SPRING CAN REALLY HANG YOU UP THE MOST

Fran Landesman died in London at the weekend at the age of 83, just a few months after her husband Jay took his leave. Fran was a fine if intermittent lyricist, and always great fun. In my book A Song For The Season , I wrote about "Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most", and included a few asides about Fran and the Landesman clan, from which this appreciation is drawn:

Spring this year has got me feeling
Like a horse that never left the post
I lie in my room
Staring up at the ceiling
Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most…

Isn't that just the most? The title has, in one sense, dated, but its retro cool somehow suits the situation, which is why the song seems to get a little bigger every year.

Where did it come from? Well, as you might guess, it's from the jazz world. There's a whole bunch of songs that aren't from Broadway or Hollywood or Tin Pan Alley, but which emerged from clubs in the Fifties, when it was hip to be hep, to quote Dave Frishberg, who, with Bob Dorough and Annie Ross and a handful of others, wrote a lot of the catalogue in what was for a while a thriving sub-genre. In this case, the writers were Tommy Wolf and Fran Landesman. I've known Fran and her husband, and her son, and her nephew, and her ex-daughter-in-law, and her ex-daughter-in-law's girlfriend, and probably a few other members of the Landesman clan at various points over the years. She's one of those people who's the central link in an unlikely global network. But "Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most" dates from the dawn of her career. Fran was born in New York in 1927 and in 1950 moved to St Louis with her husband, Jay Landesman. Jay was one of life's natural hipsters and, although he was supposedly in Missouri to work in the family antiques business, he and his brother Fred wound up opening a club called the Crystal Palace. There, in 1952, sitting at the bar, Fran began writing lyics. She was very taken by a line from T S Eliot:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

What would "April is the cruellest month" be rendered into hep-cat talk? Fran mulled it over and came up with:

Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most.

That's a classic demonstration of Ira Gershwin's rule:

A title
Is vital
Once you've it
Prove it.

So Fran did. She took her title, placed it at the end of the phrase, and proved it – beautifully:

Morning's kiss wakes trees and flowers
And to them I'd like to drink a toast
I walk in the park
Just to kill the lonely hours
Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most...

For the tune, she turned to the piano player at the Crystal Palace, Tommy Wolf. He did a wonderful job: it's a melody full of ache and yearning; it strains to soar, but keeps getting pulled down to earth – way down, in that last deep note on Ella Fitzgerald's recording. One day George Shearing came into the club, heard the song, and asked what it was. They told him, and he took a tape of half-a-dozen songs back to New York with him, and that's why we know "Spring Can Really Hang You Up" today. He gave the Landesman/Wolf tape to Jackie & Roy, who were a terrific duo in the Fifties and looking for material for their new act, and he also gave "Spring" to Jerry Winter, who made the first recording of it, and from there it went to Sarah Vaughan and Betty Carter and then to Bette Midler and Elkie Brooks and Rickie Lee Jones and on to Ann Hampton Callaway and Jane Monheit today. Women love the song; it's not showy, but it's very insinuating:

Love seems sure around the New Year
Now it's April love is just a ghost
Spring arrived on time
Only what became of you, dear?
Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most…

What became of Fran, dear? Her husband, Jay, was a versatile beatnik. By day he was editing a magazine called Neurotica; by night he was running the Crystal Palace, and introducing St Louis to up-and-coming talent such as Woody Allen, Phyllis Diller, the Smothers Brothers, Lenny Bruce, Barbra Streisand, Nichols and May, Stiller and Meara. Jay didn't have Fran's talent, but he was for a while an impresario of talent - in Norman Mailer's words, "the man who started it all", for a bewildering range of people. And somewhere in between his various activities he wrote a roman à clef about his friendship with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. He called it The Nervous Set, and Fran and Tommy Wolf turned it into a musical, and it was a hit in St Louis, and then they took it to Broadway, rubbed a few too many rough edges off, and it didn't do so well, but Richard Rodgers, among others, liked it very much.

By the time I knew the Landesmans, they were living in London. It frustrated Jay that his proximity to fame had brought him so little of it himself, but his ventures into traditional routes to celebrity were ill-starred. For an unimpressed Peter Cook, he once auditioned what he called the first stand-up "subliminal comedy" act. "I'm trying to take the laughter out of comedy," he explained. "Congratulations, Jay," said Peter.Their son Cosmo was a dapper man about town: he's currently the film critic of The Sunday Times, but you wouldn't have been surprised, from the cut of his suit, to hear he was something big in the City. I assumed the bespoke thing arose as a child's rebellion against his parents, who by then were quaintly bohemian. As Cosmo wrote of them:

By the time Flower Power came around, they were in the twilight world of middle-age. Their hair became longer, their dress became wilder, the drugs got stronger and marriage became more experimental. I tried to get them to stay at home more instead of rushing round to pop festivals …and I warned them about the friends they ran around with. The thing that upset me most was their dress and appearance. I can remember when I first thought of having them committed to the Institute for the Criminally Dressed. It was Parents' Day at school. They arrived looking like two hippies who had failed the audition for the musical Hair. Mother wore a purple Afghan coat that from a distance looked like a seasick piece of mutton. She was wearing enough bits of glass beads and jewellery to resemble Brighton beach after a bank holiday rumble. Dad came with his long hair, mirror-lens sun glasses: the pièce de resistance of this visual cacophony was not the orange rudiments of a shirt, but the black plastic trousers. In those days the only people who wore them were industrial workers and the insane. My classmates stared in disbelief as I shrivelled in horror.

Fran and I had a mutual interest in showtunes. So, every so often, they'd call up and we'd go hear Steve Ross at Pizza On The Park or some such, and Cosmo would bring along his wife, Julie Burchill, who's now a ferocious scourge of Islam but back then was running with Toby Young a publication called The Modern Review, to which I occasionally contributed. In London, Julie's loved and hated, but for a punk gal she's very well informed about the pre-Sex Pistols stuff: she gave me one of the sweetest gifts I've ever received – a copy of a long out-of-print autobiography by Sam Coslow, the man who wrote "Cocktails For Two" - and she knew all the funniest anecdotes from it, too. As for Fran, she doesn't have the disdain that a lot of that milieu had for their mainstream predecessors: we once had a long conversation about what a marvelous song Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein's "No One But Me" is. She considered it one of Hammerstein's "wildest" lyrics.

It was never very clear to me quite how they supported themselves. Jay wrote a very groovy memoir - Jay Walking - and they lived in a big if somewhat chaotic house in North London. I said to Fran I liked it a lot and she said none of her old New York pals did. "It's a Jew-proof house," she laughed. "They won't stay here. It's the lack of carpet." Well, maybe. Yet, when I swung by for what I'd assumed was a small drinks party I'd find that, say, Paul Schrader, the director of Cat People and American Gigolo and screenwriter of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, had also dropped by, and there was a big movie crowd there. And then I'd head to New York and bump into them at Broadway openings of plays produced by their nephew, Rocco Landesman, who ran the third biggest group of theatres on the Great White Way and is now Obama's head honcho at the National Endowment for the Arts.

It's quite a trick to be the link between George Shearing and Julie Burchill and Martin Scorsese. My only disappointment was that, by the time I met her, Fran no longer wrote songs. "Spring" and "The Ballad Of The Sad Young Men" and a couple of other Landesman lyrics were still widely sung, but Tommy Wolf had died, relatively young, in the Seventies, and, though Fran had written with Richard Rodney Bennett, Steve Allen (from "The Tonight Show") and a couple of other composers, she'd wearied of the lack of regular access to every good lyric's first requirement: a good tune. "I write poetry now," she told me. "If anyone wants to set them to music, they're welcome." In recent years, a lot of folks have.

But "Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most" belongs in a category all its own. On the Internet, Powerline's Scott Johnson celebrates the song every year round about the vernal equinox, and points out that, if "Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most" descends from "April is the cruellest month", that line in turn descends from Chaucer's "Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote", which puts 600 years of history behind one of the mid-20th century's slow-burn standards. I don't know what we'll be singing in 600 years, but this ballad is for the ages - and is a rare standard with a full second set of lyrics that matches the first:

All alone, the party's over
Old man winter was a gracious host
But when you keep praying
For snow to hide the clover
Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most.

I wouldn't exactly say she was a gracious host, but she was a fun one. Her own choice of epitaph was: "It was a good life, but it wasn't commercial." Cute. But, when I heard she'd died, I went to the piano and plunked my way through an unknown (and thus to date uncommercial) song of hers I especially like - "Photographs", with music by Alec Wilder. A little while back I gave a lead sheet to my friend Monique Fauteux, who was on our Frank Loesser centenary show, and if you happened to be at the Upstairs club in Montreal a couple of years ago you'll have heard Monique give a wonderful and all too rare performance of a Landesman ballad that deserves to be in the standard repertoire. The lyric of "Photographs" is just that - an accumulation of memories, as two old lovers browse through an old photo album:

Here's our house up in Maine
And me, again
I always loved that view
There are lots in this book
How young we look!
That's me in love with you...

Almost everything fades, but, as they do, what remains burns through, ever brighter. That's how it is with "Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most" and and a handful of other Landesman lyrics. Rest in peace, Fran.