“I have the tenacity of a praying mantis.”
—Judy Garland (1963, private tapes on Judy Garland Speaks! CD)
Size does matter. Music consists of a series of agreed-upon elements, which can be defined as a series of contrasts: high versus low, short versus long, loud versus soft, fast versus slow, a full orchestra or just piano, major versus minor, happy versus sad. In the art of Judy Garland, these components can be reduced to a single consideration: big versus small. There are big notes and small notes, a big line in a song or a small line, and, as sure as there are good witches and bad witches, there are great big noisy songs and little intimate ones.
Size isn’t everything, though. Garland’s voice is, more than any other performer short of Louis Armstrong or Jimmy Durante, a direct manifestation of who she is and what she represents. She has an amazing instrument at her disposal—an overwhelming that seems miraculous coming from such a small woman. She can sing as loudly and as powerfully as the occasion calls for, yet she’s never more effective than when she seems to falter, when she lets us hear her gasp for breath, when she puts in a tremolo, making a tone quiver instead of hitting it straight. Her voice, even more so than those of the other major song stylists of her caliber, is immediately identifiable—it throbs like no one else’s, cries like no one else’s, even, in her low moments, cracks like no one else’s. The voice is big, or at least it can be big when she wants it to be, yet even when she’s belting at the top of her lungs, there’s an incredibly personal quality to it.
Which brings us back to the matter of size. One of the more thought-provoking statements I’ve read on this subject was an essay in the Gene Lees Jazzletter by a self-described gay jazz fan who made a point of letting us know that he did not care for Judy Garland. His chief argument was that both Garland and her daughter Liza Minnelli were in his opinion incapable of sounding “small.” This may or may not be true with regard to Minnelli, but in the case of Garland, it’s simply wrong. For Garland, those big, bravura numbers like “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart” are only half the experience. In fact, as Pete Hamill once said of Sinatra (an observation that’s even truer with regard to Garland), the big, fast, exuberant numbers work so well because they offer a letup from all the pain and heartbreak of the slow, sad, melancholy songs, like “Here’s That Rainy Day” and “Memories of You.” By referring to these as big songs versus small songs, we can summarize all the more specific components of music—tempo, dynamics, coloration, orchestration, pitch, harmony, rhythm—into a single pair of words.
For years I actually believed our anonymous gay jazz fan, but now I know that both his key points were wrong. Apart from making the bizarre claim that Garland couldn’t be intimate (if I ever meet him, I’ll play him Garland’s reading of André Previn’s “Yes” on the That’s Entertainment! album), he also insisted that gay people, himself aside, did not like jazz. From my own experience, I can tell you that the percentage of people who like or dislike jazz is exactly the same in both the gay and the straight communities. The gay men and lesbians I know listen to symphonies, jazz, folk songs, Barbra Streisand, Art Pepper, Bobby Darin, Charlie Parker, Tony Bennett, Hank Williams, Ray Charles, Leonard Bernstein, Oscar Peterson, Eddie Condon, Bruce Springsteen, and others.
I hope our gay jazz fan doesn’t mind me making a sexual-orientation-related observation of my own. I’m willing to admit that it’s possible he really doesn’t like Judy Garland: Some people honestly don’t like Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, or ice cream. But it could also be that he’s rebelling against the stereotype. For decades, Judy Garland and musical theater (be it Broadway or opera) were considered the sum total of so-called gay musical taste. Even in the new millennium, this stereotype, to some degree, persists.
No matter whom you sleep with, or whether you’re a fan of the Metropolitan Opera or the Grand Ole Opry, practically everybody in the second half of the twentieth century (in America and around the world) has grown up with Dorothy and The Wizard of Oz; just as Garland was the major musical icon who started as a child star (even more than a headliner, like Sammy Davis Jr. or Buddy Rich), she’s the only performer in the Sinatra-Fitzgerald-Crosby league who captures most of her audience while they’re still little kids. Everybody knows who Garland and Dorothy are by the time they’re ten, even before they know who Elvis (or, more recently, Lady Gaga or Eminem, not to be confused with Auntie Em) is—she’s the one adult pop icon who has instant name-brand recognition with an even younger demographic than most kiddie pop stars. Like a favorite aunt or a best friend, Garland is part of our childhoods.
Yet she’s also part of a unique musical aesthetic. One is tempted to describe it as a jazz-based tradition, but clearly it’s larger than that. You can’t describe it as purely an American phenomenon, since it also includes such overseas artists as Edith Piaf. Indeed, Garland, Piaf, and the more purely jazz-and-blues-based Billie Holiday form a unique triumvirate of female vocalists. Theirs was a bittersweet legacy of happy songs (even from the often gloomy Piaf and Holiday, particularly in their early years) tainted by short lives crammed with abusive relationships. Perhaps the price for moving an audience is a penchant for self-destruction. If their songs told us to get happy, their lives told us otherwise.
Garland’s performances were emotionally explosive, often to the very edge of hysteria, yet even her highest moods were undercut by an undercurrent of melancholia. She was one of the great musical presences of all time, yet unlike her friends Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Doris Day, she wasn’t a band singer or a recording star who graduated to film stardom, nor, like Ethel Merman, was she a Broadway headliner who took a fling at Hollywood. Rather, Garland was—other than Astaire—the only great vocal artist whose primary medium was the motion picture, whose gifts were not only purely aural but also visual and dramatic.
It’s hard to think of a screen-sound track performer—perfect in her acting, singing, and dancing—who, as a consummate craftswoman, created more perfect and endearing characters. None but Garland could have made convincing all those little Lily Marses filled with adult aspirations, those Dorothys yearning for over the rainbow, those teenage Esthers who never seem more innocent and naive than when they’re trying to act sophisticated. America watched Garland grow up, but at every stage she experienced a new plateau of misfithood: the “little in-between” too old for toys and too young for boys, from Betsy Booth, who wants Mickey Rooney to take her seriously as a romantic partner and not just treat her like a kid sister, to Dorothy, looking beyond the rainbow to a land beyond childhood’s end and yet also to a kind of eternal childhood.
Garland shared with Sinatra a capacity for making every song sound like a chapter in an autobiography. Her “Born in a Trunk,” a dreadful song that she transforms into a classic, describes a born trouper’s backstage childhood, and becomes her equivalent to Sinatra’s “My Way” (come to think of it, another dreadful song): a vividly personal depiction of triumphs and travails both on stage and off. Garland really did grow up in the equivalent of the “Princess Theatre, Pocatello, Idaho.” She was born Frances Ethel Gumm on June 10, 1922, in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. Her mom played piano, while her dad both managed theaters and performed. At age three, “Baby Gumm” joined her two older sisters in a singing trio that played vaudeville theaters and movie houses across the country.
The Gumms settled in California when “Baby” was four, which put them at ground zero of the impending media revolution. In addition to their consistent theater work, “The Gumm Sisters Kiddie Act” were recruited by early Hollywood radio stations and, eventually, by some of the first talking pictures. By the time she was ten, the youngest Gumm had become the focal point of the act, and the family, acting on a tip from trouper supreme Georgie Jessel, had changed its name to Garland. In 1934, Hoagy Carmichael’s song “Judy” would have a profound effect on show business history: This was the first song that Ella Fitzgerald sang professionally (or so she said), and the same tune that inspired Frances Ethel (or so she said) to become Judy.
Just as the trio was beginning to crack the big time, it was becoming increasingly apparent that the youngest Gumm was, in fact, the whole act. Her two sisters stepped out around the time that Judy was jointly signed to contracts to cut discs for Decca Records and to do nobody-quite-knew-what for MGM Pictures (the latter coming about as the result of a personal audition for megamogul Louis B. Mayer). Fortunately, Judy reached adolescence during a brief period when, for a few years, little girls were ruling the roost in Hollywood. In the mid-thirties, Shirley Temple was the single highest-grossing star in pictures, and Garland’s early colleague Deanna Durbin went on to save Universal from bankruptcy. In an age of Depression, sunshiney moppettes singing sunshiney songs supplied a much needed message of optimism. With Garland, however, Hollywood got much more than it had bargained for.
Unfortunately, developing Garland’s persona took longer than perfecting Temple’s toddler optimism and Durbin’s sunshine soprano. The studio wisely assigned her to Roger Edens, the musical guru who’d previously worked with Ethel Merman. At the very beginning, the most impressive aspect of the Garland-Edens relationship was its constant experimentation, even if not every avenue they explored would pan out.
Edens couldn’t have known it, but he was helping shape a musical icon. It was key for Garland to find a way to channel her offstage personality into her performance style. Other icons were all around her: Bing Crosby was the ex–bad boy who became Mr. Home-and-Family and, later, Dean Martin was the happy-go-lucky tippler who couldn’t bring himself to care about anything—even where his next drink was coming from—while Sinatra was the guy who loved and lost, lost and loved, and took it all the way. Garland’s original musical and screen personality was the misfit, while Sinatra was to a certain extent the outsider—at least he gave the impression of wanting to be the defiant one who shook things up. Garland was the outsider who wanted to fit in: As a child she’s the one who wants to be accepted by the other kids; then she’s the kid who wants to be taken seriously by the grown-ups and accepted as one of them; and finally, in the fifties and sixties, she becomes a mature woman who wants nothing more than to please her man and take care of her kids. The central element of her character is the act of wanting. All Garland ever wanted, she tried to tell us in her music (and in a rather bizarre series of taped ramblings released surreptitiously as Judy Garland Speaks!), was to be a normal woman with a normal family. The major thing that stopped her was a virtuoso talent for self-destruction that, in the end, outshone even her talents as a performer.
The songs from Garland’s poor-little-in-between phase, composed by Edens and others, have dated badly. They are, in fact, among the few entries in her entire canon that are less than delightful today. However, they serve a key function in her musical development in that they establish her not just as a singer of songs—as were any of the female band singers of the era—but as a precocious talent who was quickly developing a fully formed musical and showbiz persona. “In Between” (from Love Finds Andy Hardy) directly expresses the young singer’s early identity crisis, thereby establishing her predilection for musical autobiography. By 1940, Garland was actually able to make the state of misfithood seem attractive with “I’m Nobody’s Baby” from Andy Hardy Meets Debutante.
She was a recording artist even before her film career took off. As we’ve seen, the young singer was scouted out by the recently formed Decca label before MGM came a-callin’. The first four Decca sides (starting with “Stompin’ at the Savoy” and “Swing, Mr. Charlie”) were made a few days after Garland’s fourteenth birthday, even though the label billed her as a “thirteen-year-old swing singer.” Her major predecessor had been a prepubescent “swing singer” named Baby Rose Marie. Though barely out of diapers, Rose Marie was a hot and lusty and throaty vocalist with amazingly good time. She was a headliner in vaudeville, radio, and talkies—and had also made a few records—at the time the Gumm Trio and Garland the soloist were getting started. It was probably the success of Baby Rose Marie, soon to drop the “Baby” from her billing, that inspired Decca and then Metro to promote Garland as a “swing singer”—plus that this new thing called “swing” was in 1936 the musical craze beginning to sweep the nation.
In retrospect, this was a major miscalculation. Producer Joe Perry backed Garland with one of Decca’s top swing bands, Bob Crosby’s orchestra, and supposedly the band’s manager (not Crosby himself) rankled at the thought of playing second fiddle to a fourteen-year-old newcomer (especially one passing herself off as thirteen). And so the Crosby band itself was not credited on the label of “Stompin’ at the Savoy” and “Swing, Mr. Charlie.” Judy had her own revenge, however, when just a few years later Bob Crosby and His Orchestra were delighted to get a very minor guest spot in her starring vehicle Presenting Lily Mars.
Garland’s first four sides, done on a one-shot, session-by-session basis (Victor or Columbia could have come in and snatched her up anytime they wanted) serve mainly to illustrate to history that as vastly talented as Garland was, even at this very early stage of the game one of the things she definitely was not and never would be was a swing singer like Ella Fitzgerald. She was a belter, not a swinger (although the two ideals wouldn’t always be mutually exclusive). Garland just doesn’t have a jazz rhythmic sense, and when she does “Savoy,” which referred to the ballroom where Fitzgerald reigned supreme, she doesn’t know where to cut off her notes. Most of these very early recordings have Garland trying to establish herself as a swing singer by merely shouting the word “swing” over and over.
Garland had her own sense of time, informed more by the Broadway stage than by the jazz-dance bands of the era, though this, admittedly, was an age of considerable overlap, when nearly all the major show tunes of the era were reinterpreted in swing time by the leading bands, and when Benny Goodman himself appeared onstage in two Broadway musicals. Garland could certainly sing fast, although with her, “fast” was obviously a variety of “big.” As early as 1939, the year Garland recorded “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart,” she had perfected her own rhythmic style. Sung by the sixteen-year-old in Listen, Darling (1938), this was the first of the great Garland belt numbers. “The Jitterbug,” a number cut from The Wizard of Oz (which features composer Arlen singing Ray Bolger’s Scarecrow part on the Decca recording), shows that if she wasn’t swinging in the Count Basie sense, she could certainly sing about swing.
The best of Garland’s numbers in a swing-band vein is “F.D.R. Jones.” Harold Rome, a progressive-minded songwriter out of the same school as Yip Harburg, originally wrote it for a 1938 revue called Sing Out the News, and it was recorded that year by Chick Webb and Ella Fitzgerald. Edens apparently thought it would be a great number for Garland to do in a minstrel-show sequence in Babes on Broadway (she also recorded it for Decca). Rome probably thought he was furthering race relations by showing that black people could be patriotic and name their offspring after the president. Edens, on the other hand, saw the song as part of the minstrel-show tradition—the act of naming a black baby after the president was an extension of the minstrelsy practice of low-class colored clowns affecting grand names and airs for themselves as part of a comically inflated sense of self-important grandeur. As had already become her custom, Garland transcends any kind of political consideration, instilling in the song an exuberance that’s irresistible. The politics of the song become as dismissable as the musical specifics—what’s important is the way that Garland makes us all want to shout “Yessiree! Yessiree! Yessiree!”
In 1937, Garland launched a major phase of her movie career with Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, her first appearance in a picture with Mickey Rooney. This was the start of a ten-film partnership (three Andy Hardys, four Mickey–Judy–Busby Berkeley spectaculars plus Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, and guest shots in Words and Music and Thousands Cheer), which took second place only to the Astaire-Rogers partnership as the most exciting in celluloid musical history.
However, the major turning point of her pre-Oz existence was “You Made Me Love You.” By the time of Broadway Melody of 1938, Garland and Edens were on the right track. Like many Garland landmarks, it’s an old, old song (like 1914 old), sung in the teens by Al Jolson, who, like Merman, was a Garland role model. The inclusion of a chorus of special material, a whole song in fact (the semispoken “Dear Mr. Gable,” Edens’s homage to the celebrated Clark), harks back to the acoustic era, when comics like Jolson and Eddie Cantor included spoken monologues in the middle of their discs. It also looks ahead to such mature Garland spectaculars as the geographically driven “Chicago” and “San Francisco,” which combine song, arrangement, and speech.
“Dear Mr. Gable/You Made Me Love You” (in Broadway Melody of 1938) was followed by “In Between” in Love Finds Andy Hardy, and then “Sweet Sixteen,” which wasn’t sung in a film, though it’s easy to visualize Garland as Betsy Booth singing it in a Hardy Family comedy. Instead of singing of Mr. Gable, she tells us that she “wouldn’t trade places with Shirley Temple” and explains that she was all set to join a monastery until she realized that this would make it impossible for her to listen to Bing Crosby (whose influence led to her subsisting on a diet of Kraft cheese).
In these early songs, Garland has already found the persona of a little girl with big dreams, a starstruck fan who pines after legendary leading men and fantasizes about going over the rainbow into adulthood. The ability to sing about big dreams would be even more crucial to Garland’s success than her big voice, and by projecting these dreams onto Gable and Crosby (who would himself become one of her saviors later on when she needed all the support she could get) she was anticipating the moment when she herself would become the object of those same kinds of dreams and longings. With “Dear Mr. Gable” she struck a nerve; MGM started looking for bigger parts and songs for her, and Decca, at last, signed her to a regular recording contract.
Then, in 1939, Garland not only became an emerging star but shot to the upper pantheon of the immortals with The Wizard of Oz, not only the major vehicle of her career, but quite possibly the greatest of all movie musicals (and in my opinion the greatest film ever made, thank you very much). With “Over the Rainbow,” Garland took the art of yearning to new levels. The notes themselves, with their operatic octave leap in the first interval, symbolized a reaching out, an optimistic striving for a greater good. Surrounding the seventeen-year-old trouper with three of the world’s finest song and dance character men and a top score by lifelong friend Harold Arlen, Oz showed the world how good the movie musical could be. One of the tragedies of Garland’s life is that she never surpassed Oz; still, after this she was the preeminent leading lady of the Hollywood musical. No woman in Hollywood—not Alice Faye, Betty Grable, Rita Hayworth, Ginger Rogers, Eleanor Powell, or Betty Hutton—could possibly compete with her.
It was an astonishing achievement, especially considering that she had yet to play an adult role, participate in a love scene, or share an onscreen kiss. Her early post-Oz roles weren’t all that different from the prior ones: Her parts in Ziegfeld Girl and Presenting Lily Mars come directly out of her earlier Andy Hardy picture roles, except that in some of these, Betsy Booth finally scores a little romantic action. Girl Crazy (1942) may have been the first vehicle to present Garland as a genuine object of desire, while For Me and My Gal from that same year completed the process, with Garland emerging as a full-fledged romantic heroine in a period romance with leading man Gene Kelly as a nogoodnik (in his first movie part, and essentially reprising his Pal Joey character from the 1940 Rodgers and Hart show that brought him to Hollywood’s attention). In Girl Crazy, for the first time, Garland and Rooney get a genuine boy-meets-girl (meeting cute) scene that seems more like the Astaire-Rogers films than anything in the previous Garland-Rooney entries.
After The Wizard of Oz, Garland’s most perfect performance was in the 1944 Meet Me in St. Louis. We should rejoice that the twenty-one-year-old star went against her initial decision not to revert to teenhood in Meet Me in St. Louis, because the resulting role (with three career perennial tunes, “The Trolley Song,” “The Boy Next Door,” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”) was an instant Garland milestone. The conflict of the story is allegedly the Smith family’s decision whether or not to leave St. Louis, but the real drama is all within Esther herself, a veritable case study in Freudian repression: a young woman with the usual raging hormones who’s trapped in the strictures of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century bourgeois society around her. Throughout, she endeavors to keep any show of feeling as tightly restricted as her corseted torso—or her pretty little neck in her high starched collar. Even here, playing a young adult, she makes herself seem more immature by overdoing her attempts to act like a grown-up—never more so than by treating her little sibling Tootie (Margaret O’Brien) as if she were some sort of species of subinfant.
Tellingly, the big climax of emotional release is not a love scene between Esther and the Boy Next Door, but a musical number, in which she lets her feelings explode in a flurry of notes and Technicolor. In Garland’s hands, “The Trolley Song” isn’t just about a chance encounter on the mass transit system, it’s a musical foreshadowing of James Dean’s “You’re tearing me apart” speech in Rebel Without a Cause. Both cultural demands and her own desire for decorum, as well as a fear of embarrassment, force her to rein in her feelings, but by the high point of “The Trolley Song,” she tells us she knows “how it feels/When the universe reels” (if that’s not a euphemism for an orgasm I don’t know what is). The contradiction isn’t just an element in the performance, it’s the whole show, the driving force. When Garland is later shown in a proper clinch with leading man Tom Drake, it seems anticlimactic compared to the emotions she’s already triggered in “The Trolley Song.” By then, we all know how it feels when the universe reels.
The “mature” phase of Garland’s MGM years yielded one high point after another. The major Judy vehicles were produced by Arthur Freed, generally credited with shepherding Garland to stardom as well as with making a mature, salient art form out of the movie musical itself. The classic Freed-Garland efforts, Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), The Harvey Girls (1946), The Pirate (1948), and Easter Parade (1948), were all, like The Wizard of Oz, thoroughly integrated assemblages of song and story. Each boasted a complete, Broadway-style score, and on the whole they were all more intellectually ambitious than the backstage stories still dominating most of Hollywood song and dance productions. In each venture, Garland’s character is about wanting—wanting to find a place to fit in and a place to find love, whether she’s a mail-order bride who becomes a wild west waitress and reforms the bad guy with love, a chorine who becomes a dance star by being allowed to be herself, or a sheltered Island beauty who idolizes cutthroats but learns that politicians are really pirates and vice versa.
Garland also participated to great effect in several Freed all-star productions: the producer’s biopics of Jerome Kern (Till the Clouds Roll By, 1946) and Rodgers and Hart (Words and Music, 1948). Throughout the forties, she’d gone on recording for Decca, and her film songs were generally at the center of her recording career. While singers who had come up from the world of big bands and radio (Crosby, Sinatra, later Doris Day) were constantly in the recording studio, those who were essentially a product of Broadway or Hollywood (Merman, Astaire) were, alas, not nearly so copiously documented. Garland recorded about eighty titles for commercial release between 1936 and 1947, which was only a fraction of what comparable stars like Ella Fitzgerald cut in those same years.
On occasion, Decca did record her singing numbers other than those from her films, including a number of Gershwin standards that anticipate her 1943 appearance in the definitive film of the composer’s Girl Crazy, as well as a trio of Rodgers and Hart songs, done with twin pianos, in advance of her guest spot in Words and Music. There also were duets with Johnny Mercer, Dick Haymes, and Bing Crosby (their “Yah-Ta-Ta, Yah-Ta-Ta [Talk Talk Talk]” is a charmer that foreshadows a routine on Seinfeld by about fifty years). There are also a few surprising standards, like Noel Coward’s “Poor Little Rich Girl,” and some very rewarding treatments of movie musical songs other than her own: “No Love No Nothin’ ” and “A Journey to a Star” from The Gang’s All Here, “This Heart of Mine” and “Love” from Ziegfeld Follies, “Poor You” and “The Last Call for Love” from Ship Ahoy. Unfortunately, Garland’s relationship with Decca Records ended with the American Federation of Musicians ban of 1948.
Proving that Garland’s brilliance was not Freed’s exclusive province, producer Joe Pasternak employed her with excellent results in two less ambitious vehicles, In the Good Old Summertime (1949) and Summer Stock (1950). Apart from summery titles, the key element to both films was the music of Harold Arlen; she hadn’t worked directly with him on a project since 1939 (in addition to Oz, Arlen had written a song for Babes in Arms), but she had recorded his hits “Buds Won’t Bud,” “Blues in the Night” (on which she seems to be mimicking the composer’s own vibrato), and “That Old Black Magic” for Decca. Summertime’s highlight was actually cut from the original release but was included, luckily, on home video issues: Garland singing “Last Night When We Were Young,” a 1934 composition that further expresses Arlen and Harburg’s epic side.
Likewise, Summer Stock, despite an excellent new score by Harry Warren, was climaxed by another Arlen oldie, “Get Happy.” There was gender bending afoot, as Metro decked Judy out in a man’s tuxedo jacket and fedora, yet somehow neglected to supply her with a pair of pants (which would have made her look something like Eleanor Powell in male top-hat-and-tails drag). She danced surrounded by a male chorus line, displaying shapely gams that went on for days—somehow putting on a man’s formal jacket made her look more sensually feminine. Now that she was in-tux-icated, Garland could become the object of our erotic dreams. Clearly, she wasn’t in Kansas anymore.
Nor would she be at MGM any longer. For Garland, the demands of stardom were too much for her to take, and before long her self-destructive reaction to those pressures was more than the front office at MGM could take. Garland’s post-1950 career is inconsistent: She continued to excel in several mediums she’d long since conquered—phonograph recordings and radio—and even found new ones, such as an outstanding career on television and on the concert stage, live appearances being something she’d barely tackled since the Gumm Sisters days. Yet she was generally excommunicated from working in the medium where she did her best work, the motion picture musical.
Cast out of paradise, Garland was most steadily employed during this dry spell by old friend Bing Crosby. They had already duetted together for Decca, but their rapport on the air was even greater than on disc; a number of their exchanges have been released on two English CDs, When You’re Smiling (Parrot) and All the Clouds’ll Roll Away (Parrot). (On one program, she jokes about having been bitten by Metro mascot Leo the Lion.)
Yet even if she hadn’t been cast out of MGM, it was clear that she couldn’t have gone on making forties-style movie musicals, excellent as they were. In 1948, she began work on Metro’s film of the Broadway hit Annie Get Your Gun, which, had it been completed as planned, might have provided Garland new direction. She would have been the perfect star to essay the great Broadway leading roles for Hollywood. Think about it: Garland as Julie Jordan in Carousel, Garland as Laurey in Oklahoma!, Garland as Nellie Forbush in South Pacific, Garland as Ella Peterson in Bells Are Ringing, Garland as either Magnolia or Julie in Show Boat. I can also imagine Garland as the climber of every mountain in The Sound of Music. Most of all: Garland as Mama Rose in Gypsy. In fact, apart from Fiddler on the Roof and Zorba, it’s hard to imagine any traditional musical comedy that wouldn’t have been much improved by Garland’s presence. Alas, it was not to be.
Still, the 1954 A Star Is Born cut deeper than anything Broadway had yet attempted. In retrospect, it seems perfectly fitting that Garland’s most significant production in her thirties or forties was a picture that glorified old-school Hollywood while at the same time exposing its dark, seamy underside. Far from the optimistic days of The Harvey Girls and Meet Me in St. Louis, here was a brooding noir drama that happened to be about movie stars, replete with some of the finest musical numbers of her career—again the work of Harold Arlen, this time in a one-off partnership with Ira Gershwin—particularly the devastating “The Man That Got Away” and the lively “Gotta Have Me Go with You.”
It was four years between Summer Stock and A Star Is Born, but it proved to be worth the wait. The same could hardly be said for the six years between A Star Is Born and the disastrous Pepe in 1960, an allstar flop highlighted only by Garland’s reteaming with former Metro orchestrator André Previn, who supplied her with a haunting ballad called “The Far Away Part of Town.” This excellent, overlooked song ensures that at least three of the 195 minutes of this clambake are worth watching (or at least listening to, since Garland is only heard on the sound track and not seen on the screen).
A Star Is Born aside, her Capitol albums were her most rewarding work during the fifties. As during the Decca years, she recorded considerably less than her colleagues: Sinatra and Nat Cole were, in spite of demanding movie, concert, and TV schedules, releasing new full-length-album masterpieces every three or four months. Garland turned out only one studio album a year for Capitol between 1955 and 1959, with two in 1960:
Miss Show Business (1955), Dick Cathcart, Harold Mooney
Judy (1956), Nelson Riddle
Alone (1957), Gordon Jenkins
Judy in Love (1958), Nelson Riddle
The Letter (1959), Gordon Jenkins
Judy: That’s Entertainment! (1960), Jack Marshall
Judy in London (aka The London Sessions) (1960), Norrie Paramor
Miss Show Business, the first of the Capitol albums, suggests that she was on her way to becoming something like Al Jolson and Sophie Tucker in the second half of their careers: a walking nostalgia machine, re-creating old hits over and over—“You Made Me Love You” (she leaves out the special material concerning Mr. Gable), “A Pretty Girl Milking Her Cow,” and even “Over the Rainbow.” What makes Garland a special case is that, as we’ve seen, she was tapping into the nostalgia market at the height of her career, and Miss Show Business would seem to be offering not only nostalgia for Garland’s earlier output, but for that of Jolson and Tucker as well, as evidenced by such signature songs as “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody” and “Some of These Days.” She was not only re-creating her own past triumphs, but everybody else’s as well. You might say that she was offering nostalgia for nostalgia.
Overall, Miss Show Business was a cautious entry. It captured a large part of her 1952 Palace act, and served as a tie-in to her first TV special in 1955 on CBS. The album plays almost as a live performance, with musical transitions between the cuts rather than silent spreads. Considering that she was simultaneously moving into two new mediums at once with the project (LP and TV), it was perhaps understandable that no new musical ground was broken on this venture. She was on home turf here in more ways than one: The set was conducted by her brother-in-law, Jack Cathcart, and the pleasant, but hardly particularly innovative, arrangements (actually written by Harold Mooney) did not give her cause to stretch or leave her comfort zone.
Her finest moment here is comparatively the most modern, “Happiness Is Just a Thing Called Joe.” Garland had already inspired many a great musician (Harry James was motivated to record “You Made Me Love You” after hearing her homage to Gable, thus landing the trumpeter one of his first and biggest hits) and, conversely, Garland was inspired to do “Happiness” after hearing Woody Herman play it. Her last child and only son, Joey Luft, was also born in 1955, and Garland certainly sings with so much tenderness and vulnerability that there’s no way this can be a coincidence.
“Happiness” is also the track that points ahead to the three major masterpieces of her late fifties studio albums, both of those with Riddle and the first with Jenkins. Garland has a way of moving forward even while traveling backward into her own past: “Happiness Is Just a Thing Called Joe” (from the film version of Cabin in the Sky, directed by second husband Vincente Minnelli) is from her most reliable source of great songs, Harold Arlen, and thus leads directly into two of the highlights of Judy, which are two additional songs by Arlen from another all-black production, “Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home” and “Come Rain or Come Shine” (both from St. Louis Woman); she also honors the operatic side of Arlen with “Last Night When We Were Young.”
Although it, too, was released in conjunction with a TV special (her last one until 1962), Judy was different in every way. With arrangements by Nelson Riddle, who had midwifed the rebirth of both Sinatra and Cole, Judy offered a new Judy, a more exciting, more mature, more sophisticated version of the Judy everybody already loved; Dorothy Gale, Esther Smith, Betsy Booth, and Lily Mars had all grown up; no more a mixed-up little in-between. She still sang the old songs, and she still had that vaudeville two-a-day in her soul, still channeled the spirits of Jolson and Tucker, but now she did it to exciting new rhythms, modernistic new harmonies, and fresh orchestral colors, vividly documented, for the first time, in high fidelity. On “Dirty Hands, Dirty Face,” she seems to throw the gauntlet down in front of the ghost of Jolson (who is listed as one of the four composers); as a love song to a male child it’s presumably a direct follow-up to “Happiness Is Just a Thing Called Joe.” Yet Riddle and Garland also seem to be thinking of Sinatra and the “Soliloquy” from Carousel as an intimate anthem of parenthood, and Riddle closed with the same sort of classical coda harmonic twinkling he would later put behind “Soliloquy” on The Concert Sinatra.
Judy begins with Garland singing “Come Rain or Come Shine,” almost a cappella, accompanied only by a bongo drum in the distance (a recording that made use of acoustic space in a way that wouldn’t have been possible a few years earlier), with a hint of Cuban rhythm that no one until then would ever have dreamed of using behind a mainstream singer doing a show tune. Judy and its follow-up with Riddle, the 1957 Judy in Love, easily amount to the high point of Garland’s recording career. The use of Afro-Cuban polyrhythms in “Come Rain or Come Shine” was only the beginning; even more remarkable was the second chorus, in which Garland played with the Arlen-Mercer song in a way that was so personal they couldn’t even be labeled jazz. These variations (like repeating the phrase “let me” over and over) were not strictly spontaneous; they were part of the chart, and had probably been worked out in advance by Garland and Riddle, yet when she performed the chart on other occasions (as on the London sessions and at Carnegie Hall), she did variations on the variations. As time went on, Garland dropped the reference to Cole Porter (“one of those crazy things!”) but continued to add more and more “let me’s” to the end of the bridge.
Judy in Love, arranged by Riddle, and Alone, by Jenkins, were flip sides of each other: The first featured all optimistic, even erotic love songs, not all of them fast—in fact, the slow “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love” (one of many Garland standards incorporating special material lyrics, probably by longtime mentor Roger Edens) and “I’m Confessin’ ” are two of the warmest, earthiest, and sexiest vocals ever captured on recording tape. Alone consists of eleven songs (one added only in the CD era) about strolling with one’s shadow, sitting there and counting fingers and raindrops (not to mention a million sheep), about getting the right to sing the blues when it rains. Yet in Garland’s musical universe, no less than Sinatra’s or Holiday’s, even the happy songs have more than a hint of melancholy, like a spice in a stew, and some of the sad songs, like “Mean to Me” and “By Myself,” are delivered with a brassy beat.
The only disaster of the period is The Letter, not only arranged and conducted by Jenkins but with words and music by him, too; in 1945, the composer-conductor had struck gold with Manhattan Tower, a sort of hybrid song cycle and musical theater for a narrator, male and female soloists, orchestra, and choir. The original Decca recording was a blockbuster and so was the 1955 LP remake for Capitol; both Capitol and Jenkins were hoping that this very similar work, also with a metrocentric theme and adding Garland’s star power, would cause lightning to strike twice. Capitol heavily bankrolled this pseudo-sequel, with the first vinyl copies released in lavish packaging that included a “letter” in an envelope. Garland is in excellent form on the disc, but this music drama is far from Jenkins’s best work. In 2007, DRG records reissued the album for the first time on CD, and included four bonus tracks, which sound like the same tracks prepared for singles release. The songs, especially “That’s All There Is” (later recorded by Nat Cole), sound considerably better without the dialogue, narration, and extraneous dramatic business.
The Letter was a misstep, but Judy: That’s Entertainment! is an underrated gem. The arrangements, by Jack Marshall (best known for his work with Peggy Lee), are less distinctive than those by Riddle or Jenkins, but are suitably either jazzy or old-fashioned as the material demands. He, too, found new beats for Garland to groove to, including a Dixieland “Puttin’ on the Ritz” and a campy mambo clave for “You Go to My Head” (his use of Latin rhythms is hardly as subtle as Riddle’s). Apart from these rhythmic explorations, That’s Entertainment! contains several of her most effective, understated ballads: “I’ve Confessed to the Breeze,” a delightful, forgotten song from No, No, Nanette that remains obscure despite Garland’s championing of it; André Previn’s “Yes” is one of Garland’s most touchingly intimate performances, and a stunning example of how she didn’t have to get big and loud to move an audience; “It Never Was You” shows that Kurt Weill was just as good at writing sophisticated Broadway love songs, in the tradition of Kern and Rodgers, as he was at declaratively antibourgeoisie battle cries.
She made two studio albums in 1960 because no one had expected to release the London recordings as an album. (On the other hand, if Judy in London qualifies as a “bonus” album, then it’s only fair that the dreadful The Letter should qualify as a “minus” album.) In fact, it’s hard to say exactly why Garland did those London dates: She was making a concert tour of England with the well-known British bandleader Norrie Paramor conducting, and for some reason the two of them decided to get together in the studios of EMI, which by then had become the parent company of Capitol Records. The odd thing is that 1960 is supposed to be one of the low points in her career. Photos reveal that she was extremely overweight; she was chronically mismanaged (as usual); and, in general, she was in a very depressed state both personally and professionally. Yet somehow in London she rallied; some of these were songs she’d already been doing for twenty years or more, and the arrangements were ones that had been written for her previous six Capitol LPs.
The recording quality was superb and Garland herself was somewhere beyond inspired. The high point from the sessions is a city song that she seems to have recorded only this one time in a studio, Cole Porter’s 1930 “I Happen to Like New York,” which is embellished by a special material verse written for her. To hear her sing it, one has a hard time believing that she wasn’t born in a trunk in the middle of Times Square. The use of a semisymphonic arrangement and angelic choir (not to mention the subject matter) puts us in mind of Manhattan Tower and The Letter; the way she steadily grows louder and modulates higher is at once operatic and old-school showbiz. This is an anthem, plain and simple, evoking the same spirit of stand-up-and-salute that Ray Charles later brought to “America the Beautiful.” What makes it work is the contrast between Porter’s dirgy melody and the sense of humor of the text, which is amply amplified by Garland. Porter doesn’t idealize New York, but rather embraces the city for all its failings as well as its virtues, the “sight and sound and even the stink of it.” It’s a performance that never fails to give me goose bumps.
At thirty-eight, then, Garland was hardly wiped out; rather, she was ready for a last hurrah, a comeback that would put her entire career in perspective.
During her lifetime, Capitol also released three live concert recordings:
Judy Garland at the Grove (1958), with Freddy Martin and His Orchestra
Judy at Carnegie Hall (1961)
Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli, Live at the London Palladium (1964)
Carnegie Hall is just about the single greatest live album by a singer of popular American standards, the other major contenders being Ella in Berlin (although there are several other Fitzgerald packages one could also name), Tony Bennett at Carnegie Hall (done a year after Garland and almost as exciting), Nat King Cole at the Sands (released posthumously), and Sinatra at the Sands (with Count Basie, and a very late entrant in the live album stakes, but nonetheless superb). There were also several exciting live Mel Tormé albums, although all of Peggy Lee’s “live” recordings turned out to be studio fakes.
Garland was in fine fettle as part of an extended concert tour that climaxed on April 23—when she became the first major pop singer to fill an entire evening at Carnegie (unless you count fifties chart divette Joni James). She was on fire from start to finish, fully in touch with The Force throughout, the bright side on “San Francisco” and “Zing!,” the dark side on “Alone Together” (the one tune on the original double LP from a studio session). She also showed she had a sense of humor about herself—a whole other kind of camp that’s completely different from that which is usually associated with her—when she belted out a red-hot mambo treatment of “You Go to My Head.” (Having led in the live album stakes, it’s too bad she didn’t join Lawrence, Gormé, Lee, Reese, Tormé, and Clooney and later Sinatra and Jobim in the pop-singers-go-Latin category.)
Judy at Carnegie Hall was a blockbuster concert and a blockbuster album and launched an upward spiral for her. She followed Carnegie with a TV special, which she shared with guests Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, and the results were so successful that CBS gave her a shot at a weekly variety show. In 1963, TV Guide called it “the Great Garland Gamble.” The Judy Garland Show was indeed a crap shoot, in which CBS bet a heavy bundle both that the allegedly unreliable superstar, whose penchant for self-destruction was already legendary, would behave herself and that any program could challenge NBC’s Sunday night blockbuster, the Western series Bonanza. Within six months, the stress of the weekly series left her again in a state of physical breakdown (Sinatra learned from her experience when he elected to make his ultimate television statement in a series of annual specials), and the mighty Cartwrights of the Ponderosa Ranch still had all their wagons in a circle.
In the meantime, however, Garland and her crew created twenty-six generally brilliant hour-long shows (most of which have been made available in a highly recommended series of DVDs from Pioneer Home video, while a number of the sound track vocals are on the four-CD box Judy, produced in 1998 by 32 Records). Bonanza be darned! From the vantage point of forty-five years, The Judy Garland Show was a triumph. That’s not only because of the supercharged dynamo at its center, but for the quality of the writing, the orchestrations by Mort Lindsey, and the special vocal arrangements by Mel Tormé. In the lineup of guest stars, including Tormé, Peggy Lee, Vic Damone, Jack Jones, Steve Lawrence, Martha Raye, Lena Horne, and Tony Bennett, The Judy Garland Show amounts to a nearly definitive visual library of great American pop. Nearly every minute of the twenty-six hours—even the frequently dated comedy bits—is worthy of preservation.
CBS kept insisting that the star had to be showcased as “the girl next door,” which presumably meant like Dinah Shore—a fine, cheerful, and decidedly nonthreatening singing star who hosted a nonthreatening show. The producers, however, starting with George Schlatter, wisely followed their own artistic consciences, and presented Garland as the marvelous monster that she was: the greatest of all pop superdivas, at once larger than life and supremely mortal in her wounded glory. At times she seems to burst with so much emotion and intensity that the small screen can barely contain her, yet for the most part, the television medium affords us a chance to witness a more intimate and personal side of the unique singer’s personality than movies or even live concerts ever did.
Garland’s numbers, which include her only performances of many wonderful songs, make the point convincingly that her pinnacle years were here in the early sixties and not, as most people assume, the golden age of movie musicals twenty years earlier. Any singer can make her strengths work for her—a beautiful voice, for instance—but it takes a master like Garland to turn a liability into an asset. On “Moon River,” Garland’s throat sounds drier than usual. Yet she uses her shortness of breath to help her tell the lyric’s now familiar tale of yearning, to make the story even more poignant, even to the point of desperation, and every gasp, wheeze, and broken note makes her that much more convincing.
For Garland it was all about getting and keeping your attention: From one point of view, she was seen as a musical conservative—hell, a lot of her big numbers were songs that Al Jolson made famous long before she was born—but her arrangements were always innovative. She was the master of using the verse to a song as a way to heighten drama, and when Sinatra, Bennett, Fitzgerald, and Tormé did this, it was something they had learned from her. Garland often relies on the idea that an audience might not be familiar with the verse even to a song whose chorus they knew by heart (she’s the only one I’ve heard sing the intro to “I May Be Wrong”—it’s on a V-Disc with Tommy Dorsey), and in those cases, the leap from one to the other is always suspenseful. Garland takes this a step further in several cases by commissioning all new introductory verses to songs that already had perfectly acceptable ones. There are original intros to one of the oft-performed pieces of her career, “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love” (no, Dorothy Fields was not writing about Thunderbird automobiles back in 1928), as well as to a song that she only sang once (so far as anybody knows), “Just One of Those Things,” recorded live at her London debut at the Palladium in 1951.
Garland consistently sang verses to songs—more so than nearly any other singer in her class, including Sinatra—but the one verse that was conspicuous by its absence was that of her major mantra, “Over the Rainbow.” As Mel Tormé and others have observed, Garland regarded that song as something sacred, and was hesitant to tamper with the arrangement. It would have been like messing with a religious text. There is a radio performance where she actually sings the verse to “Rainbow,” and others where she does parody lyrics, but these are rare exceptions to the rule. Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, and more recently Tony Bennett have all included that verse in their recordings of the Harold Arlen perennial, at once in tribute to Garland and in an attempt to put their own stamp on her property. In addition to the radio reading with the verse, there are two from the 1939 Good News program, which premiered the Wizard of Oz score: a truncated reading with Arlen himself “coaching” her from the piano, and a fuller run-through from the same show where she fudges one of the lines coming out of the bridge. Most sacrilegious of all is a politically motivated parody version recorded in conjunction with a 1944 fund-raising event for the Democratic Party.
Between Roger Edens at MGM and Mel Tormé at CBS, Garland had the benefit of working with two of the all-time best writers of special material, which was one of the essential elements that made Garland Garland. Edens had instilled in her a reliance on unique orchestrations as early as “You Made Me Love You”/“Dear Mr. Gable,” and for her 1963–64 CBS TV series she went so far as to hire Tormé as a sort of hipper, heterosexual heir to Edens. Her radical revision of “San Francisco” owes only the central 32-bar chorus to the song introduced in the picture of the same name by Jeanette MacDonald in 1936. For starters, there’s another one of those great new Garland verses, which plays on the song’s history by poking fun at Miss MacDonald and the aforementioned movie. After the refrain, there’s a set of variations in the form of a patter chorus (similar to those Garland employs on another city song, “Chicago”).
But it’s the tempo change that really brings it home. The classic jazz-pop ideal, perfected by Louis Armstrong in the twenties, is to increase excitement by making a song go faster and faster—think Sinatra’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” and Bobby Darin’s “Mack the Knife.” Garland achieves the same effect by slowing things down to a crawl. But it’s a crawl tempo that’s at once sexy (in something of the mold of “The Stripper,” the hit instrumental by her ex-husband David Rose) and classic showbiz, with a very dramatic emphasis on the second and fourth beats of every measure. (It’s less pronounced in “San Francisco,” more so in the ingeniously hoked-up Sousa-esque march “Hey Look Me Over.”) When Garland gets all of it working at once, as indeed she did almost all the time, she’s impossible to resist.
At the time, the Carnegie and CBS period (1961–64) seemed like a short-lived comeback for the singer. In retrospect, it may well have been her pinnacle, more of a career climax than even the amazing arc of films and recordings from The Wizard of Oz to Summer Stock. There were later films: The 1962 animated feature Gay Purr-ee brought Garland back to Oz territory in that it was ostensibly children’s entertainment, but it boasted decidedly adult laments in a fine Harold Arlen score.
Unlike Sinatra, Garland was not able to reinvent herself as a nonsinging actor, even though she proved herself dramatically in the nonmusical The Clock (1945) well before Sinatra did in From Here to Eternity. (She did it again in a supporting role in Judgment at Nuremberg, 1961.) In 1963, she starred in two dramas with music, A Child Is Waiting and I Could Go On Singing. Fans found joy in the latter in that it boasted three excellent Garland numbers, two oldies plus the new title track, which would be the last of the major songs written for her by Harburg and Arlen. A further reunion with André Previn would mark her final appearances on a Hollywood soundstage; she recorded a vocal of “I’ll Plant My Own Tree,” which might have rescued Valley of the Dolls (1967) in the same way that “Far Away Part of Town” saved Pepe, but it didn’t make the final print. Two years later, in 1969, she died at the age of forty-seven. “She was a good friend,” as Tony Bennett put it, “but she couldn’t be helped.”
We launched this love letter with the observation that size was the most important consideration of Garland’s singing; whether it was a big number or an intimate one ultimately mattered more than whether it was fast or slow, or loud or soft. But perhaps size didn’t really matter after all. Whether Garland was blasting or whispering, she always seemed so much bigger, and more wonderful, than life.
When Buddy Greco walks out on stage, he’s likely to start with an introductory move that’s somewhere between cute and obnoxious. For instance, when Carnegie Hall mounted an all-star tribute to Nat King Cole in July 1997, Greco, an obvious disciple of the departed King, was fittingly on hand. Whereas everyone else on the bill introduced his segment by complimenting Cole, Greco elected to start his spot by saying something flattering about himself. “Nat and I had a lot in common,” Greco told the Carnegie crowd, “we both had perfect pitch.”
Greco is so simpatico with audiences (even when he’s being antipático) that it makes sense that a significant number of his many albums were made in front of live audiences. At all the sets I’ve experienced, whether in person or via vinyl, he throws in at least one minor move calculated to give a little zetz to his listeners, a little dig, a twist, something to give us pause. It’s a strategy, I suspect, calculated to get us interested, to make sure we’re paying attention, because once he’s got us listening, he knows it’s just a matter of a song or two before he’s won us over. We listen to his smooth vocal delivery, his excitedly aggressive swing numbers and surprisingly sensitive ballads, his virtuoso piano playing, and his relentless sense of rhythm, and how can we not be captivated?
Sometimes he starts by irritating us—as on “Baubles, Bangles and Beads” (On Stage!, 1964), in which he makes it look as though he can’t even take his own arrangement seriously enough not to giggle through the thing. Or on “To Each His Own”: Where the lyric calls for the title phrase to be repeated in a singsong fashion, Greco, instead of doing the repeat, simply shouts, “Same thing!” Yet even if he starts by teasing us with a little minor annoyance, he’s more than able to deliver the goods. No performer works harder at pleasing his crowds.
He’s a veritable study in high energy. The classic Greco tracks, like “This Could Be the Start of Something Big” (on Buddy’s Back in Town), have the artist slowly gathering in both momentum and machismo, something his dual citizenship as musician and singer allows him to do. He varies between holding back and belting, and with every chorus he pushes the whole works just a little bit noisier and more exciting.
Many keyboardists will add the occasional vocal to their act, but they tend to have minimal voices and sing in an offhand, spare fashion, like Joe Mooney, Barbara Carroll, or Dave Frishberg, or even, in his early years, Nat Cole. Not Greco: It’s not enough for him to be playing and singing at the same time, he has to totally occupy every space in the performance. Why should he let even a rest go by, or a fill between lines, when there’s a potential opportunity to turn on a crowd—he’d much rather let a consonant ring (or should I say, “ring-ah”—as in “It happened in Monterey-ah”) than let there be any kind of letup in the music.
Greco’s biggest accomplishment may be his perfect synthesis of the two greatest male jazz-pop artists of the mid-twentieth century, Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole. He has the confidence, the charisma, the swagger, the Swingin’ Lover machismo of the former, as well as the piano chops, the vocal and instrumental precision of the latter. For a period in the late forties, when Greco was serving as boy crooner with Benny Goodman, he also seemed to be making a move on Billy Eckstine’s territory.
In discussing the influences on Greco, it wouldn’t be fair to leave out the singers he himself has inspired, most notably Bobby Darin. Indeed, Darin’s blending of Sinatra’s Swingin’ Lover school and rhythm and blues is in many ways anticipated in Greco’s work, and Greco also foreshadowed his younger paesano in his employment of a Louis Jordan/Louis Prima shuffle rhythm. Greco’s grunted use of nonverbal noises (those “ho”s and “hup”s) also found a place in Darin’s art, but most notable is his overall phrasing. Also anticipating Darin, he tends to use modulations more frequently than Sinatra, a technique that obviously grows out of Greco’s skill as a pianist—as indeed, it may well have also for Darin, an accomplished multi-instrumentalist himself.
The contemporary, Sinatra-styled singer Cary Hoffman and I have both noticed that Bobby Darin tended to cut off his notes in a jazzy, hard-swinging fashion that’s obviously patterned after Greco. When I pointed this out to Buddy, he responded, “I had to cut my notes like that—I don’t have any voice. After all, I’m not Sinatra, you know.” It’s as rare to find an artist who can put his own craft into perspective as it is unusual to find Greco acting humble—even if, in this case, he sells his talent short.
As with his hero, Nat Cole, for Armando Joseph Greco (born on August 14, 1926, in Philadelphia) it all started with the piano. In fact, his father, a devoted opera buff, made him practice on a “virtual keyboard” made out of cardboard long before the family could afford their own piano. And though he normally worked as what Greco called a “hardwood finisher,” at one point Greco Senior pooled enough of his resources together to open a record shop, and future pop star Al Martino, then holding down a day job as a bricklayer, worked at the front of the store. At this point, in the early forties, Greco was able to hear the earliest releases of the King Cole Trio, and was soon to absorb the great jazz piano tradition of Tatum, Waller, Hines, and Wilson. “But the guy that really did it for me,” as Greco has written in “I Had a Ball” (the working title of his unpublished autobiography), was not a pianist but the great Louis Armstrong. “When I first heard [him] play, he not only made me feel good, he made me happy and he made me laugh. I knew then and there that I was going to be exactly what I am.”
However, he wasn’t working the small-time circuits for very long. Around 1945, Greco came to the attention of Elliot Wexler, a well-connected talent agent. First, Wexler brought him to Musicraft Records, for whom he recorded his first hit, “Ooh, Looka There Ain’t She Pretty?” a Fats Waller–esque tune done within a King Cole Trio–style rendition. Some of the early articles and liner notes on Greco state that this disc sold over a million copies; while it seems unlikely that the tiny independent Musicraft could have marketed or even manufactured a million-seller, “Ooh, Looka There” is, surprisingly, listed as a certified gold disc on the Billboard charts (according to Joel Whitburn’s Pop Memories).
Equally important, Wexler brought him to the attention of Benny Goodman, who, even several years after what was considered the end of the big band era, was still one of the central figures in showbiz. Greco was hired ostensibly as a pianist, but he also served as the band’s major male singer and on occasion he even fronted the band. (Greco also relates that one Norma Jean Baker auditioned for the band as a singer, but BG advised her to consider some other line of work.) Goodman’s own sentiments were, at the time, somewhat divided: On the one hand, he was deep in a love-hate relationship with the new music known as bebop, and had assembled an outstanding ensemble that was more than capable of playing it. At the same time, he was continuing a love-love relationship with the big band classics he had already been playing for a decade. Goodman was also keen to satisfy the dancing public’s hunger for pop music, which was generally achieved by featuring Greco’s singing on contemporary numbers like the forgettable “Having a Wonderful Wish (Time You Were Here).”
When Goodman broke up the bop band, Greco went out on his own with a small combo just at the time that Nat Cole was deemphasizing his own jazz trio and featuring himself almost exclusively as a pop singer. Today, we think of Greco as exemplifying the better class of artists working in Vegas and Atlantic City, but in the fifties and sixties, he headlined at increasingly prestigious nightspots all over the country. He never quite made it to the superstar level of Sinatra, Cole, or Tony Bennett—he didn’t have the multimedia career of the first or the propensity for hit singles of the latter two. It may tell us something that he spent his glory years under contract to two major recording concerns, MCA and Columbia, but that in both cases these companies assigned him to their subsidiary operations: Rather than appearing on Decca or Columbia, Greco’s albums were released on Coral and Kapp (in the late fifties) and then on Epic (in the early to mid-sixties). Yet he recorded what seems like thousands of albums for these corporations, most of which hold up very well forty to fifty years later, and all of which are deserving of CD reissue. At the same time, he enjoyed a long run at the very top of the nightclub world during the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson years.
Greco did nearly all of his classic work for Coral/Kapp and Epic. For a time, Coral had the idea of presenting him as a romantic crooner, and released a number of ballad singles, nearly all of which went nowhere at the time and don’t sound any better now. By the start of the LP era, he had come back to the King Cole–style pianist-singer and hot combo format that would serve him satisfyingly, with occasional exceptions, from that point on. The earlier albums tend to use small combos more consistently, most notably his own working group (including his brother, the talented saxophonist Al Taylor, who used that stage name to avoid charges of nepotism). The Epic albums often use full orchestras and team Greco with some of the best pop orchestrators in the business. Both corporations have released anthologies that I would endorse as well-chosen samples of the best of his work in those years. Talkin’ Verve (don’t ask me to explain the title) covers the fifties, and 16 Most Requested Songs lives up to that title’s promise of delivering most of his best-remembered tracks of the Epic era. He made live albums in both periods; the earlier ones, like the 1955 Buddy Greco at Mister Kelly’s, appear to be genuine location tapings. However the sixties projects, such as My Buddy (1959) and On Stage! (1964), tend to follow Columbia’s baffling—yet consistent—policy of crafting bogus live albums.
Although the 1958 Buddy (half of which, including all the vocal numbers, is included on Talkin’ Verve) was neither a live album nor a pseudolive one, it seems to be a fairly accurate representation of what Greco and his group were doing live in the clubs at the time. Buddy uses Greco’s working quartet, featuring Taylor on various saxophones (and taking a very creditable flute solo on “That’s All”) and is divided between vocal and instrumental numbers. By the end of the decade, and the switchover from MCA to Columbia, his style was practically perfected.
“Yes Sir, That’s My Baby” is light and swinging, yet at the same time dense, with Greco shtick at its most endearing: He starts with a rap (“I met a chick/The other day …”) similar to that used by Ray Charles in “Greenbacks” or by Sam Butera in “Next Time,” and from there goes into “I Love to Love” (an amorous anthem of the era associated with Peggy Lee and Lena Horne), and just when we’re convinced that “Love to Love” is, at last, the song he’s going to stick with, he leads us into the long-awaited “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby.” Such side trips would become part of Greco’s formula: The thoroughly de-waltzed “It Happened in Monterey” finds him detouring through Billy Eckstine’s “Stormy Monday” and Nat Cole’s “Calypso Blues,” while “The Rules of the Road” (on the 1964 On Stage!) takes us to “The Man That Got Away.”
“Shtick” is often perceived as excluding jazz.However, while Greco’s bits of business are undeniably shtick, they are mightily swinging shtick. The most purist of jazz purists (the same ones who pooh-pooh Louis Prima) could conceivably object to Greco’s highly animated offerings, but they’d be tapping their feet four beats to a bar while they did so.
It’s Greco’s unfailing sense of swing that makes his act musical. Following the examples of Sinatra and Tormé, “It Happened in Monterey,” Mabel Wayne’s ersatz Mexican waltz from 1930, is now no longer in 3/4 time: Greco’s group has invested it with genuinely exotic rhythms, complete with flute and bongos. The same can be said for Irving Berlin’s 1919 “I’ll See You in C-U-B-A,” only there it’s a case of a comic faux-Latin song—as opposed to a romantic one—being made at once more authentic and more swinging. Likewise, Greco opens his sambafied “All of You” with a “Peanut Vendor”–like moan. Even when he’s not folding songs into other songs, he and his groups have a great gift for finding suitable countermelodies, like the insinuating, country and western style vamp that emerges out of the lower registers to accompany “One for My Baby” and the catchy tenor sax introduction to and vamp behind “The Party’s Over.” And Greco doesn’t always sound like a lounge lizard on steroids. Ballads like the sensitive “Here Am I in Love Again” reveal that he has—who’d’a thunk it?—a sensitive side.
My Buddy (1959) launches Greco’s run of Epic albums, as well as several titles that play off his stage name—e.g., Buddy and Soul. Although ostensibly “recorded at Le Bistro, Rush Street, Chicago,” the package seems to have been done in the studio with applause and other live effects added later. But the two Epic “live” sets—the other is On Stage!—are two of the singer-pianist’s most essential packages. Although the applause may have been phony, Greco’s swinging style was decidedly not, and a number of his classics were first documented on this set—the opener, “Like Young,” André and Dory Previn’s ode to swinging beatnikism, for instance. On “The Lady Is a Tramp,” Greco (like Ella Fitzgerald in her live treatments of the sixties) concentrates on Larry Hart’s fourth verse; even though Lena Horne, Frank Sinatra, and Mel Tormé had all made a career peg out of this song, Greco manages to imbue it with his own personality and becomes yet another performer identified with this Rodgers and Hart hit.
Where My Buddy includes a tender treatment of Erroll Garner’s well-known “Misty,” On Stage! (1964) has him doing that hit song’s less-successful follow-up, “Dreamy,” which he smartly introduces with a Garnerlike piano flourish. The two “live” albums also include what may well be Greco’s two greatest wise-ass anthems: The 1959 set has “That’s What I Thought You Said,” an ingenious exercise in avoiding the issue of a significant other’s rather extravagant demands, and the 1964 set has “The Best Man.” This piece was earlier immortalized by the King Cole Trio (from whom Greco doubtless learned it) and has been revived more recently by singer-pianist Eric Comstock as well as by Cole’s talented younger brother Freddy. But only Greco projects the perfect balance of ego and insecurity; only he sings it as if he really believes he is “The Best Man”; only Greco has the cojones to throw in a coda in which the ex-girlfriend comes to the conclusion that he (and not his best friend, whom she married) is “the best man in the end.”
During the years 1959–64, Greco recorded seventeen LPs for Epic—it seems unlikely that the whole bunch will come out on CD, but I can dream, can’t I? Of the ones I’ve heard, only a few can be called disappointing, and even those are far from worthless. Apart from the live albums, there are a number of other concept packages—four sets of ballads, one of Italian songs, one most unusual composer-driven songbook album, and an instrumental/all-piano package.
There are some surprises, and not all good ones. The Neapolitan package, My Last Night in Rome (1964), is, frankly, lame. Perhaps out of not wanting to screw around with his ethnic heritage, he sings most of these songs too straight—as if he were Al Martino, Jimmy Roselli, or Jerry Vale. One wishes that the whole thing had been done in Italo-American Swingin’ Lover style, like Dean Martin or Louis Prima, or the way that Greco himself sang Rodgers and Hart (and, for that matter, the way he does the Italian song “[I Don’t Care] Only Love Me” on My Buddy). Although the songs are suited to him, most of the discothequey arrangements just sound corny. The most engaging performance here is the opener, “It Had Better Be Tonight” (included on 16 Most Requested Songs), written by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer for The Pink Panther.
On the other hand, there are some excitingly irreverent orchestrations, credited to Greco himself, and the singing to go with them, on Modern Sounds of Hank Williams (also 1964), Greco’s one songwriter-tribute project. The great country composer’s hits are solidly situated within a contemporary jazz-pop framework; for instance, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” is a jazz waltz in the manner of Ray Charles’s “Busted” (most of the others are in a solid four), “Jambalaya” employs a vaguely Latin beat, and “Hey Good Lookin’ ” has Greco soloing on a funky Hammond organ. (The only letdown is Williams’s gospel number “I Saw the Light,” which is sung by a Disneylandish choir interacting with Greco’s piano improvisations, but, alas, no vocal from Greco himself.)
The love song albums are Songs for Swinging Losers (1960), a set arranged and conducted by Chuck Slagel that’s different in tone from any of Sinatra’s downer albums. A better comparison would be the Nat Cole–Billy May Just One of Those Things, which similarly intersperses up-tempos (like the highlight “By Myself”) with down moods; the comparatively dull Buddy Greco Sings for Intimate Moments (1963), conducted by future bigwig Dave Grusin, which has Buddy belting “If Ever I Would Leave You” against a syrupy choir; and the superior Buddy and Soul (1962) and Soft and Gentle (1963), both of which also mix slow and fast moods in a general love song context. The inspired orchestrations of the shortlived Robert Mersey greatly enhance these last two, as does a good selection of tunes (especially an “After the Lights Go Down Low,” in which he grunts like Al Hibbler). On his best ballads, Greco is nearly competition for such masters as Vic Damone, and frequently puts the lie to his own contention that he doesn’t have any chops.
Ballads are all well and good, but there’s no debating what Buddy Greco does best: swing. Pure swing. Explosive, relentless, insensitive sometimes, almost even annoying swing. This is precisely what he achieves on I Like It Swinging and Let’s Love, the two albums that very well may represent the apogee of his entire career. Both are from 1961 and both are arranged and conducted by Al Cohn, the star jazz saxist.
Greco classics abound here: In “Around the World,” he reinvents the Victor Young movie waltz as a killing swinger saturated with Prima-style shuffle rhythm. Instead of ending his first chorus with “for I have found my world in you,” as written, Greco throws in a whole bunch of “I like it! I like it! I like it!”s as he lunges into a modulation. He even reanimates the normally tender and sensitive “Surrey with the Fringe on Top” and “Secret Love” with testosterone to spare. He gives the Greco treatment to two Peggy Lee signatures, “Fever” and “I Love Being Here with You” (wisely employed as a closer rather than an opener), and very nearly wrests them away from that great lady, while his “Roses of Picardy” is a blueprint for the famous Darin–Billy May treatment of a few years later. He also invades blues territory, in Jackie Wilson’s “You Better Know It,” Ray Charles’s “Hallelujah I Love Her So,” and Willie Mabon’s 1953 “I Don’t Know,” which amounts to the latest in the ongoing line of Greco raps.
The Epic series ends with an instrumental album with the beguiling title From the Wrists Down (1965). Continuing the parallel with Cole, this package has more in common with The Piano Style of Nat King Cole (piano solos with orchestral accompaniment) than with Penthouse Serenade (piano solos with trio backing). That in itself is not necessarily a bad thing, nor was the decision to subject only contempo hits to this treatment. Greco’s digits and the accompanying orch do fine with the bossa novas “So Danco Samba,” “Carnival,” and “Corcovado,” although it’s hard to see why producer Tony Palmer wanted a piano-orchestra instrumental of “What’s New Pussycat?,” “Sweet Pussycat” (I’m detecting a theme here), “Help!,” or the Herman’s Hermits hit “Henry the Eighth.” (Throughout the early sixties, Greco scholar Tony Sachs informs me, the pianist-singer recorded a steady stream of fascinating and diverse material for Epic singles, which have never been collated on LP or CD, ranging from Lennon and McCartney to Swingin’ Lover Rat Packer finger-snappers like the marvelous “To Be or Not to Be in Love.”)
Cole also echoes throughout Big Band and Ballads (1966), the first and best of three albums Greco recorded for Sinatra’s Reprise label, produced by Jimmy Bowen. BB&B opens with two songs from Cole’s concept album and TV special Wild Is Love—the title track and “It’s a Beautiful Evening.” (He also performs two other songs from the Cole songbook here, “L-O-V-E” and “Funny.”) BB&B marks one of the few straight-ahead packages ever produced by Bowen, already famous for “contemporizing” the Rat Pack. Ironically, nothing that Bowen ever produced for Sinatra is as good as Big Band and Ballads.
The other Greco-Bowen-Reprise collections are not up to that level: Buddy’s in a Brand New Bag (1967) fails for all the wrong reasons, and Away We Go (1967) fails for all the right ones. Brand New Bag, as the title hints, attempts to foist Greco on the jukebox crowd with songs by Leiber and Stoller and Italo-pop-like “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” (already a hit for Dusty Springfield and later for Elvis Presley). On Away We Go, the title being taken from a summer replacement TV series that Greco shared with another pugnacious Buddy (namely Rich), the songs are generally of a higher class, but it was a mistake to try to update Greco with bossa nova hits: Unlike Sinatra, he is just too aggressive to work with those gentle, undulating rhythms. Sam Cooke’s “Good Times,” Greco’s latest reconstruction of a rhythm and blues hit, works much better—thanks partially to an arrangement inspired by the Sinatra-Riddle Strangers in the Night album. (Greco’s attack on “Summer Wind” is far from magical, alas.)
Away We Go seems to be Greco’s last major label venture, though he’s recorded about a dozen albums since 1967. There’s some confusion about who he is and what he should be recording: The seventies and eighties albums are generally divided between him doing remakes of his past triumphs (“Around the World,” etc.), and someone—sometimes the pianistsinger himself—trying to be contemporary with current hit songs and rock and/or disco rhythms. “Those awful eighties albums are, I believe, the brainchild of Buddy, much as I wish someone else had put him up to them,” as Buddy’s rabbi, Tony Sachs, put it. “He’s very proud of, for instance, his cover of ‘Me and Mrs. Jones.’ ”
But Greco never faltered in live performance, and when he brings that same clarity of focus to his recorded work, the results are memorable. For instance, the 1994 Route 66, with his quartet, is an admirable tribute to Nat Cole. (“Moonlight in Vermont” was never associated with Cole, but who gives a paper moon?) ’Round Midnight (1992) was a concerted attempt to make a jazz album with a capital J, and while the arrangements are a little on the jazzlite side, there are copious solos from such West Coast luminaries as Jack Sheldon, Terry Gibbs, Ernie Watts, Grover Washington, and Toots Thielemans. Jazzier still is Jazz Grooves, an all-instrumental package (only Greco’s second) with challenging charts by guitarist Joe Lano.
’Round Midnight is one of several successful projects resulting from the union of Greco and producer-arranger Alf Clausen. (Unfortunately, while Greco and Clausen are obviously best buds, Clausen has never engineered an appearance by Greco on his most famous venture, the music for The Simpsons. Too bad—Greco would make a great replacement for the late Phil Hartman as the voice of Lionel Hutz.) Clausen also contributed to It’s Magic (1990), In Style (1996), and MacArthur Park (1996).
The song “MacArthur Park” has been Greco’s most reliable showstopper over the last few decades. Other singers, particularly Italianate crooners looking for the youth audience (Sinatra, Bennett, Damone), have sung it, but only Greco can claim that the song was written on his own piano: According to him, songwriter Jimmy Webb was crashing on the Greco couch at the very time he left his famous cake out in the rain. Only Greco renders it as an instrumental, which, given the autobiographical specificity of Webb’s text (even after Sinatra and Bennett, I still can’t quite bring myself to care about either that cake or that rain), is probably for the best. Greco generally uses it as his show closer—as with Bennett and “How Do You Keep the Music Playing,” one gets the impression that nothing can follow it—and even though my rational mind can’t stand the song, I always find myself applauding wildly and leaping to my feet whenever I hear Greco play it.
I had occasion to do so one day in 1985, when Eric Comstock and I hopped a Greyhound down to Atlantic City to catch Greco, Billy Eckstine, and Tony Bennett, who were all appearing at the same hotel. Tony was in the main room, while Mr. B and Mr. G alternated in the lounge. Needless to say, it was one of the greatest marathons of jazz-pop singing I’ve ever experienced, and Greco easily held his own with these two big-voiced vocal athletes. He made a triumphant New York appearance in March 2001, a few months before his seventy-fifth birthday, and was next seen in these parts in summer 2005—at which point he announced that he was about to open his own club outside Palm Springs, California. Greco and his fifth wife, the talented Peggy Lee–styled vocalist Lezlie Anders, kept the club going for a few years in the mid-oughts before moving to the U.K. in 2009. His most recent vocal albums are a fine big band set called Like Young and a marvelous jazz combo album called Back to Basics. Greco sounds so good on this latter album, recorded in 1999, it’s a small tragedy that he hasn’t cut another one in the last ten years.
Both Back to Basics and Like Young are fitting titles and even mantras for an artist who, after well over sixty years in the business, is still as irrepressible, as charming, and as irritating as ever. Greco has all the finger-popping shallowness we associate with lounge lizards, but at the same time there’s a sincerity and even a purity to his work that’s quite remarkable. There’s no one quite like him. Like, I’m hip.