Today we have not only the responsibility of administering the government of Ohio, but also of aiding to keep Ohio‘s war production on its farms and in its factories ever increasing and at its peak.
We also have the deep obligation to those hundreds of thousands of boys including those from Ohio who are fighting for us around the world.
We have the further duty of doing everything we can to aid the national government in the prosecution of the war and in the winning of the war at the earliest possible time. For the next two years these shall be our solemn and determined duty.
Howard Metzenbaum (Democrat), quoted on his election to the Ohio House of Representatives, Hamilton Journal News, Wednesday, January 10, 1943
On the same day that the above announcement was made in the Midwestern city of Hamilton, the local newspaper announced the following birth on the same page:
“Engel, Lieutenant Noel W. and Betty (Fortier), 122 Sherman Avenue, a boy, January 9, Fort Hamilton Hospital.”
To 32-year-old Noel Walter Engel and his wife, Elizabeth Marie (née Fortier, familiarly known as Betty and of the same age as her husband) was born a son, Noel Scott Engel. By his mother’s account, the boy weighed in at a healthy eight pounds and measured a strapping 24½ inches long. Born as the tide of World War Two had yet to definitively turn, the child would be a privileged offspring of the USA’s post-war economic boom and the explosion in popular culture that accompanied it.
His birthday fell one day after that of little Elvis Aaron Presley, then eight years old and living in poverty in Memphis, who would become a hero to the Engel boy in his teens. That same date, four years later, would also see the birth of one David Robert Haywood Stenton Jones in London, England – who would bear the distinction of being one of the few performing artists the adult Engel might regard as a peer.
In 1943, however, much darker spectacles were playing out on the world stage. While his naval lieutenant father faced up to the horrors of war in the Pacific, little Noel and Betty were housed in the grand-paternal family home at Sherman Avenue. For a while, mother and child would live with Noel Sr.’s parents and his big sister – little Noel’s Aunt LaNelle.
Grandpa Scott, from whom Noel Jr. took his middle name, ran a dry cleaning business from his home and had been an enthusiastic semi-pro musician, playing the fiddle on Cincinnati Radio. All paternal family members were descended from George Engel Sr., who first migrated to Cincinnati in the mid-19th century. Born in the German principality of Bavaria, George had been schooled in the strict Old Testament teaching of the Zion Lutheran Church – a faith still adhered to by some of his descendants 100 years on.
This was the family environment the little boy was briefly grounded in, before his mother took him off to live an often peripatetic existence. On February 23, 1945, the local Journal would read:
“Mrs. Grace Jarrett Engel… 122 Sherman Avenue, died at five o’clock Thursday afternoon in Fort Hamilton hospital. She had been ill one year…
“She leaves the widower, Scott Engel… one son, Lt. Noel W. Engel, serving with the navy in the South Pacific… a daughter-in-law, Betty Engel and grandson, Noel Scott Engel, both of California.”
By the time of her son’s second birthday, and before the US’s conflict with the Imperial Japanese Army was concluded, Betty would take the boy intermittently back to stay with her sister Celia (‘Aunt Seal’) on her native West Coast.
On Noel Sr.’s honourable discharge from the US Navy at the end of the war, adjustment to civilian life was compounded by difficulties in a marriage he’d hardly known. While Noel Jr. (or Scotty, as he increasingly came to be known) would be doted on by his mother, she could do little to stop him witnessing the trauma of a marital relationship in breakdown.
“I lived in a nice home – but things were always tense,” Scott would later tell one of the sixties Brit pop magazines that hung on his every word. “It was a very bad time for me. I held it against Dad – which I shouldn’t have… But it had been a violent situation between Mum and Dad.”
Added to this was the experience of watching his mother undergo an emotional and nervous breakdown. For the first time, young Scotty Engel would become aware of the fragile nature of human consciousness and the strange ways in which it responded to external pressure.
Noel Sr. and Betty capitulated to the emotional forces destroying their marriage in 1949, divorcing when Scotty was six years old. With Noel now working as a geologist for the Superior Oil Company, his career would take him to Midland, Texas. Betty and Scotty would stay for the time being at the previous family home, 2871 Krameria Avenue, Denver, Colorado, with the boy occasionally staying at Noel’s place on the wide open range. Beneath the benign shadow of the Rocky Mountains, Betty would pour all her hope and affection into Scotty, nurturing whatever talents she felt he might possess.
In her son’s twenties, as he gradually passed from burning star to cult artist, ‘Mrs Betty’ briefly became a cult figure herself to Scott’s Japanese fans. In an interview for Nipponese magazine Music Life, ‘Mimi’, as she was now known (an affectionate nom de plume bestowed by her son), was described as in her late fifties, elegant, “dressed in a beautiful blue velvet long skirt… the pearl dinner ring from Scott on her finger”.
In pedantically translated reminiscences of her son, she describes a “sensible” child who “often bit the nail of his thumb… Compared to others, he was quiet, but he was a vigorous and cheerful boy who moved around very much… He used to play with his friends in sand and being a cowboy and so on.”
Inspired by Roy Rogers and his faithful horse Trigger, at the Saturday movie matinees, seven-year-old Scotty was thrown from his steed the first time he tried horse riding when visiting his father’s Texas home. According to Scott, he was knocked spark out for a few moments. Such was Betty’s faith in her son’s physical robustness that she picked him up, dusted him off and put him straight back on the mount.
The Engels were by tradition a sporting family. Noel Sr. had been known as ‘Tubby’ or ‘Tub’ at Hamilton High School, but the school’s 1928 Weekly Review photo shows not a fat boy but a solid-looking kid with a pomaded hair parting and thick lips. He was a stalwart of the school’s football team and pitched in with baseball too, while Grandpa Scott served as commissioner of the Butler County Merchants Softball League up to the time of his death, in his mid-eighties.
As a schoolboy, young Scotty would engage in running, athletics, even boxing training – whatever the assumptions about his artistic, introspective nature, by all accounts the Engel boy learned how to land a punch. For all his good health and self-reliance, however, according to Betty, childhood was not without its hazards:
“When he was five years old, he played with matches with his friends in the neighbourhood. And then the fire began to burn the curtains of his bedroom. I took him out through the window at once! He almost got burnt!
“I remember he always came home having small hurts but he had no big hurts,” she was quaintly misquoted, evoking a cover version from Scott’s first solo album. Mrs Betty describes an active child who (at least then) “wasn’t nervous at all”:
“He was healthy as he didn’t catch a cold… He had only caught a scarlatina that children catch when he was seven years old. And he almost died because of having been very feverish.”
As scarlatina is the less serious manifestation of the illness, it’s possible that the Japanese translator meant a more dangerous scarlet fever. In any case, his mother describes a healthy childhood suddenly invaded by delirium and fever dream. This may have been the start of the “very bad dreams” that Scott acknowledges suffering from all of his life. Or perhaps the oneiric nightmare side of his existence had already begun, initiated by the unpredictable adult world with all of its conflicts and mood swings.
Modern classical/Broadway composer Leonard Bernstein characterised the post-WW2 era as ‘The Age Of Anxiety’. This was the cultural landscape in which Scott Engel spent his formative years; it would permeate his life and work throughout his adult career.
But not all dreams were the stuff of cold sweat. Scotty, far from friendless but too self-absorbed to need much human company, lived out some of his dreams on the screen, moving along from the corny ‘horse operas’ that were his introduction to cinema.
“I used to watch the movie The Rocking Horse Winner, an English film, and I was just fascinated,” he later recalled as an adult. “I must have been very young when I had seen this, and it had such a dream-like quality that the American things didn’t have for me.” An expressionistic 1950 adaptation of a D.H. Lawrence story about a clairvoyant little boy, its unsettling elements are subtly cloaked in shadow and a Mussorgsky-esque orchestral score.
In the Music Life interview, any momentary glimpse of fractured consciousness was passed over in favour of the aspects the interviewer had come to talk to Betty about:
When did he begin to be interested in music?
“Well, when he was seven months old, he stopped crying to hear music. He was 11 years old when he studied music really.”
Had he a favourite singer?
“Yes, he favoured Bing Crosby so much, as he sang his songs instantly…”
Do you think that he inherits Crosby‘s spirit now?
“I think that he was impressed by his songs, being a ballad singer. He says that he likes Crosby best still.”
In the early fifties, when Scott was a young boy, the baritone-voiced Bing, idol of the thirties/forties, was still the USA’s crooner laureate, its nabob of ba-ba-ba-ba-boom. Though some of the bobbysoxer idols he influenced were on the way up (particularly the more worldly Frank Sinatra, who would revive his stalled career with the Nelson Riddle-orchestrated In The Wee Small Hours in 1955), the almost catatonically laid-back Crosby remained America’s biggest seller with his perennial ‘White Christmas’.
When did Scott sing in public for the first time?
“When he was about four years old, he appeared at a lot of charity shows. At that time he seemed to get a lot of pleasure from songs which he had first been able to sing.”
According to ‘Mrs Betty’, a small-time neighbourhood impresario picked up on the boy’s nascent talent via his schoolmates, getting him to perform regularly in local charity shows. The young trouper took to it so naturally that he would frequently volunteer himself for performances, whether his mother accompanied him or not.
In 1951, The Denver Post paid tribute to this precocious talent with a three-column article on page one:
“He has the volume of Mario Lanza, the stage personality and showmanship of the late Al Jolson, and a deep, vibrating, baritone-bass voice that’s all his own.
“That’s a description of Scotty who is leaving Denver to appear on several television shows in Los Angeles.”
An eight year old with the volume of a light opera-singing tenor; with the charisma of a much-loved ragtime jazz singer – though memories of Al Jolson singing ‘Sonny Boy’ in blackface may today seem a strange anachronism. (Jolson, who died at the beginning of the fifties, would return to surrealistic effect in the lyric ‘Jolson And Jones’ – then a lifetime of nightmares away.)
“The mite of a boy with the mighty voice brings the low notes from his small chest like a professional. It’s almost weird to watch him; you keep looking for a hidden photograph.
“Scotty, who says he is not sure he wants to be a singer when he grows up, is also scheduled for an audition with Bing Crosby.
“The lad, who has been appearing on special programs and U.S.O. [United Service Organizations] shows at service camps since the age of two, never has had a voice lesson.
“According to his parents, Scott has had dancing lessons but no vocal instruction outside the family. His heavy voice just happened.”
No record exists of how the audition with Crosby went – or indeed, if it ever took place. By the middle of the fifties, Betty and Scotty would decamp to New York City, seemingly to pursue his talents further.
“I asked him about his year or two on Broadway, in a Rodgers and Hammerstein play when he was 13, and he basically just said, ‘I really don’t remember anything about that,’” laughs Stephen Kijak, the documentary filmmaker who created the nearest thing to a Walker autobiography in existence. “Okay, moving on…”
The story goes that Scott picked up his Broadway role at random, when attending an audition with a Puerto Rican friend. According to a 1957 article in American Fan Club Magazine, these two ‘lost years’ of the boy’s life did not occur quite so casually. Having already appeared in an amateur Texas production entitled Ten Men In A Barroom, the nascent trouper’s New York stage debut was in a production of Plain And Fancy – an almost forgotten 1955 show described as “the best Rodgers and Hammerstein musical not written by Rodgers and Hammerstein”.
This in turn led to a singing supporting role in the real deal, a musical entitled Pipe Dream, which ran from November 1955 to June 1956 at the Shubert Theatre on Broadway. A sanitised version of the sequel to John Steinbeck’s novella Cannery Row, it skirted around its female lead’s profession as a whore, much in the way that the 1962 film of Breakfast At Tiffany’s would with its Audrey Hepburn character. It was also Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s only commercial flop.
Although Betty seems to have received regular alimony from Noel Sr., their living expenses could still be stretched to the hilt. Scott’s stint on Broadway allowed him to become the family breadwinner for the first time in his young life. It also acted as a prelude to his participation in a TV talent contest held at Madison Square Garden, entitled Star Time, and his precocious debut as a recording artist.
Scotty Engel would cut his first single disc – ‘When Is A Boy A Man?’ / ‘Steady As A Rock’ – for the RKO Unique label in late 1956, issued the following year. The A-side is a show tunelike number which might have originated from any musical or TV variety show of its era. What is remarkable about it is the perfectly pitched bellow erupting from the chest of its 13-year-old vocalist (laying down a challenge to the world: “Take me if you can. I’m a man! I’m a man!”). It seemed you could take the boy off Broadway, but traces of the greasepaint and the roaring crowd would remain.
“That wasn’t anything serious,” a much older Scott protested from a 21st century viewpoint, decades down the line. “A lot of my friends sang at school and stuff. Someone would hear us singing and pick certain guys and say, ‘Oh, would you like to make a record?’ or whatever.”
His dismissive attitude extends to how much ‘Scotty Engel’ material would later see unauthorised release, including songs intended only as demonstration copies. But it also fails to acknowledge that, just for a brief period, young Scotty’s search for stardom would be pushed as far as it would go.
As ‘Mrs Betty’ would later tell Japanese fans, Scott had cut his first disc with surprising ease and a seemingly total lack of nerves. “As it was pointed out that his voice was good, I had confidence in his voice, a little. But I thought that being a professional singer depended on his luck and that he might face a lot of difficulties. I didn’t want him to be a professional singer…”
By the time of Scott’s 15th birthday, he and his mother would return permanently (at least in her case) to the West Coast to be close to her family again. For all their drifting around, their surroundings were not nothing short of salubrious.
“Scott lived with his mother, Betty, in a house that looked like a mock castle on Scenic Drive in Hollywood,” testifies Gary Leeds, the fellow Californian who would go on to play a major role in Engel’s life. “It was very big and contained about 12 apartments. The ‘chateau’ was painted a light grey and had a dark-grey roof, trimmed in white. Most of the flats had turrets, which is something you don’t normally see in LA, except in the movies, so the building had a bit of Hollywood magic. You could see the big white Hollywood sign up in the hills from Scott’s bedroom window…”
As a student at Hollywood High School, the boy’s musical interests and studies would expand far beyond Tin Pan Alley. For a while, however, he would perform demonstration discs – demos, which would earn him a few dollars for performing the untested new works of commercial songwriters, with an eye toward getting a chart act to perform them.
Scott Engel’s own second disc was released in 1958 – ‘The Livin’ End’, by the new (and short-lived) songwriting team of composer Henry Mancini, who would earn fame by creating movie/TV soundtrack music including the Pink Panther theme, and lyricist Rod McKuen – who would find fame in the sixties as the self-styled ‘most popular poet in the world’.1 The song was premiered on the TV show hosted by mainstream pop crooner Eddie Fisher and notable solely for being its young singer’s first foray into rock’n’roll (“Do you wanna go boppin’? Do you wanna go rockin’?”) – albeit closer to Bill Haley than Little Richard. The B-side, ‘Good For Nothin’, exhibited similar vocal confidence as the young kid got his vocals around a tongue-tying bopper.
This was the era that passes for Scott’s rock’n’roll years – roll over Bing Crosby, and tell Sinatra the news. For a brief period, he would be intoxicated by the prowess and excitement of Elvis Presley, Johnny Ace and the doo-wop genre.2
“Particularly Elvis. Like a lot of kids in the fifties I was just blown away by those Sun recordings and the whole Elvis thing at the time.” That combination of operatic bellow, shit-kicker inflexions and southern bubba charisma would leave its mark.
In later years, Scott would remember his teenage debutant era as mainly a period of recording demo discs of songs later recorded by tame Middle American soft-rock crooners like Paul Anka. The surviving artefacts tell a wider story of a boy who, for a period at least, sought bona fide stardom, playing family-friendly engagements at Coney Island in New York and the Honolulu Civic Auditorium in Hawaii.
In late September 1958, a Honolulu newspaper ran the following story:
“There he is,” the teen-age misses screeched, as 15-year-old Scott Engel stepped off the United States Overseas Airlines plane.
“He’s so handsome.”
The five-foot seven-inch 121-pound singer said he was “very impressed with the wonderful reception”.
Kisses were planted on Scott’s cheek as female fans presented him with leis.
Just who is Scott Engel? He’s a recording star for Hi-Fi Records (the Orbit label), a regular on Eddie Fisher’s television show, and a swingin’ performer on stage…
Scott plays the guitar, “but I don’t use it in my act… I don’t think I play it well enough.
“I’ve always wanted to become a singer,” he said. “And I guess I made it.
“I’m not an expert student at school but I get by all right. Being in the business doesn’t interfere too much. I often receive stuff through the mail, and I send them back.”
Does the blue-eyed, dark-blond, curly-haired youngster go steady?
“No.
“As far as my favourite performers go, I’ve got to classify them into three groups: For ‘rock’ Presley is king, he’s my favourite; Steve Lawrence [male half of the schmaltzy Steve & Eydie duo] is great… other than ‘rock’ … For girl singers, Peggy Lee’s my favourite.”
He was dressed in Ivy League trousers, a flashing green sports shirt, a tan sweater, and tan loafers. “I don’t like to dress up… unless there’s a show.”
The article was accompanied by a photo of young Scotty with a brushed-back, James Dean-style DA hairdo, and an intense, unsmiling gaze. It seemed to have been reproduced from his Ohio family’s photo album, as it carried the handwritten dedication “To Grandpa, love Scott.”
Another surviving historical artefact is a fan club letter on headed paper, featuring a screen print of young Scotty posing with his eyes averted right, a lightly greased quiff and dogtooth box jacket.
“This is dated November ‘58, the very first Scott Engel fan club,” explains Arnie Potts, English arch-fan of The Walker Brothers and collector of Walker ephemera. “He would have been about 14 [sic – 15] at the time. This [membership card] was sent out signed by Scott, and by the look of the type I think it was actually typed by Scott. Sent out to one of his fan club members, Elaine [Igarashi] in Honolulu”:
Nov. 28, 1958
Dear Elaine
Please forgive me for not answering your nice letter written at the fan club meeting Sept. 27. All I can say is that I am terribly sorry, but have been so busy. I am staying out of school this week to catch up with the mail, as I like to answer them myself.
Thanks for liking my performance, you kids were a great audience, and I loved doing the show. I’ll never forget it either, and hope I can get back again real soon, only stay a little longer.
You kids have been really wonderful, putting my records upon the top I can never thank you enough. I had hoped to have a new record out by now, but we are having trouble finding the right songs.
I also want to thank you for joining my fan club, Geri and Gwyne are doing a great job. I owe both of them so much, plus the rest of you kids. Maybe someday I can show my appreciation. I think of you kids lots, and how wonderful you were to me.
Thanks too for writing, and all the good wishes and compliments that were in your letter. Please forgive me for not answering sooner.
Sincerely,
Scott
SCOTT ENGEL
c/o ORBIT Records
7803 Sunset Blvd.
Hollywood 48, Calif.
In fact, Scott had recently issued two more songs on 78/45rpm discs: ‘Charley Bop’ demonstrated how quickly rock’n’roll rhythms could be adapted into Tin Pan Alley saccharine, while ‘All I Do Is Dream Of You’ is an old-fashioned show tune by lyricist Arthur Freed. Around the time of the week-long Honolulu residence, Scott also released ‘Paper Doll’ and ‘Blue Bell’. The latter was the type of would-be show tune that showed up on US variety shows or BBC Home Service radio’s Two-Way Family Favourites. (“On my way to Albuquerque / I’ll be feelin’ mighty perky!”)
The A-side is more interesting, if only because of its origins. An upbeat but self-pitying ballad about desiring a paper doll, instead of a real woman, so that those “flirty, flirty guys with their flirty, flirty eyes will have to flirt with dollies that are real”,3 it sold up to six million copies in versions by the Mills Brothers and a young Sinatra from 1942-44. “What has turned it into a bonanza,” claimed Billboard, “is the affection and loyalty displayed for the song by boys in uniform during World War Two.” But in June 1936, composer Johnny Black left an estate valued at $100. A lifelong resident of Hamilton, Ohio, he died in its Mercy Hospital (not too far from Grandpa Scott’s place on Sherman Avenue) after a fight with customers in his club over 25 cents in change.
In the celebrated documentary film, Scott Walker: 30 Century Man, Arnie Potts gives further details of his collection onscreen: “That’s a 10-inch acetate. Basically, [Scott] started doing demos when he was about 13 or 14 years old, I think he was pushed along by his mother.”
Titles on the ‘reference record’ by ‘Scott Engle’ (sic) include ‘Are These Really Mine?’, ‘Crazy In Love With You’, ‘Oh What It Seemed To Be’, ‘Your Eyes’ and ‘Misery’. Further unreleased acetates shown to this writer include ‘Paradise Cove’, ‘Everybody But Me’, ‘When I Kiss You Goodnite’, ‘Too Young To Know’, ‘Take This Love’, ‘Till You Return’ and ‘When You See Her’. By far the most impressive of a largely corny bunch is ‘Sing Boy Sing’ – Scott’s demo rendition of another rhythmic tune co-written by the up-and-coming Rod McKuen. The released hit version would be by its co-composer, young singer Tommy Sands, but it lacks the demonstrative howl of Scotty Engel at this age. Having employed his baritone like a falsetto in reverse, Scott’s vocal style seems to have acquired more depth after he hit puberty – his now broken voice has an almost femininely husky quality, not too far from his favourite jazz singer of the time, Peggy Lee (of ‘Fever’ fame).4
Despite the boy’s brooding blond good looks (inheriting his father’s Nordic tones and his mother’s statuesque but slender frame), he was reticent as to how he might actually respond to the love objects he sang about on his 78s and 45s. “He was very negative and was shy,” admitted Betty to the Japanese magazine. “The time that I felt Scott had found someone was very late and when he was 17 years old. She lived in Bakersville [CA] and was very charming with blonde hair. Since she married, we have not seen her at all, but I heard that she married someone about two years ago.”5
And didn’t he have a steady girlfriend till then?
“[with a little prodding] Yes, he had. In America it is a custom to have a steady girlfriend when one goes to junior high school. When he was 18 years old he was introduced to Miss Janet when she lived in New York. But they were finished before I knew.”
It seems that by the ages of 16/17, and the passing of the fifties into the early sixties, the teenage boy had wearied of the path to stardom – if not forsaken it altogether. In a subsequent mid-decade interview for England’s New Musical Express, he was keener to present himself as an alienated kid on the verge of juvenile delinquency. One might have thought Scott never harboured any showbiz brat aspirations at all.
“School bored me,” he complained, “they didn’t make it interesting and it wasn’t. Nothing they were talking about seemed important to me then and anyway I was into more important things like getting into trouble!”
This hardly sounds like the sensitive soul whose vocal cords would melt hearts in his newly adopted country. But the interviewee was warming to his theme – rebellion without a cause.
“I was expelled from about three or four schools because I was such a nuisance. I was the guy who’d get a group around him and looked for trouble. We’d get up to all sorts of things. I was a horrible son… I disliked school and the stupidity of having to sit in classes, and I suppose having a gang was a way of forgetting what a drag everything was. It was a form of rebellion, though I wasn’t rebelling against my home, just school.”
In case ‘having a gang’ carries any modern-day connotations of random violence and meaningless murder, we should let Scott mitigate in his own favour: “I did join in on most school activities. I always liked music and art and sometimes my drawings would be exhibited to others.”
While admitting to colour blindness, the intellectually curious but non-academic high school kid was a student of both classical and contemporary fine art, from the devotional painters of Renaissance Europe to Picasso’s cubist period and beyond.
Outside the classroom and the family home, however, life seemed to be a situationist prankster’s game of chicken.
“Somehow I found a bunch of guys who felt like me so we had something in common. We… got a car and used to go around at nights finding trouble.
“We didn’t want to hurt people – just the authorities. Anything that was owned by the authorities – lampposts, seats, anything – we’d damage. But you had to be quick. Part of being in a gang was having the knack of talking your way out of a tight spot if the police caught you…
“We got caught a couple of times and were prosecuted, but I always managed to avoid detention homes or being put on probation. In the States the police are different from [in the UK], and if they catch you, you can usually talk your way out. Also you’ve got to do something really bad before they send you to a detention home.6
“I must have been the worst son ever and my mother had real worries with me. I was horrible, I’d be out late and she wouldn’t know where I was, and it was terrible for her when I got into trouble.7
“One of our favourite tricks we got up to in the dead of night. In Beverly Hills the fashion then was to have your beautiful home built at the top of a hill cliff and at the bottom of the garden there would be an outhouse. (That’s what you call an outside toilet.)
“When everyone was asleep and the streets weren’t busy, we’d go up to Beverly Hills and push the outhouses over the edge of the cliffs. Some of them were heavy but… we pushed like mad and the thrill of seeing it going over was really great.”
As the sixties drew on and the violence endemic in American culture erupted, often irrationally and without warning, Scott and his LA buddies’ antics would fade into the memory of a more innocent era. By the end of that psychotic decade, ‘pranks’ could equate with slaughtering an entire houseful of people in the Hollywood Hills. In contrast, Scott’s own ‘creative destruction’ didn’t extend further than purportedly blowing up a telephone booth with cherry bombs smuggled over the Mexican border. Similar pyrotechnics in a toilet cubicle got him suspended for several weeks, but it was the use of ‘profane language’ in the street that got him expelled from his last public (non-fee paying) school – resulting in Betty paying for his stint at Hollywood High.
Although his attendance could be erratic (as alluded to in the letter to young fan Elaine), Hollywood High’s more creative environment eased some of the tedium he’d previously felt in one interchangeable school after another. It was here that he joined the California Youth Orchestra, learning to play the double bass. Already basically competent on the guitar, he would soon combine his two chosen instruments to become a bass guitarist. Scott also found a focus for his musical interests far removed from the Americana of the era, in the florid themes of Mozart and busy sonatas of Haydn.
Modern jazz too offered new avenues of exploration. He started attending the Lighthouse Café underage on Hermosa Beach, a showcase for West Coast jazz since the early forties. It was here he’d listen to the fluid guitar stylings of Barney Kessel, played live. Having switched his own instrumental allegiance from guitar to bass, Scott took occasional lessons with jazz bassist Marty Budwood. It epitomised the ‘cool jazz’ ethos of LA, a world away from the frenetic storms brewing in New York as John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman took improvisation further and further out. It was also light years away from mainstream pop – which was surely no longer where it was at (daddy-o).
At age 16, however, the sometime demo singer was still issuing single releases. In 1959, grown-up smoocher ‘The Golden Rule Of Love’ might have made a passable last dance for younger members at a rotary club. More rock’n’roll-inflected were ‘Comin’ Home’/’I Don’t Wanna Know’ – both sides of the disc written by original rockabilly Johnny Burnette. Cheesy backing vocals on the A-side dulled its edge, though the flip boasted authentic-sounding hillbilly guitar. ‘Take This Love’/’Till You Return’ were more schmaltz, underlined by horribly obtrusive backing vocals.
“There’s a great story about Scott,” be-quiffed English singer/guitarist Richard Hawley testified much later. “I worked with him… I think it was [at] Metropolis [studios in west London], and there was a little fifties specialist rock’n’roll shop a couple of doors down. I cheekily nipped in there when we should have been doing a session and I bought loads of rock’n’roll stuff, like an Eddie Cochran album. Scott was really interested in these records, ‘cos it was stuff that he grew up with, and he pulled the Eddie Cochran one out and he said, ‘Shake my hand.’ I shook his hand and he said, ‘When I was 16 I met Eddie Cochran, so you’re shaking Eddie Cochran’s hand through me.’ That was a bit of a moment.”
The late, lamented Eddie, like the young Scott, was recording for Liberty Records at the time. But Scott was still then a protégé of mainstream pop singer Eddie Fisher, cropping up on Fisher’s TV series several times from 1957-59. “I sang at a luncheon in Palm Springs and Eddie Fisher was there,” he later admitted, “and he kind of adopted me. He took me on a tour of 15, 16 TV shows with him, but then he got burned…”
In 1959, the scandal of Fisher’s affair with a friend of his actress wife Debbie Reynolds (‘America’s sweetheart’), a sultry brunette named Elizabeth Taylor, put the skids on his career. The TV show was dropped; Eddie could do little for young Scott, being too preoccupied with saving himself. The young man’s pop-music career seemed stuck in a deep, crackling groove.
The boy initially took some time out to think, indicating to his mother that he might give up singing altogether and enter business school. As the new decade beckoned, however, Scott Engel took the more creative step of enrolling at California’s Chouinard Art Institute as a trainee commercial artist, much to Betty’s relief. The college’s co-director and chief patron was Walt Disney, whose suburban utopia in Burbank mirrored the anodyne fantasy of Disneyland as a living environment for the future.
It could have been a major step toward corporate conformity for the young man. “I liked it at the time,” he’d admit. “There seemed to be nothing for me in music, and I’d felt sure there was, but nothing was clear to me.” As a newly diligent student, Scott was even given some design assignments by Uncle Walt himself.
But something had to give. As a self-professed cynic who’d lived a largely independent life in several major American cities by his mid-teens, the boy was feeling more worldly (and at the same time more out of place) than his tender age gave him a right to be. His yearning for an indefinable freedom found expression in the books and movies of the age – or at least in its art cinema and hip lit.
“I used to go to these art cinemas on Wishire Boulevard and watch Bergman or Fellini or Bresson,” he later recalled. “It was like it was in my blood, y’know? … I had an enormous desire for something that was not American, for something that nobody in my environment really understood.”
But one latter-day offshoot of US culture did connect. Even before the coming of the hippie era, ‘drop out and hit the road’ was becoming something of a cliché. If the idea of cruising America’s endless highways and byways retains a romantic feel even to this day, it’s due at least in part to Jack Kerouac’s On The Road – which reads largely as a mythologisation of the author and his beat generation buddies like Burroughs and Ginsberg.
(While Scott picked up on the 1957 novel, like many young students of the time, he reserved his greatest admiration for a writer who was not of the beat generation but served to inspire it. As a kind of godfather figure to the movement, Henry Miller’s prose does not suffer from Kerouac’s attempts to replicate jazz riffs in print. His matter-of-factness about sex exudes poeticism as well as squalor – something the older Scott would later detect in a certain Belgian songwriter.)
So it was that, before he reached his 17th birthday, Scott Engel decided to ‘see America’ by hitchhiking all the way back to the East Coast alone. While he later spoke of how he’d blown a $2,000 loan from his dad (who he rarely saw at this stage) on a car, his road trip seems to have been facilitated by sticking out his thumb and doing moonlight flits before his motel bill was due. Noel Sr. may have joked to the Hamilton High School Review in 1928, when asked about his ‘Predetermined Predicament (20 years hence)’, that he’d become a ‘hoboe’ (sounding more like a woodwind instrument than a freight train rider). But in 1959 he was following the American corporate dream. It was his son who’d become a bum – however temporarily.
On coming to stardom in the UK, Scott would later paint his experience as a sordid view of the USA’s underbelly – without describing it in detail, he’d darkly allude to how he was exposed to people and situations that only worsened the cynicism which made many people take against him. At best, the drifting characters he’d met along the way might turn up, disguised, in some later song lyric.
But by the time he briefly became a television personality, in the late sixties, he was taking an altogether more sentimental view:
“I came from the beatnik era in America,” he liltingly told the audience of his TV show, Scott. “They labelled it the beatnik era anyway. I read Jack Kerouac and dug progressive jazz and got kicked out of schools and hitchhiked across America, the whole bit you see. Met a lot of wonderful people, the relationships were ephemeral but some of the best I’ve ever known, and this is a song about it.”
(The song is ‘It’s Raining Today’, from Scott’s third solo album.)
Scott Engel never specifically indicated how long this period lasted. His art studies would soon resume – and, perhaps most incongruous of all, the early sixties would see further detours down Tin Pan Alley. ‘Anything Will Do’ was issued in 1961 on the Liberty label; Scott’s voice may have matured, but the material is just as cheesy (a dance number referencing contemporary crazes like the Twist – “Wah-ooh! Wah-ooh!”).
In 1962, the final recordings by a teenage Scott Engel comprised four tracks on an EP – though its release would be deferred for four years, until the vocalist had achieved some renown all the way across the Atlantic. Standing out from the other slices of American cheese, lead track ‘I Broke My Own Heart’ is a swinging aw-shucks number, complete with tinkling barroom piano and brush drums. ‘What Do You Say?’ is a country-tinged ballad of regret which perhaps comes closest to the early part of Scott’s professional singing career. For all his exploration of other forms of music, this track testifies to his growing admiration of Jack Jones – a crooner with perfect pitch and vocal control who took the genre to a new technical level.8
And then it was over. Or, if we shift our perspective, it was just beginning.
“It happened for so many people around the same time,” reflects Scott of his early years, “when Elvis appeared, of course, and then everybody thought yes, I’d like to do this, because he inspired everybody. So it didn’t really start happening for me till I started joining bands, and I was in a lot of bands – blues bands and all kinds of bands, just as a player.”
Scott Engel the student had resumed his art studies. Scott Engel the musician was now strictly a jobbing bassist. For all his dismissal of his earliest recordings, it seems that by then he’d experienced a taste of stardom on a micro-scale – and found it wanting.
1 No one ever talked their way through a lyric like McKuen. In the sixties, he would collide again with Scott’s personal orbit by becoming the first lyricist to translate a chansonnier named Jacques Brel into English. At this stage, however, both men’s European digressions seemed like a lifetime away – and half a world away, for Scott at least.
2 “The first record I ever bought was Frankie Lymon’s ‘Why Do Fools Fall In Love?’” It can be safely assumed that records by the older crooners that young Scott learned his technique from were supplied by Betty.
3 Roxy Music’s ‘In Every Dream Home A Heartache’ this is not.
4 In 1968, Scott would take out an injunction against Ember Records who planned to release a compilation of early demo and single cuts under the title Scott Walker – including ‘Too Young’, a gruesome teen ballad previously a hit for DJ Jimmy Young in the UK and later for Donny Osmond, and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘Sunday’, from their musical Flower Drum Song. The offence was avoided by adding Looking Back With… to the album title.
5 This interview took place in the late sixties.
6 What Scott said at the time (1966) was contrary to the prevailing wisdom. While an old-fashioned ‘clip round the ear’ by British bobbies might more realistically translate as a kick in the balls, it was less harsh than being sent to one of the USA’s scarier reformatories – which were often hunting grounds for predatory gang members.
7 “Because… we moved from place to place, he was not used to school,” Betty later told the Japanese fans. “We don’t say he was a good student. But I am to blame. It made him negative.”
Is it the reason he converted to music?
“I think so. From the first he liked music. But he had much time to play the guitar alone, I think he dreamed of being a singer.”
8 If Sinatra sang songs for swinging lovers, it can be argued that Jones produced hi-fi music for hip insurance salesmen.