A Blog of My Own

A big way I got hooked on original Broadway cast albums involves a store that used to exist in Manhattan called The Record Hunter. I grew up in Baltimore. My NY grandmother (my mother’s mother, widowed at 47 and never remarried) would mail me the cast albums of the latest Broadway hits, and they always came shipped from The Record Hunter. I loved getting those 12 X 12, stiff cardboard boxes with The Record Hunter’s label on them.

She lived at 86th and Broadway, so The Record Hunter, on Fifth Avenue between 42nd and 43rd, wasn’t necessarily more convenient for her than Sam Goody’s or King Karol. I suspect the reason it was her store of choice was the name! I think she found something clever about it. The idea that they would “hunt” for you, for the unusual record you sought. It would have tickled her particular sense of humor, and she would have wanted to reward them for their intrepidness in the hunt.

More often than not, the records that arrived were for shows I didn’t know about. And that was great. When, as a child, someone sits you down to tell you a story, you don’t expect it to be a story you’ve already heard, and you might be disappointed if it were. Well, each of these albums was a brand new story. I immersed myself in them, imagining the plotlline the songs told, believing in the reality of the characters, constructing scenarios to account for their dreams and ambitions, building stage sets in my mind to show me how the show looked, how it felt, as I listened.

I think my grandmother’s hooking me on cast albums was a quite conscious strategy on her part. On the most obvious level, she wanted to bring me closer to her by sharing an experience with her. (The album was always for a show she’d attended and enjoyed, and, having seen the show alone due to her circumstance, she wanted to recruit an ally in this pleasure, as we all might.) But on a deeper level, she was looking to create another, permanently inescapable bond with her, to make sure I’d never stop thinking about her despite the miles that separated us. She was NY. The shows were NY. The association was unbreakable. Every time I listened to one, she’d know she was in my thoughts. She still is.

The biography of lyricist Johnny Mercer by Philip Furia was recenty recommended on the Songbirds list by eminent jazz critic/historian Dan Morgenstern, and that recommendation alone necessitated my reading it.

My take: I can see why Dan liked the book, while I found some things about it ridiculous or aggravating.

First, the good news. Much of the book’s value is due to Furia’s having had access to an unpublished autobiography by Mercer, which resides with the Johnny Mercer Papers at Georgia State. I never knew the Savannah-born lyricist, supreme commander of the American vernacular — collaborator with Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen, Harry Warren, Richard Whiting, Arthur Schwartz, Hoagy Carmichael, Henry Mancini and many other composers (Mercer would write with anyone he respected, becoming the most promiscuous of the great lyricists) — had written the story of his own life. This is colossal news, and reason enough for the Furia book’s existence. I would love to see Mercer’s tome published someday, even if it is in an unfinished state. It may be the new Holy Grail for us who are into that sort of thing. In the meantime, Furia relies on it heavily and quotes liberally from it, which will do.

He relies as well on interviews and articles contained in the Johnny Mercer Papers, and on an archival interview with Mercer housed at Georgia State. And, in the later chapters covering the fifties, sixties, and seventies, decades that yield people still living who knew the pantheon-level lyricist, Furia has collected good material from his own interviews.

But the book suffers a flaw. It has a “thesis.” And Furia, like a caricature of a university academic (he is, in fact, a real one), won’t let go of it: Mercer’s life and work post-1940 were completely shaped by his affair with Judy Garland.

Over and over we read that this or that deeply-felt Mercer lyric owed its existence to his lifelong frustrated love for Garland. That when Mercer wrote (X) in song (Y), he was writing “about” this love. Furia wants us to believe Mercer’s love for Garland informed every yearning lyric he ever wrote and every melancholic bender he ever went on.

It’s reductionist hogwash. Let’s stipulate that Mercer did have an affair with Garland and that he never got over it. (I don’t know that this is so, but let’s stipulate it.) Is there no other way to understand the life and work of Johnny Mercer than through this prism? Could any of Mercer’s love lyrics have been about, say, another woman that he had feelings for along the way, or a yearning for something else entirely? Could any of Mercer’s lyrics rise to the level of poetry, such that they transcend simple decoding? Not according to Furia, who insists on making the Garland affair Mercer’s Rosebud. You sense that Furia feels he has made a major discovery, and his unwillingness to let you forget his triumph is palpable. Over and over he forces everything through his funnel, to a point of such ludicrousness that the reader would laugh if it weren’t such a sin to have an otherwise worthy book marred this way.

Furia also cares inordinately about when Mercer and his wife-to-be Ginger first had “sexual intercourse,” as he puts it. I don’t know why, but he insists on reading Mercer’s letters to Ginger with the help of some sort of “sexual intercourse” Ovaltine decoder ring, as if determining the moment Mercer lost his virginity (and yes, Furia has a point to prove about this) matters. Furia teases out the meaning of every word in these letters, barely containing his excitement that he has discovered the occasion of Mercer’s deflowering. Suffice it to say he is unconvincing. The passages that Furia cites can be read in other ways, to mean other things. But let an academic latch onto a thesis and he’s like a dog with a bone…

At any rate, the book is more than worth reading, infuriating flaws and all (hey, I just realized Furia is infuriating’s middle name), and is available from many book dealers in new and used form, both hardcover and paperback, at a wide range of prices including the eminently reasonable and downright cheap, here and here and here.

Several forces lately have focused my attention on the challenge of staying true to our passions in an unsupportive world.

How do we stay true to our passions in an unsupportive world? Several forces lately have conspired to focus my attention on this question.

An internet mailing list, of which I am a member, is devoted to the discussion of original cast musical theater recordings. Recently a discussion began concerning the members’ experiences as children and teens. When young, did we find friends who shared our love of the great Broadway musicals, the works of sublime genius created by Rodgers, Hammerstein, Lerner, Loewe, Loesser, Sondheim, Styne, and their ilk? (Small ilk.) Or did we not? This discussion forced me to examine a truth I hadn’t ever quite acknowledged: that I did not have a single friend, growing up, who listened to this music. How did I keep doing it? Why didn’t I succumb to “peer pressure” and change my tastes to conform with theirs? How did I sustain my love for great Broadway music in the complete absence of positive reinforcement?

I would say that the music itself gave me no choice. Once you listen to it, if you are susceptible to its charms, you discover just how much is going on in it, and most other music seems thin gruel from then on. And that’s part of the answer. But not all of it.

Something has to give you the strength to go on being alone, being interested in the things you’re interested in even if no one else is. In some sense you are like a character in The Twilight Zone who discovers he is the sole inhabitant on earth, or like the astronaut at the end of Kubrick’s 2001 who lives out his days in the absence of a fellow creature. Sure, you derive sustenance from the knowledge that someone out there likes the art you like, because someone is putting out recordings and other people are buying them. You just don’t know any of those people. So you have to be comfortable with being lonely. And the more comfortable you get with it, the more you start, in some sense, to prefer your loneliness. You begin to feel that loneliness is the only way for you to survive, because to join the crowd would be for you to relinquish the essence of who you are. We are what we love.

Now, did I lack for friends who appreciated my interest in musical comedy? No, I had those. When a song parody was needed “to the tune of” some Broadway standard that everyone could sing to, they knew I had a talent to amuse. And I felt they respected my peculiar interest in the musical, in the manner that people often respect someone who sticks to his guns against all odds. And that was certainly a whole lot better than being made a pariah for it. But how different it would have been for me, had I found even one or two boys or girls who actually shared my passion, instead of just acknowledging it. Some of the correspondents on the mailing list reported having been lucky enough to find others like them as children and teens, and it made me wonder how different it would have felt to have lived that alternative adolescence — and how much less used to being alone, and comfortable with it, I might have become.

Mind you, this was in the fifties and sixties, when the Broadway musical was much more a part of the mainstream culture than it is now.

Even more amazing than that I didn’t know a single other child or teen who was into the same music I was? It’s that once into adulthood and a creative advertising career that involved the production of music, some of it in a theater-influenced style, I encountered very few people who shared my passion for the music even then. In my three decades of adult life before the internet, I think I accumulated a grand total of four friends with whom I can have a conversation listing the ways in which Stephen Sondheim is a deity walking among us or how Carousel makes us cry from the first notes coming from the pit in act one.

A lifetime of accretion of knowledge on a subject that very few people know or care anything about can make one seem like a sufferer of Asperger syndrome when the knowledge comes pouring out, observes my friend Jim Dyer. On the other hand, when the specialized knowledge is interesting to people, when they can count on you to know the answer to a question they actually want to know the answer to, the line between “Asperger sufferer” and “fascinating expert” is a thin one.

Here are some words about Asperger syndrome found at Wikipedia:

…restricted and repetitive interests and behavior…intense preoccupation with a narrow subject, one-sided verbosity…a person with AS may engage in a one-sided, long-winded speech about a favorite topic, while misunderstanding or not recognizing the listener’s feelings or reactions, such as a need for privacy or haste to leave.

So yeah, maybe that’s what I’ve got.

All this is by way of preface to my recommending a new book by Steven Suskin on the great Broadway orchestrators. It’s one of those books on such an obviously important subject that one can’t believe it hasn’t been written yet, but nobody did it before Suskin. The sound of Broadway was at least as much the work of orchestrators like Robert Russell Bennett, Don Walker, Robert Ginzler, Sid Ramin and Irv Kostal as it was the work of composers, and now the orchestrators get their due. Suskin writes in satisfying detail not only about what they did and how they did it, but the stylistic traits that distinguished one orchestrator from another. Throughout the book, Suskin acknowledges, in asides, how very few people will be interested in his subject, and also, how very interested those few who are interested will be. And he’s right. For anyone who loves Broadway, being immersed in the book is like being in paradise. As thorough and complete as it is at 565 pages, when one is reading it one wishes it were twice as long as it is. If you are one of the small number of Americans who are into musicals, and you know who you are, you will find it fascinating, even if you have little or no knowledge of technique. (Suskin wrote the book for the non-technical reader; all you need is ears.)

But this whole isolated, socially-awkward, narrowly-shared passion, Asperger thing…it’s a much bigger subject than Broadway musicals. With me, it was that. With you, it’s something else. Something you’ve always been into that, unless you’re very lucky, practically no one else in your “real life” has ever been. Thank goodness for the internet, where we can find more people who share our interests than we may ever have found without it. But what about all those years before the internet? Somehow, and I don’t mean this lightly, we found a way to survive without surrendering what made us special, found a way to remain who we were. Let’s all give ourselves a pat on the back for that, let’s all give ourselves a hug. And hug, virtually, each other.

What causes someone to start a blog? Good question. Here’s an even better one: What causes someone to abandon a blog after making exactly one post? This is the question examined by the blog One Post Wonder, which harvests the work of bloggers who, apparently, were able to say it all, all at once.