Monday, April 6, 2015

MUSIC: Peggy Lee, "Is That All There Is?" (1969)




One look at her publicity photo and you'd think that butter wouldn't melt in her mouth. Then you might study her eyes, her nose, her mouth and her chin. Ignore the illusion. Here the great Peggy Lee interprets a Leiber and Stoller song, "If that's all there is, my friends, then let's keep dancing, break out the booze and have a ball..."

1 comment:

  1. This comes from those very nice people at Wikipedia:

    "The song was inspired by the 1896 story Disillusionment (Enttäuschung) by Thomas Mann. Jerry Leiber's wife Gaby Rodgers (née Gabrielle Rosenberg) was born in Germany, lived in the Netherlands. She escaped ahead of the Nazis, and settled in Hollywood where she had a brief film career in films noir. Gaby introduced Leiber to the works of Thomas Mann. The narrator in Mann's story tells the same stories of when he was a child. A dramatic adaptation of Mann's story was recorded by Erik Bauserfeld and Bernard Mayes; it was broadcast on San Francisco radio station KPFA in 1964. One difference between the story and the song is that the narrator in Mann's story finally feels free when he sees the sea for the first time and laments for a sea without a horizon. Most of the words used in the song's chorus are taken verbatim from the narrator's words in Mann's story."

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