{"id":1420,"date":"2010-10-30T13:14:35","date_gmt":"2010-10-30T17:14:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=1420"},"modified":"2015-09-25T19:45:41","modified_gmt":"2015-09-25T23:45:41","slug":"do-it-again-and-lazy-afternoon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=1420","title":{"rendered":"Previews of Love"},"content":{"rendered":"

Theme Songs Page<\/a>\u00a0| Previous Theme Song<\/a>\u00a0| Next Theme Song<\/a><\/p>\n

Previews of Love<\/h2>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Do It Again, sung by Judy Garland 1961, encountered 1962?<\/h3>\n

Lazy Afternoon, sung by Marlene Dietrich 1954, encountered 1962?<\/h3>\n

Strange how potent cheap music is, Noel Coward advises, in an understatement.[1]\u00a0 Such power isn\u2019t merely over our emotions; it also informs our thinking.\u00a0 That\u2019s particularly true if we happen to be just entering adolescence, before we\u2019ve had any meaningful seasoning of reality to counter or at least temper what the cheap songs tell us.\u00a0 I think Plato wanted to keep the poets away from youth for just that reason: the notion that they would mislead the kids.[2]\u00a0 Poets misleading kids I don\u2019t know about; songwriters and singers, definitely.\u00a0 But being misled that way is part of any fully-lived adolescence, if you ask me.\u00a0 With apologies to Plato, I\u2019d rather be deceived and misled in my impressionable youth than do without my cheap music.\u00a0 In fact, being deceived and misled was an enjoyable part of growing up also.\u00a0 And I\u2019ll bet you found it that way too, gentle reader.<\/p>\n

And so we come to a couple of numbers that misled me a bit as I was beginning to think more seriously about girls.\u00a0 I was then about thirteen.\u00a0 I had all these, uh, feelings, and was trying to match up some kind of plausible scenario to them.\u00a0 Enter two popular chanteuses to serve up suggestions: Marlene Dietrich and Judy Garland.<\/p>\n

Bit of background: Dietrich had been an immense favorite during the War, but I think by the early 60s she was becoming a bit vieu jeux<\/em> with the public at large, though with people of my parents\u2019 generation, then nearing their fifties, there was great loyalty.\u00a0 I sensed that in buying all Dietrich\u2019s records, my parents were clinging to an increasingly old-fashioned taste, which meant that I felt a little bit sophisticated sharing it.\u00a0 (I was just a year or so too young to be tempted to be embarrassed because I liked something out of date.)<\/p>\n

Garland was having a different career trajectory, going up and down all the time, but mainly up.\u00a0 And she had just at this point enjoyed the biggest night of her career, her big concert at Carnegie Hall in 1961.\u00a0 Everyone loved the double album that came out of that.\u00a0 My frenemy Paul, fiercely competitive with everyone, had the album before anyone, and knew all the songs by heart.\u00a0 I mention this because Paul was the type to have a sense what was acceptable and what was out among us young teens, and was not<\/em> the type to have publicly indulged in a taste that was unacceptable.[3]\u00a0 The album charted for 73 weeks on the Billboard chart<\/a>, including 13 at No. 1.\u00a0 So responding to that album was simply a different matter from responding to Dietrich\u2019s \u2013 even though neither of these ladies was prime teen-listener material (at their respective times of recording the songs I want to talk about Garland was 38, Dietrich 53 \u2013 and Dietrich was in her sixties at this point).<\/p>\n

At this point, my mom and stepdad and I would spend a lot of time socializing with other faculty families.\u00a0 For whatever reason, I tended to be the oldest kid a lot of the time, and so I tended also to be the one up latest after my younger peers had been put to bed, which meant that I spent the occasional evening in houses with grownups doing their<\/em> thing (drinking, smoking, arguing, laughing) while I was sometimes the only one doing my<\/em> thing.\u00a0 And the problem sometimes was that I wasn\u2019t exactly clear what my<\/em> thing was.<\/p>\n

But somehow my thing, especially at late hours when I was the only youngster awake in the house, came to include thinking about girls.\u00a0 Not so much any specific one, although that would start happening soon enough.\u00a0 But right at this point, I was just trying to imagine what it would be like to \u2013 well, there isn\u2019t a good word for it.\u00a0 Sex (of which I\u2019d understood the mechanics already for a few years) was definitely not what I was trying to imagine.\u00a0 As a good Catholic schoolboy, I knew that that kind of thing wasn\u2019t on the program until I got married.\u00a0 I guess the best way to say it was I was trying to visualize romance.<\/p>\n

Judy gave me one idea.<\/p>\n

You really shouldn\u2019t have done it,<\/address>\n
You hadn\u2019t any right.<\/address>\n
I really shouldn\u2019t have let you kiss me.<\/address>\n
And although it was wrong,<\/address>\n
\u00a0I never was strong.<\/address>\n
\u00a0So as long as you\u2019ve begun it,<\/address>\n
\u00a0And you know you shouldn\u2019t have done it,<\/address>\n
\u00a0Oh, do it again.<\/address>\n
\u00a0I may cry no, no, no, no, no, but do it again.<\/address>\n
My lips just ache to have you take<\/address>\n
\u00a0The kiss that\u2019s waiting for you.<\/address>\n
You know if you do you won\u2019t regret it.<\/address>\n
Come and get it.<\/address>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The way Judy sang Do It Again<\/em> in that Carnegie Hall presentation<\/a> told me a lot, maybe not all of it right, about female longing.\u00a0 But it made conceivable, perhaps for the first time, that women might like kissing, even if they didn\u2019t admit it right off the bat.\u00a0 Overcoming their reluctance sounded like fun, so long as the reluctance was only \u2013 what? \u2013 not feigned, but provisional and temporary, like Judy\u2019s.\u00a0 I never visualized forcing a kiss from someone who really didn\u2019t want to.\u00a0 But that was the problem in a nutshell: how could you tell before you tried?\u00a0 And there was a secondary problem: how were you going to deal with the embarrassment if you discovered they really didn\u2019t<\/em> want to?\u00a0 (A dilemma that I believe continues to haunt nice young men through the generations.)<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just the words, of course.\u00a0 Judy makes her voice soft and naive and virginal.\u00a0 Had Ethel Merman sung the same thing, it might have rung a bell or two with adult listeners, but not with a 13-year old.\u00a0 Thank goodness, too, I had the old LP, and not the CD reissue, which includes about 1:20 of monologue after the applause dies down, all about how Judy might have a cold, having perhaps \u201cpicked up an old fungi in Atlanta.\u201d\u00a0 And all of the sweetness is gone from her now-New York-accented voice, a cultivated but recognizably Gothamite accent like my father\u2019s and my aunt\u2019s \u2013 way too grownup.\u00a0 What my young adult son now calls a buzzkill.\u00a0 My early adolescent fantasies might not have been the same.<\/p>\n

The funny thing about that lyric is that the key phrase, \u201cdo it again,\u201d reportedly originally came into the compositional process when lyricist Buddy DeSylva was urging on composer George Gershwin to repeat a musical phrase<\/a>.\u00a0 I guess it\u2019s part of the genius of songwriting to transmute simple directions into expressions of longing.<\/p>\n

Well, in my fantasies, somehow I was going to get over that obstacle of finding the girl who actually wanted to kiss back \u2013 how, I wasn\u2019t certain, but it was going to happen.\u00a0 Then what?\u00a0 That was where Marlene came in with Lazy Afternoon<\/a><\/em>.\u00a0 She presented me a plausible fantasy about what the blissful communion of two lovers might be all about.\u00a0 I should hasten to add that it was about the only completely graspable thing on the album where I encountered it: Marlene Dietrich at the Caf\u00e9 de Paris<\/em> (1954).<\/p>\n

This vinyl platter was a mass of confusing semiotics (a word I learned much later in life, of course) that it was going to take me years to work my way through, but I sensed I didn\u2019t get the half of what was going on.[4]\u00a0 One of the few songs I thought I really understood was Lazy Afternoon<\/em>.\u00a0 It suggested what I and the girl might do once we discovered we really, really liked each other.\u00a0 We could walk out to the countryside together and sit very, very still, and let nothing happen, and it would be incredibly intimate:<\/p>\n

It’s a lazy afternoon<\/address>\n
And the beetle bugs are zooming<\/address>\n
And the tulip trees are blooming<\/address>\n
And there’s not another human in view but us two<\/address>\n
It’s a lazy afternoon<\/address>\n
And the farmer leaves his reaping<\/address>\n
In the meadow cows are sleeping<\/address>\n
And the speckled trouts stop leaping upstream as we dream<\/address>\n
A far pink cloud hangs over a hill<\/address>\n
Unfolding like a rose<\/address>\n
If you hold my hand and sit real still<\/address>\n
You can hear the grass as it grows<\/address>\n
It’s a hazy afternoon<\/address>\n
And I know a place that’s quiet except for daisies running riot<\/address>\n
And there’s no one passing by it to see<\/address>\n
Come spend this lazy afternoon with me<\/address>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The orchestration is simple, alive with shimmering strings that suggest a sultry afternoon.\u00a0 It\u2019s all very, for Dietrich, unambiguous.\u00a0 In recent years, the song has been recorded by everybody (AllMusic.com lists 500 recordings<\/a> including Barbra Streisand, Vanessa Williams, and Wynton Marsalis), but Dietrich\u2019s was almost certainly the first,[5] and there still weren\u2019t many by 1962.\u00a0 So this came at me as a breathtaking first.<\/p>\n

It provided me with a plausible picture in my work-in-progress fantasies of what might happen after the Do It Again<\/em> kisses.\u00a0 In Ann Arbor of 1962, you could still walk from the center of town to real farms (much harder now).\u00a0 And with my parents, I would sometimes be driven to places that were just a little further out that were so unpopulated you could truly be alone.\u00a0 I\u2019d slip away from the grownups, and go for a long walk in deserted fields and by deserted ponds, and think about what bliss it would be to have someone who loved me to share it all with.\u00a0 That sounded pretty good to me.<\/p>\n

Strange how potent cheap music is!<\/p>\n

\n

[1].\u00a0 Private Lives, Act I (1930).<\/p>\n

[2].\u00a0 Glance around Book II of The Republic<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

[3].\u00a0 De mortuis nil nisi bonum<\/em>.\u00a0 Paul\u2019s life was full of vagaries, and he died of a very bad disease.\u00a0 It\u2019s startling how little animus one can feel about a contemporary in light of such facts.\u00a0 I\u2019m getting too old, regrettably, to hold good grudges any more.<\/p>\n

[4].\u00a0 We start with the cover, Marlene with her face probably plastic-surgerized and definitely airbrushed to such a ridiculous extent one stares at its featureless smoothness in wonder. She is swathed in white furs against a backdrop of Tiffany blue, coming across like some vision of young perfection, when everyone (even I) understood she was getting on for ancient.\u00a0 On the back she is pictured in a diaphanous gown that looks as if she\u2019s naked, yet one knows she isn\u2019t.\u00a0 And again, no woman her age (and few of any age) has such a perfect-seeming body.<\/p>\n

She\u2019s introduced in couplets by Noel Coward (warning: not on the .mp3 download issued in 2010) in a paean to her sex appeal. A sample: \u201cFor female allure, whether pure or impure, has seldom reported a failure.\u201d\u00a0 Well, probably it reported a failure with nearly-out gay Noel Coward.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And what about the fact that Dietrich was fairly lesbian herself?\u00a0 Or the liner note by Jean Cocteau, also gay?\u00a0 A sample from him<\/em>: \u201cMarlene Dietrich!… Your name, at first the sound of a caress, becomes the crack of a whip.\u00a0 When you wear feathers, and furs, and plumes, you wear them as the birds and animals wear them, as though they belong to your body.\u201d\u00a0 Coupling that saluation with the white ermine adorning Marlene on the cover, would I be the only one hearing echoes of Sacher-Masoch?\u00a0 No, actually not: in another liner note Kenneth Tynan, a known S\/M fan, made it explicit, calling Marlene\u2019s persona as she presented this performance \u201cthe Venus in furs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Moving on to the music, there\u2019s the odd blending of German accent with a Western song from Destry Rides Again<\/em>, the sort of playing with men and kicking them to the curb stuff that she patented from The Blue Angel<\/em>, and just layers of irony and self-conscious showmanship covering everything she did.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s all good, of course.\u00a0 Nothing at all wrong with polymorphous themes running just under the surface.\u00a0 Just confusing as hell to a 13-year old.<\/p>\n

[5].\u00a0 The performance from which the recording was taken occurred June 21, 1954<\/a>.\u00a0 The song apparently came from the musical, The Golden Apple<\/em><\/a>, lyrics by John Latouche, music by Jerome Moross, which had premiered in March of the same year to great acclaim but what turned out to be a limited run<\/a>.\u00a0 Dietrich must have snapped it up as soon as she or her people heard it.\u00a0 When she announces some of the songs, there\u2019s a big cheer from the audience that tells us the song was familiar to them.\u00a0 With this one, there\u2019s no such reaction.\u00a0 While the musical was still playing on Broadway on the recording date, the Caf\u00e9 de Paris, where Dietrich was singing, was in London.\u00a0 That might account for some of the unfamiliarity, but surely the recency of the song had more to do with it.<\/p>\n

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn<\/p>\n

Theme Songs Page<\/a>\u00a0| Previous Theme Song<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0\u00a0Next Theme Song<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Figuring out girls with a little help from Judy Garland and Marlene Dietrich …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[968],"tags":[1564,1559,1572,1558,1557,1575,1549,1561,874,1573,1556,1570,1579,1578,1550,1563,1571,1547,875,1548,1562,1560,1551,1552,1553,1567,1574,1555,1554,1576,1577,1568,1569,1565,1566],"class_list":["post-1420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-theme-songs","tag-barbra-steisand","tag-billboard-chart","tag-buddy-desylva","tag-cafe-de-paris","tag-carnegie-hall","tag-destry-rides-again","tag-do-it-again","tag-ethel-merman","tag-gays","tag-george-gershwin","tag-impressionable-youth","tag-jean-cocteau","tag-jerome-moross","tag-john-latouche","tag-judy-garland","tag-judy-garland-at-carnegie-hall","tag-kenneth-tynan","tag-lazy-afternoon","tag-lesbians","tag-marlene-dietrich","tag-marlene-dietrich-at-the-cafe-de-paris","tag-new-york-accent","tag-noel-coward","tag-plato","tag-poets","tag-private-lives","tag-sacher-masoch","tag-singers","tag-songwriters","tag-the-blue-angel","tag-the-golden-apple","tag-the-republic","tag-tiffany-blue","tag-vanessa-williams","tag-wynton-marsalis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1420"}],"version-history":[{"count":44,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1420\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5462,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1420\/revisions\/5462"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}