Benny Green notes . . .
In 1975 I had a long conversation
with Perry Como, and from what I gathered during that talk, Como would
find something faintly absurd about my compiling this note. He cannot
really agree that there is anything very interesting about him. He
insists that apart from his singing he is a perfectly ordinary fellow,
which is rather like saying that apart from his career Napoleon
Bonaparte was a perfectly ordinary Frenchman. Como's modesty is utterly
genuine; he is not one of those bores who wait to be cajoled into
backing modestly into the limelight. In fact, so self-effacing is he
that the occasion of our talk, a conversation-cum-interview for a BBC-TV
profile, was a landmark in his career. In all his years in show business
he had never once agreed to submit to a filmed interview of this kind.
The reason he had always given was that he had nothing to say about
himself which would not put the viewer to sleep as deeply as if he had
been banged on the head with a sandbag. He was only persuaded to change
his mind when he say the extraordinary scenes of enthusiasm for his
singing and affection for himself which took place at every venue of his
British tour.
In the event, of course, Como
turned out to be the ideal subject for an interview, the type who makes
the interviewer look good, because the answers flow so naturally that
even the most stupid questions seem intelligent. Our chat revealed that
Como, like all intelligent creative men, retains an abiding affection
for his own roots; the programme for which we chatted was called
"The Barber Comes to Town", a reference to Como's early days
as a tonsorial virtuoso. (Como was running his own clip-joint by the
time he was thirteen years old.) He was highly amusing on the subject of
his haircutting technique, and justifiably proud of the fact that as a
barber he had been a very good one. He also spoke of the beginnings of
his singing ambition, and the mild bewilderment of his father, who could
not for the life of him work out the economic logic of a situation
whereby a young man was happy to get X dollars for singing when he could
make 2X dollars for singeing. However, Como's father, who was evidentially
as reasonable and as compassionate a man as his son, eventually agreed
to let Como take a shot at singing for a living. This was back in the
days before the arts of amplification had been worked out, and Como told
me that there was one open-air venue where he used to sing through a
megaphone; one day the management introduced the new-fangled vocal
microphones, but Como , staunchly conservative and perhaps eager to hide
his face, insisted on continuing with the megaphone. At last a
compromise was reached; Como sang through the megaphone into the
microphone. The mind, as they used to say, boggles.
The next part of the story is
really quite dramatic considering it comes from a man who thinks there
is nothing particularly interesting about him. Como rose into the
semi-professional and then the professional world, married and became
the father of a child. He then decided that there had been enough
singing and that the time had come for a return to the haven of the
barbershop. He never liked the idea of a baby being on tour, he liked
even less the idea of being without the family on the road, so he calmly
decided to throw up singing and go back to his home town. In many
biographies of ultimately successful performers this moment would have
come through as one of scarlet melodrama, anguished heart-searching,
postures of breast-beating self-sacrifice. But the way Como tells it,
there was nothing else a sensible, intelligent man could do. And Como
actually did it, only becoming a member of the Ted Weems band after a
chapter of accidents.
It was with Weems that Como must
have put the final polish to an already natural singing voice. One of
the most pleasing aspects of Como's singing has always been its complete
lack of strain. As he has sometimes said, when he has to sing, he just
opens his mouth and out it comes. "I have to lay off the wine and
the spaghetti for a few weeks, lose a little weight, you know, like a
fighter getting into shape, but the voice is always there if you don't
abuse it." For this reason, that to sing is a perfectly natural
thing for him to do, Como's voice shows even less signs of age than his
face. (There is a photograph in one of the Big Band histories showing
Como in the Weems band then and at a reunion now; he looks marginally
more handsome in the second photograph. When I asked him how he did it,
he laughed and said he didn't know what I was talking about.)
Another aspect of his modesty
was his absolute astonishment at the warmth of the welcome he received
on his British tour. (Like our TV interview, it was another First;
difficult as it is to believe, Como had never in his career done a
series of barnstorming concerts before.) He had had to be persuaded to
do the tour at all, because he found it hard to believe there was any
need for his art over here. When finally he came and the tens of
thousands rolled up, giving him gifts and souvenirs, refusing to allow
him to leave the stage, imploring him for just one more encore, rising
to him like a sporting crowd which has just witnessed the breaking of a
world record, he was literally overcome. He told me he had never known anything
remotely like it in fifty years of singing for his supper. There had
even been a short interlude when the heat of the reception he received
at Glasgow induced him to go around with a tam-o'-shanter on his
head.
For all these reasons, the
contents of this album are a fitting consummation
of the heady days of that first British tour. Como actually said to me
that that tour was so happy an occasion for him that he was frightened
to work anymore for fear of an anti-climax to anything. I do hope I am
asked to interview him again sometime. If there is one thing I do enjoy,
it is being made to look good.
Benny Green
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