studios in London, where we recorded "A Marshmallow World", "Sweet Gingerbread Man" et al, and Gary, our engineer, mentioned that I'd just missed Bert Kaempfert's widow and daughter who'd been in with "The New Bert Kaempfert Orchestra" re-recording all his big tunes for some monster retrospective. There are a lot of them - not just "Strangers In The Night" and "Wooden Heart", but also his own orchestral hits like "Wonderland By Night" and "A Swingin' Safari", one of the greatest instrumentals of all time; plus a ton of wacky one-offs, like Wayne Newton's "Danke Schoen" and Andy Williams' "Almost There" and everybody's "L-O-V-E". Kaempfert's horn arrangements are one of the unmistakeable signature sounds of the Sixties, as distinctive as Burt Bacharach or John Barry. But, while lots of folks admire his arranging, many of the same people are awfully sniffy about his compositions. He eschewed the standard 32-bar A-A-B-A song, possibly on the grounds that a middle section was way too much work. Instead, his tunes are built on the slightest of melodic themes, endlessly repeated. Yet they are, as the Germans say, Ohrwurmen - or earworms: maddening tunes that insinuate their way into your head and refuse to get out. "L-O-V-E" is the über-Kaempfert, a tune so simple that its lyricist Milt Gabler turned it into a spelling lesson, an "Alphabet Song" for grown-ups:

   L is for the way you look at me
   O is for the only one I see
   V is very very extraordinary
   E is even more... 

"Strangers In The Night" sounds to me like another minimalist Kaempfert tune: the title phrase - da-da dee-da-dee - is about 50 per cent of the song. Yet a remarkable number of other people claim to have had a hand in its creation. The last time I mentioned the thing in this space David C Tobin of Washington, DC wrote to say that "Strangers" was "credited" to Avo Uvezian. Actually, "credited" is the one thing it isn't: "Strangers In The Night" is "credited" by its publisher Screen Gems-EMI and Songs of Universal, by BMI, by the Harry Fox mechanical licensing agency and by every other official source to Bert Kaempfert, Charlie Singleton and Eddie Snyder. So did Mr Uvezian, a Beirut-born Armenian-American pianist cum cigar manufacturer, compose the music? So he says. But, on the other hand, so said the late Ivo Robić, the singing Croat, who claims he wrote "Strangers" for a music festival in Split, Yugoslavia. When it failed to make the final selection, he supposedly sold it outright to Bert Kaempfert, which sounds very odd to me. Having been rejected in Split, why didn't he insist with Kaempfert on at least a 50/50 split? Robić was, after all, the only singer from Communist Yugoslavia to have his records on sale in western European music shops. Like Mr Uvezian, he surely understood the basics of Euro-American intellectual property law - and furthermore he had a relationship with Kaempfert stretching from his 1959 hit "Morgen" to his Croat version of "Spanish Eyes", "Lijep Je Nas Dan" - not to mention an entire album called Ivo Robic singt Bert-Kaempfert-Erfolge. Why would he do that after being cut out of credit and massive royalties on a worldwide hit? Robić subsequently recorded "Strangers In The Night" in both German ("Fremde in der Nacht") and Croat ("Stranci u Noći"), which again seems an odd thing to do if he'd sold the tune outright to Kaempfert. Robić had nothing to do with the Strangers/Fremde/Stranci concept: That was imposed on "his" song many months later and thousands of miles away in America by Snyder and Singleton. So why would you help Kurt Felitz (the German lyricist) and Marija Renota (the Croat lyricist) make more money from your composition than you the composer will ever make?

So, while we await clarification from these various Croatian-Armenian claimants, we're left with the official narrative. In 1966, Bert Kaempfert was asked to score his first Hollywood movie - a James Garner caper called A Man Could Get Killed, directed by Ronald Neame. And for it he wrote a theme called "Beddy-Bye". Before the picture was released, Kaempfert's publisher, Hal Fine, went round to Jimmy Bowen's house to play him some instrumentals. Bowen had been signed by Sinatra's record company, Reprise, to handle the rock'n'schlock end of things. He was the guy who got Dean Martin to dust off "Everybody Loves Somebody", put a semi-rock-ish beat on it, and knocked the Beatles' "Hard Day's Night" off the Number One spot. And he figured he could do the same for Frank with the right song. So he's listening to Hal Fine's bunch of Kaempfert instrumentals and "Beddy-Bye" comes up. And Bowen says, "Man, get me a lyric on that, and I'll do it with Sinatra."

He'd never uttered any such words ever before - for a fairly obvious reason: He was in no position to promise any such thing. "Obviously," he explained subsequently, "nobody knows what Frank is going to do till he says what he's going to do." But he knew that that "Beddy-Bye" theme smelled like a hit, and Hal Fine took him at his word. He farmed the tune out to various writers, and submitted a couple of lyrics. Jimmy Bowen didn't like either of them.

So Hal Fine tried again, with Eddie Snyder and Charles Singleton. Born in New York in 1919, Snyder studied piano at Juilliard and became a jobbing songwriter of no particular distinction. That said, "Talk To Me", a song he wrote with Stanley Kahan and Rudy Vallee, was recorded by Sinatra in 1959 with a Nelson Riddle arrangement, and tickled the lower end of the hit parade. For "Beddy-Bye", Snyder took his cue from the film and the James Garner/Melina Mercouri characters: They're strangers, exchanging glances, and, by the time the tune's reprised in the final moments, you know that, as the song says, they're "in love forever". "We had the scene," recalled Snyder. "A man is sitting across from a girl in a bar. That was it." But that was all they needed:

   Strangers In The Night
   Exchanging glances
   Wond'ring in the night
   What were the chance
   We'd be sharing love
   Before the night was through... 

As Snyder recalled it, they took two weeks over the song, working it out round the piano, him, Kaempfert and Singleton. Snyder claimed to have contributed not merely the lyric but part of the tune, too. But, unlike Messrs Robić and Uvezian, he was actually in the room with Kaempfert saying, "No, no. Do it like this." If memory serves, he said his contribution was somewhere around the big, broad middle eight:

   Strangers In The Night
   Two lonely people
   We were Strangers In The Night
   Up to the moment
   When we said our first hello
   Little did we know
   Love was just a glance away
   A warm embracing dance away... 

This time Bowen liked the lyric. The only problem was that, by this stage, Hal Fine doubted Sinatra would ever do the song and had offered it elsewhere. Bowen heard that Jack Jones was going into the studio to record "Strangers" that very day, Friday. He called Ernie Freeman, the arranger for Frank's chart-friendlier stuff at Reprise, and told him to crank out an arrangement that weekend. On Monday evening, April 11th 1966, Bowen had a studio (United Recorders), a conductor (Donnie Lanier), an orchestra, a song and an arrangement. At 8pm Sinatra walked in.

It was not a smooth session. As Jimmy Bowen told it, Frank had difficulty with the key change just before the final eight. In theory, it's no different from the half-tone rise on a zillion other Sinatra tracks - except there's no orchestra under him at all at that point, and nothing to latch onto for the lift. So Bowen told him, "Sing it right up to the key change and cut. Then we'll give you a bell tone and we'll go from there in the new key to the end." So they did:

   Love was just a glance away
   A warm embracing dance away.

Cut. Bell tone. And onwards, leaving Bowen to splice it together afterwards:

   Ever since that night
   We've been together
   Lovers at first sight
   In love forever... 

"Together"/"forever"? That may be the laziest bum rhyme on a major Sinatra song. Well, okay, there's "too few to mention" and "without exemption" on "My Way", which is my absolutely least favorite Sinatra false rhyme without exemption.

But boy, Frank and Ernie Freeman wring some real juice out of the song. What Sinatra scholar Will Friedwald calls the "chinking rhythm guitar and repetitious percussion" somehow suit the tune, but Frank puts a lonely ache on the title line, and the big vowel sounds at the end of the main theme are full of yearning:

   Something in your eyes
   Was so inviting,
   Something in your smile
   Was so exciting
   Something in my heart
   Told me I must have yoooooooooooooooooooo....

It's a beautiful vocal, but the romantic stuff isn't what it's most famous for. That distinction belongs to Sinatra's improvised end. He sang one take clean, listening to the dull outro with the orchestra playing on without him to give Bowen time enough for a radio-friendly fade-out. Then he did a second take:

   It turned out so right
   For Strangers In The Night....

At which point he added:

   Dooby-dooby-doo
   Doo-doo da-de-da...

According to Friedwald, this was Sinatra's second documented "dooby-dooby-doo" following an impromptu interjection on "Please Be Kind" with Count Basie for a TV special a year earlier. But it gave the song a memorable outro that the plonking soft-rock drums and sawing strings alone wouldn't have accomplished. The "dooby-doo" is just a few seconds but in some ways it became the most famous part of the record, and, in an era of lazy fades, a very memorable end - so much so that, for the 2008 compilation Nothing But The Best, they added an extra nine seconds of fade so that dooby-doo aficionados would get more dooby for their dues.

But in 1966 they had a more pressing problem: Could Jimmy Bowen get the record to radio stations before the Jack Jones version came out? Sinatra had wrapped up his vocal by 9pm. Bowen mixed the track and cut a few acetates. The Jack Jones promo copies had gone out by mail the previous Friday. Bowen called couriers and, with a bit of help from friendly cross-country air stewardesses, had advance copies of Sinatra's "Strangers In The Night" with major disc-jockeys by Tuesday night. It hit Number One in Britain at the end of May, displacing the Rolling Stones ("Paint It Black"), and reached Number One in America shortly thereafter, seeing off the Beatles ("Paperback Writer").

It was an influential record. Hanna-Barbera are said to have got the name of their cartoon canine from Sinatra's outro:

   Scooby-dooby-Doo
   Where are you?

It had a huge impact on the guy playing that "chinking rhythm guitar", too. He was a fellow called Glen Campbell. At the time, he was a session guitarist with no particular interest in singing. "I'd never really paid that much attention to it, because I'm really a musician at heart. Singin' was, like, secondary," he said. "But when I heard the way he phrases, I said, 'Wow, that's really cool.'" Playing the melody along with Sinatra, he started to notice the way the singer pushed certain words and held back on others. He was so fascinated by the vocal technique he couldn't take his eyes off Frank. At the end of the session, Sinatra said to Jimmy Bowen, "Who's the faggot on guitar?"

Frank famously hated "Strangers": It was, variously, "a piece of sh*t", "the worst f**kin' song I ever heard", and really "about two fags in a bar", that last thought perhaps prompted by the otherwise vigorously heterosexual guitar-playing stranger in the night stealing glances through the session. But, for "a piece of shi*t", it changed the singer's and his company's attitude to what he did. There was always a distinction between Sinatra's album art and his hit parade-fodder. But at Capitol in the Fifties, while singles like "French Foreign Legion" and "Lean Baby" and "Five Hundred Guys" were certainly goofier than "I've Got You Under My Skin" or "One For My Baby", they were still recognisably in the same vernacular, with the same arrangers and producers. At Reprise in the Sixties, Frank was a musical schizophrenic: Sonny Burke produced and the great arrangers (Riddle, Billy May, Gordon Jenkins, Neil Hefti, Quincy Jones) arranged the albums, and Jimmy Bowen produced and Ernie Freeman arranged the singles. After "Strangers", everything was about coming up with the right piece of soft-rock schlock to make lightning strike all over again.

They had their moments - "That's Life" is a great single, with Sinatra full of bluesy aggression. It would have made a fine Track One for Songs For Anti-Social Lovers. But much of the rest falls into a category Will Friedwald calls the sort of songs Sinatra would have done "had he deigned to portray a singing villain in Batman". "It's one of those things where you grasp the moment," said Jimmy Bowen. "I had about a four- or five-year period where I had the feel of how to take these kinds of artists into the marketplace, to Top 40 radio, at a time when Top 40 radio didn't want to play them." Looking back on all the tracks he did with Sinatra in the Sixties, he reckoned Frank was pleased with the results on "Strangers", "That's Life", "Softly As I Leave You" and "Somethin' Stupid". "I don't know about the other things," he said. "A lot of the other things we did together were not nearly as wonderful as what he did when Sinatra was in charge of Sinatra." He happened to attend the recording of September Of My Years, an album Bowen wasn't producing and had nothing to do with, and the one with "It Was A Very Good Year", "September Song", "This Is All I Ask" and much else. And Bowen was amazed at the difference between Frank's level of engagement on his throwaway pop singles and on a project "when Sinatra was in charge of Sinatra". "Strangers" and the rest? "My guess would be that it was just something he was doing at that time in his life."

Frank loathed the song, but made a great record of it. All the other singers loved the number, but understood that it was Sinatra's now and forever. Of the thousands of other versions, I shall say nothing except to single out two favorites. The year after "Strangers", Frank, Jimmy Bowen and Ernie Freeman went into the studio to record "Don't Sleep In The Subway", a Tony Hatch song Petula Clark had made a big hit. Sinatra invited Pet along to the recording session. Miss Clark told me she thought the result, complete with "C'mon, baby" choral backing, was a "cute record", which I said was awfully generous of her. As it turns out, she made her own "cute record" of "Strangers In The Night", in which she manages, unlike most other singers, to impose her own personality on it. (It comes out as a kind of peppier "Downtown".) As for my second pick, I have a fondness for Bette Midler's by-the-book disco version. When Jessica Martin and I did our Seventies disco remake of "Marshmallow World", I wanted it to sound like a disco version of a standard rather than a disco record in its own right. So I'm grateful to Miss Midler for helping nudge me in the right direction.  

What else? Well, in the 1985 film Fletch, Chevy Chase sings, "Strangers In The Night/Exchanging clothing..." To be parodied, a song has to be well known enough, and this one certainly is. It quickly became a kind of cultural shorthand - an easy pointer you use in soundtracks, novels, poems to skewer time and place precisely. "Fathers In The Snow" by Jill Bialosky:

   When the dates came we went up to our rooms
   and mother entertained.
   Frank Sinatra's "Strangers In The Night,"
   the smell of Chanel No. 5 in her hair and the laughter.  

In the wake of 9/11, there was a Frank-esque "Strangers On My Flight" - a nifty idea not as neatly executed as it should have been. And, over on the other side of the aisle, for the album Sing Along With The Democrats, The Freedom Toast offered "Strangers On The Right":

   Something in their eyes
   Resembles fire
   Roe v Wade's demise
   Is their desire
   Cutting down to size
   Those states that still are blue...

It's faintly creepy hearing "Roe v Wade" crooned in a love ballad. Everything rhymes but it still comes out tone-deaf: 

   Strangers On The Right
   To Europeans
   They are Strangers On The Right...

Europeans?

As for Sinatra, he tried to get as far away from it as he could. For years, it was the only one of his big landmark hits that wasn't a part of his live set, and on the rare occasions when he'd succumb to requests to sing it he would make his feelings known. "Here's a song I can't stand," he said in Jerusalem in 1975, "but what the hell?" Only in the Eighties and Nineties, in the final stretch, did "Strangers In The Night" establish itself in his concert repertoire, and even then, if the mood struck him, he'd out-Chase Chevy on the lyrics:

   Love was just a glance away
   A lonesome pair of pants away...

Okay, it's not "Wee Small Hours" or "Luck Be A Lady" or the Soliloquy from Carousel. But as a two-and-a-half minute pop record it stands up to pretty much anything else it was sharing the hit parade with back in 1966 - "Hanky Panky", "Wild Thing", "Sunshine Superman", "Yellow Submarine"... In such company, how good does a two-take pop record with an orchestral chart worked up over the weekend have to be?

Aside from the Seventies revival of "Spanish Eyes", Eddie Snyder never had another hit. But then he never needed one. As he told his alma mater Juilliard in one of his last interviews two years ago, "'Strangers In The Night' made a bum out of me. Because I didn't have to work anymore."

   It turned out so right

...for Eddie Snyder.


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