The Exception

As can be seen from Our previous blog, somewhere between Our eighth and ninth years We lost all of Our interest in American popular music--Pat Boone and Elvis Presley poisoned the well, so to speak--and, with one exception, We never regained it.  That exception was Bobby Darin, whom I once, when I was fifteen or so, saw/heard sing, on television, his version of 'Mack the Knife'--and it knocked my socks off.  I became therewith a huge Bobby Darin [and, though I didn't know it, Kurt Weil] fan, delighting even in 'Splish Splash, I Was Takin' a Bath.' As with any popular music 'singer,' you have to ask yourself, "Is it his musicality that captivates me? or his winning character? or the profound sensibility and mordant wit that lies behind everything he says and does?" Whatever, it is an exception that does us both (Bobby Darin and me) credit, I think.

I admit that the criteria for my negative judgement of most popular American music have been, at least in part, extra-musical:  The perfect tastelessness of ('April Love') Pat Boone, for example, is, to me, indistinguishable from his smug troglodytic political conservatism; while the poor-white-trash nastiness cum necrophilia of Elvis Presley, and the stink and swagger of the Mafioso that hung in the very air around Frank Sinatra have made it impossible for me to hear either of them simply as 'singers.'

Ultimately, a large part of my admiration of Bobby Darin himself is not so much for his music as for his having divorced (the utterly negligible) Sandra Dee, and for his support of, and participation in, Robert Kennedy's political campaign.

It is interesting, I think, that Dick Clark--whom I detested, and whose 'American Bandstand' I fervently loathed--advised the then young and up-coming Bobby Darin not to sing 'Mack the Knife,' on the grounds  that it was "too operatic."  Ha!

When in the fullness of time I became accompanist to a cabaret singer (an intelligent and difficult young woman), our best and most satisfying work, generally speaking, was the songs of Kurt Weil--We knocked 'em dead with 'La Complainte de la Seine.'   But our all-time foot-stompin' stupendous success (with our audience) was our dynamic version of 'Le Jour où la Pluie Viendra.'