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CROONING GLORY
Lenny Kaye writes about moons, spoons, Junes, etc.
BY MIKE MILIARD

On September 2, 1934, nightclub performer and RCA recording artist Russ Columbo, the "Romeo of Radio," was visiting a friend in Hollywood. He sat at the friend’s desk, fiddling absently with an antique dueling pistol while holding an unlit match in his other hand. Somehow, the hammer of the pistol came into contact with the match and sparked it, igniting the gunpowder residue in the barrel. A projectile ricocheted off the opposite wall and entered Columbo’s brain. Emergency surgery couldn’t save him, and he died at age 26. That accident of fate piqued Lenny Kaye’s interest in this short-lived but seminal crooner. He started scrounging around for old fan magazines from the 1930s, and spinning Columbo’s crackly 78s. And before he knew it, he’d written a book, You Call It Madness: The Sensuous Song of the Croon (Villard, $25.95), from which he’ll be reading this Friday at the Art Market Gallery, in Jamaica Plain.

Kaye, best known as the long-time guitarist for the Patti Smith Group, is also a critic and a renowned collector and curator of American popular music. (He compiled the legendary Nuggets box set, which rescued countless mid-’60s garage-rock classics from bargain-bin obscurity.) But this book — which focuses on three disparate singers: Columbo, Rudy Vallée, and Bing Crosby — found him digging deeper into this country’s musical past than even he was used to. "It was a really fun trip that I was surprised to find myself in," Kaye says over the phone from the Poconos. "As I entered the world of the ’30s, I got more and more fascinated with it. I almost see it as the jumping-off point for the 20th century. It was a time when the last of the 19th century was just about out of everybody’s system."

As the roaring ’20s crashed to a halt and the Great Depression set in, folks weren’t really much in the mood for hot jazz or the Lindy hop anymore. They wanted music that was more subdued, a bit melancholic. At the same time, innovations in microphone technology and recording techniques meant singers no longer had to holler into a tinny bullhorn. Enter the crooner. Their slow and sensual songs set a mellow mood — and the growth of radio brought the delicate shadings and inflections of their smooth baritones into the living rooms of millions. It’s not much of a leap from Bing Crosby to Elvis Presley, Kaye argues, and thence to the rest of rock and roll.

Kaye allows that crooning might seem like an odd topic for someone who made his name as a proto-punk pioneer. But, he says, "The most fun thing for me was to find out that these characters, who I always regarded as grandfatherly and staid, like Bing Crosby or Rudy Vallée, were quite the hellions. There was a lot of scandal and a lot of roaring good times ... to see them as innovators, and as wild animals, was eye-opening — or ear-opening."

You Call It Madness is written in a dense, evocative, sometimes experimental style reminiscent of beat poetry and spoken-word performance. "I wrote it musically, tried to make sure the phrases had a kind of rhythm and melody to them," Kaye says. Take, for example, the poetic undulations of this sentence: "He spoke the romance of Latin, the language of chimera; as in Latin Lover. The Romeo of Song: wherefore art the next Valentino?" Later, Kaye describes Columbo, dapper and debonair, with precise, haiku-like clarity: "A pinkie ring. A tuxedo and bow tie. Hair a smooth black sheen brushing backward. He is sleek, like a seal coat."

Kaye plans to croon some lyrics himself as a "show and tell" to accompany his reading. "It’s just gonna be me with a guitar, trying to channel the shades of these long-lost crooners," he says. "At bottom, these songs are just beautiful. [Crosby’s] ‘Where the Blue of the Night (Meets the Gold of the Day)’ is one of the most beautiful songs ever written. And it’s such a joy to sing it."

Lenny Kaye reads and performs this Friday, November 19 at the Art Market Gallery, 36 South Street, in Jamaica Plain. Call (617) 522-1729.


Issue Date: November 19 - 25, 2004
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