I am a proud cast member of the annual Spectacular Senior Follies show in Dallas. It’s lotsa music, lotsa dancin’, big ‘n’ shiny costumes—a real production! And everyone in it must be at least 55 years old. The first year I auditioned and got in, my mom sighed, “Lordy, my son is a senior!”
There are some monumental wistful and wise songs about growing old. The best of them all is “This Is All I Ask,” one of two Gordon Jenkins songs in my Best Songs Ever Vault. (The other is “Goodbye.”) It has been recorded by many, but the version recorded by Jimmy Durante in 1964 is the real tearjerker. Ol’ Schnozzola is workin’ it, wringing every bit of pathos out of it. Durante got it just right on another song about aging, the Knickerbocker Holiday standard “September Song,” on his 1963 album of the same name.
Gordon Jenkins’ one brush with the rock ‘n’ roll era was as the arranger/conductor for Harry Nilsson’s trip down memory lane, A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night, in 1973. Gordon wasn’t fond of the pop music of that time. According to Bruce Jenkins, his son and biographer, Gordon Jenkins said that Nilsson, whose singing was lauded by pop music critics and audiences, “didn’t have much of a voice, but he had good pitch and feeling, and he was willing to work.” Apparently, Jenkins did like young Nilsson’s version of “This Is All I Ask,” although not quite as much as the Frank Sinatra version he also conducted and arranged, for the Grammy-winning album September of My Years. A personal-favorite version of the song was by the cabaret singer Mabel Mercer, who also sang expressively of the foibles associated with the aging process in the whimsical numbers “Wait ‘til You’re 65” (a nice playlist follow-up to “When I’m 64”) and “I’m Glad That I’m Not Young Anymore.”
Gordon Jenkins had one other brush with the pop music world. A song called “The Conductor,” from Jenkins’ 1953 concept album Seven Dreams, was the obvious source for one of Johnny Cash’s biggest hits, “Folsom Prison Blues,” which was released on Sun in 1955. Because Jenkins’ album was pretty obscure, the blatant plagiarism didn’t get taken care of until fifteen years later, when Jenkins was awarded $75,000 in royalties. No way could The Man in Black get out of this one: Although the original was sung by a woman, with a jaunty blues-with-horns backing, most of the tune is identical, and in verse after verse, only a few words are different from “Folsom Prison Blues.” Quoted on the back of the Seven Dreams LP cover are these lyrics: “If I owned that lonesome whistle / If that railroad train was mine / I’ll bet I’d find a man a little farther down the line / Far from Crescent City is where I’d like to stay / And I’d let that lonesome whistle blow my blues away.” Can’t you hear Johnny Cash singing that? Good for Gordon Jenkins that he finally did.
Familiar lyrics, on the back of the Seven Dreams LP cover
Jenkins and Frank Sinatra (and songwriter Ervin Drake) were responsible for another fine sixties song about growing old, the unlikely pop hit “It Was a Very Good Year.” It also appeared on the September of My Years album. Sinatra was fifty years old at the time. (Fifty is September? I think that’s still July, or maybe even June.)
When, as a twelve-year-old boy, I heard the song on the radio, it was haunting. Even though the lyrics are more wistful than melancholy, the Jenkins string arrangement, which got him a Grammy, joined Sinatra’s stark delivery to set a very somber tone. That tone was pastiched to great effect in the 1971 TV special Diana! by a pre-teen Michael Jackson, who sashayed out, coat slung over his shoulder, fedora at a tilt, and sang, “When I was six years old / It was a very good year.” He also managed to throw in a “ring-a-ding-ding.”
Michael only made it to fifty. The September of his years. Kurt Weill, who wrote the music for Maxwell Anderson’s “September Song” lyric “But the days grow short, when we reach September,” died at the age of fifty.
“Arranged & Conducted by Randy Newman”
In the same category of inventorying life from the perspective of The Golden Years is the rich and strange late-career hit for Miss Peggy Lee, “Is That All There Is?” This song of disillusionment, even more than “It Was a Very Good Year,” gave me chills whenever I heard it on the radio in the late ‘60s. I was unfamiliar with Peggy Lee, except as the voice of the dog Darling, singing “He’s a Tramp” in Disney’s The Lady and the Tramp. When I saw her on a television variety show, looking so jaded in her platinum-blonde flip-up wig and her blue-tinted glasses as she sang “If that’s all there is, my friend, then let’s keep dancing,” I was mesmerized.
I hadn’t parsed its elements; I just responded to its cumulative effect. It was only years later that I discovered and appreciated the creative contributors who’d helped Miss Peggy Lee make such a powerful record. The songwriters were Leiber and Stoller, the class clowns who wrote so many Coasters comedy classics, like “Charlie Brown” and “Poison Ivy.” They took quite a diversion from their usual fare for this one. An as-yet-little-known Randy Newman, doing journeyman work for Warner Brothers, crafted the eerie string arrangement, a sound for which he would become lauded on albums like Sail Away and soundtracks like Ragtime. The song’s style owes more than a little to my man Kurt Weill’s German theater period, too. A happily-accidental confluence of disparate characters led to the strangest hit of 1969.
The record did lose its charm for me for a few years in the nineties. While processing books and records in the backroom of the Half Price Books main store, employees got to play music on an ancient stereo. A co-worker and I came across a 45 of the song and put it on. We were so enraptured by it that we played it again and again, until our fellow employees ganged up on us and banned “Is That All There Is?” from backroom play forever.
There are also numerous songs recorded by young rock rebels who sing of advanced age as if they’ll never get there. “I hope I die before I get old.” Does Roger Daltrey, now in his seventies, still sing “My Generation”? Does Mick Jagger still sing “What a drag it is getting old,” which he wrote as a twenty-something? Crooners and belters of earlier times, like Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, Jimmy Durante, seemed to age comfortably into their repertoires. From this remove, I hear Der Bingle’s ‘30s recordings and picture an old Bing, and the sound and the mental image fit. On the other hand, as we see our rebel rock heroes aging, they all seem to be growing out of a young person’s repertoire but desperately hanging onto it, because that’s what the boomers aging along with them want to hear. An exception is Bob Dylan, who has a history of reinventing himself. He did it again, appropriately to his age and quite successfully, at the beginning of the new millennium, with an ongoing series of craggy-voiced blues and ballads that seem completely separate from the popular music of these times, and also completely non-nostalgic for the sixties. Alas, Mick and Keith aren’t able to do that. They seem to be enjoying themselves but surely must be tired of all the rooster-struttin’ and riffin’.
It can be more difficult to continue musical adventures as we age, but it seems to me that, even if it may appear to be arrested development, it is therapeutic. As the founder of the Dallas Spectacular Senior Follies says, “We don’t stop singing because we get old; we get old because we stop singing.” (Or dancing or joking or laughing.) Wise words.
Quota Songs (good songs, but have reached their lifetime quota): “Cats in the Cradle” is a fine song with a nice idea, but I had to play it in a Harry Chapin revue night after night for a month. That did it.
Dream Jukebox Candidate: “Is That All There Is?” by Miss Peggy Lee, with help from Messrs. Leiber, Stoller, & Newman
Songs on a Theme 