by Peter Cates

Dionne Warwick

Scepter records was the label that released albums by the very gifted singer Dionne Warwick. Back in 1968 the first record I ever bought of her was a 45 that I was able to special order from a vendor who set up a consignment rack at the Cates Country Store. Through him, I acquired LPs by Eydie Gorme, Richard Harris, Sergio Mendes, Glenn Yarborough, etc., all within quarter mile walking distance of home and may have been the most frequent customer of discs benefitting Uncle Ben Cates’s cash register.

A month previously, I had seen the movie Valley of the Dolls, a very compelling depiction of Hollywood and its pill culture, based on the novel by Jacqueline Susann and starring Barbara Parkins, Patty Duke and Sharon Tate (Tate and several others would be murdered in the summer of 1969 by members of the Manson gang during a home invasion when she was hosting a social gathering at the house she lived in with her husband Roman Polanski, he not being home that evening).

The movie ended with the gorgeous theme from Valley of the Dolls composed by Dory and Andre Previn and sung by Miss Warwick which was contained on that above-mentioned Scepter 45, along with side 2’s I Say a Little Prayer, a Hal David/Burt Bacharach megahit.

Scepter started a budget classical label Mace records and, as a teenager, I won a free LP from the company for answering questions about composers correctly. That record had the title Unforgettable Folk Music from Germany, most of that music being quite forgettable.

Mace also released several very good LPs – beautifully played Trios for Clarinet and other instruments by Beethoven and Brahms, a wondrously performed Mozart K. 334 String Divertimento and sets of Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler Symphonies that listed fake names but were still satisfying interpretations.

The label had a musicologist Hope Sheridan who very concisely put her finger on why my personal desert island composer Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) achieved the greatness he did in her jacket notes for a recording of the Piano Quartet in G minor, Opus 25, completed when Brahms was only 28:

“A bounding muscular vigor, melodic exuberance, and headlong brilliance characterize this youthful work. This early quartet, in fact, is filled with all the trademarks which later were to identify the bulk of Brahms’s music. For the 28-year-old composer, it was almost a declaration of self. The quartet begins with declamations of a lovesick young romantic, passes through the catalyst of self-analysis, and ends with a declaration of gypsy abandon – specifically, Brahms own decision to lead the life of a ‘gypsy,’ to renounce the bourgeois fetters of a middle-class existence and to follow his muse wherever it might lead him.”

The recording alluded to above was released, not on Mace which frequently used Sheridan’s writing, but on Vox/Turnabout in 1965 and featured pianist Georges Szolchany with three members of the Hungarian Quartet, a group that taught and performed 14 summers between 1960 and 1974 at our own Colby College. And the interpretation conveyed this music’s vigor, exuberance and brilliance in a stunning manner.

Recordings of the same composer’s 4th Symphony proliferate here at the house. A 1941 78 set of five 12-inch shellac discs feature the wired up, very inspired genius Music Director Serge Koussevitzky (1874-1951) conducting the Boston Symphony which he led for 25 brilliant years from 1924 to 1949. The manner in which he nagged, snapped and screamed at the 105 musicians in rehearsals is rumored to have caused 106 ulcers, one man developing two of them.

But the Victor Red Seal records Koussevitzky left posterity were of a consistently sublime quality. He conducted the Brahms 4th with a combination of thick, yet eloquent sonority from the strings, clear as a bell detail from the woodwinds, powerful brass and percussion while the phrasing sometimes verged on the stodgy yet never went overboard.

A couple of other recommendations are the 1927 Beethoven Pastoral and the 1935 Sibelius Second Symphony.

This conductor mentored Leonard Bernstein, but disapproved of Bernstein writing Broadway musicals.

by Peter Cates

Louise Dickinson Rich

The Coast of Maine by Louise Dickinson Rich (1903-1991) was first published in 1956 and subsequently revised in 1962 and 1970. Dipping in it, I came across the following:

“Considering its present and past eminence as a seaport, which always connotes-perhaps unfairly – sailors celebrating shore leave by bending the festive elbow, I think it is a little odd that Rockland, over a hundred years ago, organized the first Total Abstinence Society in America. I’m not talking about temperance now, but complete abstinence, an unheard-of thing at the time.”

“The tourist trade had its inception around 1870, when Bar Harbor, which was then little more than a collection of fishing shacks, was ‘discovered ‘, along with the other now well-known resort towns of the coast.”

Finally Kennebunk has a Unitarian Church containing a bell in its steeple that was cast by Paul Revere.

Rich’s book has numerous other anecdotes about past and, as of 1970, present Maine along with a number of striking black and white photographs by Samuel Chamberlain. For me personally, it lends itself better to browsing than cover to cover reading.

Sir Laurence Olivier

Sir Laurence Olivier (1907-1989) wrote in his autobiography Confessions of an Actor, published in 1982, of being asked to fire British actress Dame Edith Evans from a production he had directed in which she had the leading role because she was messing up her movements on stage, not remembering her lines and generally looking spaced out.

Feeling incapable of firing a much admired colleague and friend, Olivier strolled to the actress’s dressing room “to bluster it out with Edith”:

“As I was doling out the bubbling greetings of an old colleague, I caught sight of a pair of unworn eyelashes beside her makeup tray and burst out, ‘Edith, dear, why on earth didn’t you wear those?’ ‘Well, dear,’ she said, ‘I didn’t want to think of it as a performance!’

Preparing to drop “the bloody but necessary axe” if Edith still messed up, Olivier was much relieved when the actress delivered a much better “performance”, approaching her role as a “performance” and wearing the necessary eyelashes, and Olivier kept her on for the play’s entire run.

Olivier himself delivered a very memorable performance as the sadistic Nazi dentist Szell working on Dustin Hoffman’s teeth in the 1976 Marathon Man.

Other memorable roles were the earlier film classics Wuthering Heights, the suspenseful Rebecca directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Richard the Third with actress Claire Bloom and the Boys from Brazil as the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal opposite Gregory Peck as another Nazi doctor.

Olivier’s second ex-wife, Vivian Leigh, (1913-1967) performed exceptionally as Scarlet O’Hara in 1939’s Gone with the Wind with Clark Gable’s Rhett Butler and Olivia de Haviland’s lovely Melanie Hamilton.

Olivier’s third wife and widow Joan Plowright, still living at 95, delivered a sterling performance in the 2005 Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont.

Olivier speaks of the challenges for memorizing lines when one is past 60: “When the brain is at its clearest, probably in the early morning, is the best time for learning; when you’re young, late at night is all right – well, any time’s all right for anything when golden youth is yours.”

by Peter Cates

The Five Scamps

The Five Scamps, The Fishing Song; and Good Lover Blues. Columbia 30168, ten-inch 78, recorded 1949.

The Five Scamps were an African American group of singers and instrumentalists who began performing informally in a WPA work camp in 1936 but then the story ends there until 1946, when their professional career started taking off in Kansas City, Missouri, and extended to California and a contract with Columbia Records in 1948.

The Fishing Song is a hilarious, slightly risqué number while Good Lover Blues is a most captivating example of early rhythm and blues.

By 1950, after recording eight titles, Columbia terminated their contract due to a lack of sales but the group would earn a decent living as a night club act in Kansas City, with some changes of personnel until the early 2000s when they called it quits due to old age.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

In an 1837 entry in his ever-fascinating American Note-Books, Nathaniel Hawthorne writes the following during his visits with friends in Central Maine:

“On the road from Hallowell to Augusta we saw little booths, in two places, erected on the roadside, where boys offered beer, apples, etc., for sale. We passed an Irishwoman with a child in her arms, and a heavy bundle, and afterwards an Irishman with a light bundle, sitting by the highway. They were husband and wife; and B__ says that an Irishman and his wife, on their journeys, do not usually walk side by side, but that the man gives the woman the heaviest burden to carry, and walks on lightly ahead!”

These patriarchal and lazy attitudes of so many husbands expecting their wives to be beasts of burden during the good old days of 150 to 200 years ago were recounted in anecdotes by my own relatives, nowadays in blessed eternity, about how some of our ancestors treated their spouses.

I am also now curious as to whether Hawthorne visited East Vassalboro and South China during his travels around Augusta and the Kennebec River, and what he would have seen along the China Lake stagecoach roads.

Special Ops

I have recently started watching season one of Special Ops: The Lioness, a very suspenseful new series based on the increased recruitment of women in secret intelligence operations in the Middle East and elsewhere starting around 2003.

The only familiar face here is the very good Nicole Kidman as a CIA boss but the rest of the cast also does superb work.

Kudos to the on-location cinematography along Chesapeake Bay Bridge and elsewhere.

Raymond Dixon

Raymond Dixon – Underneath the Stars; Alice Green and Harry Macdonough – Shadowland. Victor 17946, ten-inch acoustic shellac disc, recorded January 4, 1916.

Raymond Dixon, Harry Macdonough and Alice Green were pseudonyms used by tenors Lambert Murphy (1885-1954) and John Scantlebury Macdonald (1871-1931) and soprano Olive Kline (1887-1976) while the two songs fall into the long forgotten category; and they are im­mensely charming ones which have held up through several recent playings of this record.

Murphy’s voice had an appealingly effusive quality which suited the expressed romantic sentiments of the nocturnal Underneath the Stars.

Shadowland was more upbeat but evoked similar emotions aroused during a nighttime stroll with one’s significant other. The lean tart vocalism of Macdonald’s reedy tenor blended well with Kline’s consistently exquisite high notes.

Olive Kline’s 1929 electrically recorded rendition of Ethelbert Nevin’s Mighty Lak A Rose remains one of my favorite vocal records of all time since I first heard it more than 10 years ago and I own the original 78 and an Amazon cd special transfer.

Graham Greene

Graham Greene in his 1969 Collected Essays described “Beatrix Potter’s style” as having “a selective realism, which takes emotion for granted and puts aside love and death with a gentle detachment.” That “gentle detachment” is evoked in the manner in which Peter Rabbit’s mother sweetly reminds Peter and his siblings of steering clear of the McGregor garden – “Your father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor.”

My first encounter at the age of six with Peter Rabbit’s foolhardiness was through a five-inch yellow plastic 78 Golden Record in which Peter was depicted being shot at, sound effects and all, by the evil Mr. McGregor’s shotgun. For several years in my mind, the name McGregor equalled those of Hitler, Stalin and Dillinger in the ominous realm.

Greene also provided a telling quote from what he considered to be one of her masterpieces, The Roly-Poly Pudding in which rats in the attic have captured Tom Kitten:

– “Anna Maria,” said the old man rat (whose name was Samuel Whiskers), “Anna Maria, make me a kitten dumpling roly-poly pudding for my dinner. “
– “It requires dough and a pat of butter, and a rolling pin,” said Anna Maria, considering Tom Kitten with her head on one side.
– “No,” said Samuel Whiskers, “Make it properly, Anna Maria, with breadcrumbs.”