Gifts my mother gave me

My mother in
Ireland. Not a great 
photo of her, but one
she loved.

My mother was a square. That’s not a nice way to start a tribute to a parent who recently departed (on Aug. 29, at 85 years of age), but when I decided to write about the tastes that my mother passed on to me (as I did with my father eight years ago), I came up against the fact that, in the rock ’n’ roll era that she grew up in, my mother was generally into “square” music, meaning popular standards (called more grandiosely “The Great American Songbook”) as opposed to rhythm and blues and its flashier stepchild, rock ’n’ roll. 

But there was a greater beauty in the stuff that my mother enjoyed. I only understood it from my 30s onward, when I began to actively listen to the popular standards my mother loved and delve into the different singing styles, and the exquisiteness of some of the songs. You see, my mother was lucky in that she always wanted to be a wife and mother (this was a part of her Eisenhower-era Catholic training) and so, she was blessed to raise me and my sister for a bunch of years at home before she did have to go back into the workplace (the late Seventies were difficult for everybody). 

And while my father led me to the golden age of movie comedy, comics, pulp thrillers, and most importantly, foreign film, my mother did have more staid taste. That said, I did pick up some cultural items from her that have stayed with me lo the many years. I’ll start off with a few movie/TV things (because generally that was my dad’s area for cool-stuff indoctrination) and then tackle the whole musical issue.

Champagne for Caesar (1950). My mother did like certain kinds of screwball comedies — not the rowdier ones, but movies that were cleverly scripted. In this regard, she turned me on to this light comedy that tackles the TV quiz show world just as it was taking off.

It’s a smart little satire of these shows and also their viewers. It features Vincent Price in a great role (one of his own personal faves), as the quirky owner of a soap company that Ronald Coleman is trying to bankrupt via the game show that the company sponsors, called “Masquerade for Money.” The smart casting extends all the way down to the pet that the film is named after, an alcoholic parrot named “Caesar.” (Voice courtesy of the inimitable Mel Blanc.) 

 

Ah, the mysteries! My mother also loved carefully plotted Christie-type whodunits. She never read ol’ Agatha (in the second half of her life, she became addicted to the work of Mary Higgins Clark, though), but she, along with her brother, my Uncle Neil, was a definite fan of the clever-detective-unlocks-the-“perfect murder” type of murder mystery. (Her absolute fave of these was Rene Clair’s And Then There Were None, 1945.) 

Her primo fascination in this regard as far as TV detectives went was the best of the bunch, hands down — that being Lt. Columbo of the LAPD. The show was indeed the best-written mystery show on the air for two reasons: The first was the fact that its creators, Levinson and Link, decided to invert the murder-mystery formula and let the viewer see who the killer was — the mystery then became how Columbo could figure out the culprit and apprehend them. (The fact that he would often entrap them with what seemed like flimsy circumstantial evidence didn’t matter, as the killer would usually have a flip-out when accused and could then be arrested; the matter of whether these cases would hold up in a court of law was beyond the purview of the show.) 

The second reason that the show (which wasn’t a regular weekly series; it was instead a sequence of TV movies with some great haughty murderers) remains so indelible is, of course, because of Peter Falk’s timeless and brilliant performance as the Lieutenant. Blending a deceptively sloppy facade with a razor-sharp mind, in every good episode (there were only a few real clinkers — most of those came in the ABC reboot from the ’90s) Columbo constantly surprised the killer by figuring out their “perfect crime” and proving that ratiocination (the ultimate Holmesian phrase!) didn’t need to be exercised while wearing an attention-getting mustache or a deerstalker cap. 

 

And my mother truly got me into Hollywood musicals. While my father steered me toward the Marx Bros, Laurel and Hardy, and W.C. Fields, as well as more serious films by Orson Welles and Jean Cocteau, my mother did prefer a happy ending. Thus, her love of MGM musicals (most decidedly of the Arthur Freed unit vintage — and the “A” titles, not those “B” musicals).

She had two heroines as a girl: Margaret O’Brien and Esther Williams. (One identifiable for a kid; the other aspirational for a girl going to the pool in Astoria Park.) Her all-time favorite MGM title was their Little Women (1949), but aside from that one dramatic foray into Alcott-land, she primarily watched and rewatched the musicals starring Gene, Judy, Fred, and Debbie. 

The best among those is arguably Singin’ in the Rain, which remains fresh and lively every time it is viewed, and also sported some crazy-ass colors in the “Broadway ballet” that featured athletic and acrobatic Mr. Kelly and the sensuous and slinky Ms. Charisse.

The film was often seen on TV, but for the moviegoing experience, nothing was as impressive as seeing musicals at the now defunct Ziegfeld Theater, where That’s Entertainment (1974) premiered and which later had programs of classic MGM titles. As was the case with Disney movies (which I never got hooked on — sorry, Ma!), my mother brought us to these screenings in the hopes that we would like what we saw, but also to rewatch the films that she had loved from her childhood and teen years. 

As a teen my mother really loved Eddie Fisher. Yes, the same Eddie who is mostly known to show-biz fans for leaving Debbie and wedding Liz, only to have Liz publicly humiliate him with Burton the way he had humiliated her with Debbie. (Later in the Sixties he married Connie Stevens but there wasn’t much humiliation [that we know of] in that relationship, so it’s not much talked about.) 

My mother was a member of the Eddie Fisher fan club, Astoria, Queens, division. She described the meetings to me once — there was another teen girl in Astoria who loved Eddie, too, so they sat around and talked about him and played his records. But they were given “official” status!

Oddly enough, my mother didn’t have any LPs of her favorites saved from her child/teen years. But she did have some 45s, and one of them was this “Italianate” tune from 1954 that sounds moderately operetta-ish and significantly from the school of fake Italian songs that gave us “Come On-a My House.” (My mother also loved Rosie.)

The songwriters of this opus were Bennie Benjamin (a Black songwriter who gave us both “Wheel of Fortune” and “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”), George Weiss (“The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” “What a Wonderful World”), and Al Bandini (a jazz trumpet player). The song is not one of Fisher’s greatest hits, but it kinda mesmerized me as a kid, since it seemed like a gibberish tune back then (I loved novelty tunes and still do), but catchy. Now I’m grown up and it’s still gibberish and just as catchy.

 

The big discovery for me as a kid, though, was my mother’s love of Nat King Cole. The odd thing was, again, that she had just one surviving single of his (I’ll get to that), and I was first hearing his songs via an album of Jerry Vale’s that my mother loved where he covered Nat’s hits. (Yes, this is a very “square” way to find out about Nat.)

But my uncle had extra pristine-condition LPs at his house and ended up gifting my mother with a greatest hits record by Nat that had a number of his romantic ballads. I didn’t really wanna hear them all the time as a kid because… well, I was a kid. But they got into my subconscious and, as of my 30s, I did realize how singular and beautiful Nat’s ballads were. They remain so, and always will be.

This song is from 1952 and was written by Jimmy Van Heusen (a regular supplier of great fare for Sinatra) and Sammy Gallop (“Wake the Town and Tell the People”).

 

The interesting part about my mother’s love for Nat’s music is that the one 45 she had of his was this one, which is one of the times that Nat tackled rhythm and blues. Thus, this was one of the rockin’-est singles my mother had in her possession. (I enjoyed the Crewcuts “Sh-Boom,” but I had no idea that was a whitebread cover that just kept the hook and got rid of the soul.)

The song was released in 1957 and was written by Ollie Jones (a member of the doo-wop group the Cues, who backed up Nat on various tracks). 

 

My father passed on to me a fascination for radio as a medium, since he was of the generation that thrived on the theater of the mind that is now quaintly called “old time radio” (although they still have radio comedy and dramas over in the U.K.). My mother was of the TV generation, and while she had dim memories of some of the major radio shows of the Forties, she had major reminiscences about her and her brothers rewatching “the Million Dollar Movie” (which aired one movie every day for a week, twice a day).

She therefore was more familiar with radio as a medium for deejays playing music. And one of the most velvet-voiced of that breed, in NYC at least, was the late, great William B. Williams. Willie B. hated playing anything that wasn’t the Great American Songbook, but WNEW-AM played MOR “soft rock” for more than a decade — and that’s when I got into listening to it, to hear the new songs and also the patter by the deejays (Klavan in the Morning, Willie B., Julie LaRosa, Ted Brown, Jim Lowe, what a bunch!).

My mother felt Willie B. was the best of the group, thus this aircheck from around the time we had it playing around the house. It sounds just like AM radio, since it goes in and out at points. And though Willie got to play his beloved American popular standards, you’ll notice that he also plays Linda Ronstadt (in her soft-rock heyday), Carly Simon, and the Association’s “Windy.” (One of the interesting things was that WNEW was still playing Sixties hits in the Seventies.) This is a joy to hear, for those who used to listen to Willie B.

 

I move from the radio to the music it played, and the music my mother played around the house. Her album collection contained no old LPs from the Fifties, but it did contain original cast albums of Broadway shows. And so I was “drilled” on this music by her playing it on record. Once I hit upon the kind of rock I wanted to hear (which did move back and forth from singer-songwriter stuff to “new wave” and back again), I said goodbye to the popular standards. 

But in the Nineties, people were unloading their albums like crazy. A store I used to shop at (which was directly across from my dotcom office at the time) had what seemed like the full discography of Sinatra LPs going for 50 cents to 3 dollars a pop. I ended up buying all of them and then (while retaining my love of singer-songwriters and certain bands very much) falling down the rabbit hole of American popular standards. 

At various points, I realized I was now listening to “my parents’ music.” But I didn’t care because the songs were so fuckin’ beautiful. (Really, when you’re into Tom Waits, how can you not go back and listen to Sinatra’s “suicide” albums?) I credit my mother for this part of my musical taste, since she was so entrenched in that area.

And I turn here to a singer she didn’t particularly care for, but who does here a simply perfect rendition of a song that I’m sure I heard first from her record collection. You see, she had this original cast album for a show called “All-American” that flopped on B’way in 1962. The show is notable for two things: its lovely score by Charles Strouse and Lee Adams (Bye Bye Byrdie), and for the fact that it was the only B’way show to ever have an original libretto by Mel Brooks.

Duke Ellington thought the score so good that he released an album of his versions of the tunes. And vocalists began to record the beautiful “Once Upon a Time.” Sinatra did a very solid version of it, but I prefer this particular version by Bobby Darin because there is a palpable sadness and yearning in his voice.

It could be attributable to the fact that his marriage to Sandra Dee had ended (he left her in May of 1966 and this concert was taped in November of the same year; their divorce was finalized the following year), or it could just be that this emotional version (seen in a British TV concert by Darin called “Something Special” that never aired over here) found him in a reflective mood. Whatever the case, it’s one of the best renditions of this big song from a flop musical.

 

One of the performers I was able to get my mother into from the raft of singer-songwriters I loved was the great storyteller Harry Chapin. Harry is an acquired taste because his songs were so long and the best ones among them were indeed short stories in song form. At his best he crafted these terrific little narratives that were remarkably emotional, yet contained, as in the song below. 

Of all the Chapin songs to choose to celebrate my mother I choose this one because she also had a secret desire to be a children’s book author. She wrote little stories for the family to read about myself and my sister, or the holidays, or memories she had of this or that incident. (My father used to draw the illustrations for them. I have none of these particular stories — but the tale behind that is a long and thorny one, as many of my mother’s final years were a sadly thorny situation.) 

My mother was drawn to Chapin because I would listen to his albums and she noted that they “sounded like a Broadway show.” He did indeed have a short-lived 1975 Broadway show made from his songs, The Night That Made America Famous; he appeared in the show along with his two brothers and other cast members — at that time I was too young to be into his music. She was unfortunately busy the one night that I saw Harry (at Carnegie Hall!), but we attended tributes to him together after he died.

The song below is a very beloved one among Harry’s fans (along with the exquisite “Better Place to Be” and “Corey’s Coming”); it talks about a real-life individual in a fictionalized manner. Harry read a brutally terse review of a man’s singing debut at Town Hall in Manhattan. He decided that his song would provide the man’s point of view, but also give us the review, and the aftermath, which is quiet and very touching. It is a gorgeous parable about how the arts “make us whole.”

 

And because if you’re going to talk musicals, you might as well go for the big guns: I close out with what I believe was the last Broadway show I saw with my mother. You can’t surpass Sondheim, he was truly the end of classic B’way musical-writing, and Sunday in the Park With George was one of the musicals that had a book that didn’t “let down” his absolutely impeccable songwriting. 

The best songs by Sondheim have a deeply emotional core; the best thing about the songs here is that he split the topics between the act of creation and the act of loving (and how they’re really the same thing). In this case, James Lapine’s book was split into a flawless first act (showing the creation of a painting piece by piece, which in itself is a marvel) and a somewhat bumpier second act, but one that added the notion of being “in fashion” in the art world and how raising money was a key part of the artistic process in the 20th century.

Sondheim and Lapine.

I’m trying to remember if we saw the show with both leads intact — one of my mother’s favorite topics of conversation about Broadway shows was how many “follow-up” stars she saw in lead roles, after the original lead performers have taken a hike. I believe we saw both original leads in it. In any case, this play was thankfully put on PBS and made available for the world to see. It wouldn’t’ve made a good movie (and it’s good that one time they left things at the level of a stage play, where the magic actually was).

There’s absolutely no better place to end this tribute to my mother’s “gifts.”

A fan turned historian: Deceased Artiste and NYC FM legend Pete Fornatale

The bond between the great radio voices and their audience is a direct one and, oddly enough (given the spatial disconnect), a very emotional one. Free-form FM legend Pete Fornatale created such a bond in his work, whether he was playing music he deeply loved, or stuff that was on the dreaded “playlist.” Like many of the free-form folk who are still with us, Pete also served the function of “curator” of pop-rock culture, teaching, writing books, giving lectures (that were suitably free-form), and trying to keep alive the enthusiasm for music that is now enshrined either as “oldies” or (BAH) “classic rock” while still exploring the work of new folkies and rockers.

Pete’s obits and the tributes from his colleagues at his station, WFUV, all stressed that the guy spent his whole life in his chosen profession — he started as a DJ at his college radio station (which, coincidentally, was the very same FUV) in the mid-Sixties, and then was lucky enough to score a berth at NYC’s leading FM rock station, WNEW-FM, forging a long association that seemed to have contained a lot of his happiest moments and some of the most regrettable (enter: the playlist!).

My own relationship to Pete’s work on radio was somewhat spotty: I noticed in listening to the airchecks that are on the Net that the reason I probably fell away from listening to him and a few other NEW DJs as an adolescent was that I wasn’t into the “arena rock” acts that were emphasized on the station by the late Seventies. I always had (and will always have) a special connection to that incredible air-staff (Allison Steele, Muni, Fornatale, Elsas, Scelsa), but that “dinosaur music” (as I thought of it then, and still sorta do) was being washed away in my mind by new wave and punk.

In researching this piece, it was thus a pleasure to discover the moment in 1982 that Pete created “Mixed Bag,” his nearly 30-year radio show featuring the music he really loved — folk, folk-rock, and basically any quality rock and popular music that fit into his episodic “themes.” This show ran on early Sunday morning (basically the only time he had found when the tightly-playlisted stations he worked at would leave him alone), so I wasn’t hearing Pete for some years (late sleeper that I am).

On the return to WFUV, with his friends and fellow free-form legends Dennis Elsas and Vin Sclesa (who have both followed their own interesting trajectories over the years), it was a joy to hear Pete go off on his audio reveries. In its most recent incarnation, “Mixed Bag” was a fascinating, at times nearly OCD (but very listenable!), exploration of themes or concepts in music. One thing made me have infinite respect for Pete: the fact that, no matter how “out of fashion” an artist was, Pete continued to play them if he loved their music.

Such was the case with Harry Chapin, one of the artists whose work I dearly love, but even I haven’t paid tribute to on this blog or the Funhouse TV show (not because he’s “disapproved of,” but because no new material has emerged and I’ve been distracted by the million other artists whose work has popped up on this rabbit-hole called the Internet). Pete, however, regularly played Harry, and now that he’s gone, I wonder if anyone else will continue to spin those gorgeous and moving story-songs that Chapin made a specialty of.

Speaking of Chapin, Fornatale was not just a DJ who talked the talk — he was a “child of the Sixties” who still made charity a priority, doing dedicated work for the organization Harry created called WHYHunger. Here Pete is introducing a documentary on the Occupy Wall Street Movement this past December at the Paley Center in NYC:

It’s hard to convey what is special about any great radio personality (I had this trouble trying to sum up what Lynn Samuels did in my Deceased Artiste tribute to her). The best way to experience his work is to go to the the NY Radio Archive site, which has a number of recordings of Pete’s great moments available as free MP3 downloads, including:

— an extremely early 1969 fill-in slot, where Pete discusses whether the Jerry Lewis telethon is “legit” or not (fascinating!).

— a gorgeous 1977 interview with Brian Wilson in full “Landy mode.” The interview is particularly touching because Pete tells him at two points how much Pet Sounds and the Beach Boys’ music has meant to him. He also tells Brian how much he is loved, which is particularly moving (given that I saw Brian on Larry King a few years back, and he is still haunted by being what he calls “a bad man”).

— a 1977 segment which, as noted above, reminded me how codified WNEW became as the Seventies wore on. Too much arena- and classic-rock (Yes, Pink Floyd, Santana, Chicago). Perhaps the only song that I loved then and still love is “Time Has Come Today,” which was of course an “oldie” by ’77. You do get to hear Pete playing a tape of the ad he did for the Woodstock festival back in ’69, which is amazing.

— the first “Mixed Bag” from 1982. Utterly invaluable, as it includes a “presentation tape” (that’s what Pete calls it) that was used to sell the idea to WNEW’s management. The first song is Chapin’s “Remember When the Music,” and the first guest is Don McLean, who sounds oddly angry for such a wonderfully sensitive singer-songwriter. The piece de resistance is that Pete’s first themed set is geared to the holidays — he does a set on the topic of loneliness.

—a 2003 clip where Pete plays 1996 interviews with himself and Jonathan Schwartz (the mellow-voiced DJ who always makes me think of Robert Klein’s exquisite parody of him). Schwartz discusses the radio “experts” called in to retool WNEW in the late Seventies, and Pete also weighs in on his growing disillusionment with the station.

In that interview, Pete discusses his friendship with Harry Chapin (how the two met when Pete picked up Harry when he was hitchhiking in Long Island during the Sixties) and digs out the oft-repeated story about how one of his first fan letters for “Mixed Bag” was a note commending him, but noting there were lots of new Eighties folkies who needed airplay (the note was from a then-unsigned Suzanne Vegas). Find this aircheck and many more at the NY Radio Archive.

Now, since this blog is more visually oriented, here are some clips that show different sides of Pete. First some audio of he and Dennis Elsas on WNEW in 1983. Here is rare documentary footage of the station, with some vintage Pete in the middle:

A very odd item, a video docu called “How Audio Recordings are Made” featuring the group The Washington Squares, hosted by a very nerdy-looking Pete!

Pete had a literal who’s-who of singer-songwriters and folkies on his different radio shows. One of the people he said he was proudest to host is the “Old Folkie” himself (thanks, Harry), Mr. Pete Seeger. Here Pete introduces Seeger at the Lone Star in 1985 and here he is interviewing Seeger, Jim Brown (no, no that one), and Roger McGuinn in 2007:

Proving that Pete was a very good interviewer, here’s a rare chat with Leonard Cohen from April 28, 1985, fortunately preserved by a fan. Caught in the morning (and sounding somewhat burnt), Leonard is incredibly honest and funny, sings “Night Comes On” and reads poetry from his Book of Mercy:

Finally, acknowledging Pete’s other “professions,” here he is lecturing on the subject of Woodstock at Queensborough Community College. “Lecturing” is a poor word to capture what he did with an audience — he clearly drew on his years teaching high school English to captivate an audience and, most importantly (this guy clearly remembered what school was like), to keep them awake! (Watch his techniques here to involve the audience, but also to “swerve” things just when they seem to be reaching a mellower tone.)

The last time I saw him host an event, it was a tribute to the Bottom Line at the World Financial Center in the summer of 2011 (or was it 2010?). His sense of enthusiasm was truly infectious, and he did work to keep the audience engaged in a live venue — this was indeed interesting to me, having grown up on the mellower, slow-talking, somewhat nerdy-sounding, older-brotherly DJ voice he used on the radio (no AM Top 40 “puker” was he).

What was most important, though, at that show — as he lamented the loss of that sadly long-gone NYC nightspot that hosted all the non-arena/concert-hall performers who counted in the Seventies and Eighties — and in the clip below is how much he loved talking about this stuff:

Pete was one of the last of a dying breed. Thankfully, in the NYC area, we still have free-form radio legends Bob Fass, Vin Sclesa, and Dennis Elsas not only still with us, but also still on the air on a weekly basis (Elsas is on every weekday on WFUV). We should acknowledge their contribution and treasure it while we still have them.