IN EARLY 1967 Louis Armstrong began a bizarre, if at times fruitful, association with Brunswick Records, a label then specializing in such soul and rhythm-and-blues artists as Jackie Wilson, Isaac Hayes, and LaVern Baker. In 1966, producer Carl Davis became the label’s main A&R man, developing a Motown-like sound for its records.1 How Armstrong ended up at Brunswick, which did not record much jazz, is unknown. One thing, however, is certain: Joe Glaser was always looking for a hit record, and Brunswick did produce hits. So it was that Armstrong’s first Brunswick recording was a strange cover of “Daydream,” a huge hit by the Lovin’ Spoonful. Saddled with a sad, half-rock/half-soul arrangement, Armstrong gave as much as he could on the occasion—exuberant vocals and brief, relaxed trumpet playing—but overall, the record was a dud. As he had since 1929, Armstrong was still recording popular songs of the day, but with less than inspiring material it was becoming harder to summon the old magic.
A pall was cast over the early months of 1967. To be sure, the All Stars continued to tour nonstop, but Armstrong found himself mourning the recent deaths of past collaborators such as clarinetist Edmond Hall and pianist Herman Chittison, as well as the passing of one of his greatest disciples, cornetist Muggsy Spanier. In an April 10 letter to Karlheinz Drechsel, Armstrong mused: “Well—God Bless All of them. We never know when our time will come to go. As for myself—I have had a pretty nice life. So—I am ready to go any time the ‘Man up above’ (The Lord) will call me. ‘Yessir.’ ”2
Four days later, Armstrong was dealt another blow when his clarinetist, Buster Bailey, died of a heart attack. The band had just returned from a stint in Las Vegas and was enjoying a rare two-week vacation when Bailey suddenly died in his New York home at age sixty-four. “Buster Bailey, when he finally got the call, was very happy and he fit beautifully, both personally and musically,” Dan Morgenstern recalls. “But he was not up to it anymore. He had not worked at that pace, I think, since he left Fletcher Henderson or John Kirby and even then. So he was a victim of that. I mean, he just couldn’t do it.”3
Five days after Bailey’s passing, Red Allen, a New Orleans trumpet master who had performed for years in Armstrong’s big band, passed away at age sixty. “The same time we went to Buster’s funeral, Red Allen died,” Buddy Catlett remembers. “That was like a double mourning. We were going to the church and got the news that Red Allen passed on.” Asked if Armstrong took these deaths hard, Catlett says, “I think he was more or less used to death in the musical circle he traveled in. And that’s the only way I can look at it because I never heard him talking about it at all.”4
Armstrong quickly replaced Bailey on clarinet with Johnny Mince—a CBS studio musician and veteran of bands led by, among others, Tommy Dorsey and Bob Crosby—and was soon on the road again. But a few weeks later, Armstrong contracted bronchopneumonia. The iron man of yore might have shrugged it off, but now Armstrong played it safe, cancelling all bookings from late April to mid-June. (Though this didn’t stop him from luring Tyree Glenn into an impromptu rehearsal of “That’s My Desire” during one of the trombonist’s visits!)5 The respite was salubrious, and Armstrong returned to performing a reenergized man. On June 22, he appeared on The Tonight Show, his trumpet playing stronger than it had been in quite some time, surpassing any of his 1966 studio recordings. On “Hello, Dolly!” he soloed well, in complete command, and he even took a spot on “Mame,” a song that usually featured no trumpet playing. Clearly, for now at least, Armstrong was ready to blow and eager to show it.
When Armstrong had been recuperating, clarinetist Mince returned to being a studio musician, perhaps daunted by the wearying prospect of the constant touring that may have contributed to Bailey’s and Kyle’s premature deaths. While the All Stars clarinet position had been commanded by many prestigious musicians, Armstrong’s new man was relatively unheralded: thirty-six-year-old Joe Muranyi. Born of Hungarian descent in 1928, Muranyi studied with pianist Lennie Tristano for three years and had performed with such great trumpeters as Max Kaminsky, Jimmy McPartland, and Yank Lawson. A tall, skinny white man with a mustache and glasses, Muranyi looked more like an accountant than a jazz musician. In fact, he remembered Armstrong once introducing him by saying, “How about a hand for Joe Muranyi. Come on, Joe. He’s going to play a clarinet solo for you—although he does look like a college professor!”6
Muranyi was playing with the Village Stompers, another group booked by Glaser, when he got the call to join Armstrong. Glaser told him, “You’re on, if Louie approves.” “So the first rehearsal, I was more than a little nervous,” Muranyi remembers. “I mean, how the fuck can I play with Louis Armstrong? But then he recognized me, he had heard me play. I don’t know if he knew my name, it was one of those things. But the rehearsal went well.”7 Muranyi joined the band and quickly got along well with its other members, especially with Armstrong: “I was the only one in the band that knew all the records and the history and stuff.”
On one of Muranyi’s first nights as an All Star, Armstrong asked him, “How the fuck do you pronounce your name?” Muranyi responded: “ ‘Muranyi, like [blues singer] Ma Rainey.’ Oh, he loved that! He broke up laughing, he never forgot it. A lot of cats in the business call me ‘Hey, Ma Rainey!’ ” Muranyi felt that Armstrong admired his comportment offstage as much as his clarinet playing. “The thing was, I wasn’t a fall-down drunk or anything and I had a couple of young kids and I’m a college graduate … I think it meant something to him that I had the wife and the two kids and I wasn’t coming from the—I don’t know what kind of milieu, a drug-addict milieu or whatever.”8 Armstrong was loath to tolerate offstage carousing if it interfered with music making onstage.
According to Muranyi, Armstrong “did not like cats being drunk or carrying on in the band. [Others say] ‘Oh, he smokes pot.’ But [performing] was very serious to him. Take care of business. And the line I heard him yelling at (I think) Buddy or somebody that was drunk and he says, ‘Don’t fuck with my hustle.’ Which is great. But in a way, the thing is, he thought what he did was a hustle. It was just an expression, but it was like street smart. He certainly was street smart.” About Armstrong’s persona, Muranyi says, “He could be, you know—he had good sides, bad sides, he wasn’t always an angel, but … He was the greatest star I’ve encountered because he really was a star but he didn’t act like one. He was very real. There wasn’t a phony bone in his body. And he liked people. And he liked poor people. And he liked crippled people and fat ladies. He loved the humanity aspect. And he was just wonderful, I can’t tell you.”9
Armstrong was obviously feeling good at the time of Muranyi’s arrival, as evidenced by seven songs from a concert at Ravinia Park in Highland Park, Illinois, on June 30, 1967. Armstrong’s second wife, Lil Hardin, was in the audience, as might have been a few other associates from his early Chicago days, and the trumpeter responded by blowing with tremendous force, especially on “St. James Infirmary.” Soon after, journalist Larry King managed to spend an evening with Armstrong. His account of the night appeared in Harper’s and is one of the finest portraits of Armstrong to ever appear in a magazine.
King spent one night interviewing Louis, drinking and smoking and singing “That’s My Desire” together with the maestro. The most captivating aspect of King’s piece concerned race, including a quote from Civil Rights activist Julius Hobson on Armstrong. “He’s a good, happy black boy. He hasn’t played to a black audience in ten years. I’m glad I saw him though, but I wouldn’t come here if I had to pay. He’s an interesting example of the black man’s psychology but if he had took this band—two whites, three Negroes, a Filipino—down on U Street it would start a riot.” King added, “Clearly Armstrong, who remembers that not long ago everyone cheered him for having an integrated band, is genuinely puzzled by such comments.”
Armstrong insisted to King that he had been a racial pioneer:
When I was coming along, a black man had hell. On the road he couldn’t find no decent place to eat, sleep, or use the toilet—service-station cats see a bus of colored bandsmen drive up and they would sprint to lock their restroom doors. White places wouldn’t let you in and the black places all run-down and funky because there wasn’t any money behind ’em. We Negro entertainers back then tried to stay in private homes—where at least we wouldn’t have to fight bedbugs for sleep and cockroaches for breakfast. Why, do you know I played ninety-nine million hotels I couldn’t stay at? And if I had friends blowing at some all-white nightclub or hotel I couldn’t get in to see ’em—or them to see me. One time in Dallas, Texas, some ofay stops me as I enter this hotel where I’m blowing the show—me in a goddamn tuxedo, now!—and tells me I got to come round to the back door. As time went on and I made a reputation I had it put in my contracts that I wouldn’t play no place I couldn’t stay. I was the first Negro in the business to crack them big white hotels—Oh, yeah! I pioneered, Pops! Nobody much remembers that these days.10
And Armstrong addressed the issue of a black man needing the support of a white man to succeed. “If you didn’t have a white captain to back you in the old days—to put his hand on your shoulder—you was just a damn sad nigger … If a Negro had the proper white man to reach the law and say, ‘What the hell you mean locking MY nigger?’ then—quite naturally—the law would walk him free. Get in that jail without your white boss, and yonder comes the chain gang! Oh, danger was dancing all around you back then.” Naturally, Joe Glaser was brought up, of whom Armstrong said, “Ya know, Pops, my manager, Joe Glaser—Papa Joe, bless his ole heart he’s my man, we been together since we was pups, why to hear us talk on the phone you’d think we was a couple of fairies: I say, ‘I love you, Pops,’ and he say, ‘I love you, Pops.’ ”11 But when it came to issues of race, Armstrong added, “Sometimes Joe Glaser says I’m nuts. Says it wasn’t as bad as I recall it. But then Papa Joe didn’t have to go through it. He was white. Not that I think white people is any naturally meaner than colored. Naw, the white man’s just had the upper hand so long—and can’t many people handle being top cat.”12
Armstrong had resumed playing for less than a month when his busy schedule began taking a toll on his chops. He was in erratic form on a broadcast from Atlantic City, and matters didn’t improve much when he headed overseas. During a concert in Copenhagen, Armstrong forgot the melody to “Tenderly” and started playing a disturbing passage of wrong notes.
On the next two nights, Armstrong performed at the Festival d’Antibes at Juan-les-Pins, France, where he was filmed by Jean-Christophe Averty. Armstrong was visibly annoyed onstage because the television crew kept getting between him and the audience, which responded by booing. Shots of him in the wings during features by Tyree Glenn and Jewel Brown show him looking weary and solemn. Though he still played strong solos on “Hello, Dolly!” and “Cabaret,” among other tunes, and led the ensembles with his usual charge, he no longer played the more demanding solos on instrumentals like “Indiana” and “Muskrat Ramble.”
Muranyi remembered the poignancy of how the band would know that Armstrong wouldn’t be soloing on those songs. “What happened was when he physically wasn’t up to it, Ira Mangel would come to the band and say, ‘The trumpet solo is out. No trumpet solo.’ ’Cause Pops would tell him and then he’d tell us. So it was not in.” But as Muranyi was quick to point out, Armstrong compensated in other ways. “It varied but he never, it was never a question of he couldn’t do the show or anything. He did his things and he just sometimes worked less. But I tell you something, with him, the audience got their money’s worth. If he chose not to do it [play trumpet], he would go out of his way for his audience. He loved his audience. And it wasn’t ego so much as he took it seriously. I mean, he loved his audience.”13
According to Tyree Glenn, Joe Glaser didn’t want to see his prized client struggling onstage and offered a suggestion. “Mr. Glaser, he says, ‘Let Tyree do the playing, you do the singing. You don’t have to work that hard.’ But man, you know he’s going to get out there and play, play his trumpet, you know. He never let up on nothing. When he’d hit that night, he’d be feeling bad, but you’d never know that he was sick. When he hit that stage, that was something else. He never let down one bit, man.”14
Three weeks after the Juan-les-Pins concert, Armstrong again entered a recording studio. The session was organized for ABC-Paramount by Bob Thiele, who’d been responsible for the studio pairing of Armstrong and Duke Ellington in 1961. “Some years later, in the mid-1960s during the deepening national traumas of the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, racial strife, and turmoil everywhere, my co-writer George David Weiss and I had an idea to write a ‘different’ song specifically for Louis Armstrong that would be called ‘What a Wonderful World,’ ” Thiele would later recount. “We wanted this immortal musician and performer to say, as only he could, the world really is great: full of the love and sharing people make possible for themselves and each other every day.”15 Aware that Armstrong’s recent records had fallen into the rut of trying to mimic “Hello, Dolly!” Thiele, for “What a Wonderful World,” decided to surround Armstrong with a full orchestra and choir.
Joe Glaser approved the song, but according to Muranyi, Armstrong’s first reaction to it was “What is this shit?” But Muranyi said that Armstrong began to warm to it, perhaps because he related it not so much to the social upheavals of the 1960s as to his own life.16 “There’s so much in ‘Wonderful World’ that brings me back to my neighborhood where I live in Corona, New York,” Armstrong said in 1968.
Lucille and I, ever since we’re married, we’ve been right there in that block. And everybody keeps their little homes up like we do and it’s just like one big family. I saw three generations come up on that block. And they’re all with their children, grandchildren, they come back to see Uncle Satchmo and Aunt Lucille. That’s why I can say, “I hear babies cry / I watch them grow / they’ll learn much more / than I’ll never know.” And I can look at all them kids’s faces. And I got pictures of them when they was five, six and seven years old. So when they hand me this “Wonderful World,” I didn’t look no further, that was it. And the music with it. So you can see, from the expression, them people dug it. It is a wonderful world.17
Thiele wrote, “In fact, Louis agreed to record it for minimum union scale (approximately $250 at the time) because he liked both the song and this new concept for him, and was mindful of the expense required for the extra string musicians to achieve the desired effect we envisioned.”18 The first song recorded on that August date was another Thiele composition, “The Sunshine of Love.” From the opening notes of the arrangement by Tommy Goodman, it’s clear that Thiele succeeded in creating a recorded sound for Armstrong that was different from his other output of the period. This may not have been all to the good. The opening seconds of “The Sunshine of Love” are painfully saccharine: a slurping sax section, weepy strings, a harpsichord, and a stiff two-beat rhythm invite a listener to dismiss the tune. But Armstrong starts singing and all is forgiven. He manages to get the band to swing as he embarks on one of his patented lyric transformations. Goodman smartly keeps the strings playing the melody the entire time, allowing the listener to marvel at the rhythmic liberties Armstrong takes with it. Hopelessly commercial and corny though it might be, “The Sunshine of Love” still ranks as a choice Armstrong vocal.
With one tune in the can, it was now time to record Thiele’s new opus, “What a Wonderful World.” Goodman’s arrangement is ultrasentimental—more weeping strings, guitar arpeggios, and, later, even an angelic choir. Yet Armstrong managed to infuse the triteness of it all—the melody bears more than a passing resemblance to “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”—with so much emotion as to have created one of his best-known songs. What is singular about his performance is that he stuck to the melody almost entirely throughout, something he rarely did. He occasionally plays with the rhythm, but for the most part he sings it as written—and beautifully, as the song seems to speak to his philosophy of life. Here there is also no trumpet playing and no scatting, though Armstrong’s inimitable “Oh yeah” is a definitively fitting conclusion. “What a Wonderful World” hardly changed the musical landscape like “West End Blues,” but, even though it’s been ubiquitous in recent years, there’s no denying that it is a magical recording.
Larry Newton, the president of ABC-Paramount Records, however, demurred. Newton thought Thiele was crazy to record a ballad instead of an uptempo number like “Dolly” and didn’t hesitate to tell him so throughout the session. “As the recording progressed, he became increasingly incensed and disruptive as his agitation about this ‘radical’ concept intensified,” Thiele wrote. “Finally, he declared he wanted to cancel the date and fire the musicians and me as well.”19 Thiele told Newton to leave the control room, as he was verging on becoming the first person “who ever threw Louis Armstrong out of a recording studio.” Still angry, Newton had to be physically restrained from re-entering the studio. “Miraculously, with all the sinister drama and ominous distractions, the recording of one of the most optimistic songs ever written was completed,” Thiele wrote. When Glaser heard of Newton’s behavior, he offered to buy “What a Wonderful World” outright. Newton refused. But the drama of “What a Wonderful World” was far from over.20
Armstrong’s hectic pace in the summer of 1967 caught up with him in September. For the second time in five months, he was stricken with pneumonia. Forced to cancel a string of gigs in Reno, Nevada, Armstrong was hospitalized for a few days, which was reported in many newspapers at the time.21 Back home, he discussed his recent illness in a letter to clarinetist Slim Evans. “My manager Joe Glaser was so happy that I was OK all he said—take it easy on your two weeks’ off. After all … we ain’t ‘39’ anymore. Speaking of age of course. So I agreed.”22
On September 28, Armstrong was released from the hospital, spending a short time recovering at his Queens home. A few days later, he was back on the road, appearing on The Tonight Show, where he debuted “What a Wonderful World.” Armstrong twice returned to the studio in October and November to record seven numbers for an album for Brunswick. Though it included a couple of songs from the Broadway songbook that had provided him with some of his recent hits, most of the album’s selections come from films. Instead of backing him again with a Motown-inspired orchestra and letting the All Stars be the All Stars, Brunswick saddled Armstrong with an orchestra conducted by Dick Jacobs.
Joe Muranyi minced no words vis-à-vis Jacobs: “Schmuck. Schmuck … Mr. Square … I’m not saying he was a bad guy or anything. He was just a commercial arranger.”23 The “orchestra” was composed of the All Stars, an organ, a choir, a banjo, a guitar, the drums of Grady Tate, and the intruding bounce of Everett Barksdale’s electric bass. Early in 1968, Armstrong and Jacobs collaborated on three more songs in a similar vein. The resulting album, I Will Wait for You, cannot be described as one of Armstrong’s finer moments. On the entire ten-song album, he blows a total of forty bars of trumpet; even his singing is upstaged by Jacobs’s cloying choir and corny arrangements. “The Happy Time” must vie for the dubious distinction of being the worst recording Armstrong ever made, marred as it is by the egregiously weak material, syrupy chorus, and stiff arrangement. But Armstrong’s dramatic vocals on “You’ll Never Walk Alone” must be reckoned with. He had been performing the tune as an instrumental for years, but with the Vietnam War raging he began singing the lyrics more and more in live performances and television appearances, always dedicating the song to the soldiers and the mothers of the soldiers fighting in Vietnam.24 “I Will Wait for You” is also undoubtedly a highlight of Armstrong’s twilight years for its stirring opening trumpet cadenza and righteous vocals.
Dick Jacobs may not have been the man for the job, but he and Armstrong weren’t through collaborating after the Brunswick album of movie and show songs. Their next project would be more successful, but arguably the most unusual in Armstrong’s career thus far: four songs with vocals sung by Armstrong in Italian—recorded in New York City for the Discografica Italiana label and slated for release in Italy. An Italian instructor from the Berlitz School was on hand to teach Armstrong to sing the lyrics phonetically. During the recording sessions, the instructor stood next to Armstrong and whispered the correct pronunciation of each phrase seconds before Armstrong had to sing it. The scene cracked Danny Barcelona up almost forty years later. “Yeah, well, he had this guy right next to him showing him,” Barcelona said, breaking into laughter, “showing him how to pronounce his words and stuff like that, you know. It was funny—this guy right on Louie’s ear, you know. Then you got that Italian words coming out, stuff like that.”25 On the recording itself, the instructor’s voice can now and then faintly be heard; he had apparently sometimes been whispering a little too closely to the microphone!
But the Italian coach aside, this was far from an easy session for Armstrong. Muranyi remembered Armstrong’s frustration over the arrangements making for a tense situation: “And I start to laughing and—the only time he did anything like this—he turns to me and says, ‘You don’t like your job?’ Isn’t that a riot? Oh, man, I fell out laughing—not there, to his face. ‘You don’t like your job?’ He was so pissed, you know, that he had to do all this work and they didn’t have it together enough so that the music fit the words.”26
These recordings are virtually unknown today but are worth tracking down, especially “Dimmi, Dimmi, Dimmi,” with its passionate, upper-register trumpet solo, and “Mi Va di Cantare,” a song that inspired one of the last great spontaneous trumpet solos of Armstrong’s career. There are also live versions of the latter, performed at the San Remo Song Festival in Italy on February 2 and 3, 1968, where Armstrong played with a combo led by clarinetist Henghel Gualdi (pianist Marty Napoleon accompanied Armstrong on the trip). During the February 2 performance, Armstrong’s “Mi Va di Cantare” followed the record itself right down to the twelve-bar trumpet solo and “Stormy Weather” quote, though his horn work was a little hesitant. The following night Armstrong began the song the same way, but once he started playing his trumpet, he improvised an entirely different solo, still a bit shaky at first, but after the “Stormy Weather” quote, he improvised new variations on the melody, his blowing becoming stronger and stronger, right into an unplanned second chorus full of fierce runs, leading to a heroic ending: six high A’s in succession before a glide up to a high concert C. Here is one of Armstrong’s last great hurrahs. His lip was no longer in peak shape, but his pride was altogether another matter. Here is the last great extended solo of his recorded career.
Armstrong continued to prove his mettle throughout 1968. He recorded yet another curious concept album: Disney Songs the Satchmo Way. The most important jazz musician of all time found himself singing such ditties as “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo” and “Heigh-Ho” amidst a studio orchestra and mixed choir—not a promising venture, an apparently desperate attempt at commercialism after the fashion of the Brunswick fiascos of the period. The results, however, disabuse all low expectations. Disney Songs the Satchmo Way is one of Armstrong’s finest albums of the 1960s. The record was produced by Tutti Camarata, who had been responsible for Armstrong’s tremendous 1953 Decca date with the Commanders. Camarata, “another wonderful cat” in Joe Muranyi’s parlance, intelligently picked ten songs that suited Armstrong perfectly and handed arranging duties to Maxwell Davis, who kept things fun yet interesting, with no trace of the awkwardness of Dick Jacobs. To be sure, there is a little schlock on “Heigh-Ho” and “Whistle While You Work,” but Armstrong’s infectious enthusiasm is convincingly winning. His trumpet playing, too, is in surprisingly good form for so late a date; his harmonic note choices and dexterity are deft. He’s at his most rhythmically free on this album; everything coheres on the nearly seven-minute “Chim Chim Cher-ee,” which features two completely different sixteen-bar trumpet solos, each—haunting and even modern—performed over a descending minor vamp.
Yet “Chim Chim Cher-ee” isn’t the album’s highlight; the towering “When You Wish Upon a Star” is. This beautiful song inspired Armstrong to give one of his most heartfelt performances ever. Davis’s arrangement is gorgeous and the choir sounds heavenly, though it’s placed far enough in the background so as not to distract from Armstrong’s primer in jazz singing. When he sings “Mama, when you wish upon a star,” you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Seconds later, when he starts to play the trumpet, the results are profoundly moving—it’s time to cry. Armstrong opens with simple quarter-notes as the band slowly begins to swing along with him. His first eight bars are low-key, mellow, before he ascends to a concluding eight. It’s an astonishing solo for its sheer passion and emotion, a wise solo, the sound of an old man summing up a lifetime in brief.
Muranyi fondly remembers listening to the playback of “When You Wish Upon a Star” with Armstrong and Camarata. “Here comes Louis with a white handkerchief and he’s standing there … Camarata’s standing there, too. And he said, ‘You’ll be glad to hear it.’ I think I grabbed his hand or grabbed him around and said, ‘Pops, I think it’s wonderful. That’s the one.’ I don’t know that he said, ‘You think so?’ but that look he gave me, a very soulful look, ’cause he liked it, too. A wonderful moment. Every time I hear that, I think of that.”27
Armstrong was clearly affected by his performance. In a letter to Camarata that was reprinted on the back of the original LP’s cover, he wrote, “I listened to the record that you gave me of the tune ‘When You Wish Upon a Star.’ It knocked me out—but way out, Tutti!!! … You could still put ‘Wish Upon a Star’ with the rest of the tunes in the album, which I am very fond of and very happy I did, but this goldarned ‘Wish Upon a Star’ is so beautiful—and more than that, man—I listen to the tune three or four times at night.” It was another magical moment in a lifetime full of them.
When Armstrong resumed touring with the All Stars, prominently featuring “What a Wonderful World,” John S. Wilson wrote the song off as “a dreary bit of sentimental claptrap.”28 There was good reason for Armstrong to plug “What a Wonderful World” in May 1968: the previous month, it had become a number one hit in England, selling more than six hundred thousand copies. Strangely, the record had done almost no business in the United States, largely because of the still-simmering animosity between the song’s composer-producer, Bob Thiele, and ABC-Paramount president Larry Newton. Newton, still upset with Thiele for recording the number, sabotaged its marketing by not at all promoting the record in the United States. Armstrong did his best on its behalf, singing “What a Wonderful World” in live shows and on television, but according to Thiele, months after its release the record hadn’t cracked a thousand copies in America. Newton was blind to the success of the recording not only in England, where it became a smash, remaining number one for thirteen weeks, but also in other European countries as well as in South Africa.
As Newton and Thiele persisted in their tug-of-war, Armstrong headed to England in June for a three-week tour to take advantage of the “What a Wonderful World” mania. British journalists Max Jones and John Chilton, co-authors of the biography Louis, spent much time with Armstrong on this trip. As they relate it, the tour began with that rarity of rarities: a two-week stint in one place, the Batley Variety Club in West Yorkshire. Jones and Chilton recalled Armstrong’s patience with his fans as he happily signed autographs for, and answered questions from, each and every one of them. They also report that a travel-weary Armstrong grew impatient with “a persistent and somewhat racist-sounding drunk” who asked Armstrong, “Do you know who I am?” Armstrong snapped, “All you white folks look alike to me, Pops.”29
On July 2, Armstrong and the All Stars filmed two concerts for the BBC. In the footage, it’s striking how physically small Armstrong had become; he had slimmed down tremendously since the Juan-les-Pins concerts of July 1967. As to the cause, Joe Muranyi says: “I think he had a lifelong fixation with dieting and stuff. People thought he was ill, said, ‘Gee, he’s got cancer.’ He dieted; no, he wanted to lose the weight.”
Swiss Kriss was still central to Armstrong’s regimen, so much so that he now started handing out postcards with a picture of himself on a toilet, with the inscription: “Swiss Krissly—Leave It All Behind You!” Muranyi describes one episode on an airplane when Armstrong was proselytizing with his postcards and samples: “Everybody’s left the plane and … he walks down the aisle and [Bob] Sherman, the valet, had handed out the postcard pictures to the crew and stuff, and he gets [to the cockpit] and they’re all laughing and he shakes hands … There’s a cute little blond hostess, you know, she’s got one of them Swiss Kriss packets, a cute little blond thing—she says, ‘What is this? What is this?’ He said, ‘It’ll make you shit!’ ”30 Addressing the issue of his weight to British writer Steve Voce, Armstrong tried to clarify matters: “Speaking about my weight, there’s a lot of people think ‘Oh Louis Armstrong, my God, he must have some kind of disease, or something,’ but they ain’t thinking that if a person eats sensible and eats on time and the right food … I lost a hundred pounds with a diet sheet that I saw in Harper’s Bazaar—I didn’t pay but 25 cents for it.”31
In the BBC performances Armstrong is seen making a strong go of it. He still didn’t play his old, fiery solos on “Indiana” and “Ole Miss,” but both tunes featured strong lead playing and humorous new quotes: “Sidewalks of New York” on the former, “Bye and Bye” on the latter. On “A Kiss to Build a Dream On,” he pushed himself to play higher than usual on what was by now a set solo. On “You’ll Never Walk Alone” and “What a Wonderful World,” his vocals are singularly passionate, even melancholy. As was his wont, he dedicated “Alone” to the mothers of Vietnam soldiers, managing to look at once somber and warm and inviting. A review of a Canadian gig in May 1968 accurately captures this quality of Armstrong’s: “If he doesn’t happen to be playing the sort of impeccable, trailblazing trumpet he was 40 years ago (and who does these days?) he offers something in its place—a warmth and humanness that is all too sadly lacking in many younger musicians today,” Peter Harris wrote.32
Back home, the contretemps between Bob Thiele and Larry Newton took an unexpected turn. The European market was demanding an album assembled around “What a Wonderful World.” Newton relented, but only if Armstrong would record the rest of the album for $500. Joe Glaser wanted a $25,000 advance. Thiele became their go-between and recalled their spirited exchanges. Glaser: “I heard what went on. You tell that fat bastard to go fuck himself and give us twenty-five thousand dollars for eight more sides.” Newton: “Tell him to go fuck himself and why do we give a shit about those European companies? Screw ’em all.” Back and forth it went until pressure from abroad finally persuaded Newton to green-light the rest of the album and agree to Glaser’s demand. Seven additional songs would be recorded once Armstrong returned to the United States.
As always, Armstrong never had the luxury of complete availability during a recording session; Thiele had to squeeze the date in while the All Stars were playing in Las Vegas. The producer booked two sessions, one featuring just Armstrong’s group and another featuring the All Stars and a small string section. Armstrong played trumpet on a few numbers, sounding tired for the most part, but he still conveyed wisdom on such tunes as “Dream a Little Dream of Me” and “There Must Be a Way.” But his singing rarely sounded better than on the session with strings. He performed another song written by Thiele and Weiss, “Hello Brother,” which assuredly would have sounded laughably corny and dated if sung by any other vocalist of the period. Yet Armstrong is quite moving in this ode to the working man.
Ironically, Armstrong also sang a tune called “The Home Fire” at that final session. He sounds wistful, as if brooding on his home in Corona, Queens, and all the people, young and old, in the neighborhood whose lives he had touched since moving there with Lucille in 1943. Armstrong was about to spend more than a year at home, away from the stage. The indestructible Satchmo had finally broken down.