Nat "King" COLE: Love Is The Thing

(#9: 8 June 1957, 1 week; tied with The King And I)

Track listing: When I Fall In Love/Stardust/Stay As Sweet As You Are/Where Can I Go Without You?/Maybe It’s Because I Love You Too Much/Love Letters/Ain’t Misbehavin’/I Thought About Marie/At Last/It’s All In The Game/When Sunny Gets Blue/Love Is The Thing

The first number one album by a named black artist (since we can hardly discount Harry Edison or Louis Armstrong’s key contributions to previous chart toppers) and the third beginning of time in this tale; Marvin Gaye, whose lifelong ambition was to make an album like Love Is The Thing, begins here, as do Jimmy Scott, Isaac Hayes, Barry White, Teddy Pendergrass, Luther Vandross, D’Angelo and so many others. Although the idea for the concept of Love Is The Thing was inspired by the examples Sinatra had set, its own invention – that of a mood record consisting solely of seductively romantic ballads – has perhaps proved the most durable of all the Capitol concepts.

Like Sinatra, Cole on Capitol had been working more or less exclusively with Nelson Riddle, but by late 1956 he was looking to do something different and sent for Gordon Jenkins; on the spine of my 1986 reissue Jenkins and his orchestra are given full co-credit, and this is apt since the conversation which Jenkins’ strings and Cole’s voice have throughout Love Is The Thing is articulate, deft and touching. In addition, the record stands as a quietly surprising counterpart to the tortured soul, unable to douse his torch, typical of the Sinatra/Jenkins collaborations. There are no breakdowns or confessions here, no losing it altogether (as Sinatra audibly does on the last, wracked, parched “joy and gladness” of his 1960 “None But The Lonely Heart”); there are songs of lost or absent or rejected love, but Cole gives them all the same dignity as happiness, a dignity all more the dignified because we now know how hard won Cole’s was.

Cole died on 15 February 1965, exactly three weeks after my first birthday, aged 47, and I think he was the first major singer who for me was exclusively in the past tense; I have never known a time when Cole was “here,” with us. As a child this was quite unnerving, but the more I found out about Cole and his struggle later – even as a star he was obliged to cope with attempted stage invasions by racists, cancellation of TV shows by scared sponsors, burning KKK crosses on his Hollywood lawn, and of course there was also his other tale, that of a significant figure in the history of jazz piano in the forties – the more my admiration for that dignity, that noble refusal to be brought down or reduced, strengthened, and this made it all the sadder that he was eventually brought down prematurely, not by racism, but by lung cancer caused by his heavy smoking habit.

With Love Is The Thing there is also the case for its being the first ambient number one album and certainly the first album of suspended animation mood music to top the chart; all but one of its dozen tracks are set in the same slow tempo, rubato meditations alternating with discreet guitar, bass and brushes accompaniment, cantering steadily like a patient donkey reluctant to leave Oklahoma. There is a uniformity and yet also an indelible variety about these songs which puts me in mind of Satie; the same object, or subject, viewed from twelve different angles.

And each of these songs offers a specific and different angle on the theme, or the being, of “love” – so The Lexicon Of Love may also begin here – with every conceivable aspect viewed and studied. The mood is so convincing that it’s easy to escape the fact that Cole sings most of the songs from the perspective of a man alone; he has love to offer, but he doesn’t often have a lover to reciprocate. Hence the opening “When I Fall In Love” stands as a sort of manifesto, a declaration of Nat’s principles. Even in the introduction Jenkins sets up the male/female duality, words from the male – the low ‘cello, slowly moving upwards – answered by words from the female – the high strings which slowly come down to meet him. Both converge in the middle, ready for Cole’s sumptuously deep foundation of a voice (with a discreet signature of harp) to complete the picture. He sings, in the lightest yet profoundest of all bass voices, of the importance of permanence (“in a rest-LESS world like this is”) and of his unwavering commitment to fall in love with the right person and not settle for anyone except the right person, however long it may take. The climactic “and the moment I can feel that you feel that way too” seems to be addressed to the listener as much as any would-be Other; but he cannot hide his striking awe at the prospect of this deepest of loves.

Cole’s “Stardust” has perhaps by default become the most famous version of this song, and there is instructive comparison to be made with Sinatra’s attitude to the song in particular; although Sinatra recorded the song several times in his career, he never did it for Capitol – in part because he believed Cole’s reading to be definitive and unimprovable – and notoriously, for the 1962 Reprise Sinatra & Strings album, he sang only the prelude verse, much to Hoagy Carmichael’s bafflement, but he explained that he felt the prelude underrated and wished to give it its proper due.

Jenkins’ orchestration of “Stardust” seems to fade in as though floating into orbit from an unknown galaxy, and we get the first hearing of the repeated two-note semitone motif which keeps recurring with some disquiet throughout the album (even in the midst of the relatively tranquil and content “Love Letters”). There is more than a hint of the Bernard Herrmann ominous here; much has been made of Jenkins’ debt to Mahler, but listen to Herrmann’s Vertigo soundtrack in particular, recorded and released in 1958 since there is considerable, though independent, correspondence with what Jenkins did with his strings.

Cole, however, is undeterred; he has lost someone who perhaps can never be brought back, but he will keep his countenance. He sings the prelude in full, and beautifully, with a tone that suggests deep but resigned regret that “You wandered down the lane and far away.” Jenkins gradually eases the volume down in order to allow the song to begin in earnest, Cole marooned on his asteroid belt, helplessly glancing down at the nightingales, the memories of arms and hearts and new, but the post-Bing triple loops on words like “long” (in the line “But that was long ago”) trigger a moderately florid string commentary as the memory floods back into his deprived present, words like “reverie” and “refrain,” all of which graciously travels on into a far from certain future, the final, not quite resolved major string chords recalling Vaughan Williams and Thomas Tallis. My favourite version of “Stardust” remains the composer’s own, recorded in 1960, relatively late in his life, and alone with just piano and the words spoken, rather than sung, Carmichael ’s delivery sounding astonishingly similar to that of Kerouac; but the completeness of Cole’s reading is unlikely ever to be bettered.

“Stay As Sweet” returns to the themes of depth and permanence; he is not alone in this song, but a distant fear of mortality is beginning to grip his soul, as can be heard in his subtly trembling “Don’t ever lose” – and Cole is always ready to balance that emotionally with the softly ecstatic contentedness of “The way you say yes.” Once more we note words subsequently abandoned by pop – disused adjectives such as “discreet” and “grand” – and how Jenkins’ strings seem to snuggle up to you in the instrumental interlude. But again towards the end there intrudes an impalpable darkness – “Night and day I pray” and “that you’ll always stay” are accompanied by a quietly terrifying four note bass line resembling a suddenly magnified heartbeat, or an unspeakable chill – although Cole and Jenkins are careful to leave a final, sweet aftertaste.

Then we return to lost love; “Where Can I Go Without You?” is a sort of anti-“Around The World” (which latter Sinatra would go on to sing richly and contentedly with Billy May’s arrangement on his 1958 Come Fly With Me album); Cole wanders the globe without redemption (“I went to London town to clear up my mind”) and finds no joy (Paris, Singapore, Vienna, “even in Switzerland” – there’s always something there to remind him). There is just the merest hint of emotional exhaustion in Cole’s “I’m tired of faces and quaint old places if you can’t be there with me” and a reading of the final “Back on the boat again” verse whose gravitas, contrasted by the glittering waves of strings, betrays the tiniest suggestion of a weary march towards a self-erected gallows. “I’ll trade the sights I’ve seen for one loving glance” he concludes as Jenkins provides a cinematic sunset of an ending, but in truth there’s never any real doubt that he will continue to sail and search, even if – as he should – he comes to the conclusion that he needs to search himself.

Unrequited or wasted love is treated in “Maybe It’s Because I Love You Too Much,” a seldom-revived Irving Berlin song – and as with Swingin’ Lovers, it’s a tribute to Cole’s enterprise that the selections here are far from obvious – in which Cole is clearly and deeply sorrowful, but more for the lady who is rejecting or laughing at him than for himself (he nearly puts too much into his axiomatic “too much”) than for himself. Bemused and not even pretending to understand, he resolves that “maybe with a love so great and a love so small/Maybe I’ll be left with no love at all” as a sudden run of pizzicato mimics the sand draining out of the hourglass. Jenkins eventually builds this up into an ending of genuinely Mahlerian tragedy.

And then we arrive at love at a distance. “Love Letters” appears here in its original form, complete with the prelude set aside by Ketty Lester and all those who followed her (although the harp arpeggio in this version isn’t that far removed from doo wop), and it’s a pleasure to be reminded of how good this prelude is: “The sky may be starless, the night may be moonless/But deep in my heart there’s a glow,” and Nat takes his time to allow the weight of his happiness to sink in: “You love me because”…then a pause the length of the universe…”you told me so.” “Love Letters” includes some of the best Jenkins/Cole conversations; Cole’s “I memorise every line” is answered by Jenkins’ scanning string section acting as his intent eyes, his “I kiss the name” by a resolving, deep major chord and his “that you sign” by Jenkins’ shivering, descending flourish of a signature.

Even “Ain’t Misbehavin’” is taken in the same, luxuriously patient way, with some markedly rhetorical strings from Jenkins; Cole is alone again, but naturally unshaken and still utterly convinced that he is right to wait (“I’m through with flirting”); he is perfectly happy to be “home about eight, just me and my radio” for however many years he’ll have to do it because he is saving his love for the right person and has both patience and unconquerable faith.

“I Thought About Marie,” composed by Jenkins himself, is a nicely soured-turned-to-humble account of the aftermath of a disastrous love; now Cole is having trouble getting to sleep and can’t get this affair out of his mind: “Our love affair had to struggle for existence/And many were the fights we had,” he observes stoically, but soon confesses that “it wasn’t too bad.” He can even work humour into his dignity, with the lines “Though she told me we would meet again when the rivers all run dry/And I told her I would see her when there was snow in mid-July,” but still he’s sad, and he resigns himself to reconciliation as an alternative to the unthinkable – “Still, your pride looks small at midnight/And I’m tired of being alone/So I thought of Marie/And reached for the ‘phone,” into which quatrain Cole manages to work double entendres, Shakespearean melancholy and rekindled hope and desire.

Fittingly, there then comes “At Last,” in which all the desires and pledges of the record finally come good and are answered and reciprocated. Cole sings it rather as Robert Wyatt sings Chic’s “At Last I Am Free,” and he can hardly see in front of him either; he reels in stunned disbelief at the blueness of the blue sky, can’t believe that “life is like a song,” and the song’s blues undertones slowly recede as a caravan of loneliness no longer to be maintained. “I found a dream that I could speak to,” Cole gasps,” I found a thrill to press my cheek to” – and Jenkins’ orchestra quivers like the brightest of planets on Cole’s “you smiled.” “And here we are in heaven” he sighs with satisfaction and fulfilment; Jenkins’ concluding smile of a major sixth the most heartwarming of happy endings.

Then Cole casts his glance out into the world, and upon others not yet quite convinced by love. “It’s All In The Game” is the only track to vary in tempo – it is taken as a courtly waltz – but Cole’s generosity and reassurance are as open as ever; yes there will be arguments, but it will all work in the end and nothing will be lost. Jenkins almost exceeds himself here with the mighty flourish of acappella, rubato strings midsong – and provides another final smile of reassurance. “When Sunny Gets Blue” is a song full of tricky harmonic and rhythmic contours and Jenkins’ strings are perhaps a little too prosaic here – descending cascades for “rain begins to fall” etc. – but Cole even brings a pregnant hint of Scott Walker to this troubled and dark song (“She breathes a sigh of sadness/Like the wind that stirs the trees,” not to mention “weird and haunting melodies”). Yet he climaxes the song with an outward prayer: “Hurry new love, hurry here” so that Sunny might be saved.

Finally it is left to the title song to sum up all of the album’s threads and Cole casts his knowing smile back towards us, with a song quite startlingly current in its intent: “What does it matter if we’re rich or we’re poor?/Fortune, fame, they never endure/Love is the thing” – and he emphasises that latter phrase twice, with infinite gentleness. “What good is money if your heart isn’t right?” he asks rhetorically. “Here in your arms I’m wealthy tonight.” Once again, the declaration of lasting and permanent values (“When youth’s had its fling…love is the thing”). In many senses this song – music by Victor Young, words by Ned Washington – also looks forward to 1967 (“While others fight for power/We can walk among the flowers/Knowing that the best thing in life is free…love for you and me”) as much as 2008: “And even though our castles crumble and fall/We have the right to laugh at them all” – although Cole is meticulously careful not to laugh, knowing that he, that they, are so much better than that “for love is still king.” Jenkins’ strings negotiate the loveliest of bridges leading to a key change, and he and Cole leave us with a solo violin reaching towards the heavens – and that same two-note semitone motif, now voiced by the harp, in a major key. One of the most beautiful and giving of all number one albums.

Frank SINATRA: This Is Sinatra!

(#8: 2 March 1957, 1 week; 16 March 1957, 1 week; 30 March 1957, 1 week; 27 April 1957, 1 week)

Track listing: I’ve Got The World On A String/Three Coins In The Fountain/Love And Marriage/From Here To Eternity/South Of The Border/Rain (Falling From The Skies)/The Gal That Got Away/Young-At-Heart/Learnin’ The Blues/My One And Only Love/(Love Is) The Tender Trap/Don’t Worry ‘Bout Me

The first compilation album to make number one, and a useful reminder that at the same time Sinatra was pioneering the concept of the long playing album he was still obliged to service the needs of the jukebox users and the singles buyers. Billed in the sleevenote as “a dozen of his recent and best hits,” This Is Sinatra! rounds up the pick of his 1953-6 singles and B-sides; it was part of a running Capitol promotional series (other This Is… albums featuring Dean Martin, Nat “King” Cole and so forth) but the only one to chart, and although it has since been superseded by dozens, if not hundreds, of Capitol Sinatra compilations it remains a fascinating listen in itself, even if in terms of tentative steps towards the mastery of aesthetic and delivery that Sinatra achieved in the album format.

It begins, as most Capitol Sinatra compilations do, with his fumblingly celebratory “I’ve Got The World On A String” from 1953, the song and performance which marked his permanent return from the coldness of semi-obscurity; a titanic fanfare from Nelson Riddle’s brass (Riddle arranges and conducts all of the selections except for “South Of The Border”) promises to herald a returning conqueror, but then Riddle quite unexpectedly turns the orchestra sotto voce, a brooding rubato sax section over which Sinatra sings the title line, slowly and slightly cautiously, as though still doubting whether he’s really earned his return, or dazzled with disbelief that he’s back in the spotlight. Swift reassurance is provided by a bright trumpet section exclamation mark and Sinatra quickly settles into the song’s easy swing – “What a world! What a life! I’m in love!,” a triple flush which announces the new Frank, the confident, suited, self-mocking but fundamentally right-minded middle-aged Frank, the man who has burst forth from the chrysalis of his previous gangly boyish self. “I can MAKE the rain go!” he exclaims, and there’s no doubt in his mind or in our ears that his Other will be more than prepared to get next to him. A hard snare accent takes the comeback to its crescendo as he proclaims, “Man, this is the life! Hey now…I’m so in LOVE!” and hangs on to that “LOVE” for a long, long sustain, just as he would do in “You’re Sensational” but in terms of achievement rather than hope.

“Three Coins” gave him his first UK number one single in 1954 but does indicate the drawbacks inherent in the short-play Sinatra model. Many of these singles were made for and taken from the movies, and Riddle had to arrange to order; thus Sinatra’s very tender delivery of the song – his unusual emphasis on the word “thrown” as though contemplating throwing himself off a tenth-storey balcony and on the “will” of “which one will the fountain bless?,” the whispered prayer of “Each heart longing for its home,” and the very rare (for Sinatra) use of the two-syllable upward elision in the “mine” of every third “Make it mine,” all of which point to his sublime development as a ballad interpreter – tends to be drowned out by Riddle’s over-florid cascades of strings and harps. Likewise, the very real hurt of “From Here To Eternity” – a heartbreaking “Dieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeyou” segue between the word “die” and the phrase “you gave your lips,” the boyish bafflement of “how could I know?” which was about as vulnerable as Sinatra allowed himself to get in this period, the dehydrated desperation of “this endless DESIRRRRRRRRE” – is obscured by bluff, hearty brass to signify the presence of a war.

In light comedy, too, Sinatra still couldn’t help being a morose and dark presence, like a reformed crook who can’t quite get used to going straight; thus he sounds somewhat ill at ease with the bland optimism (because there are no shadows) of “Young-At-Heart.” He did better with the Kurt Weill lite slapstick of “Love And Marriage” and while I note with some melancholy the absence of words like “disparage” from contemporary song, the song’s brash broadness ensures Sinatra has a good (if slightly laboured) deal of fun, rapidly switching from deadpan to vibrato while singing the title, tossing out the occasional “You can’t have none!” snarl, rolling his tongue on “othurrrrr” and zipping up his fly in time for the closing double bassoon parp. Meanwhile, “(Love Is) The Tender Trap” is amiable fluff (albeit clever fluff, with each chorus summing up the preceding verse, complete with internal rhymes) masquerading as a growl but is now best viewed as a training run for the unutterable confidence of Swingin’ Lovers – “and suddenly you’re sighing sighs” leading to the seamless sigh of “Muuuuuusic in the breeze,” his varying attitudes to the words “tingle” and “single,” his half-regretful, half-priapic “nice” and – again – the climactic sustenato payoff of “LOVE!”; the ingredients are all there but not quite yet solidified into a forward-thinking whole.

The most fun track on This Is Sinatra! is “South Of The Border,” done with Billy May’s band, and immediately we get May’s characteristic sliding saxes, blaring raspberries of trumpets, sceptical trombones and surprisingly adventurous harmonic voicings, but Sinatra takes his self-induced jilting with laughing grace and enjoys himself with May’s responses, for instance the muted trumpet nyah-nyah-underpants figure which comes after Sinatra’s “old Spanish lace,” amusing him enough to sing of a “smile A-pon her face” and with great insouciance shrug off the “down” from “down Mexico way.” Following a brief, broad exchange between saxophones and snare drum Sinatra sneaks back down south to find to his dismay his one night stand kneeling down to pray in the church; from his shoulder-shrugging tone it isn’t clear whether she’s getting married or become a nun, but Sinatra adopts a carefree what the hell stance, as confirmed by his throwaway “The mission bells told me – ding dong,” with that jaunty “ding dong” the ash of regret tapped off the cigarette of careless adventure; he does some “ay ay ay ay” trading of fours with the band and is still more than happy.

Another huge hit included here is 1955’s “Learnin’ The Blues” and it is a matter of extreme regret that this song - #2 as a single in Britain that year – has drifted into something approaching obscurity since it is clearly a transitional recording; the sleevenote refers to “the rhythmic and torchy lesson Frank taught willing millions via juke boxes, record stores and disc jockeys” and it’s an astute reflection since “Learnin’ The Blues” bridges the upbeat, confident Sinatra with the deeper and more shadowy slow motion Sinatra. Riddle’s arrangement is confident, brightly thrusting and on the beat – perhaps indicating a very early response to this nascent rock and roll thing – with textural variety provided by Harry Edison’s trumpet (he even quotes Ellington’s “Creole Love Call” in the intro) and Red Norvo’s restless vibes.

But the lyric goes the other way entirely. “You play the same love song/It’s the tenth time you’ve heard it,” and it’s clear that Sinatra is suffering (the second person singular/plural adopted for the song may well be a deflection from his own pain) since the phrase “your first lesson” is answered by a wagging teacher’s finger of alto saxes, and soon one realises that this is a world of unbearable, involuntary solitude: “The cigarettes you liked, one after another…/You’re only burning a torch you can’t lose,” and indeed we are in Trojan horse torch song territory here, Billie Holiday sentiments smuggled into a primary coloured hepcat bop. We feel the “taunt” the victim feels at home, and the “haunt” when he’s in the crowd; Norvo’s vibes irritably tickle Sinatra’s “sleepless nights,” and by the time he’s arrived at the tragedy of “But you can’t forget her/Soon you even stop trying” his performance is at discomfiting odds with the tune and arrangement, his rumbling “mmmmm the nights” leading into the final, hopeless key change – it is as if the landscape of Swingin’ Lovers is built but still empty; he has not yet learned how to reinhabit that place, or has been locked out of it and is watching the merriment from outside the barring gate.

And so it is that we must pass to the remaining four ballad performances, a matter of particular importance since the ballad Sinatra will not be intruding too directly on this tale; Where Are You?, the first of his beyond-extraordinary collaborations with Gordon Jenkins, was a top three album later in 1957, and Frank Sinatra Sings For Only The Lonely (with Riddle’s finest ballad writing, particularly on the devastating “What’s New?”) went top five in 1958; 1960’s devastating No One Cares (with Jenkins) was too strong and bitter a pill to chart at all. Perhaps the bravest of these four tracks is Sinatra’s take on “The Gal That Got Away,” a role reversal of the song which Garland had unquestionably and irrevocably made her own in A Star Is Born; Sinatra tries his hardest but can’t match Garland ’s natural hurt. Still, Riddle pulls most of his stops out here, the opening striptease trumpet quickly giving way to hushed saxes, strings and brushes, Sinatra staggering over barlines like an inconsolable drunk, or limping down the highway with a twenty-ton backpack weighing him down. However, Riddle can’t sustain the emotion; the alto sax as “girl” metaphor was running out of steam even then and again (and this time, I think, not by intent) the arrangement is at variance with Sinatra’s incrementally increasing despair (his apocalyptic “tomorrow she may turn up”), his fading cries of “please come back…won’t you come back…”

Each side of the album concludes with a far more satisfactory ballad interpretation; side one finishes with “Rain” which despite the needless sound effects at its beginning and end sees Sinatra and Riddle in rough concordance; the opening high strings/alto flute shimmers directly anticipate Scott Walker’s “It’s Raining Again” (and everything that developed from the latter), Sinatra sounding as though he’s just scampered underneath a shop doorway for scant shelter, with a very direct rain/tears analogy (“Streeee-aming…down my face”) which soon turns into ardent prayer for deliverance (the “skyrain” segue which comes out of the first “praying that a new tomorrow will put the sun back in the sky”). Following an eerie, almost ahuman topline for high violins (predicting Percy Faith’s “Theme From A Summer Place”), Sinatra returns with intensified emotion; this time his “in the sky” is succeeded by a long, acappella and heart-rendering cry of “PLEEEEEEASE!” to lead into the final key change, Sinatra now begging – out of tempo, with just strings and one French horn to accompany him - for the rain to “wash away my tears” even as he’s crying them, clinging to the “SUN” like a disappointed God in “so when that SUN appears” and leading to “I’ll see my looooooooove again” with a final harp/celeste caress signifying that once he is able to wash those tears away, his love will be there, waiting for his soul to clear, patient and smiling and welcoming.

Side two’s closer, “Don’t Worry ‘Bout Me,” similarly points to Walker – and, of course, to Jerry Butler - since it is the direct ancestor of “Make It Easy On Yourself,” a selflessness so heartfelt it threatens to render its singer in half, as we already know from Sinatra’s first, unaccompanied “Don’t” and the funereal saxophones which enter thereafter. He knows it’s over, that she mustn’t cling on (“cling to some fading thing” perhaps a double bluff to his audience; go on then, I’m pushing forty but I can still live and love and be loved), and wants her to be happy but his performance indicates that he’s tearing himself apart while doing so – the Tosca sustenato of “I’ll,” the hopelessly hopeful upward “be-e” in “be happy my love” and sentiments such as “look out for yourself” and “don’t be a fool” – but Riddle’s fortissimo trumpet break betray the truth; the screaming horns echo his blazing, internally suppressed soul. Then, the last comedown and one of the most moving moments on any Sinatra record when he sings, hushed, “If you can’t forget,” and is answered by a saxophone section, head bowed, sadly shaking its head in response.

But I’m not going to leave This Is Sinatra! or indeed Sinatra like that; I want a happy ending, so it’s back to side two, track four, and one of the most sheerly beautiful performances he ever gave, “My One And Only Love,” where all the ingredients of his sadness are turned on their heads and sides and become a recipe for profound joy and happiness. Against, once more, strings and alto flute – or, I should say, now with them, rather than against them – Sinatra sings with the awe of a borderline believer whose prayer has unexpectedly been answered, “The very thought of you makes my heart sing” and does so in one unbroken, astonished, flying cry of a syllable of joy. Also the subject of a gorgeous interpretation on 1963’s John Coltrane And Johnny Hartman album, “My One And Only Love” is such an intrinsically lovely song that it’s almost impossible to ruin, and Sinatra builds a tender temple on its foundations (Robert Mellin, the unsung hero of inter-war popular song). The “mystic dreams” takes it virtually into the realm of Astral Weeks transcendence and Sinatra stunned and happy is a wonderful thing to hear; one trembles at his “hush of night while you’re in my arms,” TOUCHES the flesh of “I feel your lips so warm and tender,” ascends to the skies with the contented, if dazzled, sigh in the middle of “The touch of your hand is like heaven…a heaven I’ve never known,” the simple ecstasy of “the blush on your cheek whenever I speak”…we are virtually in his heart, sensing his breath as he bows down (in worship) to the wonder of love. The second middle eight sees his “touch of your hand” accompanied only by rubato trombones, the “heaven I’ve never known” just by violins, and then both together, with the addition of a harp and his “tells me that youuuuuare my own,” almost going beyond what language is able to articulate. His ardent “You fill my eager heart with such desire” is noble in the best of senses, the “SOUL” of “Every kiss you give sets my SOUL on fire” is aquatic and self-exceeding, his gladly tearful “I give myself in sweet surrender,” again out of tempo, unspeakably beautiful, the final modulations culminating in harp ripples of confirmatory consummation. This is Sinatra, but this is also life, and all that makes us want to keep on living it.

ORIGINAL MOTION PICTURE SOUNDTRACK: High Society

(#7: 16 February 1957, 1 week – tied with The King And I)

Track listing: High Society Overture/High Society Calypso/Little One/Who Wants To Be A Millionaire/True Love/You’re Sensational/I Love You, Samantha/Now You Has Jazz/Well Did You Evah?/Mind If I Make Love To You

Compared with the Rodgers and Hammerstein epics, High Society appears insubstantial, yet by a now familiar paradox its nothingness does more to entertain and interest me than the substance of, say, The King And I. Or perhaps I should compare it to Oklahoma!, since if that tale can be boiled down (as Oscar Hammerstein readily admitted) to a girl who can’t make up her mind which boy to take to the barn dance, then High Society is pretty much the same tale bearing a carefree admission that, no, such a story doesn’t really matter. Not worth falling on your pitchfork for.

Nobody dies, or gets particularly hurt, in High Society, but then Cole Porter was always careful to screen emotions beneath a vaporisable curtain of high table manners, knowing that the high and the low needed and thrived off each other and that the high/low distinction was ridiculous to begin with. The strain of such a society maintaining such a seamless, spotless surface doesn’t really come to our notice during High Society, whereas the meaningfully meaningless franticity of its source film, 1940’s The Philadelphia Story, stands as an unlikely Hollywood equivalent of La Règle du Jeu in its deceivingly amiable portrait of a stratum lightheartedly clinging onto a raft before a future about to engulf them, except, unlike Renoir’s film, there is no call for furtive shadows, bloodstained hunts or genuine tragedy. Nor is there any need; Hepburn, Grant and Stewart could suggest immense seismic faults of hidden rage, resentment and dread beneath their bucolically dismissive merriment - and Stewart’s jolly photographer will in time turn into the cheerfully paranoid voyeur of Rear Window, pondering over whether to fuck, adore or dispose of Grace Kelly.

High Society seems particularly unnecessary when you consider its casting, next to that of The Philadelphia Story; Kelly gives the Hepburn role the same beaming blankness that Hitchcock used and subverted so artfully, but without Hitchcock her elegance tends to dissolve into a void of direction-free glamour. Sinatra is rougher than the James Stewart of 1940 was prepared to consider, for better or worse. But 36-year-old Cary Grant is succeeded by 53-year-old Bing Crosby, old enough to be Kelly’s father, an idling Rhode Island sugar daddy.

Much was made of Bing and Frank, the former king and his usurper, coinciding in a film for the first time but the structural anti-dynamics of the picture ensure that they are pitched together in unsteady conspiracy, bosom pals who secretly detest each other for what he isn’t. Still, “Well Did You Evah?,” a number not added until very late in the making of the film when it occurred to the producer that no Bing/Frank for-the-first-time-ever duet had been included, is an exemplary demonstration of enmity drunkenly resolving into something of an apathetic truce set against the bothersome rest of the world. The song’s woozily chummy surface masks some fairly stark barbs; Sinatra remarking to Crosby that “you are called the forgotten man” or abruptly responding “Don’t dig that kind of crooning, chum” to one of Crosby ’s trademark “ba ba ba boom”s. Crosby , meanwhile, floats as serenely on the surface as a discarded pair of water wings dipped in leftover Chablis (“Please don’t eat that glass my friend”). Ass-trobars, being stoned, a quick King And I parody (a temporarily hectic waltz sequence with an exaggerated, extended “Wonderful,” topped off by sceptical piccolos and a comparison to old Camembert), avalanche victims…even the anticipated end of the world (“Next July we collide with Mars”) disturbs and shakes them not (unlike the suddenly jagged calypso which erupts from the orchestra near the song’s end, trying to delay the closing down of humanity, soon succeeded by a blast of “Le Marseillaise” to remind us of Renoir); like cockroaches, they’re equipped to survive any apocalypse.

Given the extended wordplay, the oceans of subtexts and the inventive (if sometimes dispassionate) inventions and inversions, there is a marginal case for considering High Society as the first New Pop number one; Porter sees the musical as the makeshift sham that it is but contrives to do as good and seemingly offhand a job as possible with his songs. Having dispensed with the “plot” by means of Louis Armstrong’s handy précis during “High Society Calypso,” he frees up the rest of the record to look at what can fairly be described as “the look of love.”

Both Bing and Frank bring their own brands of blankness to the film; we already know that Crosby is blissfully uninterested in anything or anybody, and his passive blankness is counterpointed by Sinatra’s active black hole; he grumbles, chuckles and generally gives the impression that all of this business is happily below him. Still, each exceeds their own preset personality in the course of the songs. Not all of it works – “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” is a pointedly poisoning double bluff of a song which makes it perfectly clear that its singers do want that yacht and ringside seats for Wagner at the Met, but the unlovely, not to say unfunny, hamming of Sinatra and Celeste Holm suggests one of those novelty Mitch Miller Columbia sides which helped drive Sinatra to desperation in the first place.

Yet Bing’s blankness finds perhaps its ideal home in the slacking backwaters of High Society. Note how he seems to lean into the start of “Little One” with his “Oh, let me see now” as though walking down a country lane and discovering a severed ear in the grass; vaguely amused and entirely unsurprised. Yet this song is a Rochester plea for salvation – Bing admits that he “felt that life sure wouldn’t do me,” and speaks of “controversy” and “downfall” before suggesting to his former wife that marriage take two might be a pleasant way to pass the time; and yet, after fretting that “fate might miscarry” he indulges in a bit of whistling, as though he were already bored by life but finally agrees to continue breathing. Even Armstrong’s don’t-be-getting-too-mellow trumpet obbligatos have little detouring effect; Crosby does some subtle call and response but his “I’m a good guy” (trumpet) “show me mercy!” (trumpet) seems to be a plea to Armstrong to back off.

On “I Love You, Samantha” he’s so casual that he doesn’t materialise within the body of the song until 1:41 when he again wanders in with his “la da dee”s and his quizzical turn to microphone – oh, you’re here again are you? Well I might as well do some confessing – as he negotiates the strange contours of this song, with its restless (and possibly rootless) whole tone modulations. Armstrong is once again on hand to ward off complacency (in this context, his strident commentary is the direct precedent to Lester Bowie’s amiable raspberries when interpreting popular song) but Crosby is again pleading with one shoulder and no eyebrows raised – “I’m a one-gal guy,” he promises, and seems genuinely hurt by the very existence of the prospect of “Get along, go away, goodbye,” extending the “bye” to connect with the “remember” of “remember Samantha,” and he at last stirs and does that “remember” a little more assertively at song’s end, just before the harp brings down the curtain…or Grace Kelly’s dress?

He does his best to be enthusiastic on “Now You Has Jazz” and might have done better with his “hats and cats” and “sharps and flats” twenty years earlier, since Billy Kyle’s piano intro suggests the parlour rather than the speakeasy. One’s rationality boggles at the thought of Bing’s Dexter being able to run any jazz festival, not least Newport in 1956, a year when jazz was visibly and audibly beginning its stylistic diaspora, and the performance of Armstrong’s All Stars group is more in keeping with the Cool School of the West Coast than turn of the century New Orleans, as the closely harmonised horn chart confirms. The presence of Armstrong in High Society is perhaps the most warily subversive stroke of all that this musical has on offer; as burningly eloquent a spokesman against the contemporaneous goings on at Little Rock as Mingus was, a man still fundamentally angry despite his air of happy scrappy bonhomie, his glee in “High Society Calypso” at having finally penetrated the colonies of his former oppressors is barely disguisable; “Square detail!” he giggles; he intones “high” very much in the other sense of that word; his throaty cough of a laugh is a double-edged dagger. “Can you dig old Satchmo swinging in the beautiful high society?” he exclaims at the end, with exceptional gladness that it’s not swinging in the “Strange Fruit” sense, as might once have been the case, but also with a “ha! Got you fuckers!” snort of satisfaction.

That having been said, he had pretty much settled for showbusiness by the fifties, and historical distortions and agendas have tended to present the standard picture of the young Hot Five/Seven radical being swiftly neutered. Aural evidence in fact proves that Armstrong’s invention and capacity as soloist, composer and bandleader thrived well into the forties and the future was not something he ever abandoned fully; in 1964 he was due to record an album as featured soloist with Gil Evans and his orchestra – which would have made a fascinating adjunct to the Miles trilogy - but at the last minute it fell through after finances couldn’t be agreed upon. Still, it has to be said that the All Stars who appear on “Now You Has Jazz” were by 1956 primarily rep reliables rather than stars as such – Trummy Young instead of Teagarden, “Mr Barrett Deems” rather than Cozy Cole – and their general reticence (though not, of course, on the part of their leader’s playing) doesn’t quite square with Bing’s endearing scoutmaster attempts to get hip (“Oho, hold the ‘phone!” he chuckles in response to a Trummy trombone raspberry; a roue’s murmur of “Le tout ensemble…oh, that’s positively the-ra-pEEEu-tic!” which may have helped invent Vivian Stanshall). Things perk up a little when he exchanges vocal fours with Satch, freestyling about Frenchmen, Siam (another sly dig at its King?) and makes a subtle comment about “everybody singing that rock, rock, rock, rock, rock ‘n’ roll” in terms of reminding The Kids where it all (or at least in part) came from – “Jazz is the thing that folks dig most!” he proclaims at the climax, even if he knows that’s no longer really the case, if indeed it ever were. But “Better Git It In Your Soul” it is not.

And yet, amidst all this cheery blankness, a dream of a pop record; “True Love,” the film’s big hit song (#4 as a single in Britain in 1956, and on the chart for over six months). Here Bing finally finds his true home, within a ship in a glass, on a fake deck, dreaming, droning, caressing Grace with grace, accordion and harp, “suntanned, windblown” – and here he finally discloses something resembling emotion, in the shockingly fragile “par” in the line “feeling far above par”; the “par” is almost voiceless as though singing it audibly might shatter the glass. His voice floats and surfs on the music’s pliant, placid waves, if still forever wandering (he sings “guardian angel on high” as one incandescent word, as though swimming through the abandoned avenues of Atlantis). The words are minimal but effective in the haiku sense, and surely must have influenced Buddy Holly when he came to write the practically abstract “True Love Ways.” Finally, Grace Kelly, singing for the first and last time on this album, comes in on the second half of the final chorus, appearing as if in answer to Bing’s prayer; the song’s final heartbreaking chords enclose them forever, as perfectly as the Frankie Goes To Hollywood “Power Of Love.”

Yet perhaps the most striking performer on High Society turns out to be Sinatra. His “Mind If I Make Love To You,” which quietly closes the album (and afforded predictable BBC controversy at the time), anticipates with its high strings, slow motion alto flute and patient, proto-bossa nova rhythms his Jobim collaboration by more than a decade. “In the heavens, stars are dancing” he sings as gently as possible, before spinning out the word “moon” sufficiently to form a ladder by which he may climb to it.

But Sinatra’s “You’re Sensational” is transcendent. With Nelson Riddle as arranger, suddenly High Society turns into a Sinatra album, and his undemonstrative awe is in itself awe-inspiring. He’s not put off by what he’s heard – he hangs on “aloof” like a dog reluctant to surrender its last bone – and he doesn’t care if she’s called The Fair Miss Frigidaire, even if he sings as though he direly needs to come in out of the cold, but he is able to call up emotions which abruptly make Crosby sound ponderous and stuffy; his crescendo and “love” in the bridge’s “making love” seem to erupt and demolish the politesse of the rest of the musical – suddenly this is a striving for something and somebody real. He falls on the first half of “heart” in the first “fire your heart” – this was a familiar Sinatra trope, but the humility expressed here makes the grandstanding on “Millionaire” and elsewhere seem especially otiose, especially when he gently lands on “that’s all” (having summoned the courage to tell her she’s sensational, and that’s all he wants or needs to say to her), cushioned by Riddle’s hearth of a trombone section, followed by sweet strings, rising trumpets and intensifying cymbal accents as Sinatra again reaches for a slightly surer climax. He quivers movingly on the first syllable of the final “sensational” as the corner of a temple which he and only he can hold up and prevent from collapsing; stability confirmed, he settles on a final, verging on silence but satisfied and awestruck trilogy of “that’s all,” kissed by a celeste each time before the pages are closed by muted trumpets and flutes. High Society’s secret, radiant heart, and indeed its "All Of My Heart."

Elvis PRESLEY: Rock 'n' Roll

(#6: 10 November 1956, 1 week)

Track listing: Blue Suede Shoes/I Got A Sweetie (I Got A Woman)/I’m Counting On You/I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone/That’s All Right (Mama)/Money Honey/Mystery Train/I’m Gonna Sit Right Down And Cry Over You/Tryin’ To Get To You/One-Sided Love Affair/Lawdy Miss Clawdy/Shake Rattle And Roll

Referred to by many as Rock ‘n’ Roll No 1, and although Bill Haley ensured that chronologically in this tale it was Rock ‘n’ Roll No 2 – to add to the confusion, the second UK Presley album release was entitled Rock ‘n’ Roll (No 2) and peaked at #3 in 1957 – I still think it one of the best album titles, as inspired as calling a single “Rock ‘n’ Roll Part 2” in 1972 (whatever your feelings about the co-creator of the latter, it was undeniably the big middle finger that “American Pie” deserved).

The real curiosity with the original 10-inch HMV issue – apart from the stark contrast between the Sunday morning pipe tobacco typography and layout of the back cover and the pink-green-monochrome-Astounding Tales-via-Mondrian-and-Weegee franticity of the front cover – lies in its sleevenote. Written by Bob Dawbarn, Melody Maker’s fifties equivalent of Simon Reynolds, it valiantly attempts to recast Presley as a “Jazz (with a capital J) phenomenon” and Dawbarn was clearly intent on not being Mr Grumpy It’s All Noise Jazz Journal Man. Still, he draws his well-meant lines – that Presley was “a little rhythm and blues, a little bit hillbilly” is, to be kind, one way of putting it – and is careful to paint him as a legitimate addition to the noble folk/blues tradition rather than as a trembling, adrenalined sex needle. Notoriously, he describes “Mystery Train” as the “kind of number popularised by British ‘skiffle’ singers,” presumably as a way of luring sceptical skiffle purists – even then oblivious of the oxymoron – into Elvis’ world; and it is a great personal regret that this tale won’t be addressing Lonnie Donegan’s Showcase album, a record whose influence on its generation of British musicians, as well as the following one, is incalculable; it sat at number two for six straight weeks over December 1956-January 1957, stuck behind the King And I behemoth.

While it shared a cover and chart-topping status with RCA’s Elvis Presley US album release, Rock ‘n’ Roll’s track listing is different, although it equally cherry picks from new tracks, mainly covers of recent rock and R&B hits, and selections from the Sun archive; as with Dawbarn’s notes, the idea was clearly to introduce Presley’s work to a wider and (it was presumed) less fickle audience in a way that wouldn’t put them off (i.e. by hinting at any notion of sexuality). We have to remember that for British audiences this would have been their first exposure to “That’s All Right” or “Mystery Train”; proof that the icy alien of “Heartbreak Hotel” didn’t just spring from nowhere, that there was a history, and rawer than anyone here might have suspected. Still, the HMV release may be its own well-meant equivalent of Steve Allen sticking Presley in a bowtie and tuxedo.

Ideas of formality are of course immediately blown out of the quiescent water by the opening fanfare of “Blue Suede Shoes.” Already we can see that Haley was only revealing, or able to reveal, part of the story; “Blue Suede Shoes” has the same double-drum shuffle beat but Presley is now taking it places Haley could never have hoped to have gone – “Let’s go, cats!” he roars prior to Scotty Moore’s first sat-on-a-wasps’-nest guitar solo; “Oh, WALK the dog!” he cries jubilantly. DJ Fontana’s snare drums are like Jud Fry with a machine gun, shooting down the polite past. “ROCK IT!” “YEAH!!” A “GO GO GO!!!” in tandem with Bill Black’s bicycling bass. Presley is his own Nietzsche, thankfully without even knowing it: “Well you can burn my house, steal my car” – what doesn’t kill him makes him stronger – though his key warning carries more amused bemusement than menace; why exactly do you want to step on my blue suede shoes? But the carefree rat-a-tat demolition ball of the track renders even this question irrelevant; he’ll go on, stepped or unstepped on.

In the UK singles chart the Elvis and Carl Perkins recordings of “Blue Suede Shoes” fought an honourable draw (Elvis’ peaked at #9, Carl’s at #10) but as perfect as Perkins’ version is, Presley takes the song’s intent and breath somewhere beyond perfect. Crucially – and this album proves it over and over – Presley had the ability to turn this raw material into pop. Consider his take on Ray Charles’ purposely blasphemous beginning of soul time “I Got A Woman” (and no, I’ve no idea where the “Sweetie” came from either since Presley doesn’t sing the word once – maybe someone was trying to attract mourning Al Jolson fans). Ray’s original was and is electric, and literally shook the temple, but Presley’s opening basso profundo “Wellll…” indicates a total confidence that is slightly scary as much as it is elevatingly liberating. Fontana is careful to step on and off the drumming gas, always simmering the song up to a climax then falling back, holding back until the final and only climax. After a fierce trading fours duel between voice and drums, and in the midst of a Sargasso sea of echo, Elvis achieves climax; his “Well, she’s my baby” is followed by a dub whirlpool of vowels which eventually stammer into formation of an “I” to reveal that “I’m her loving man” succeeded by a lion’s double purr of “She’s alright” and a “whatcha gonna do about it” abrupt declaration of “IGOTAWOMAN!” This was taking the punctum under Sinatra’s skin so deep that it might recolour the arteries of pop blood.

“I’m Counting On You” mutates the hymnbook in a subtler manner; a doo wop prayer adapted to address his Other, cyclical piano alternating with Platters staccato, intoned by a man clearly uncertain of his own faith; observe the octave-leaping small-to-capital-E gulp of “in e-Every way” and the 9.5 on the Richter scale “dawn” in “From the dawn of each day. He makes the spiritual connection explicit by twice rendering the subject of “if…knew” not quite comprehensible; is he singing “if you knew” or “if He knew”? In both cases he conceals the subject with a falsetto hiccup before coming down gently, if shakily, to land on an emphatic tremble of the title.

It has already been noted by others how keen young Elvis was for his records always to have a happy ending. So what if you step on my blue suede shoes; heck, I’m gonna live longer than you (though this turned out to be a not terribly accurate prescience; still, the symbol remained). Likewise, in “I’m Left,” which is proto-Tennessee Three boom-chicka-boom trying to cross the border into rock as politely as possible, he hiccups all over the rhythm’s cunning lope. But he’s not bothered at all by her desertion – “But now (WHOOP!) I just don’t care,” and a “She’s gone, I know not where!” rendered in the manner of a camper Keats as the rhythm continues to unwind on its self-built spindle; and then he bumps gladly down the hill with his “I’ve-a-fa-ha-ha-ha-allen (HICCUP!) for you,” snarling a terrifying, don’t-give-a-shit “FOR” in “FORgive me now” en route. Scotty, meanwhile, is busy inventing ska in the middle eight, and his main solo is so clean you could eat your dinner off his plectrum.

Then we get “That’s All Right,” the happy accident that began an avalanche, the horse not in need of a nail, a pop which Crudup could not have accessed; given the innumerable accounts on the part of British pop and rock stars of how their world was immediately altered by first exposure to “Heartbreak Hotel,” one can only guess at the additional impact this must have made to virgin ears, even if in a Lonnie-didn’t-come-from-nowhere-either sense. So light, so sure of its own destiny; she’s gone, he shrugs his shoulders and will carry on down the road regardless (“de de dee da da de de”), but note Scotty’s vibrato shaking the last virtuous apple out of the tree on Presley’s “no good” and his virtual hard-on under “hangin’ round your door.”

Side one concludes with a reading of “Money Honey,” a 1953 R&B hit for the Clyde McPhatter version of the Drifters, and while it may cause problems for those who persist in seeing things in stark black and white, Elvis’ seems to me the “blacker” version; looser, more capricious, less hangdog. The intro’s high staccato piano cleverly mimics the irritated landlord ringing Presley’s front doorbell, and in his second greatest moment of explicit personal crisis on this album Presley writhes and wriggles in a baffled you-lookin’-at-me? manner, like a prematurely skewed skate. By song’s end he’s lost his woman and looks like he might lose his roof too – underlined by Scotty’s aggressive bitonal guitar solo - but he dismisses all of this with three “huh”s and another whoop; what the hell, I’ll set up shop elsewhere, and young buttoned up Britain listened and absorbed.

Side two commences with “Mystery Train” and I’ll return to that at the end, since with the two Sun-derived exceptions this side is markedly weaker than the first; “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down” is another ballad, but Presley’s reading seems less than committed. Moore ’s solo seems to disappear logically into his own tunnel, the drums are mixed too far back at the expense of greater voice emphasis. Into the voice itself some mannerisms (as opposed to nature) are already creeping in, and the pianist appears poised to play Monk’s “Misterioso” at fadeout.

“Tryin’ To Get To You” – the other Sun track on this side - wipes it out immediately. The rhythm is far more involved and propulsive and Presley’s pronounced nobility in travelling night and day, running all the way is a significant contrast to the cheerful running away in which he has been indulging elsewhere. A decade and one ahead of Alex Chilton, he gets her letter, and his preserved nobility immediately erupts into screams: “WHEN I READ YA LOVIN’ LETTAH!” burns the song up; he squashes the “THING-I” conjunction into a dozen scrambled syllables, echoed by Scotty’s snakes and ladders guitar strikes and Fontana’s deadpan clip clop drumming. When he reaches the carnal-to-spiritual apotheosis of “TRUE – LORD ABOVE” he moves from sob to yelp to ecstasy; he compresses all his painful wandering into that “TRUE” and shifts into an R&B Frankie Laine prayer in thanks for spiritual guidance; having strayed so merrily and so far, he’s now taking it all back to the church, even if it’s the Church of Him.

That would have made a dynamic ending to the album, which otherwise peters out somewhat anticlimactically; “One-Sided Love Affair” begins like Winifred Atwell with its jolly pub piano and Presley quickly turns it into slapstick with one of his most bizarre vocal performances, resembling a distressed doo wop baritone having just eaten his lunch atop a beehive. This “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” doesn’t compare with Lloyd Price’s 1952 original or Presley’s own startling revisit in his ’68 Special but does have some good guitar/tom tom interface in the first instrumental break, and Presley’s final “Down the road I go” is accompanied by fierce snare accents as though he is being bodily kicked down that road. Still, things do pick up again for the closing “Shake Rattle And Roll” – derived from Joe Turner rather than Haley and kicking the latter’s good-natured backside down the road to cabaret nostalgia for good measure, despite a miscued intro; Presley and the group play it like prototype garage rock (it actually does sound as though recorded in a garage), but Scotty’s wildly oscillating guitar solos blast it into intractable orbit. Elvis’ own vocal lacks a certain lustre but he cringes appositely in the “over the hill, way down underneath, you make me roll my eyes and then you make me grit my teeth” sequence which Haley was too damned polite to retain.

As a proclamation of who might be the real Rock ‘n’ Roll No 1 there is a certain logic to the album concluding thusly, but predictably I am drawn back to “Mystery Train”; an astonishing record whose music consists of almost nothing save echo (the song is its own ghost). But the source of its astonishment is Presley, and the qualities which made him, at his best, surest and least afraid, beyond perfect. The song opens just as the Junior Parker original did; the train’s taking his baby away, seemingly for good (he’s on the same train but one half is sealed off from the other). In his reading Parker mournfully accepts this as generations of bluesmen had done before him; shit happens, this is reality, people die, disappear, vanish, vaporise.

The greatness of Presley’s reading – apart from the fact that he tears up the book – is that he refuses to accept reality; this by some distance is the worst crisis he has to face on Rock ‘n’ Roll, but just as he has turned from disappointment, betrayal and poverty elsewhere on the record, here he turns reality around. He doesn’t like reality so is determined to change it: “It took my baby (drop to snarl) but it never will again – no, not AGAIN…” Bridged by a Scotty solo which takes the equivocal middleground – it’s unsure whether it should be mourning or celebrating – Elvis comes back, triumphant, barely concealing his grin: “Well it’s bringing my baby, ‘cos she’s mine, all mine” with the proudest of sighs on “baby.” He has made it end happily, he’s brought life back from the dead and ends the song by streaking into the distance with his darkly exultant “Who-HOOOO-WHOOOH!!” and a dismissive laugh; he’s stared the train down and mocks its now non-existent power. On its own it would be pop Lazarus on a scale equalled only by New Order’s “Everything’s Gone Green” a quarter of a century later (and I note that both fall exactly one year on either side of Ian Curtis’ lifespan); in this company, in the midst of this music which continues to excite, exhilarate and provoke hard-ons – the record is cartoon sexy but its cartoon most assuredly beats real life forced post-war monasticism – music which can still cause me to get up and dance more than half a century after it was recorded, it assuredly pulls down the old order and rearranges pop into a far more interesting and ALIVE new order. After Songs For Swingin’ Lovers!, this tale’s second real milestone.

Bill HALEY and his COMETS: Rock 'n' Roll Stage Show

(#5: 27 October 1956, 1 week)

Track listing: Calling All Comets/Rockin’ Through The Rye/Rocking Little Tune/Hide And Seek/Hey Then, There Now/Goofin’ Around/Hook, Line And Sinker/Rudy’s Rock/Choo Choo Ch’Boogie/Blue Comet Blues/Hot Dog Buddy Buddy/Tonight’s The Night

Keen students of the Guinness chart books will know that Bill Haley’s British chart career appears to come to a sudden and abrupt halt in early 1957, after a year of near-total dominance. There are reasons for this; February 1957 was when the Comets came to tour Britain for the first time, and although Haley was mobbed by thousands at Waterloo Station and the requisite riots broke out at several high profile venues, people were looking at him close up and beginning to have their doubts. These doubts had nothing to do with what Haley was but everything to do with what, or who, he wasn’t; specifically, he wasn’t Elvis. He was not lean, he sweated quite a lot, he was in his mid-thirties, a decade or more on the insurgents who flooded the floodgates which he had opened, he was a little too approachable and not particularly sexy.

None of this was fair on Haley, of course, but I suspect that rock ‘n’ roll fans had already settled him as a John the Baptist figure in their minds and were prepared to bow respectfully but move on pretty quickly. Records and films were one thing, but at first hand the Comets did not appear to be capable of igniting long-lasting fires. In the meantime Elvis had broken through, and Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee and others would soon follow or had already followed; Haley had lit the fuse but the results of the explosion swiftly exceeded him.

“Rock Around The Clock” still seems the most difficult pop record about which to write meaningfully, especially if you weren’t there at the time to witness the slow-burning combustion that it started. Watch Blackboard Jungle now and it looks like the ultimate right wing denunciation of pesky kids, irksome feral youths who will not leave well-meaning pullovers and their Bix Beiderbecke 78s in peace. But most teenagers – if such a term could have been said to have existed in stultifying post-war Britain – who went to see the film at the time, and the subsequent titular cinematic musical cash-in, felt that the smashing was the important thing; to strip down the war-sustained deference, to stop the mourning, to cease making do and mending, to become creators themselves. Or at the very least better consumers, taking what was originally intended as a “novelty foxtrot” and turning it into the king of Trojan horses.

The after-effects of what Haley was seen to start have, I think, blinded most people to the extraordinary group that the Comets actually were. Formerly Bill Haley and the Saddlemen, they started out as a fairly rumbustious Western Swing combo – hence the accordion and steel guitar which survived into their rock incarnation – but when Haley astutely picked up on Jackie Brenston’s 1951 “Rocket 88” and covered it he simultaneously sharpened and muddled the group’s edges by bringing in tenor sax and electric guitars; thus a fusion which predated Elvis, Scotty and Bill by some three years.

Likewise, Rock ‘n’ Roll Stage Show pipped Elvis to become the first rock number one album; its better known predecessor, Rock Around The Clock, sat at number two for a fortnight in September behind Carousel and then Oklahoma! Just as the album ushered in a new beginning of time (as far as albums were concerned), so does it represent something of a sea change for the group. Confusingly, the album was not recorded live, and perhaps even more confusingly bore little audible evidence of Bill Haley; he appears on only four of the album’s 12 tracks – its big hit single “Rockin’ Through The Rye,” peaking at #3 and spending 23 weeks on the list, though its ungainly adaptation of traditional Scots mores (Haley can’t help but make “Campbells” sound like “camels”) already suggested that inspiration was running out; “Hook, Line And Sinker,” a slightly slower and looser 12-bar blues variant on the standard Comets formula; a respectful if unexciting revisit of Louis Jordan’s “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie” (both versions having been produced by Milt Gabler) heightened by an interesting, if brief, roundelay of counterpart between sax and guitar; and, his best performance, “Hot Dog Buddy Buddy” where he finally sounds aroused and excited – “I got legs like a rooster, eyes like a frog,” “14 days, 14 fights, 14 lefts and 14 rights,” a giggling “Could stop now but I don’t think I oughta.”

The idea was clearly to spotlight the notion of the Comets as a group and show off the talents of its other members, and there is also evidence of stylistic diversification; two tracks, “Hey Then, There Now” and “Tonight’s The Night” are close harmony workouts (harmonised by steel guitarist Billy Williamson, guitarist Franny Beecher and bassist Al Rex) which take us right back to the Saddlemen days, and beyond to the time of the Inkspots and Andrews Sisters (“Hey Then, There Now” offers the modestly startling imagery of “I’ll give you the moon for a midnight snack”). “Goofin’ Around,” a intentionally dextrous feature for Beecher ’s lead guitar, verges on bebop as well as subtly demonstrating the Comets’ characteristic “double drums” effect with on the beat drumming counterpointed by slap bass.

In truth Rock ‘n’ Roll Stage Show is an enterprising and good humoured record which if it had been recorded six months ago by long-lost Tennessee musicians unearthed by Ry Cooder would have been heralded as a masterpiece. In 1956 Britain , however, its impact was briefly incendiary. Consider Rudy Pompilli, the album and the Comets’ real hero, and his upper register, one note Morse code reveille which commences the album and the instrumental “Calling All Comets” like a clarion call to revolution; soon the band kicks in and Pompilli’s tenor is slurring, blowing kisses, skiing on Bostic rhetoric above the waves of double rhythm. And Williamson’s steel guitar is doing pretty extraordinary things behind him, gulping like a recalcitrant rubber band, as the key changes for the climax and Pompilli ends with a deliberate “wrong” note, sticking his tongue through the reed and chuckling “fuck you, The Past.”

Even the comparatively minor Glencoe-via-Detroit romp of “Rye” is elevated by the band’s sudden forward/upward surge in the instrumental break; cymbals bashing like tidals against discarded Confederate Generals in Big Sur , the heat becoming more intense (see “Memories” by Public Image Ltd. for an interesting generational bookend), Williamson sliding into abstract patterns as Derek Bailey might have comped them and what sound like proto-synth bleeps (and note the emphatic triple gavel hammers of drums at song's end). Johnny Grande’s accordion feature “Rocking Little Tune” isn’t quite punk Cajun but has a good try, including three false endings. Meanwhile Beecher’s bending notes on the midtempo “Blue Comet Blues” invent Hank Marvin – it is impossible to underestimate the impact this would have had on millions, or at any rate thousands, of ambitious kids at the time, earnestly learning the riffs and solos or just miming to them in the mirror.

The two most forward-looking tracks on the album are “Rudy’s Rock” – also a Top 30 hit as an unscheduled single – in which Pompilli blasts off from a perfunctory (or possibly Rudi-mentary; yes, I know, my office at 9 am sharp etc.) theme statement into orbit; over an extended “Big Noise From Winnetka” dog pound of tom toms and handclaps he does everything, including askew post-Parker whole tone runs, curvaceous Coleman Hawkins swing and the obligatory Illinois Jacquet squeals and honks – and it’s still an arresting and amazing listen. Although maybe Billy Williamson is the record’s real secret hero; his vocal feature on “Hide And Seek” introduces a disquieting roughness and menace into the proceedings; it is grainy where all else is clearcut, virtually a snarl, even a roar; “I spy, kick you in the eye” seems to go against the grain of everything else on the record. Pompilli responds with a deadpan queasy vibrato, like Gene Sedric squaring up against a young Albert Ayler, to no avail – “You can’t hide beneath a four leaf clover,” hisses Williamson, and as the song reaches its call and response crescendo his “Man, I’m READY!” recalls no one so much as Iggy Pop.

But that grain of overthrow rustles like an impatient beetle throughout Rock ‘n’ Roll Stage Show, and as “Hot Dog Buddy Buddy” waves its gladly tattered flag above a meal of a maelstrom of handclaps, saxes and guitar loops the intent of Haley’s “Could stop now but I don’t think I oughta” becomes clearest; take it all down and build this new house in its place. Coming after the acutely and painfully meticulous designs and intertwines of three straight Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, it comes over like a refreshing bucket, or waterfall, of newly flowing liquid meant to wake the world up from the war and learn to live again. Don’t knock Haley’s rock; it's lasted better than we all thought.

ORIGINAL MOTION PICTURE SOUNDTRACK: The King And I

(#4: 13 October 1956, 2 weeks; 3 November 1956, 1 week; 17 November 1956, 15 weeks; 9 March 1957, 1 week; 23 March 1957, 1 week; 6 April 1957, 3 weeks; 4 May 1957, 6 weeks; 22 June 1957, 4 weeks; 10 August 1957, 3 weeks; 16 November 1957, 11 weeks; 22 March 1958, 1 week)

Track listing: Main Title/I Whistle A Happy Tune/My Lord And Master/The March Of The Siamese Children/Anna And The Royal Wives/Hello, Young Lovers/A Puzzlement/Getting To Know You/Garden Rendezvous/We Kiss In A Shadow/I Have Dreamed/Shall I Tell You What I Think Of You?/Something Wonderful/Prayer To Buddha/Waltz Of Anna And Sir Edward/The Small House Of Uncle Thomas/Song Of The King/Shall We Dance?/The Letter/Something Wonderful (Finale)/Overture (LP Version)
 
Here is why I am not composing separate entries for albums which have had more than one spell at the top; although with 21 tracks it would have been theoretically easier to do a Portishead-type track-by-track breakdown, I suspect readers would get bored very early in, and I am not convinced that the album warrants such close attention. However, The King And I soundtrack is the first real example in this list of the musical blockbusters; eleven separate runs at number one over 17 months with a cumulative total of 48 weeks, still the third longest run at the top of any album.

In the context of mid-fifties Britain it’s easy to see why such faux-exoticism should prove so attractive; the musical was a huge hit on both stage and screen and the catchiness of famous songs like “I Whistle A Happy Tune,” “Getting To Know You” and “Shall We Dance?” is unavoidable. Yet as an album The King And I hangs together far less securely than either Carousel or Oklahoma! (and neither of these is exactly secure structurally). The Angel expanded edition (on which, once again, this analysis is based) is not terrifically helpful, either; the musical is so entirely and unanswerably dominated by one man who on this record barely materialises. Yul Brynner made the role his own on Broadway from 1951 onwards and when it came to filming the show he proved himself as absolute and absurdist a dictator as his character; Deborah Kerr and others have attested that Brynner was more or less in charge of making the picture, with nominal director Walter Lang having to swallow his price, sit back and let Brynner get on with it. But on the soundtrack he appears on only four tracks and cannot really be said to be singing on any of them. His mounting befuddlement, mouldering into rage, on “A Puzzlement” is an unsettling blast after a quarter of an hour of Kerr-dominant niceness – I note both his genuine rage at the key line “Every day I try to live another day!” and the Scritti-anticipating “I very often find confusion in conclusion, I concluded long ago” – but it seems stripped of context. Similarly the comedy of “Prayer To Buddha,” which is where we get the “et cetera, et cetera, et cetera” catchphrase, and dull misogyny of “Song Of The King” seem curiously beside the point – even though they are the deadly point – on either side of the demonic cataclysm that is “The Small House Of Uncle Thomas.”

The story is yet another cynical Hardy-esque view of two Cupids without the wit or resources to be Psyches. The difference here is that Brynner’s King is destructive for the sake of maintaining his shaky construction, as leader of a country which (as “A Puzzlement” demonstrates) he isn’t even sure is worth leading. It is his imposition to continue with the way things are done, including thoughtless concubines, unquestioned authority. It is difficult to listen to Lady Thiang’s verging on tearful plea for a behavioural pardon on his behalf, “Something Wonderful,” with its open-Rochester’s-eyes appeal (“This is a man who stumbles and falls, but this is a man who tries,” “He has a thousand dreams that won’t come true/You know that he believes in them and that’s enough for you” – as with “What’s The Use Of Wond’rin’?” the singer audibly struggles to convince herself) in light of what Rita Moreno’s Tuptim brings to the proceedings.

Originally Dorothy Dandridge was earmarked to play the key part of Tuptim, the girl who will cause the house of cards to collapse, but Moreno ended up in the film; while the thought of what Dandridge might have brought to “Uncle Thomas” in particular is fascinating, Moreno brings a shot of colour and writhing carnality to shame the muddle-along politesse on display elsewhere. Her “My Lord And Master” is “Something Wonderful”’s antithesis, a slowly mounting condemnation of this Rochester ’s wilful blindness (“So he thinks…just for him,” “The smile beneath my smile he’ll never see”; hello, Smokey Robinson), and it is her vitality whose eventual extinguishment will hasten the King’s own end. Irritatingly, on the extended fantasia of “Garden Rendezvous/We Kiss In A Shadow/I Have Dreamed” – it plays as one continuous piece – one Leona Gordon dubbed the singing track for Moreno for reasons unclear, such that she lends the petrified duet an unlikely and unfeasible touch of Judy Garland. The sequence itself is a kind of obverse of “People Will Say We’re In Love”; here is a love they can’t let anyone know about for fear of brutal death, and it isn’t simply the presence of Moreno that makes it a forebear of West Side Story; Carlos Rivas (dubbed by Reuben Fuentes) turns it into a Puerto Rican declaration of dangerous faith.

And Deborah Kerr’s Anna sees all of this and knows that even without her frowning moon of a mouth, her furtively turned on eyes, they are doomed; “Hello, Young Lovers” sees her as a grieving widow singing a lullaby to someone she knows is predestined to become another one; “a night when the earth smelled of summer” suggesting a sensuality which will not be rekindled in Siam until it is too late. “The same silent tear, the same blue sea”; the story is being played out again and she knows her Victorian pernickitiness and human grief will combine to prevent a happy ending here too.

“Hello, Young Lovers” is such a movingly constructed song that I would perhaps have preferred Kerr to attempt to semi-sing it than the professional job done by Marni Nixon. The latter makes her first notable (audio) appearance here as the voice of others in Hollywood musicals but unlike subsequent ventures Kerr was in the recording studio with her; they both learned from each other and both have a great deal of fun with the enclosed bitching of “Shall I Tell You What I Think Of You?” (“Toads, toads, all of your people are toads!,” “bigamy” rhyming with “prig of me”) exchanging dialogues mid-line and sometimes mid-word; John Cale and Lou Reed did a similar trick on “Lady Godiva’s Operation” a dozen years later. However, I regret to report that Nixon’s remorselessly bright and pitch perfect tones set my teeth on edge; in something like “Hello, Young Lovers” where suppressed and horrific proto-mourning is the emotion that dare not speak its name, Nixon can’t really get beyond proto-Julie Andrews piercing wholesomeness, and her “you are precisely my cup of tea” in “Getting To Know You” (in the “preferred to sex” sense, even if she is singing in the company of the King’s children) provokes multiple cringes in this listener.

The problem with the soundtrack, though, as I said, is that it doesn’t hang together as a coherent story, even or especially with the generous (and, in one case, essential) additional material on the Angel edition; there are far too many of what technically are known as “underscores,” i.e. music soundtracking spoken dialogue, which in listening terms turns out to be acres of dreary MoR string sequences. Thus the attempted sexual charge of “Shall We Dance?” (subtext: “Shall We Fuck?”) peters out into orchestral flourishes and both the King and Anna vanish from the picture forever; nothing of the final betrayal, the reluctance which will cause the King’s heart to break and his life to end; merely the mildly baffling return of “Something Wonderful” sung by a Home Service choir – and then all of a sudden it’s The End. Other than a souvenir of songs from the show, which is clearly why so many people bought it and ensured that it spent 48 weeks at number one, the package is frustrating; as with opera, the whole story, including dialogue, needs to be told and preferably seen as well. We simply know that no one has been saved; the King is dead and his son will take over and Anna will stay there for the rest of her days, content in some ways but deserted in so many others; that Lun Tha and Tuptim will have no opportunity of being a Mr and Mrs Snow or even a Will and Ado Annie. And that Brynner too would never escape; he continued to resurrect the King in various guises – Broadway revivals, TV spinoffs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera – until virtually the end of his life (stricken with cancer in 1985, he was still playing the King on stage, as health and strength allowed), that shaven head making him ageless and nearly immortal, if (as Westworld would subtly go on to point out) already something of a machine.

But then we have to consider “The Small House Of Uncle Thomas,” nearly thirteen minutes long, now added to the soundtrack album and easily – and still – one of the most extreme pieces of music to appear in this reckoning. I am indebted to Lena for pointing out that the “Out Of My Dreams” ballet sequence in Oklahoma! is initiated by Laurey sniffing a strange, new perfume and that the sequence is to all intents and purposes the first example of a drug trip on a number one album. The East-via-West reshaping of Harriet Beecher Stowe, however, anticipates “A Day In The Life” in different, if equally radical, ways.

“Uncle Thomas” is Moreno ’s show and she grabs it; it is where all the resentment and rage felt by both her and Anna (and, in his own stupidly stubborn or imprisoned way, the King) swell up and reach resolution. Set as an after-dinner entertainment for the King and the visiting British dignitaries – he is keen to put on a show for people whom he probably rightly suspects see him as a laughable anachronism and ripe for toppling and perhaps even executing – Moreno ’s Tuptim slowly and steadily turns the analogous screws on his regime. Recorded in two separate studios facing each other on the same street, with conductor Alfred Newman and his orchestra of sixteen percussionists, playing everything from bass marimba to tuned radiator pipes, plus small string and woodwind contingents on one side, Moreno , the Siamese chorus and live dancers (!) on the other, and each communicating with the other via closed circuit TV, it was a remarkable feat of logistics in itself.

And the words and music are the most radical that Rodgers and Hammerstein ever dared. The sequence starts with soft grace and not a little humour (the deadpan mewing Siamese chorus with their “Ge-OOORRR-GE!”s) over patiently pattering marimbas and vibes, but as the slave Eliza sets to escape from the evil “King” Simon Legree the music abruptly darkens and amplifies; at the word “rainstorm” it suddenly and shockingly explodes into dissonance, huge battalions of atonal percussion hammering against contrasts of quiet but harmonically restless rhythms. The chorus’ “Run, Eliza, run!” is reminiscent of similar sequences in Britten’s Peter Grimes while their “Poor Eliza”s lose all sense of courtliness and degenerate or escalate into Penderecki-anticipating screams. Again one thinks of Scott Walker, but now it’s the Scott Walker of Tilt and specifically the very similarly constructed and themed “The Cockfighter.”

Certainly Walker comes to mind when Buddha appears with his miracle and the music’s sky suddenly clears and the tenor of the story subtly shifts; Tuptim is no longer telling the story of Uncle Tom’s Cabin but mutating it into the story of Moses and Exodus, with its frozen river, its drowned pursuers, the snow as “veil of lace.” She escapes, then, and a solitary guitar appears to pick out the melody of “Hello, Young Lovers” as George Crumb might orchestrate it (the thundering descents of xylophones and timpani earlier are worthy and anticipatory of Makrokosmos III), but now it is time for her to turn Exodus in turn into a direct protest and damnation; we have already seen how her “I beg”s have hardened up to become “I regret to put before Your Majesty,” and now she breaks free of pantomime altogether and alone roars “I too am glad for death of King, of any King who pursues a slave who is unhappy and tries to escape!,” Brynner’s handclap terminating her tirade like the whip he will ultimately be afraid and unwilling to use on her for real. And the story is not an unqualified happy ending; Little Eva is sacrificed, as Tuptim knows she must soon sacrifice herself, and the sequence ends with a slowly and terrifyingly building crescendo, culminating in an enormous, shattering detonation of massed, beyond tonal, free form percussion and bells ready to drag the world down to destruction and hell. “Beyond tonal”? Not quite, actually – the final chord is an E major and we’ll be coming across something rather similar in time. After that, back to Brynner being all Henry Higgins about women as though the apocalypse never happened. But catch the buried dread of Kerr’s “When the last little star has left the sky, will we still be together?” in “Shall We Dance?” knowing that a world, if not the world, has already ended, praying for a final explosion that will obliterate Victorian gentility as fully and mercilessly as the House of Siam. But then, was the Unabomber not Jud Fry’s final revenge?

ORIGINAL MOTION PICTURE SOUNDTRACK: Oklahoma!

(#3: 29 September 1956, 2 weeks; 15 June 1957, 1 week)

Track listing: Overture/Main Title/Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin’/The Surrey With The Fringe On Top/Kansas City/Kansas City Ballet/I Cain’t Say No/Many A New Day/Many A New Day Ballet/People Will Say We’re In Love/Pore Jud Is Daid/Out Of My Dreams/Out Of My Dreams Ballet/Entr’acte/The Farmer And The Cowman/The Farmer And The Cowman Ballet/All Er Nuthin’/All Er Nuthin’ Ballet/People Will Say We’re In Love (Reprise)/Oklahoma/Finale: Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin’/Overture (LP Version)

For a medium like the long-playing record which was originally designed with classical music in mind, it’s fitting that musical soundtracks should have been so dominant in the early years of the album chart; after all, their cycles of songs linked by common plot and narrative lent themselves to the LP format as few other forms of music did at the time – a more easily digestible variety of opera.

There seems to have been no great precipitating factor in the return of the Oklahoma! soundtrack to number one nine months after its initial run; given that in September 1956 the album had already been available for over a year its success illustrates the extremely slow turnover, verging on stasis, of the early charts; in that first top five list with Songs For Swingin’ Lovers! at number one, both the Carousel and Oklahoma! soundtracks were also present and the list was completed by two live jazz albums, both recorded at the Crescendo Club in Los Angeles, by Mel Torme and Louis Armstrong respectively (Armstrong we’ll be returning to soon, and the Torme album was the record from which stemmed the top five hit single “Mountain Greenery”; as with all such affairs, I am wondering whether my father-in-law might have been in the audience for either). There wasn’t a great deal of competition, and there’s little doubt that had the chart started earlier, Oklahoma !’s run at the top would have been far more substantial.

As it is, the fact that the prequel reached number one after the sequel complicates linear storytelling somewhat. So much of what is stated and implied in Oklahoma! seems to me to come to clearer and fuller fruition in Carousel, but conversely Oklahoma!’s surface is far brighter; “People Will Say We’re In Love” is a considerably happier study of extended irony than “If I Loved You”; Will Parker and Ado Annie a goofier Mr and Mrs Snow. Then again, we are still dealing with surfaces here. “Out Of My Dreams,” for instance, is a more ambiguous and infinitely less cosy “You’ll Never Walk Alone.”

Although the musical is set a generation after Carousel, it still seems to precede it in all senses, even though its central thrust is about dealing with the future; the show is set at the point when Oklahoma is about to accede to the Union and become a proper, full-blown state, with all the relief and responsibility that will entail, not to mention all the dread. Of course it is hard to get a grasp on the musical in terms of its original revolutionary impact on the 1943 Broadway stage without actually having sat there, watching the jaws of the audience drop as, instead of the standard flurry of high-kicking, colourful girls, they got a dim dawn and somebody singing offstage, seemingly as quiet as possible, with rhythmic, rhetorical repeats drawn from the English folksong tradition: “There’s a bright golden haze on the meadow” to introduce the cautious, breath not yet taken wonder of “Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin’” as though stepping out onto the first morning of the world, as though starting again. Showboat and Porgy And Bess were precedents, but Oklahoma! suggested things not attempted in musicals before (that is if Porgy is to be considered an opera, which many, its composers included, do or did), a slow, patient rise rather than instant gratification.

Then again, Oklahoma! could also be said to be very subtle in its futurism; Gordon MacRae’s Curly stares out at the prairie – “All the cattles are standing like statues” except for “a little brown marsupial” – which could refer to the dawn of the Earth, before God had opted to bring life to his creations, or to the statues of cattle to be viewed when entering the anti-future of such ventures to come as Milton Keynes, mass production as the subtextual goal of assimilation. Corn as high as an elephant’s eye, observed by someone who had in all probability never seen an elephant in his life.

The future in Oklahoma! is embraced with cautious enthusiasm; Gene Nelson’s rapidly blinking Will comes back from the “modren world” as represented by Kansas City, bulging with good-natured disbelief at the cars, skyscrapers (tall enough to shame any elephant) and “ri-di-ai-tor”s he’s seen there, but warning that “they’ve gone about as fir as they can go.” “The Farmer And The Cowman” constantly undermines its vaudevillian “territory folk should stick together” schtick with interestingly harmonised verses which foretell the capitalist confrontations to come (a quarter of a century after the film, Heaven’s Gate would attempt to make the war explicit), its turn-taking jibes inserted with the smiling precision of daggers or pitchforks loaded with gelignite. Still, by the time the title song rolls around, they turn towards hopelessly optimistic visions of the glories to come – “Soon be living in a brand new state!,” “Flowers on the prairie” (when they already know there will be skyscrapers and dams), “Plenty of space and plenty of room” – but note the subtle train rhythms which enter towards song’s end, the mechanisation that will simultaneously make and break them. There’s a lovely four-part harmony on one of the quiet “Oklahoma” chants which directly foresees (as so much of this work does) Brian Wilson and SMiLE, and the theme of “Cabinessence” in particular – Eastern immigrants helping to build the railways and connect America to itself – might also be usefully borne in mind when considering next week’s entry.

But bear in mind also that the musical opened just a few years after the book and film of The Grapes Of Wrath (hence the additional poignancy of the “You’re doing OK, Oklahoma” line) so we already know that this story is not bound for a happy ending, that Curly and Laurey are likely to become Ma and Pa Joad. Its jolly nature therefore conceals an abyss of doubt and fear, and the latter is best considered in light of the two ghosts which give this story its point.

Ghosts, because the character of Jud Fry, the real eye of the elephant in Oklahoma!’s sitting room, appears only momentarily but crucially in the context of the soundtrack, while we hear nothing from Eddie Albert’s snake oil salesman Ali Hakim. It is here that I must declare my own prejudice; in the summer of 1979 my school staged the musical, in considerably abridged and simplified form, as its annual “opera.” I wasn’t asked to present myself for audition, nor did I feel any great urge to do so. Jud is the only character I would have considered playing, but then it was perhaps better that I didn’t; at fifteen I had no profound insights into what makes a “bad” man bad and would have undoubtedly played the role for comedy, when, as life has subsequently taught me, the last thing you should do with someone like Jud Fry is laugh at him.

Although the film is as dull and eventlessly directed (by Fred Zinnemann) as the movie of Carousel was, Rod Steiger’s Jud is an extremely disquieting performance and seems to blow in from the wind of a different film altogether. Like Cotten’s Uncle Charlie or Hopper’s Frank Booth, his evil fullness is so evidently preferable to the “goodness” of those film’s other characters (though either could have drifted into being through the dreams of Teresa Wright or Kyle MacLachlan – “In Dreams,” lest we forget) that you root for him all the way through, even or especially when he’s being a morose and clumsy slimeball towards Shirley Jones’ Laurey; does his struggle to articulate himself make him less or more of a man than MacRae’s smilingly smug Curly, as he ejects Jud from the dance, or as he laughingly fantasises Jud’s death?

For “Poor Jud Is Daid” is maybe the blackest and most disturbing song Rodgers and Hammerstein ever wrote. The Overture betrays elements of Kurt Weill within its lusty Aaron Copland hoedowning – not to mention the sinister breeze in the air of the equally disquieting strings which never quite leaves the various thematic recapitulations – but this echt-elegy, sung by MacRae and echoed by Steiger, is a study worthy of Brecht. The song’s tonality is restless while MacRae deploys steamroller irony to ridicule the not yet daid Jud, dreaming of his hanging himself, pondering on the differing smell of the daffodils after he’s been buried (and there are elements on which the young Jacques Brel in particular must have picked up – see “Funeral Tango”), his barks of “WOOD!” and “GOOD!” to echo Steiger’s “coffin of wood” and “gone for good.” Finally, in a gesture which would still be audacious on the 2008 stage, MacRae declaims “It’s a shame that he won’t keep, but it’s summer and we’re runnin’ out of ice” as trombones blow a shocking raspberry finale; it’s almost in keeping with UK Grime in extremis (“them two dirty shirts he always wore,” “he treated the rats like equals”) but then there is the unexpectedly tender core of the song, as MacRae sweetly and sorrowfully notes “He loved everything and everybody in the world – only he never let on – so nobody ever noted.”

Jud’s preordained suicide – like Billy Bigelow, he accidentally falls on his own knife – is terrifying and far more disturbing than the one in Carousel because he is a Rochester without title or evident point who is never in hope of finding his Jane – Laurey, amiably dithering over whether to go with him or Curly to the barn dance, could never have been that saviour – so his tale is never told and he will have both lived and died in vain. But then perhaps I ought to pause at that “amiably dithering” since “Out Of My Dreams” finds Laurey as confused and fucked up as Jud or for that matter Billy. The song quickly evolves into a staggering 14-minute ballet sequence, peppered with whole tones, Curly’s reassuring strings fighting against Jud’s snarling, questioning brass and percussion. The various song motifs we’ve heard thus far are recycled and rejigged but we can’t quite get a handle on them; the increasing atonality of the intruding chords suggests Alban Berg trying to hijack the orchestra pit. Eventually the number, and the musical, crack and thunderstorms, gunshots and screams are herded in, as are the strings we will hear a generation later on “Mrs O’Leary’s Cow.” Winds howl, brass usher in a final, apocalyptic thundercrack…and it all dissolves into Steiger’s gruff “It’s time to get started on the party,” paralysing Laurey in her own terror.

As for Ali Hakim, or indeed as for Will and Ado Annie, their relationship appears already foredoomed; in “All Er Nuthin’” it’s heartbreaking to hear Gloria Grahame, the coffee scaldee (and eventual coffee scalder) of The Big Heat, whimpering about giving an imitation of a crawfish as she submits to Will’s stupid demands for slippers and pipe fealty (ditto her quivering, aw shucks guilt on “I Cain’t Say No”). Stupid because there can be no room for anything else in his preordained world – unlike the Snows, they are unlikely to do any dreaming while the children are asleep; indeed Will thunders that if they do have a child, “he’d better look a lot like me!” with the dumb obstinacy of the soon-to-be wifebeater, obsessed with a traveller who in this narrative has not even materialised; like Jud, he exists more as a dream or ideation than a reality.

Similarly, what is there for Laurey and Curly but more of the same, albeit with more grinning? Laurey struggles with her choice because instinctively she knows that Jud is likely to offer more excitement if she can make the effort to break him open; that, albeit seemingly inarticulate and permanently resentful, he’s able to give her more life, and certainly more sex, than the dully grinning Curly could ever hope to do – note her multiple ironic “many”s and “never”s scattered throughout “Many A New Day.” I wonder whether the ambiguity would have been stepped up if the producers hadn’t shown a young, pre-fame James Dean the door when he turned up to audition for the part of Curly; but then they may already have realised that ideally Dean would have had to be cast as both Curly and Jud.

For Jud also represents a dirty, seamy past of which image the pregnant new state is anxious to wash itself. Everyone has to stand shoulder to shoulder, make the correct faces, say the right things, now; we couldn’t have stayed there, how could you even think that we might have done? Thus “Surrey With The Fringe On Top” is amiable clip clop, not devoid of sexuality (“one’s like snow,” MacRae licks his lips at one point, “the other’s more like miiiiiilk!,” and later, as Laurey falls asleep on his shoulder on the return journey, a repeated whisper: “don’t you wish you’d-a go on forever?” – not to mention the startled “ker-plop!,” the conspiratorial “don’t you hurry” and the descending, elongated quiver of “friiiiiiiinge” towards the end) but not really promising anything in the end except – a little more silk? “People Will Say We’re In Love” begins with Laurey unravelling “a practical list of don’ts for you” and despite the irony it’s believable that all the couple would ever want to do is the right thing, in public, care what the neighbours think (despite the “let people say we’re in love” arc at the end of the musical).

The performances here – again, we are dealing with the Angel expanded CD edition - are technically adequate and not a lot more; Jones misses quite a lot of key notes, Steiger and Nelson do not really need to “sing,” while MacRae carries on in his own merrily absurd Victor Mature of Broadway way as the hollow but grinning lunkhead, a far more neutral performance than the one he would give Bigelow. It’s likely that a Britain still broken by its own war a decade or more after it had ended would have loved colourful celebrations of communality, whatever their subtext or foreclosing forebodings, and so Oklahoma! thrived in its own “chin up!” way, even if the film, as David Thomson remarked, seemed to strip the musical of its exclamation mark.