The Secret Life of Crooner (A book I share with no one else, beside you, dear reader.)
CharlasYou and you alone.
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1gregtmills
You Call It Madness by Lenny Kaye
The title is borrowed from Russ Columbo signature ballad "You Call It Madness, I Call It Love".
And who is Russ Columbo. He was one of the crooners, the first balladeers to exploit the power of the microphone to put their softly phrased declarations of love directly in the listener's ear, as if the two, listener and crooner, are dancing cheek to cheek. Multiply that intimacy a few million times, with radio, with records, and you have the first intimate mass media experience.
High fidelity amplification meant each word in a song could shaped perfectly and sung at murmur. It wasn't historonic belting, it was croooooning, smooth, velvety and low. You might confuse it with a clarinet.
This book is a historical novelization of the rise of the crooner in the late '20s and early '30s, focusing on vivid characterizations of Bing Crosby, Rudy Vallee, and -- especially -- Russ Columbo. Columbo had the darkest, most sensual style of three, and he was murdered in his early thirties. (Cosby and Vallee transitioned fully to films)
The book is written by Lenny Kaye -- musicologist, guitarist for seminal punk poetress Patti Smith and compiler of the influential Nuggets compilation of forgotten regional garage bands of the sixties. His writing style is idiosyncratic, leaning heavily on onomonopaies and jazzbo hipster slang, but he really hits his stride describing the performances of these men, the closeness of their voices and the warm tones of the backing orchestras that I found it easy to inhabit the space he protrays. His prose begs to be read aloud, which I did from time to time.
It's a fasinating transport to a time that we've forgotten about.
The title is borrowed from Russ Columbo signature ballad "You Call It Madness, I Call It Love".
And who is Russ Columbo. He was one of the crooners, the first balladeers to exploit the power of the microphone to put their softly phrased declarations of love directly in the listener's ear, as if the two, listener and crooner, are dancing cheek to cheek. Multiply that intimacy a few million times, with radio, with records, and you have the first intimate mass media experience.
High fidelity amplification meant each word in a song could shaped perfectly and sung at murmur. It wasn't historonic belting, it was croooooning, smooth, velvety and low. You might confuse it with a clarinet.
This book is a historical novelization of the rise of the crooner in the late '20s and early '30s, focusing on vivid characterizations of Bing Crosby, Rudy Vallee, and -- especially -- Russ Columbo. Columbo had the darkest, most sensual style of three, and he was murdered in his early thirties. (Cosby and Vallee transitioned fully to films)
The book is written by Lenny Kaye -- musicologist, guitarist for seminal punk poetress Patti Smith and compiler of the influential Nuggets compilation of forgotten regional garage bands of the sixties. His writing style is idiosyncratic, leaning heavily on onomonopaies and jazzbo hipster slang, but he really hits his stride describing the performances of these men, the closeness of their voices and the warm tones of the backing orchestras that I found it easy to inhabit the space he protrays. His prose begs to be read aloud, which I did from time to time.
It's a fasinating transport to a time that we've forgotten about.
