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(Pictured: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, stoned.)

What was the last instrumental to become a big hit? Has there been one since “Harlem Shake” in 2013? “Harlem Shake” was a streaming success as opposed to a radio hit, as I recall. Kenny G made the Top 10 around the turn of the millennium, but again, his “Auld Lang Syne (The Millennium Mix)” was a streaming hit. You have probably forgotten entirely about the Adam Clayton/Larry Mullen version of the “Mission Impossible” theme in 1996. (I know I have.) You have to go back into the 80s before you find actual radio hits, Kenny G’s “Songbird” and the Miami Vice theme and “Axel F” from Beverly Hills Cop and so on.

Instrumentals are another geeky niche interest of mine, but I’m not alone. A couple of years back I wrote a post about instrumentals that I didn’t think anybody would care about, only to see it generate a bunch of interesting comments and a reader-compiled Spotify list. So maybe you’ll indulge me if I dig into a couple more instrumentals I found down a rabbit hole one recent afternoon.

The group Michaelangelo (their spelling, different from that of the Renaissance sculptor) would likely not have been much different from a lot of other mildly psychedelic folk-rock outfits at the turn of the 1970s were it not for founding member and principal songwriter Angel Peterson’s preferred instrument: the autoharp. In 1971, Michaelangelo made an album, One Voice Many, produced by Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind of Switched-on Bach fame. The whole One Voice Many album is up at YouTube, and it starts better than it finishes; the last couple of tracks fall into a hippy-dippy vibe that gets a little tiresome. Peterson (billed on the record as “Angel Autoharp”) sometimes takes a lead on her instrument that other bands might have given to a lead guitarist, which is a unique sound. She isn’t the strongest of singers, however; the best vocals on the album are sung by one of the two other male vocalists, Steve Bohn and Robert Gorman. I don’t know which one is which, but the better one sounds a little like Neil Diamond. He’s on the tightly rockin’ “Son (We’ve Kept the Room Just the Way You Left It)”.

For Michaelangelo, it was one album and done. One Voice Many didn’t go anywhere, allegedly due to friction between the producers and Columbia Records chief Clive Davis, who held back on promotion of it. As a result, within months of the album’s release, Michaelangelo disappeared from the pages of history. Unless you’re looking at the pages of Billboard or other music trade papers publishing record charts in the spring of 1971. The instrumental “300 Watt Music Box” rose to #18 on Billboard‘s Easy Listening chart in April.

At the same time Michaelangelo was leaving its very light mark on history, another instrumental left a somewhat deeper footprint. Spanish composer/conductor Waldo de los Rios went to #5 in Britain in the spring of 1971 with a record officially titled “Mozart Symphony No. 40 in G Minor K.550 First Movement.” It would eventually cross the ocean and make #67 on the American Hot 100, but it was not the first version to hit over here. A group called Sovereign Collection, which I am guessing was made up of UK studio musicians, shortened the cumbersome title to “Mozart 40” and scratched onto Billboard‘s Easy Listening chart in April, at about the same time Michaelangelo did. The Waldo de los Rios record didn’t peak in the States until July 1971.

You will probably recognize the main theme of “Mozart 40.” It’s been frequently heard on TV and in the movies, and it was one of a handful of classical pieces that were often used as mobile phone ringtones in the 90s and early 00s.

If you need more and bigger instrumentals, friend of the blog Tom Nawrocki ran down 50 of the biggest instrumental hits at Cuepoint back in 2015, so go read.

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(Pictured: Eddy Arnold with Johnny Cash, circa 1970.)

Certain opinions I hold are self-evidently right and should be recognized as such by all thinking persons. One of them is the following: inclusion in the Library of Congress National Recording Registry is an honor of greater cultural import than winning a Grammy or being inducted into any genre-specific hall of fame. The registry reflects the myriad roles not just music but all recorded sound plays in American life and culture. This year’s induction list spans a spectrum from Paul Whiteman’s “Whispering,” considered the first million seller, to Cheap Trick at Budokan, to the remarkable recording made on November 22, 1963, of the Kennedy assassination being announced to the audience during a live radio performance by the Boston Symphony.

All of that is a windy introduction to what I really want to write about today.

Eddy Arnold was a Bing Crosby-inspired radio singer from Tennessee. He began recording shortly after World War II and hit #1 on the country singles chart 20 times between 1946 and 1955. (In 1947 and 1948, “I’ll Hold You in My Heart” was #1 for 21 non-consecutive weeks; “Bouquet of Roses” did 19 weeks at the top.) You know some of his songs, if not his recordings of them: “You Don’t Know Me” (which he co-wrote), “I Really Don’t Want to Know,” and maybe “Tennessee Stud” or “Trouble in Mind.” But Eddy Arnold didn’t become a pop star until the middle of the 1960s, and the record that did it was added to the National Recording Registry in March of this year.

Arnold was not the first to record “Make the World Go Away.” Ray Price and Timi Yuro had hit with country and pop versions in 1963. But Arnold’s version was a dual-format smash practically from the beginning. It hit the Billboard country chart at the end of September 1965. In October, KNUZ in Houston became one of the first Top 40 stations to add it. By the end of October, WJET in Erie, Pennsylvania, had it in the Top 10, on a chart topped by the Rolling Stones’ “Get Off My Cloud,” right between the Byrds’ “Turn Turn Turn” and “Boys” by the Beatles. At the end of November, WCPO in Cincinnati ranked it #1, in a Top 10 that also included “Turn Turn Turn,” “Rescue Me” by Fontella Bass, and “I Got You (I Feel Good)” by James Brown. It would hit #1 in Hartford, Connecticut, Allentown, Pennsylvania, and Waupaca, Wisconsin, before the end of the year. It made #6 on the Hot 100 and #1 on Billboard‘s Easy Listening chart. It spent three weeks atop Billboard‘s country chart in December 1965.

When you listen to “Make the World Go Away” today, it doesn’t seem very country. Maybe Floyd Cramer’s tinkling piano, but that’s about it. It is as tasteful a pop song as you can imagine, the epitome of the so-called Nashville Sound of the 60s—whispering backup singers, strings instead of steel guitars, sophisticated smoothness replacing honky tonk grit. Arnold would repeat the formula over the next year on “I Want to Go With You,” (which sounds almost exactly like “Make the World Go Away,” both written by the great Hank Cochran) “The Tip of My Fingers,” “The Last Word in Lonesome Is Me,” and “Somebody Like Me,” all of which did significant easy-listening business in addition to crushing the country chart.

(“Somebody Like Me” is another example of something I’ve written about here several times before—a song I knew before I knew that I knew it. In the fall of 1966, first-grade me heard it a few times on our hometown radio station on the way to school, and while it didn’t register at the time, it took up residence in my head so that when I heard it again decades later, I remembered where—and who—I had been.)

Eddy Arnold found hit singles harder to come by after 1968, but he remained a strong presence on TV, in live performances, and on the country album charts. He continued to record steadily into the early 80s, but released only two albums in the last 25 years of his life, in 1991 and 2005. He died in 2008, one week short of his 90th birthday. Only George Jones charted more singles on Billboard‘s country chart.

Music history is distorted by the way we tell it, by necessity. Books, compilation albums, and radio formats don’t have the scope to cover it all, as it actually happened. Awards shows and halls of fame are especially ill-suited to telling the full story of everything that mattered. The National Recording Registry gets the closest. What else has room for Allan Sherman, Mister Rogers, Dr. Dre, and Eddy Arnold?

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(Pictured: Peggy Lee. That’s showbiz glamour right there.)

The other day Peggy Lee’s “Fever” came up on shuffle while I was avoiding work I should have been doing, and as I listened to it, I thought to myself, “Hot damn, this is one fabulous record.” That’s something I have believed for years, but on that day, the imperative of avoiding work led me down a Peggy Lee rabbit hole.

Little Willie John recorded “Fever” in 1956. A number of singers recorded it thereafter, so it was a reasonably well-known song by 1957. One night, Lee’s bass player, Max Bennett, was playing in a club when a member of the audience requested it—and ended up teaching them the two chords the band needed to play it. Bennett liked it well enough, but he didn’t know the Little Willie John version, and the only recording he could find was by pop crooner Ray Peterson. Neither he nor Lee cared much for that version, but she thought that it could be reshaped into a torch song for her nightclub act. Bennett said it was Lee’s idea to strip it down to bass and drums.

Lee opened at the Copacabana in February 1958, a major engagement after four or five years away from the New York nightclub scene, and “Fever” was part of her act. She had no plans to record it, but audience response indicated that she was on to something. She sang it on TV in April, and when a disc jockey in Canada played the TV recording on his show, people loved it. When Lee went to Los Angeles for a recording session in May, “Fever” was one of the tracks laid down. It became a hit, reaching #8 in Billboard and #6 in Cash Box late in August of 1958. It even made Billboard‘s R&B charts. The song also got two Grammy nominations for the inaugural awards, including Record of the Year.

It would be 11 years before Lee returned to the charts in a major way, with a performance even more unusual than “Fever.”

In 1968, Jerry Leiber, inspired by a German short story, wrote a set of lyrics titled “Is That All There Is?” He and Mike Stoller worked them into a song for a British TV special. Its first version on wax was by Leslie Uggams, but Lieber and Stoller were shooting higher. “We wanted a record of the song interpreted by someone who understood this genre,” they wrote. At one point, they thought the song’s German roots might make it a good fit for Marlene Dietrich, but she declined. They sent it to Barbra Streisand’s manager, but he didn’t even bother to forward it to Barbra (who would eventually want to know why it hadn’t been offered to her). Finally, they thought, “How about Peggy Lee?”

Leiber and Stoller gave Lee a demo after she performed at the Copa one night in 1968; she would later say that the song read like the story of her life. She cut it in January 1969. Leiber said a single take of the song, take 36, was one of the two greatest performances he’d ever heard in a studio—but the engineer had failed to start the tape. (Take 37 became the master, although bits were spliced in from earlier takes.)

Capitol Records didn’t want to release “Is That All There Is?” as a single, thinking it was very much out-of-style for 1969. But the label had several artists it wanted to place on The Joey Bishop Show (a late-night competitor with Johnny Carson and Merv Griffin). Bishop agreed to take them on if he could get Peggy Lee too; she agreed to go if Capitol would release “Is That All There Is?” Thanks to exposure on the Bishop show, the song became a hit, charting in September and rising to #11 on the Hot 100 50 years ago this week. (In the Top 10 that week: “Suspicious Minds,” “Come Together,” “I Can’t Get Next to You,” “Sugar Sugar,” “Hot Fun in the Summertime,” “And When I Die,” and “Something.”)

Hitting when it did makes “Is That All There Is?” an oddly appropriate epitaph for the 1960s. Lee did not read it as fatalistically as it is possible to do—as existentially bleak as Leiber intended. After each disappointing experience, she resolves to “just keep dancing.” Maybe there will be more . . . next time. As so we went on into the 1970s, thinking exactly the same thing.

Peggy Lee died in 2002 at the age of 81. There’s a fabulous website devoted to her career, and I strongly recommend to you its essays on “Fever” and “Is That All There Is?” 

Continue reading “All There Is” →