The Great American Saloon Series/Bobby Short's Cafe Carlyle
Brookhiser, Richard
THE GREAT AMERICAN SALOON SERIES T hough I have lived in New York 1 for going on ten years, I never arrived until a colleague whose tastes in nights out I had formerly associated with Springsteen...
...at their rare best, severely limited...
...Short makes sure you catch every syllable of his songs...
...ne was craftsmanship...
...But they also express a facet of New York, what F. Scott Fitzgerald called "metropolitan urbanity...
...THE GREAT AMERICAN SALOON SERIES T hough I have lived in New York 1 for going on ten years, I never arrived until a colleague whose tastes in nights out I had formerly associated with Springsteen concerts suggested that we and our women go to a saloon he knew...
...the no-prestige seats are, without question, behind the pillar...
...But isn't it time we who grew up with rock admitted that the words were always the least part of it—at their frequent worst, imbecile...
...And what he wants most of all is to carry the words—carry them so that his listeners comprehend, as well as hear...
...If you sat around there long enough and heard all the phonies applauding and all, you got to hate everybody in the world, I swear you did...
...It's one of those places that are supposed to be very sophisticated and all, and the phonies are coming in the window...
...Yes, Holden, it was pretty dirty too...
...It appeared, Fitzgerald thought, after World War I: " . . . the blending of the bright, gay, vigorous elements began then...
...One of the songs Short did the night I was there, an early Cole Porter called "Pilot Me," rhymed "aeroplane" and "narrow plane," "drive it, dear" and "private, dear," all in the first six lines...
...The wall paintings look to be about the same vintage as the decor of The Four Seasons—Popular Modernism, which long since stopped looking modern, and in about ten years should give the same nostalgic kick as the Chrysler Building gives now...
...But what do these songs have to do with New York...
...They were love songs, principally, just like rock and roll...
...they are wound around internal rhymes and feminine endings like cat's cradles...
...But as you listen, you become aware that, after half a century, this voice, whatever its natural luster, does absolutely anything its owner wants...
...But there are times when you want more...
...001111111r ^ ==i::':::F--r------.., .., ,A1 lilt, 1 iv.' ....„.„,„i...........--BOBBY SHORT'S CAFÉ CARLYLE 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1987 Peres, or did Peres snub O'Connor...
...we sat in the curve of the grand piano, and liked it just fine...
...Phonies—potent word...
...But the urbane ideal did care about at least two things...
...In previous pieces for this series, I have pushed that word pretty hard, writing about Ltichow's (RIP), a restaurant, or Fazil's International, a nightclub...
...For vocal warmth, listen to Sinatra albums...
...They represent, a rare combination: music of a high order (several of these tunesmiths studied with Nadia Boulanger), as well as lyrics that are equally high...
...The more Short gives you is, with an occasional excursion into the blues, the by Richard Brookhiser golden age of the American popular song—Porter, Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart...
...The same goes for Lorenz Hart...
...Short spends most of the year touring the hinterlands, but this is his home base...
...This is not to criticize rock and roll...
...anybody who still doubts how necessary rock was only has to listen to the airless and enervated fifties jazz in the movie Round Midnight (better yet, go to the first fifteen minutes of the movie, walk out, and demand your money back...
...what is the meaning of Howard Beach...
...How happy I am, how sad I am, how bad I am, how horny I am—that about covers it...
...Shows are at ten and midnight and, as he told an interviewer recently, he plans them differently: By the last show, the customers know whether they are going home with their dates, or alone, and so he programs more introspection for the wee hours...
...But then you'll have to bring a fatter wallet, and you'll miss the fine points of a great act...
...The other half of the pleasure, and all the thought, came from what the intricate little verbal machines were saying...
...But unlike rock, you have to be older than seventeen to appreciate them...
...And besides, there's all the rest of New York for escaping urbanity...
...T s it necessary to say that the songs he 1 sings are not rock and roll...
...The prestige seats are supposed to be the banquettes along the far wall...
...He looks like a Victorian Christmas tree cherub—old ivory with a patina...
...Great tunes can be written for such a limited repertoire of sentiments...
...and with the help of his sidemen and his own piano playing, you catch their meaning and mood as well...
...Not that being heard is a trivial feat...
...His first gig, as a child performer, was in 1936...
...Better say, a former facet, for this particular New York is virtually dead (Short is a kind of curator...
...Since I'm married Richard Brookhiser, managing editor of National Review, is author of The Outside Story (Doubleday...
...John Gotti and Bernhard Goetz...
...He is supported by musicians on drums and bass (the fiddle, he calls it...
...The chain reactions it helped set off, which are not done yet, may reasonably be said to include the fall of Saigon...
...Even with the benefit of a sound system, or an attentive hall, how many singers have you heard mash their words into nonsense, so that the national anthem refers to "the dawn surly light," or the Hallelujah Chorus to "the Lord Gottem nipotent...
...In my short and decidedly amateur career as a singer, I have competed with college mixers, firetrucks, madmen, ghetto blasters, and roaring drunks, in conditions when merely to break through the surf of background noise was an achievement...
...If in the end nothing is taken seriously, then exclusion is mere snobbery and stupidity...
...What killed it...
...is Susan Sontag the last New York intellectual—Cole Porter might have put any of these people or issues in a song, but only on the condition that they not be taken seriously...
...The Carlyle Hotel's main entrance is on 76th Street, but the Cafe is around the corner on Madison Avenue...
...If they were showtunes, of course, they opened in New York, after suitable dry-runs in New Haven or someplace...
...If that's too awesome to contemplate, order more drinks...
...We took a lot of cash with us, and if you plan to visit this saloon, you would be well advised to do the same: one fifty dollar bill per person will do it, provided you don't eat, and you stick to a drink apiece...
...the Elizabethan madrigalists actually made do with fewer...
...It was an ideal that excluded a lot: for instance, America, the rest of the world, and most of New York City itself...
...and my colleague is engaged, we went to the ten o'clock...
...If this society produced the cocktail party, it also evolved the Park Avenue wit, and for the first time an educated European could envisage a trip to New York as something more amusing than a gold-trek into a formalized Australian bush...
...A better test than age, probably, is that you must be married, and not to your first love—or that you realize, from some equivalent experience, that life is not one huge choice, two roads diverging in a yellow wood, or even a few of them, but an endless series, and that not all your choices will be wise...
...But as far as New York was concerned, the disposition to treat the thoughts of a teenage kid on the brink of a nervous breakdown as profound meant the end of "metropolitan urbanity" as a cultural ideal...
...Short's voice, instead of filling his head, and the space above and in front of it, seems to come entirely from the top of his throat—sometimes, by the sound of it, a sore throat...
...Maybe you have to be older than forty (I'm not there yet, but I'm closer to the latter age than to the former...
...But in this case, I use the term on the authority of no less than the establishment's pianist, who the night we went to the Cafe Carlyle announced, "We're a saloon...
...In case you don't live in New York, the Wicker Bar is in this sort of swanky hotel, the Seton Hotel...
...The manner fits the subject...
...A teacher once told me that half the pleasure in attending a performance of Cyrano de Bergerac is waiting to find out how in the world Rostand will complete a couplet...
...The lyrics Short sings do not simply hang together...
...did Cardinal O'Connor snub Shimon s)got 0Ctil`i-,1v --1116( . II...
...We sell hooch, principally...
...Artifice may not seem natural, but it's the only way to capture all of human nature...
...Most of the songs were either pretty dirty or in French...
...Hard to say, but I nominate Holden Caulfield...
...Of course, the Café Carlyle doesn't charge those prices for the hooch, but for its pianist, Bobby Short...
...By just sitting back on your heels and shouting, you can express many powerful emotions, but you can't express these...
...There was also a version in French...
...These are the subjects and situations that the latter-day brand of metropolitan urbanity at the Cafe Carlyle is meant to explore...
...Donald Manes and John Zacarro...
Vol. 20 • May 1987 • No. 5
