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lvis Presley first set out to sing like Dean
Martin. Dean Martin never set out to sing at all. He was
dealing | back-room blackjack when one night
after work his pals prompted him to take the stage at a local nightclub.
He left with an offer of a place in the band at $50 a week. "Hell," said
Dean, who was then still Dino Crochetti of Steubenville, Ohio, and an ace
at palming silver dollars off his bosses' table, "I steal more than that
in a week." |
| He was happy enough not to be a barber like
his father, or still working in the steel mills, or back fighting as "Kid
Crochet," an untalented $10-a-bout welterweight. He'd mined coal, pumped
gas, jerked soda, stolen hubcaps and carted bootleg liquor around eastern
Ohio and western Pennsylvania before he found his calling as a croupier,
but there was nothing in his resume to suggest an itch for the arts. |
| He gave it a shot anyway, quit after a month,
was persuaded by friends to try again. (They staked him money to take up
the slack in his earnings.) Eventually, golden voice won out over golden
arm, and Dean Martin -- 27 years old already -- was born. It might as
easily have fallen out otherwise. But for one impromptu performance, he
might still be dealing "21," and happily. (In later Vegas days, he'd
sometimes take a turn behind the tables after a show.) Overweening
ambition was never his hallmark, and he seems to have approached his whole
career with a kind of relaxed professionalism -- or a professional
relaxation -- that has its perfect analog in the unstrained, unstudied
music that wafted casually from his throat. Martin managed to make not
only a life, but an art, of doing what came naturally. |
| In 1946, Jerry Lewis, 20 years old and not
yet insufferable, called him to Atlantic City to see if they could work
together. After one disastrous show that almost put them on the
unemployment line, they improvised an act as anarchic in its context as
the Sex Pistols were in theirs -- they threw food, squirted seltzer, broke
plates, cut the customer's clothes to ribbons and woke up the next day to
a line around the block. Martin and Lewis tore up the nation's nightclubs,
at exponentially rising fees, then went to Hollywood and made 16 movies in
10 years. Dean signed to Capitol Records, recorded "That's Amore" (the
only song I know to contain the word "drool") and became the idol of
Elvis, among others. |
| This, children, was of course all before our
time. Some of you, if you are like me, may recall firsthand the Dino of
the '60s, the cinematic incarnator of Matt Helm and the host of
breathtakingly loose TV variety show, for which he (famously) never
rehearsed and into which his flubs were incorporated as style. It
dovetailed neatly with his self-created image as The Constant Drunk -- you
could still play that stuff for laughs then. ("I'm not drinking anymore --
but I'm not drinking any less," is the crack that opened his first
post-Jerry show at the Sands, though the amber liquid he downed onstage is
supposed to have been apple juice.) I remember Dino's Lodge, which stood
at "77 Sunset Strip," and can recall the twilight of the Clan, aka the Rat
Pack, the Sinatra-led mutual admiration society that bid to define what
was "swinging" in the days before the Beatles made them finally look their
age. Clan members performed together in Las Vegas (a scrap of this is
preserved on Sinatra's album A Man and His Music) and in the movies
-- Ocean's Eleven, Sergeants Three, Four for Texas,
Robin and the Seven Hoods. In the early '60s, Dean and Frank and
Sammy Davis, Jr. all signed to Frank's label, Reprise, but most of Dino's
recorded corpus is long out of circulation. |
| Capitol Records, bucking that trend in a
small way, has brought up from the vaults a fistful of Martin spanning the
years 1948 to 1960. Reissued as part of the label's Collector's Series,
these 20 sides form a slyly appealing set that, while unspectacular in its
particulars, forms a persuasive whole, paints a compelling landscape. Few
of these tunes, which largely attempt nothing more (nor less) than to
express the ineffable enormity of the singer's love for the offstage
innamorata, are bound for the ASCAP Hall of Fame -- many weren't even hits
in their time -- but they work their way sliverlike under your skin. The
swing charts chug nicely, the ballads swoop like sea birds in a mural on
the wall of an Italian restaurant. Mediterranean melodies and bolero beat
abound; violins, mandolins and accordions make a plush, imported sofa for
the pitching of singerly Sicilian woo. |
| Like many if not all pop singers of his
generation, Martin based his style on Bing Crosby's, intimate but
basically untroubled. "I can deliver a song with an easy style," he once
said, "but a lot of us crooners get by because we're fairly painless."
Martin could be so painless that even the trade papers sometimes failed to
notice he sang, titling him simply "film star" or "nightclub and screen
comedian." No house afire, his voice is nevertheless both attractive and
distinctive, a husky baritone with a faint, faintly operatic sob in the
clinches and a laconic drawl throughout. And if he has none of Sinatra's
awesome pugnacity, none of his drive to haunt a lyric like the ghost of
the man who died to write it, Martin's innate jauntiness, his willingness
to clown, to sound once in a while like his shirt's untucked, establish
him as a marvel of grit and dynamism next to such other, more well-kempt
Italian warblers as Perry Como and Vic Damone. |
| This may seem like splitting hairs. Como,
Damone, Martin, even Pope Frank himself might well appear
indistinguishable to ears for whom even the Beatles -- even T. Rex! -- are
relics of a dead world beyond recall. Dino is bound to be for most of you
no more than a Phantom of the Late Show, a Face on a Tabloid, a Zombie of
Vegas, old meat, a corroded token of the world gone by, of the days of
wine and roses, dinner and dancing at the Rumba Room, the Top Kat, the
Sensation Club, the Pedigreed Penguin. The days when men got down on one
knee to propose. Women wore pearls. Children were not exceptional. Private
citizens owned cocktail shakers. A world you never made, Young Person of
the '90s. |
| But perhaps in some obscure way, it's the
world that made you. (Ask your parents about this.) It's available
now and forever through the miracle of recorded sound, a world where a man
can look at the moon and think of pizza, and that's amore. There
are worse places to travel.¶ |