June 18, 2009
Mark Steyn: Just A Gigolo/I Ain't Got Nobody
Mark Steyn, whose political expertise is dwarfed only by his encyclopedic knowledge of all things musical, recently noted the passing of Sam Butera, the saxophonist who engaged in spirited note-for-note duels with Louis Prima.
Steyn also discussed perhaps their most famous number, Just A Giggolo/I Ain't Got Nobody, reintroduced -- some might say stolen -- to a new generation by rocker David Lee Roth in the '80s.
Sam [Butera] died in Las Vegas a few days ago, and, if you never saw him during his half-century at the Sahara and other landmarks on the Strip, you missed a treat. As Louis Prima's saxophonist, he was an indispensable component of what was billed as "The Wildest Show In Vegas". And they were: Butera, Prima, Keely Smith, together in a rowdy, bawdy on-stage party that did a lot to define the desert resort in its early days.
[...]
The on-stage dueling - with Louis scatting lines of ever more frenetic gibberish and demanding that Sam instantly recapitulate them on the sax - delighted audiences right up until the day, in 1975, when Prima fell into an irreversible coma. After the shock, Butera picked up his horn and went back to work, providing customers for another quarter-century almost as much fun sans Prima. Almost.
[...]
"I Ain't Got Nobody" was written before America entered the First World War, and "Just A Gigolo" was composed over a decade later and thousands of miles to the east as a melancholic Teutonic reflection on what had happened to the Habsburg Empire in the wake of that war. In 1928, a composer called Leonello Casucci and a lyricist by the name of Julius Brammer enjoyed a big hit in Austria called "Schöner Gigolo". And, as was often the case back then, a New York publisher noticed its success in Europe and snapped up the English-language rights (one feature of our supposedly more "multicultural" age is how comparatively parochial the music biz is compared to 80 years ago).
The US publisher handed it to my old friend Irving Caesar to adapt. As you'll know if you read my obituary of him in Mark Steyn's Passing Parade, I adored Caesar, mainly because, to the impressionable lad I was back then, he was exactly what you were looking for in an old-time songwriter: A small man with a shock of white hair and a bow tie, he chewed cigars, sang songs, and regaled you with well-honed anecdotage about his biggest hits - and flops. Among the latter was a disaster of a Broadway show called My Dear Public, which earned him the worst notices he'd ever had. He served as the show's lyricist, librettist, co-composer and producer. "Okay, they didn't like it," he told Oscar Hammerstein. "But why blame me?" He went to a costume party dressed as his near namesake, Julius Caesar, but got pulled over for speeding. "Name?" demanded the cop.
"Caesar," said Caesar.
"A wiseguy, huh?"
When I knew him, he lived in the Omni Park Central in New York, having moved in many decades and several remodelings earlier. So you'd pass through a lobby of chrome or leather or whatever that season's hotel decor was, and then cross Caesar's threshold and step back through the years, to a Tin Pan Alley publishing house, circa 1924. Irving would recline in his BarcaLounger, singing "Swanee" or "Tea For Two" or another of his hits, squeaking the chair in time to the music.
I asked him about "Just A Gigolo" and, for a few minutes, he stopped squeaking. His credo was simple - "I write fast. Sometimes lousy, but always fast." So, when he was handed "Schöner Gigolo", he decided he liked the tune - a simple melody, but given a wistful bittersweet quality by the underlying harmony - and that he'd get someone to translate the German text and tell him what it was all about, and then he'd write it, fast. When he saw the translation, he realized Julius Brammer had written an allegory of Austro-Hungarian post-imperial decline in which a former hussar who still recalls the good old days is forced to eke out a living as a gigolo. Caesar reckoned that nobody in America cared about social upheaval in the Habsburg Empire but thought the basic scenario had potential. "I moved him to France," he told me, "and then I begin by describing him":
'Twas in a Paris cafe that first I found him
He was a Frenchman, a hero of the war
But war was over, and here's how peace had crowned him
A few cheap medals to wear, and nothing more
Now ev'ry night in this same cafe you'll find him
And as he strolls by, the ladies hear him say,
'If you admire me
Please hire me...'I loved how Irving sang that line to me in his BarcaLounger that day: "If you admire me/Please hire me..." He put a real yearning into it, really getting into the part. Which was impressive, because it would be hard to conjure anything less like a Parisian gigolo than a genial bachelor pushing ninety. (Irving told me he didn't want to get married too young. In the end, he waited till he was a hundred to tie the knot, and died the following year at 101.) Anyway, after that bit of Jolsonesque pleading, complete with outstretched arms, he went into the chorus. "Schöner Gigolo" translates as "beautiful gigolo", but Caesar decided to go for something more alliterative:
I'm Just A Gigolo
Ev'rywhere I go
People know the part I'm playing
Paid for ev'ry dance
Selling each romance
Ev'ry night some heart betraying...And, if you know the Louis Prima record, that line is most likely unfamiliar to you. But that's how everyone sang it when Caesar unleashed it on the English-speaking world 80 years ago. That's how Crosby did it, and Ted Lewis, Ben Bernie, Leo Reisman and the other bandleaders who made the first recordings. That's how it went on the big screen, too, after "Just A Gigolo" proved so popular that they used it as the title for a 1931 feature film and a 1932 Betty Boop cartoon.
But that was all ancient history by the time Louis Prima and Sam Butera were reconstructing the song a quarter-century later. So here's what Louis sang:
I'm Just A Gigolo
Ev'rywhere I go
People know the part I'm playing
Paid for ev'ry dance
Selling each romance
Oooooooh, what they're saying...In Prima's version, he sings two choruses of "Gigolo", and then:
When the end comes, I know
They'll say Just A Gigolo
Life goes on without me
'Coz
I...
Ain't Got Nobody...Somehow, Prima and Butera had hooked up Julius Brammer's metaphor for post-Habsburg Austria with a somewhat self-pitying ballad from 1915, written by a fellow son of New Orleans, Spencer Williams. The composer of "Basin Street Blues", "I've Found A New Baby", "Everybody Loves My Baby" and more, Williams has an enviable catalogue, but in 1956, having relocated to Stockholm, he'd more or less given up on "I Ain't Got Nobody", for whom there'd been few takers since the bluesier mamas like Sophie Tucker and Bessie Smith had given it some mileage back in the Twenties. Who knows how or why the muse descends? But somehow Butera and Prima decided to combine "Just A Gigolo" with "I Ain't Got Nobody", and make it a nightly Vegas ritual:
I'm so sad and lonely
(Sadandlonelysadandlonely)
Won't some sweet mama
Come and take a chance with me?
('Cause I ain't so bad...)That lyric's wandering some ways from the 1915 original, too. But the Prima medley rescued the song, using the exotic scenario of "Just A Gigolo" as a foundation to pile on, tongue in cheek, the self-pity of "Nobody". In April 1956, Sinatra's producer Voyle Gilmore brought Prima, Butera, and the Witnesses (with Keely Smith among the backing vocalists) into the Capitol studios in Los Angeles and put "Just A Gigolo/I Ain't Got Nobody" down on record. It wasn't a big chart hit, but it became a classic of sorts.
Three decades later, I called Irving Caesar to wish him a happy 90th birthday. For an old guy, he always seemed to have a new lease of life, professionally speaking. And so it was this time. "I'm back in the Hit Parade," he barked down the phone. "'Just A Gigolo.' Some black fellow out on the coast covered it." Actually, it was a white fellow - David Lee Roth of Van Halen - and, if memory serves, he's from Indiana. But, other than that, Caesar had got the essentials right: "Just A Gigolo" was back in the charts. Or, rather, "Just A Gigolo/I Ain't Got Nobody". And, to my amazement, upon hearing the record, I discovered he'd lifted the Louis Prima medley note for note (albeit without Sam's sax).
As I say, I was amazed. Sam Butera, on the other hand, was mad as hell. "He copied my arrangement note for note," Butera told The New York Times, "and I didn't get a dime for it."
[...]
In essence, David Lee Roth decided to launch his solo career with an act of karaoke. And not only did he lift another guy's arrangement but he couldn't understand why Butera would be miffed about it. One night, while the Witnesses were playing in Vegas, Roth swung by to catch the act and, afterwards, hailed Butera with a cheery, "Hey, Sam!"
"Who are you?" asked the sax man.
"I'm David Lee Roth," replied the rocker.
"Then where's my money?" said Butera.
[...]
Five years ago, during the 2004 presidential election, here at SteynOnline, thanks to an avalanche of lyrics submitted by readers, we started running a weekly "John Kerry Songbook" of pop parodies: An extraordinary number of them were versions of "Just A Gigolo/I Ain't Got Nobody" - or in John Kerry's case, as one reader put it, "I'm Just A Gigolo/I Don't Like Nobodies". One day someone will figure out something new to do with "Just A Gigolo", and somewhere on the other side of the planet someone else will come up with a new wrinkle on "I Ain't Got Nobody". But for now those whom Sam Butera joined together no man can put asunder. A three-minute medley cooked up at the Sahara Hotel that will play forever:
When the end comes, I know
They'll say Just A Gigolo
Life goes on without me.
Posted by Mike Lief at June 18, 2009 06:51 AM
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Comments
All this time I thought Van Halen wrote this song. Fug.
Posted by: Ruddy at June 19, 2009 11:25 PM
WOW - Louis Prima !!! AND Mark Steyn !!
Love IT, Mike - Excellent !!
Posted by: Glenn J Campbell at June 20, 2009 07:23 AM