Remember the wonderful moment when the house shakes & a glow appears under the front door & a record player has the sound of Johnny Mathis singing Chances Are filling the room as we have the first ET encounter in Close Encounters of the Third Kind? He was well represented in my parent’s record collection & I have loved his velvet voice for 5 decades… so why do I feel he is a gulity pleasure?
This clip is from Johnny's first TV appearence 1957 on Ed Sullivan.
In 1958, Johnny’s Greatest Hits was released and was the first ever Greatest Hits album in the music industry. It began the Greatest Hits tradition copied by every record company. Johnny'sGreatest Hits spent an unprecedented 490 consecutive weeks (nine and a half years) on the Billboard album charts, a feat earning him a place in the Guinness Book of World Records & not broken until the 1980s by Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon. He has had five of his albums on the Billboard charts simultaneously, an achievement equaled by only 2 other singers, Frank Sinatra & Barry Manilow. He has produced over 60 albums, released 200 singles & had 71 songs charted around the world. He is Barbra Streisand’s favorite singer & one of mine.
Do you know how as song can bring you back to a time, a place, or an era? Certain tunes bring me back to the point that am having a breath of the air, & hearing the sounds from a time when that song was having an impact on my life.
In the early 1970s, while going to college at Loyola Marymount University, I was able to live what I thought was a very quintessential "L.A. lifestyle". I drove a '59 T-Bird, a gift from my father. I lived on the beach in Playa Del Rey, with double sliding glass doors that opened onto white sand beach & the Pacific Ocean; on a clear day I could see Catalina Island. My travels & adventures were almost entirely "beach". I would go to cafes & bars in Venice Beach & Santa Monica. I had a professor that lived & had events at his house in Malibu. My red curly hair turned the color of straw & I became deeply tan. I went to school with & was friends with children of stars. I did cocaine & fooled around with a major sports figure in the bathroom of a very famous producer’s home in the Hollywood Hills. I saw a brand new show from London at The Roxy, with some actor named Tim Curry, called The Rocky Horror Show, which blew my mind. I saw Linda Ronstadt at The Troubadour with Joel Douglas (son of Kirk, brother of Michael). I was doing my L.A. thing & loving it.
I know I should feel a shutter of embarrassment for my love of Johnny Mathis. I think it started at an early age listening to my parent’s record collection. I find this tune, (& I have it by other artists including Art Garfunkel, Julio Iglesias & Nancy Sinatra), is a real little pop gem. I like that it strays from the –“I am so in love with you” format of many pop songs of the era. It has a real melancholy & a sense of the rhythm of driving in a car alone. The music is by Albert Hammond with lyrics by Hal David. The session players on Garfunkel’s version included Toni Tennille, Andrew Gold, Stephen Bishop, Paul Simon, & David Crosby. It was produced by Richard Perry, who I fantasized would produce my first album- Jockstraps & Valium.
This morning, on the MAX train, 99 Miles From L.A. was on my Ipod in shuffle mode. I listened to it 3 times & I had an incredible sense memory trip of being on route 101, heading back to the city & not being able to shake my feelings for some hot dancer guy that I was in a show with. I felt like 1975's Stephen... traveling that experience again, smelling the smells & feeling the feelings of driving towards L.A..
