UPDATE! Just when you think the District of Columbia court system can't get any worse, they do: The Steyn team landed at Washington Reagan National Airport on Sunday afternoon to discover the judge has decided to postpone today's trial. Mark will have more to say about this on Monday morning.
L is for the way you look at me
O is for the only one I see
V is very, very extraordinary
E is even more...
It is the eve of trial for yours truly. Tomorrow morning, after eleven-and-a-half years in the dank septic tank of the District of Columbia Superior Court, jury selection will finally begin in the matter of Michael E Mann vs Mark Steyn. So this is my last chance to think of anything other than trial bollocks between now and Thanksgiving, and the subject of L-O-V-E seems just the ticket - although I regret that this wretched sewer of "justice" has tainted our anniversary observances of the great Bert Kaempfert, born in Hamburg in October 1923.
As you'll have heard on the first half of our centenary salute, Kaempfert was not just one of the defining orchestral sounds of the Sixties, but the only German bandleader to have played a crucial role in the careers of the three blockbuster anglophone acts of the post-war era: He gave Sinatra his first Number One hit in over a decade - "Strangers in the Night". He gave Elvis his first hit after leaving the army - "Wooden Heart". And he was also the first man to put the Beatles in front of a studio microphone - although he didn't think much of their compositions and he reckoned their name was so silly he changed it to the Beat Brothers.
Speaking of name-changes, Bert owes his own moniker to a chap called Milt Gabler, legendary record producer of Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" and Bill Haley's "Rock Around The Clock" - oh, and uncle to Billy Crystal. He occasionally wrote songs, such as a big hit for Louis Jordan in the Forties, "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie" - after which it took the best part of two decades before Uncle Milt made any further contributions to the American songbook, and both came by way of Germany.
In those days Bert Kaempfert was still Berthold Kämpfert - with an umlaut. As you may recall, it was P J O'Rourke who proposed that Washington should spell USA with an umlaut - ÜSA - to sound more bad-ass and deter its enemies. It was way too bad-ass for Milt Gabler when Bert and the missus swung by the Decca offices in New York in 1960. Back in Germany, Herr Kämpfert had had a couple of big hits at the tail end of the Fifties - "Die Gitarre und das Meer" ("The guitar and the sea") for the anglophonically appellated Teuton pop star Freddy Quinn, and "Morgen" for the Croat singing sensation Ivo Robic. Despite those successes, Kämpfert couldn't find any takers in his own country for what he regarded as the best melody he'd ever written, something called "Wunderland bei Nacht". "It's time to go to America," he told his wife Hanne. She agreed.
Initially, "Wunderland" met with the same rejection it had back home. But Milt Gabler, then well established as Decca's A&R man and a peerless hitmaker, liked what he heard and so did the music publisher Hal Fein. They changed "Wunderland bei Nacht" to "Wonderland By Night". But why stop there? Milton Gabler abbreviated Berthold and decided the bandleader could ditch the umlaut. Enter "Bert Kaempfert":
In January 1961, Kaempfert's "Wonderland By Night" toppled Elvis Presley's "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" from the top spot, and became one of a handful of easy-listening instrumental blockbusters (Percy Faith's "Theme From A Summer Place", Acker Bilk's "Stranger On The Shore") that six decades on still evokes a very precise moment. Gabler had found not only a new pop act, but a songwriting partner. Kaempfert had a song he'd written with German lyrics by Kurt Schwaback: "Danke Schön". Gabler dumped that umlaut, too - "Danke Schoen" - and then wrote English words:
Danke Schoen
Darling, Danke Schoen
Thank you for all the joy and pain
Picture show
Second balcony
Was the place we'd meet
Second seat
Go Dutch treat
You were sweet...
Were I a composer of the Germanic persuasion I might be tempted to complain that "Danke schoen" doesn't rhyme with "pain" or "explain" or "lane". Or "complain", come to that. It's more of a "u" sound. But Gabler was a New York Jew and he seems to have rhymed it Yiddishly, as Sammy Cahn had in "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen". So Kaempfert let it go, and any way you pronounce it, Gabler had a nifty plan for the song. He thought it would be great for Bobby Darin as a follow-up to "Mack The Knife". "'Danke Schoen' was 'Mack The Knife' sideways," said Darin's manager, Steve Blauner. "The tempo and everything." You kinda see what he means: It's nowhere near as insinuating as "Mack" but it shares with it an economy of melodic material endlessly repeated. We didn't know yet that that would be the Kaempfert style: as the Germans call them, Ohrwurmen - or earworms.
So Hal Fine, Kaempfert and Gabler's publisher, figured that if Bobby Darin can take one German Ohrwurmen to the top of the charts, he can do it with another. Darin had a better idea. He'd heard a new singer at the Copacabana - a boy who sang like a girl - and all he needed to put the kid over the top was the right song. He said he'd produce the record himself. "If he gets a hit, fine, you'll be happy. If it's not a hit, then I'll do it." So he called the arranger Jimmy Haskell. "I have the greatest hit song," Darin told him, "but I want you to come to and hear this kid." And so it was that a baby-faced vocalist called Wayne Newton got launched on his career with a Bert Kaempfert song:
Danke Schoen
Darling, Danke Schoen
Save those lies, darling, don't explain
I recall
Central Park in fall
Where you tore your dress
What a mess
I confess
That's not all...
I never have figured out what Wayne's going on about there: Some sort of easy-listening wilding? But it didn't seem to hurt the song. Marlon Brando told a friend of a friend of mine that it was the record Jackie Kennedy played at her pad the night she put the moves on him on one of her first dates as a young widow. She pulled him close to her and breathed Gabler's lyric into her ear as she pressed herself against him. When the record ended, she put it on again. And again. But he felt he'd had a wee bit too much performance-impairing liquor and beat a hasty retreat, Wayne Newton's voice following him out the front door:
Though we go
On our separate ways
Still the mem'ry stays
For always
My heart says
Danke Schoen...
Kaempfert and Gabler's next song was not a maddening Euro-novelty but a bona fide standard. And, even by Bert's preference for simple tunes, this is the über-Kaempfert - a tune so simple, and with an arrangement that certainly doesn't over-complicate anything:
The first time I played that on the radio my late producer Brian Savin rolled his eyes and tapped out a one-finger keyboard accompaniment. It was Brian's funeral in England last week, and I regret that, because of this fraudulent trial in Washington, DC, I was unable to be there to play him his least favorite Bert Kaempfert tune.
Indeed, that one was so simple that Milt Gabler wrote it up as a child's spelling lesson, an "Alphabet Song" for romantics:
L is for the way you look at me
O is for the only one I see
V is very, very
extraordinary
E is even more
than anyone that you adore can...
When I first heard the song as a child, that last word - "can" - always confused me. It doesn't seem to belong there. "More" rhymes with "adore" just as "very" rhymes with "extraordinary" and it feels as if it ought to be the end of the line. My ear first heard it as "Ken", who didn't seem germane to the plot, and there's so little space between "can" and "love" that, once you've ruled Ken out, it sounds oddly like "canned love".
Still, this is a somewhat niggling complaint. There have been songs called "Love" before - on our audio tribute to Hugh Martin a few years ago, we played one that, thanks to Lena Horne and Judy Garland, very nearly landed. But not quite. So it took Milt Gabler spelling it out to add a love song called "L-O-V-E" to the American Songbook:
Love
Is all that I can give to you
Love
Is more than just a game for two
Two
In love can make it
Take my heart and please don't break it...
It's a simple tune but it swings effortlessly. Hal Fine got it to Nat Cole, whom Gabler had loved ever since the King Cole Trio days twenty years earlier. But Cole was a Capitol artist, not Decca. And so the great record producer's biggest hit as a songwriter was launched in a studio session he wasn't present at, and was in fact three thousand miles away from. Cole recorded "L-O-V-E" in the summer of 1964 with a Ralph Carmichael arrangement:
Capitol liked the results so much they got him to sing it in French, too, and in a multilingual version including a segment in its German composer's native tongue. They also decided to make it the title track of Cole's new album. A few weeks later, after filming Cat Balou, and midway through a full schedule of live shows, the singer was taken ill and the hotel doctor at the Fairmont in San Francisco suggested a chest x-ray. There was a large tumor on his left lung.
In the first three days of December, Nat Cole recorded ten tracks for the L-O-V-E album. He was in great voice, and bang on the money rhythmically, bouncing off his trumpeter Bobby Bryant. A few days later he checked in to St John's Hospital in Santa Monica. The LP was rushed out in January 1965. By then, Cole's doctors had decided to end the cobalt treatments. On January 25th, they removed his left lung. On February 15th, at the age of forty-five, Nat "King" Cole died of cancer.
Milt Gabler never got to produce a Nat Cole record, but he has the distinction of having written the last standard - after "Nature Boy", "Mona Lisa", "The Christmas Song", and on and on - to be introduced by the singer. He never got to produce a Sinatra record, either, but "L-O-V-E" was everywhere in the Sixties, and, when Frank and Dino got together on TV to do one of those goofy ten-minute medleys, Kaempfert & Gabler's song was often in the mix.
I'm not sure, though, how many people expected it to last. Yet in the last two decades it's got a little bigger year by year. It was a key part of Natalie Cole's Unforgettable tribute in 1991. Michael Bublé did it, and thereby made it part of every retro-crooner's repertoire. In 2007, the British soul singer Joss Stone sang it on a Chanel commercial with Keira Knightley:
My bet is it's here to stay, even though, unlike your typical standard, it doesn't invite different interpretations. The Stone version does its best, but it sounds like someone's tied lead weights round the song. And it would surely seem perverse to do it as a ballad or a bossa nova. But if you just want a surefire swinger, it does the trick. When you've sung it through once, what can you do with it? Sing it again. And again. And after three or four go-rounds you've got a long-enough record, and you bark to your conductor, as Buddy Greco does on his version, "Rock it on home!", and the guy does as instructed and wraps things up:
My dad had that single, with "Girl Talk" on the other side. It made a great impression on me - and I was thrilled, years later, to see Buddy live in New York, and hear him do that song, complete at the outro with an elongated "Rock it on home, professor!"
Indeed. More than "Danke Schoen" or "Strangers in the Night" or "Spanish Eyes", this is Bert Kaempfert's song for the ages:
Love
Is all that I can give to you
Love
Is more than just a game for two
Two
In love can make it
Take my heart and please don't break it
Love was made for me and you!
Rock it on home, professor!
~Many of Mark's most requested Song of the Week essays are collected together in his book, A Song For The Season, personally autographed copies of which are exclusively available from the Steyn store. And, if you're a member of The Mark Steyn Club, don't forget to enter your promotional code to enjoy special member pricing.
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