This is a busy night, right?
It's like that every Monday. I don't know where they come from! It's all of a sudden. At 6:30 there's nobody here, and by 7:00, you can't get in.
That's a good thing, because Monday nights are hard for restaurants.
I worked here last night. We did 22 dinners I think, and I was here from 5 to 9. It was terrible. We probably did 80 tonight, and drinks. I was so out of breath. When I start off, I run around. But then I forget I have to sing, and you can't sing when you're out of breath.
So how does Madonna do it? Oh, wait, it's all lip-synced. Never mind![laughter]
I was in a show here in town called the Follies many years ago, and everybody except me was all pre-recorded. I told the guy that I didn't want to pre-record. I want to sing live. He said, "Well, no... you're going to be dancing." And I said, "I don't care. I don't want to mouth it, because it's so phony."
People can tell. They just look at you and know right away. You're obviously very entertaining.
I'm charismatic, that's the word. You know what they said to me last week? "You are so sick!" I thought, "Oh my god, they must know that I just got over bronchitis." Apparently sick means you're really good. I didn't know that. [laughter]
It always changes.
Or when they say, "You're the bomb." In my day, if you bombed, you were dreadful.
You're an entertainer and a performer, but when was the first time that you ever stepped into a recording studio?
When I was in college I was in a show in New York City. I went to Finch, and we were doing a show called Finch Follies, or whatever it was called in those days. I sang "Birth of the Blues" and "Mama Done Told Me." We had to record it because they knew they were going to sell them. I wish I could have that album.
That's out there somewhere?
It was 1956, Finch College in New York.
A sort of college recital type album?
Yeah. Because it was New York, we had a little theatre that we did the show in, and they sold the album after the show. That was the first time that I went into a real recording studio. It was a trio with piano, bass, and drums. Then the next time I did it was probably in the early '60s. I was working with a pianist named Peter Daniels. He ended up marrying Lainie Kazan, who was also Barbra's [Streisand] accompanist at the Bon Soir. He was my vocal coach and pianist. He wanted me to record a couple of songs that he had written, so I did that. That was just with him. Then, with "See the Cheetah," I was probably...I was very young.
Were you about 20 or 21?
Yeah, I was very young. I was with William Morris, a very big agency in New York. They set me up with a guy named Sy Shaffer who was an orchestra leader. I went into his studio and told him I was a singer. He said that they would give me a couple of songs to make demos, because the writers wanted to present these songs to famous singers who would record them.
Hopefully!
I said, "Okay, yeah." So I went in the studio. Now, in those days, it wasn't that the orchestra came and played first and then you sang over it. Everybody did it together.
You were on the spot.
He was a bastard. He wanted it right the first time. I think they had given me the music a few days before; but I sight-read, so it was no problem.
I was going to ask you if you sight-read on jobs like that.
Yes. I learned at the American Theatre Wing; they had a course on that. That was in 1957. Anyway, there was a big orchestra. He was in a booth leading me on when to come in, and when not to, because there was a very long introduction...
Like 16 bars, or something like that.
It's a very long introduction. So anyway, I sang, and I was not happy with it. It ["See The Cheetah"] wasn't in my key! I'm an alto, and he had me sing it very high. He didn't want it so much for how I sounded as much as he wanted for someone else to hear it and sing it.
He planned to present it to someone who was going to sing it as a soprano.
Right. So I did it. There was also another one, which I don't think I ever found, called "There Are No Words." It's another good one. I think it was written by the same guy who wrote "See the Cheetah." But I don't know what ever happened to that one. Then he had me sing, "My Funny Valentine." I can't remember what the fourth cover was.
Why would he have you sing "My Funny Valentine" if he didn't write it?
I don't know why he had me do that one. Maybe he liked me after all that! Who knows? But he was a much older man, and I was a kid. What was interesting was, as I got older and recorded for Spiral Records, they would record the music first. Then I would go to the studio and put on the headphones to sing over it.
Right, it's a whole different process.
I liked it much better when I sang live. There's something about having the orchestra right there. It's like being on Broadway.
Your main album was A Woman Starting Out All Over Again.
Those songs were written by a friend of mine named Richard DeMone. We had worked together in New York. I'd bought a bar [The Pied Piper] in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and I invited him to come and play there. I sang a bunch of his songs at the bar, and we decided to go into a recording studio in Boston and record his work.
[ listen-link ]
I remember hearing that you had a female engineer on the session. That was pretty rare then.
Karen Kane. They were all in the musical school at Boston U, or one of those places, so it was like their first time too.
Well, it sounds damn good!
Richard not only played piano, but also a couple of other instruments as well. He did all the orchestration. He's very talented. He lives in Florida now and has retired.
Those are all songs that he'd written?
