L-O-V-E

http://www.steynonline.com/content/view/4054/28/

Monday, 16 May 2011

Song of the Week #187
by Bert Kaempfert and Milt Gabler

   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...

The first half of our centenary salute to legendary record producer Milt Gabler, born May 20th 1911, looked at his early career, from the family hardware store to the mail-order record business to his landmark productions of Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" and Bill Haley's "Rock Around The Clock" - and to his one great songwriting hit in those early years, "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie". Gabler produced almost everyone who mattered in the pop heyday of the mid-20th century. "I only regret not being able to do Nat Cole and Sinatra," he said. "And Benny Goodman's big band." But he got closer than most folks get to two-thirds of those regrets: He had the pleasure of hearing words he'd written emerge from the mouths of two of the greatest popular singers.

After "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie", it took the best part of two decades before Milt Gabler made any further contributions to the American songbook, and both came by way of Germany. Bert Kaempfert has turned up in this space on a couple of occasions, as the composer of our Song of the Week #143 ("Spanish Eyes") and #181 ("Strangers In The Night"). The latter was a hit for Sinatra, as earlier Kaempfert had provided Elvis with his movie hit "Wooden Heart". He was also the first man to put the Beatles in front of a studio microphone, although he didn't think much of their compositions and he reckoned their name was so silly he changed it to the Beat Brothers. But, as I always say, that still makes a German bandleader the only guy in the entire global music biz to have played a significant role in the three iconic pop acts of the post-war era.

Yet he might never have got to do any of that had not Milt Gabler first played a critical role in Bert Kaempfert's own career. In a sense, it was Gabler who created Bert Kaempfert. He was Berthold Kämpfert with an umlaut when he and the missus swung by the Decca offices in New York in 1960. Back in Germany, Herr Kämpfert had had a couple of big hits at the tail end of the Fifties - "Die Gitarre und das Meer" ("The guitar and the sea") for the anglophonically appellated Teuton pop star Freddy Quinn, and (as noted a couple of weeks back) "Morgen" for the Croat singing sensation Ivo Robic. Despite those successes, Kämpfert couldn't find any takers in his own country for what he regarded as the best melody he'd ever written, something called "Wunderland bei Nacht". "It's time to go to America," he told his wife Hanne. She agreed.

Initially, "Wunderland" met with the same rejection it had back home. But Milt Gabler, then well established as Decca's A&R man and a peerless hitmaker, liked what he heard and so did the music publisher Hal Fein. They changed "Wunderland bei Nacht" to "Wonderland By Night". But why stop there? Milton Gabler abbreviated Berthold and decided the bandleader could ditch the umlaut: Enter "Bert Kaempfert". In January 1961, Kaempfert's "Wonderland By Night" toppled Elvis Presley's "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" from the top spot, and became one of a handful of easy-listening instrumental blockbusters (Percy Faith's "Theme From A Summer Place", Acker Bilk's "Stranger On The Shore") that half-a-century on still evokes a very precise moment. Gabler had found not only a new pop act, but a songwriting partner. Kaempfert had a song he'd written with German lyrics by Kurt Schwaback: "Danke Schön". Gabler dumped that umlaut, too - "Danke Schoen" - and then wrote English words:

   Danke Schoen
   Darling, Danke Schoen
   Thank you for all the joy and pain
   Picture show
   Second balcony
   Was the place we'd meet
   Second seat
   Go Dutch treat
   You were sweet...

Were I a composer of the Germanic persuasion I might be tempted to complain that "Danke schoen" doesn't rhyme with "pain" or "explain" or "lane". Or "complain", come to that. It's more of a "u" sound. But Gabler was a New York Jew and he seems to have rhymed it Yiddishly, as Sammy Cahn had in "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen". So Kaempfert let it go, and any way you pronounce it, Gabler had a nifty plan for the song. He thought it would be great for Bobby Darin as a follow-up to "Mack The Knife". "'Danke Schoen' was 'Mack The Knife' sideways," said Darin's manager, Steve Blauner. "The tempo and everything." You kinda see what he means: It's nowhere near as insinuating as "Mack" but it shares with it an economy of melodic material endlessly repeated. We didn't know yet that that would be the Kaempfert style: as the Germans call them, Ohrwurmen - or earworms.

So Hal Fine, Kaempfert and Gabler's publisher, figured that if Bobby Darin can take one German Ohrwurmen to the top of the charts, he can do it with another. Darin had a better idea. He'd heard a new singer at the Copacabana - a kid who sang like a girl - and all he needed to put him over the top was the right song. He said he'd produce the record himself. "If he gets a hit, fine, you'll be happy. If it's not a hit, then I'll do it." So he called the arranger Jimmy Haskell. "I have the greatest hit song," Darin told him, "but I want you to come to and hear this kid." And so it was that a baby-faced vocalist called Wayne Newton got launched on his career with a Milt Gabler song:

   Danke Schoen
   Darling, Danke Schoen
   Save those lies, darling, don't explain
   I recall
   Central Park in fall
   Where you tore your dress
   What a mess
   I confess
   That's not all...

I never have figured out what Wayne's going on about there: Some sort of easy-listening wilding? But it didn't seem to hurt the song. Marlon Brando told a friend of friend of mine that it was the record Jackie Kennedy played at her pad the night she put the moves on him on one of her first dates as a young widow. She pulled him close to her and breathed Gabler's lyric into her ear as she pressed herself against him. When the record ended, she put it on again. And again. But he felt he'd had a wee bit too much performance-impairing liquor and beat a hasty retreat, Wayne Newton's voice following him out the front door:

   Though we go
   On our separate ways
   Still the mem'ry stays
   For always
   My heart says
   Danke Schoen...

Kaempfert and Gabler's next song was not a maddening Euro-novelty but a bona fide standard. It's also, as I said the other week, the über-Kaempfert, a tune so simple that Gabler wrote it up as 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
      than anyone that you adore can...

When I first heard the song as a child, that last word - "can" - always confused me. It doesn't seem to belong there. "More" rhymes with "adore" just as "very" rhymes with "extraordinary" and it feels as if it ought to be the end of the line. My ear first heard it as "Ken", who didn't seem germane to the plot, and there's so little space between "can" and "love" that, once you've ruled Ken out, it sounds oddly like "canned love".

Still, this is a somewhat niggling complaint. There have been songs called "Love" before - on our audio tribute to Hugh Martin a few weeks ago, we played one that, thanks to Lena Horne and Judy Garland, very nearly landed. But not quite. So it took Milt Gabler spelling it out to add a love song called "L-O-V-E" to the American Songbook:

   Love
   Is all that I can give to you
   Love
   Is more than just a game for two
   Two
   In love can make it
   Take my heart and please don't break it...

It's a simple tune but it swings effortlessly. Hal Fine got it to Nat Cole, whom Gabler had loved ever since the King Cole Trio days twenty years earlier. But Cole was a Capitol artist, not Decca. And so the great record producer's biggest hit as a songwriter was launched in a studio session he wasn't present at, and was in fact three thousand miles away from. Cole recorded "L-O-V-E" in the summer of 1964 with a Ralph Carmichael arrangement. Capitol liked the results so much they got him to sing it in French, too, and in a multilingual version including a segment in its German composer's native tongue. They also decided to make it the title track of Cole's new album. A few weeks later, after filming Cat Balou, and midway through a full schedule of live shows, the singer was taken ill and the hotel doctor at the Fairmont in San Francisco suggested a chest x-ray. There was a large tumor on his left lung.

In the first three days of December, Nat Cole recorded ten tracks for the L-O-V-E album. He was in great voice, and bang on the money rhythmically, bouncing off his trumpeter Bobby Bryant. A few days later he checked in to St John's Hospital in Santa Monica. The LP was rushed out in January 1965. By then, Cole's doctors had decided to end the cobalt treatments. On January 25th, they removed his left lung. On February 15th, at the age of 45, Nat "King" Cole died of cancer.

Milt Gabler never got to produce a Nat Cole record, but he has the distinction of having written the last standard - after "Nature Boy", "Mona Lisa", "The Christmas Song", and on and on - to be introduced by the singer. He never got to produce a Sinatra record, either, but "L-O-V-E" was everywhere in the Sixties, and, when Frank and Dino got together on TV to do one of those goofy ten-minute medleys, Gabler's song was often in the mix.

I'm not sure, though, how many people expected it to last. Yet in the last two decades it's got a little bigger year by year. It was a key part of Natalie Cole's Unforgettable tribute in 1991. Michael Bublé did it, and thereby made it part of every retro-crooner's repertoire. In 2007, the British soul singer Joss Stone sang it on a Chanel commercial with Keira Knightley. My bet is it's here to stay, even though, unlike your typical standard, it doesn't invite different interpretations. The Stone version does its best, but it sounds like someone's tied lead weights round the song. And it would surely seem perverse to do it as a ballad or a bossa nova. But if you just want a surefire swinger, it does the trick. When you've sung it through once, what can you do with it? Sing it again. And again. And after three or four go-rounds you've got a long-enough record, and you bark to your conductor, as Buddy Greco does on his version, "Rock it on home, professor!", and the guy does as instructed and wraps things up.

MCA bought Decca in 1971, and Milt Gabler declined to follow the company out to the coast. He was still a New York boy, as he had been back when he was selling radios at the Commodore shop in the mid-Twenties. When he was inducted into the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame, his nephew Billy Crystal was booked to give the speech. "Just intro me as your mother's big brother," Milt told Billy. He did, but only after reeling off highlights from half a century that put Gabler at the center of just about every big development in American pop. "I have been involved with music, and jazz, and talent for most of my life," he wrote to Crystal not long before his death in 2001. "I had a ball and I wouldn't change one day of it." It's a long way from Billie Holiday and Bill Haley, but this song is for the ages:

   Love
   Is all that I can give to you
   Love
   Is more than just a game for two
   Two
   In love can make it
   Take my heart and please don't break it
   Love was made for me and you!

Rock it on home, professor!


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