With HBO’s Liberace biopic Beyond the Candelabra imminently due, there is certain to be a resurgance in all things “Lee.”  Though it remains to be seen if Steven Soderbergh’s film will feature Michael Douglas in the kitchen, it is a matter of historical fact that Liberace enjoyed spending time there.  ”When I’m home I like to dine elegantly, whether it’s by myself or with company,” said Lee in 1978.

A lavishly illustrated program from a 1970s concert and a pulpy paperback from the 1950s that was designed to throw people off the scent of his sexuality, will make a wonderful gift for the lucky Liberace fan in my life!  Here I’ve photographed them in a sumptuous environment for Stargayzing readers!

According to my sources, Liberace had a predilection for serving a dish in the same pot he cooked it which sometimes caused problems.  ”Every time I entertain, it costs me a pot.  Everybody loves my stew, but they’re not content with the recipe.  They always say, ‘Where did you ever find that pot?’  So I wind up giving it away.”

No doubt Liberace lost many pots over his meatball soup!  He notes that “this soup is a delicious, hearty, meal-in-one dish.  Complete menu with a bowl of crisp salad or cole slaw.

Liberace’s Meatball Soup

Serves 8

1 1/2 lbs. ground beef

1/8 lb. lean ground pork

3 tbsps. parsley, chopped

4 tbsps. flour

2 eggs

1 tsp. salt

1/4 tsp. pepper

2 quarts salted water

1 bay leaf

1/4 tsp ground allspice

1/2 cup light cream

boiling potatoes

2 slices bread, soaked in milk and squeezed dry

1.  Mix together beef, pork, parsley, half the onion, 1 tbsp. flour, eggs, bread, salt and pepper.

2.  Shape into spheres the size of golf balls.

3.  Simmer in salted water with bay leaf, allspice, and remaining onion for 30 minutes.  Thicken broth with additional flour.

4.  Remove 1/2 cup broth and mix with remaining flour until smooth.

5.  Return to pan and blend well.

6.  Simmer for several minutes.

7.  Remove from heat and stir in cream.  Serve over boiled potatoes.

5.  Liza Minnelli and Luciano Pavarotti, New York, New York

While I could easily have created an entire blog post solely devoted to the most outrageous Liza Minnelli cover songs of all-time (her version of John Lennon’s Imagine, anyone?), it is actually Luciano who is the fish out of water here.  Liza was still in her fine mid-1990s post-Betty Ford fighting form, but Luciano is just a quivering lump of bearded vibrato.  The Italian tenor has a terrible time navigating his way around the Kander and Ebb standard, reminding us repeatedly why opera singers singing pop songs can lead to such memorably awful results.  Luciano’s performance here is the musical equivalent of Aretha Franklin wheezing her way through Nessun Dorma  from Puccini’s Turandot at the Grammys a few years later, but in reverse, (ironically filling in for an ailing Pavarotti).  You’ll need Aretha Franklin to fill in for you after you see this!

Here are a few of my favorite moments to look out for:  Pavarotti’s awkward attempt to swing gently; his bizarre pronunciation of words like “stray,” and “I’ll make a brand new star of it,” when he means to say “I’ll make a brand new start of it,” (and why couldn’t someone as extensively multi-lingual as Pavarotti say the letter “t”?;  Liza’s jazzy little “you keep sayin’ it…” background part at 1:15; and, of course, her fantastic, joyful exhortation “go Luciano, GO!” when the opera singer does indeed go for his big money note on  ”my leetle town bluss”.  Though Luciano was lucky enough to have Liza pulling him through the song, in the end, even Liza moving at full throttle couldn’t tug this whale into New York, New York harbor!

By the way, ignore the fact that the entire clip repeats itself (unless you want to watch it again immediately which, to be honest, I couldn’t blame you for).  You see, this was by far the best quality version I could find and the ability to watch it consecutively without the bother of touching the mouse is actually an advantage.

Make sure you hear all the songs on the Mix Tape:

Day #1:  Rita Coolidge’s Version of Squeeze’s Tempted

Day #2:  Shirley Bassey’s Version of the Police’s Every Breath You Take

Day #3:  Steve Lawrence  & Eydie Gormé’s Version of Soundgarden’s Black Hole Sun

Day #4:  Susan Anton’s Version of Bob Dylan’s Forever Young

4.  Susan Anton, Forever Young

The willowy Susan Anton shot to fame in the late 1970s in a commercial for Muriel cigars and parlayed that exposure into a multimedia career that included TV, film, and recording work (not to mention a much publicized relationship with the much older and much shorter Dudley Moore).  Anton is probably technically the best of the group of late-1970s TV starlets who sought recording careers, an elite sororiety which also included Lynda Carter, Cheryl Ladd, and Barbie Benton, but that doesn’t mean her instincts are unassailable, as this frantic cover of Dylan’s Forever Young quickly reveals.  In my hyperactive fantasy life, I like to think that much of Anton’s musical moxie comes from years spent singing each night in her living room with paramour Dudley Moore, an exceptional pianist, as he adoringly accompanied his lovely lark whilst telling her she was going to be the next Linda Ronstadt in slurred but convincing Arthur-esque monologues.

It is a true pleasure to spend a few minutes with Anton’s fevered Forever Young.  While many singers are drawn to the songs potential as a hymn-like Great Acting Moment, in Susan’s well-manicured hands Dylan’s prayer becomes less a tribute to the world’s children than to her own Vegas-tinged vibrato, which I actually consider to be a vast improvement.  Her abject lack of soul leaves room to think about other things, less urgent things, like her amazing flowing blonde hair, which I hope you will find as relaxing as I do.  Believe me, I’m no Dylan fan—fine, he’s a poet—but I’d rather listen to Susan’s belting blast over Dylan’s death rattle any day of the week.  So sue me.  Have I mentioned this is is a live performance?

Make sure you’ve heard all the songs on the Mix Tape!

#1: Rita Coolidge’s Version of Squeeze’s Tempted
#2: Shirley Bassey’s Version of The Police’s Every Breath You Take
#3: Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé’s Version of Soundgarden’s Black Hole Sun

3. Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé, Black Hole Sun

In 1997 Hollywood Records released Loungeapalooza, an uneven attempt to breath some ironic energy into lounge music (or maybe it was to make fun of it). The real irony turned out to be that Steve and Eydie’s completely sincere reading of Soundgarden’s classic Black Hole Sun was good on its own terms. Hearing the pair wrap their silky voices around some of Chris Cornell’s stranger lyrics (“call my name through the cream/and I’ll hear you scream again”), adds immeasurably to the fun. The fact that they approached this song with such respect suggests to me an unimpeachable sense of their own identity.

Though Steve and Eydie are sometime dismissed as too-Vegas or as Easy Listening old timers if they’re recalled at all, I admire their class and professionalism. After all, very few artists cleave to their own truth no matter what, and Steve and Eydie have never tried to be anything other than what they are. The fact that they never tried to be hip made them hip. In that sense they were the Arlo Guthrie of pop; cool because they never pandered to trends or deviated from their own sense of what was authentic for them. To appreciate how hard this may be to accomplish in the face of the fear-based thinking that generally accompanies diminishing record sales, one need think no further than Madonna, who has spent the last 15 years in a misguided attempt to chase radio trends with increasingly forgettable (and frequently insane) results. Unfortunately for Madonna, none of her crappy records are crappy enough to be compelling. In fact, records like Hard Candy, American Life, and MDNA, are the one thing that is worse than bad if you’re Madonna: they’re boring.

You will also enjoy:

#1: Rita Coolidge’s Version of Squeeze’s Tempted
#2: Shirley Bassey’s Version of The Police’s Every Breath You Take

20 of Lucy’s TV Guide covers

According to Wiki, Lucille Ball was on the cover of TV Guide 39 times, more than any other person, including its very first issue in 1953. Additionally, TV guide voted Ball the greatest TV star of all-time and I Love Lucy the second greatest TV show ever (after Seinfeld).

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2.  Shirley Bassey, Every Breath You Take

Naturally I’m a huge Bassey fan and understand that being gloriously dramatic is as vital a quality of the Bassey gestalt as beaded dresses and money notes, but there is fine line between awesome over-the-top Bassey and bad/good over-the-top Bassey.  If this seems a bit confusing, try reading Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp (you’ll be back reading Stargayzing before you finish the introduction).

Shirley comes from the great generation of singer/interpreters whose meat and potatoes was singing great songs written by other people (in music publishing parlance, this was known as covering an “outside song”).  Every Breath You Take is definitely a great song written by a brilliant songwriter, but betwixt the idea and intended result lies Dame Shirley’s cover of Sting’s epic ballad about obsession and surveillance.  Shirley’s version really brings out the true creepiness of Sting’s song.

This is bad/good Bassey to the nth degree and like sonic wolfbane, I used Bassey’s misguided collection of covert tunes to keep the spectre of Grunge music from darkening my door in the suddenly-so-long-ago 1990s.  I ask you: could Kurt Cobain’s adenoidal, disaffected wimper really hold up against Shirley’s Welsh windstorm?

You will also enjoy:

Stargayzing Mix Tape: The Most Unbelievable Cover Songs of All-Time! #1: Rita Coolidge’s Version of Squeeze’s Tempted

A Stargayzing Guide to 13 of the Most Over-the-Top Vocal Performances of the 1960s, Volume 1

We all have skeletons in our closet, but mine is belting Stephen Schwartz’ West End Avenue in a cellar club on Bleecker Street.

I suppose desire for fame and fortune, to “make it big,” is as powerful and pervasive an idea as any to ever have woven its way through our personal stories and popular culture.  From Golden Boy to The Sweet Smell of Success to Catch Me if You Can, is there any narrative more ubiquitous and quintessentially American than the canard of building self-esteem through achievement?  My own journey has led me from child actor to singer/songwriter, record producer, brand manager, store manager, artist manager, songwriter’s’ manager, marketing strategist, A&R man, and now writer and blogger.  I’m reminded here of the great Lily Tomlin line, “I always wanted to be somebody, but now I realize I should have been more specific.”

To wit: a recent afternoon of shopping along the newishly-tony Bleecker Street corridor brought back the memory of a long-ago evening that occupies a particularly exalted level of shame in an overcrowded section of my brain: the Self-indulgent Experiment Department.  As I looked for t-shirts in the lower level of the Juicy Couture on the corner of Bleecker and Charles streets, I was suddenly possessed by the sound of my own voice singing Paul McCartney’s Maybe I’m Amazed, and not in a good way.  As my eyes darted about the space looking for a clue to the melodious musical fragment, the answer announced itself with a gusty symphonic blast: Juicy Couture is the former site of the Trocadero Club, the very spot where I simultaneously began and ended my career as cabaret singer on Halloween Night 1987 with a show called “A Night of Serious Music.” Indeed, the set list included Maybe I’m Amazed, which was, at the time, warmly cited by many in attendance that night as a highlight; at least my mother and cousin Roni.

You see in my mid-twenties I was studying voice and writing songs, eager to break through with one or the other.  I was okay at both but not really excellent at either, and at that time, before the scourge of auto tune, being a great singer was actually a prerequisite to being a professional singer.  What I lacked in raw ability I compensated for in drive and the willingness to take risks, a not-uncommon trait in the very young or the very delusional.  In my case it was a bit of both, which explains how I ended up fronting a clumsy trio in a cellar club on Bleecker that autumn night.

The novitiate or out-of-towner who has never seen a vanity cabaret show might good-naturedly ask, “well, how bad could your club act really have been, David?”  The experienced among us who has sat through that musical journey inside a narcissist’s hall of mirrors will tell you: very bad indeed!  In my case, it was so bad that my piano player’s primary instrument was the saxophone; so bad I’d had my eyebrows dyed the day before the show so I would seem more expressive but I wound up looking like Groucho Marx as I tore through an insipid set list; so bad I wore a floor-length navy blue duster that made me look like Bad Animals-era Ann Wilson of Heart; so bad that the audience was only made up of friends and family and half of them couldn’t get across Sixth Avenue because of the Halloween parade and we were forced to start over 45 minutes late! (more…)

One of the regrettable consequences of the end of the Easy Listening/Middle-of-the-Road (M.O.R.) era and the reign of singers who rarely, if ever, wrote their own material, is the complete absence of incredible cover songs like the ones I have aggregated herewith.  It was only in the period where the interpreter was king, and the bizarre period just afterward as these singers struggled to hang on to their chart position in the face of the tsunami of rock ‘n roll and FM radio, that you might even chance to encounter an otherwise perfectly agreeable singer like Rita Coolidge making the unfortunate decision to cover Tempted by Squeeze.  While it is quite likely that you still hear the original Squeeze single from time to time (and it still sounds amazing, by the way), I am willing to venture that you won’t often hear lovely Rita’s misguided version. And isn’t that why you read Stargayzing, anyway?

And Miss Coolidge wasn’t alone—in the upcoming days and months we’ll hear from all your pre-LITE FM favorites:  Andy Williams, Barry Manilow, Cher, Robert Goulet, Shirley Bassey, Susan Anton, Sinead O’Connor!  Wait!  Did he just say Sinead O’Connor?  Prepare to be amazed!  Viva la schmaltz!

1. Rita Coolidge, Tempted (1983)

In addition to the cachet of being married to the (legendary and very sexy) Kris Kristofferson for most of the 1970s, Coolidge enjoyed several big hit song including top-10 versions of Jackie Wilson’s (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher and Boz Scaggs’ We’re All Alone toward the end of the decade.  In addition, few people remember that she handled vocal duties on All Time High, the theme from 1983′s Octopussy, and arguably the most turgid James Bond theme ever recorded. Additionally, many will remember her memorable acting work in Kristofferson’s A Star is Born wherein she somehow  managed to be fairly unconvincing playing herself in the Grammy Awards sequence!  The memory of her stepping up to the podium with Tony Orlando in that scene makes me chortle with glee as I imagine the film’s creators self-satisfied as they concurred  that they had, indeed, created rock ‘n roll verisimilitude and captured the raw excitement of the starry Grammys!

Unfortunately, by the early 1980s as the bland but organic sounding adult contemporary record of the late-1970s gave way to the bland but synth-drenched balladry of the 1980s (The Lady in Red, anyone?), and many artists who were really folkies underneath found themselves increasingly lost in a sea of drum machines, shoulder pads, and big hair.  Rita’s version of Tempted is at once perfectly pleasant and completely awful, which is a particularly vexatious paradox.  In Rita’s defense, this is the first time I have been able to understand every word of the famous song.  On the other hand, I fell asleep, which would suggest that listeners should avoid driving or operating heavy machinery while tapping their toes!

I’ll be serving additional installments of these awesome, unbelievable covers every few days so let me know how I’m doing.  Believe it or not a great deal of research goes into curating a list this bad!  So here we go, in no particular order:

I just read a long article in Entertainment Weekly about the misfortune of the VFX industry which, despite the absolute prevalence (and to me, tyranny) of special effects-driven fare, would appear to be struggling due to the profit-driven imperatives of the multi-national coporations that make these generally odious films.  While I don’t wish financial hardship on any of the thousands of talented, apparently struggling craftspeople who work in the field, perhaps EW might show some love for moviegoers everywhere who are forced to endure season after season, year after year, of the numbing sameness of VFX films themselves.  Perhaps an interesting story with a great script is simply too much to ask from a film that needs to be understood in any language.  After all, these films, formerly called “movies” are now referred to as “franchises”, a word once associated exclusively with chain stores and a certain lack of character or differentiaing qualities.  But something wonderful has been lost in the global stampede for profits.

Back in Hollywood’s second golden age—the 1970s—filmmakers made thoughtful, small, idea-driven films financed by the same studios that now make movies that look like video games.  Until the blockbuster mentality became the norm, the most sought after special effect was a good script.  I thought about this last night as I watched Michael Ritchie’s The Candidate from 1972 and starring Robert Redford, then at the peak of his fame and cinematic sorcery.  Indeed, so intense is his movie star charisma that it is almost like watching a magician.  It’s absolutely satisfying enough to have Robert Redford and a script filled with great ideas and dialogue.

The film tells the story of a political candidate who loses his soul and should be essential viewing for anyone who is interested in seeing the kind of human stories that Hollywood studios used to make but have apparently been progressively ceded to TV in the Spielberg-era.  These companies have turned their backs not only on me and you but on themselves—on the traditions of storytelling that defined who they have always been.  Certainly a studio like Warner Bros. who made The Candidate and enjoyed a rich tradition of films with social relevance going back to the 1920s, is more than a little like the character Redford plays in the film.

Fact of the matter is that the studios used to make wonderful films that would be classified today as “indies” and they did it beautifully.  For an example that is entertaining and quite prescient, see The Candidate.  In their exploration of the subject, Entertainment Weekly might have simply concluded that there are too many VFX folks out of work because there simply is no replacement for a good script—the greatest special effect of all.

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