I've
mentioned Andy Williams on this blog before in different contexts. I
have a conflict about Andy's mega-mellow, super-easy-listening
sounds. On the one hand, certain songs of his (one in particular!) make me cringe; on the other, I could listen to certain of his
MOR hits over and over again and never get tired of them. It's all
related of course to my chronological “relation” to his music
(read: I heard it as a kid, and that music never ceases to have a primal
pull on ya). I'll cover both “sides” of the Williams phenomenon,
as well as spotlight some of the wonderful clips from his variety
show, in this post.
First,
for a little context. Much was made about Williams being one of the
last “crooners.” Well, he definitely fit in that smooth-as-silk
style, but I've always felt that the thing that distinguished him was
the fact that his voice sounded like it was emerging from an echo chamber even when
he was singing acapella. He was thus perfect for the MOR
“sound” on unamplified, impure, and often crackly AM radio, and
also on the non-stereo TVs folks had before the Eighties.
So
who was this latter-day crooner who never, ever embraced that noisy
rock and roll stuff? (Although he experimented with a LOT of
pop-rock, as we shall see.) He was born in 1927 in Iowa, attended HS
in Cincinatti, and then finally made it to L.A., He and his three siblings quickly landed movie and record gigs (including singing background on Bing
Crosby's “Swinging on a Star”) as the Williams Brothers.
He
was mentored by the actress-author Kay Thompson, who took a personal
interest in him when he and his brothers broke up the act (Thompson
and Williams had an affair when she was 38, he was 19). She did
enough finagling to get him a lot of important gigs, including the
one that broke him for real, his stint as the “boy singer” on
Steve Allen's Tonight Show (the other boy singer
was Steve Lawrence, who now stands along with Tony Bennett as the
very last of a certain kind of male balladeer).
I
knew none of this when I saw Williams on TV. I viewed him merely as the
host of a number of programs — first a variety series (which ran
nine years, from '62-'71), then a number of homespun, family-deified
Xmas specials. As a TV host, Williams was slightly hipper (definitely
younger) than Perry Como, but his mellowness didn't exactly make him
a natural comedian (as Crosby could be when he was with Hope, and as
Dean Martin always could be — Sinatra, btw, pretty meager
comedian...).
Andy
was a devout “square” in an era when rock and roll became common
currency. In going through his credits, I was surprised to find that
“Moon River,” thought to be his biggest hit, was never a single
at the time it was released (1962, after he sang it at the Oscars;
Jerry Butler actually had the single hit with the vocal version of
the song). He did, however, reach No. 4 on the charts with the
pop tune “Butterfly,” which is in the mode of Guy
Mitchell's “Singing the Blues.”
To
get a serious dose of some pop-rock Andy Williams kitsch, I HEAVILY
recommend this sucker, a cha-cha number originally sung by Earl Grant
and released by Andy in '58. It will blow your mind, daddio... (it's
also catchy as fuck)
But
what did I know about this stuff when I was a little kid? I think the
thing I enjoyed the most about his show (but also puzzled over) was a
bear that wanted cookies all the time (yes, there was an overlap with Sesame
Street).
There
are two actors listed as being in the bear suit on the show in the
IMDB listing, the most prominent being the “furry emeritus” Janos
Prohaska. I'm not sure which actor is in the suit in this clip, which
also features American instituion (and non-red-hot-mama) Kate Smith:
*****
Williams
became inextricably linked in the minds of a lot of Americans with
Christmas — and in fact his music is played on mainstream radio
*only* at that time of the year these days (but that is because
American radio is a sad cadaver that only digs out old music when the
Yuletide season comes around). This is where I'll bring in the cringing I
sometimes do when confronted with Williams' music.
His
Xmas shows were indeed so homespun they could make ya choke, and they
definitely overplayed the Currier and Ives adorable Americana aspect.
For example, here, with a nice fake blue-screen (it was blue-screen back then) is Andy taking a sleigh ride with his singers.
And
then of course there's his many fireside moments with his then-wife
Claudine Longet — the two continued to appear together on the later
Xmas specials, even though the public knew they were divorced in real
life (admittedly, it was less unctuous and pathetic than Sonny and Cher
when they returned to the air to argue as a divorced couple in the
mid-Seventies).
Longet,
who is still alive, is most infamous for having shot her lover
Vladimir “Spider” Sabich. Her claim was that the gun accidentally
discharged into him when he was showing her how it worked — this
was countered by evidence that noted that he was across the room from
her and turned away at the time of the shot.
Also,
there was a diary she kept in which she documented how the
relationship wasn't going well — and thus, in one of those nice
quirky twists of justice, she served 30 days in prison and paid a
fine (she also got to choose which 30 days she spent, they were not
consecutive). How extreme!
Anyway,
what the Williams clan showed each Xmas was a united front — Andy
and his brothers would reunite, Claudine and the kids would be
together with him, and as many other relatives and guest stars as
could be crammed onto the roster would appear in one cozy-home
setting. But there was also THAT SONG...
Written
for Williams' 1963 Xmas LP by Edward Pola and George Wyle (who was
the vocal director for Williams' TV show), "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" caught on in the
years that followed, thanks to Andy performing it every year on his
show, and the fact that it is the single most lying-est goddamned Xmas
song ever.
Think
about it. “White Christmas,” “Blue Christmas,” “Have
Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” “The Christmas Waltz” —
most of the modern Xmas songs are pretty down-hearted, but Andy's
tune is a celebration of everything that exists purely in
holiday-fantasy-land.
It's
a catchy, hooky, upbeat Xmas nightmare and it literally HAUNTS the
fuck out of all of us each Yuletide. It is a Christmas ritual, and
these days I know that shopkeepers have decided the Xmas
season is ON (usually the day after Halloween) when I hear this song
coming out over a supermarket or convenience store speaker
system. Abandon hope, all ye who hear Andy's merry declaration:
*****
The
Andy Williams Show was yet another of the mind-bogglingly
odd and amorphous variety shows in the Sixties that mixed the “old”
and the “new” in stranger and stranger ways. As the “youth
revolution” of the time was going on, these shows hugged tightly to
the old, familiar ways of show biz.
Let's
put it this way — Johnny Cash was perhaps the smartest of all the
singers who hosted a variety show when he contracted to appear in no
comedy sketches. Aside from Dean Martin (whose sketches ran the gamut
from amusing to dowrnight godawful), the singers who hosted variety
shows were not good comedians, and their writing staffs were mandated
to write family-friendly comedy that was, to be kind, mediocre.
I
submit as evidence this clip from The Andy Williams Show that begins with an awesome bit of
Jonathan Winters ad-libbing with Andy, but then swiftly degenerates
into a terrible sketch about a no-budget local TV station featuring
Winters, Ozzie and Harriet, and Karen Carpenter (on drums!). The
frame from Jonathan is great, the sketch is just unbelievable:
The
clash of the “new” and the “old” was never as jarring and
entertaining as it was in this appearance by Bette Davis, who sings a
specially-written song to promote Baby Jane (it's
a fucking twisting song!). Given that the film is a totally
brilliantly deranged horror film/character study, this bit of odd
promotion becomes even odder:
And
what better to follow that than Miss Davis with the New Christy
Minstrels and Andy singing “Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore.”
Variety shows were wildly unpredictable at times:
Andy
was indeed awful at comedy, but he did have some good comedians on
his show. The only problem was that, for some reason, his producers
thought it wise that he stay on the stage with them as sort of a
straight man or a talk-show type inquisitor. He stays onstage for the
opening of this appearance by Vaughn Meader, and is a wholly unnecessary interlocutor
for a young Woody Allen:
This
“why is Andy on the stage with these people?” factor also comes
up when one watches him singing along with the younger musical acts
of the Sixties. His becoming a fourth member of Peter, Paul and Mary kind of works, but him insinuating himself
into Simon and Garfunkel is oh-so-pointless.
Add
to that his odd musical number with the Carpenters, a rather clunky rewrite
of the Beatles “Ticket to Ride” in the first-person plural
(“We've got a ticket to ride, and we don't care...”). And what
can be said about Andy becoming a part of the Ike and Tina Turner Review,
doing a duet with Tina?
One
of the cases where Andy was included in a rousing closer number is
fascinating, in that he's not completely unnecessary, he's just the
“lowest voice” on stage that serves to lead to the louder singers
assembled around him: Mama Cass, a young Elton John, and Ray Charles.
The last-mentioned duo play piano on the pop-gospel number “Heaven Help
Us All”:
Thankfully,
the Williams show featured younger performers on their own before
they were forcibly detained with Andy. There are memorable turns
online by Elton John, The Jackson 5, and Andy's label mates, the
utterly awesome Sly and the Family Stone:
Further
proof of the wondrous weirdness that was the Sixties is this terrific
turn by Tiny Tim singing “I’m a Lonely Little Teardrop":
to be continued...
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