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Johnny Mercer Song of the Day
by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer

This week saw Johnny Mercer's one hundredth birthday, but we're continuing the celebrations to the end of the month here at SteynOnline. You can hear part one of our centenary podcast here, and read my anniversary appreciation here. Plus, as part of our Mercer Month on SteynOnline, you can get my take on Goody Goody, Blues In The Night, Hooray For Hollywood, Midnight Sun, and Autumn Leaves. And for news of non-Steyn anniversary observances, do check out the special Mercer centennial website. Today's Johnny Mercer standard is a classic:

For Frank Sinatra, it was the all-time great saloon song. And for Bill Miller, Frank's longtime accompanist, it was the number that defined the Sinatra style more than any other. Miller played it at Frank’s funeral in 1998, and a few months later, for a concert by Frank Jr, Miller made an unannounced return to the song. The lights were dimmed, the pianist took his seat in the dark, and began the bleary quarter-to-three opening of “One For My Baby”. “The audience let out a gasp,” said Frank Jr. “They were all Sinatra fans and they recognized Bill immediately.”

As well they should. Miller’s barroom piano intro has become part of the song. “One For My Baby” had been around a decade and a half before Bill and Frank claimed it definitively, but, until their version, it had never really broken out to top-rank standard. Fred Astaire introduced it in The Sky’s The Limit, a sluggish 1943 movie in which the star plays a Flying Tigers air ace in love with Joan Leslie. Things aren’t going well by the time he sings “One For My Baby”, in the inevitable barroom setting but with various maudlin flashbacks to happier times. And then, when the bartender refuses to top up the glass and walks out of the room with the bottle, Astaire goes into one of the most frenzied tap dances of his career: no grace, no wit, no playfulness, just driven energy, like a rage you’re trying to purge. And the bartender re-enters, ready to head home, and Astaire shrugs off the frenzied dance with a casual, “Well, that’s how it goes…

And Astaire wants him to know he’s fine for the road: 

Don’t let it be said
Little Fred-
-die can’t carry his load…

It’s not the greatest Astaire routine, but it’s the best thing in the picture. So naturally a theater owner in San Francisco wanted the scene cut because such “wanton description” of alcoholic imbibing during wartime was “extremely distasteful if not unpatriotic”.

Oh, well. Harold Arlen’s tune is what he called one of his tapeworms – not 32 bars, but 58: it has a kind of tipsily meandering unhurried quality just right for the situation. “One For My Baby” is one of those songs everybody thinks is all about the words. And it is a great lyric. What a marvelous conversational opening – “It’s quarter to three…” But it sounds great because Arlen’s deceptively simple piano and the intense chromatic writing show off the words to their very best.

The text is Johnny Mercer, of course. But did you know he wrote it about Judy Garland? They’d been having one of those affairs that are born doomed. And, just as Mercer had finally decided to ask his wife Ginger for a divorce, Walter Winchell came on the radio and announced that Judy had eloped to Vegas with the composer and bandleader David Rose.

You don’t need to know that to appreciate the song – the point of popular music is, as Goethe said, to take the specific and make it universal. But Mercer’s affair colors his approach to the lyric. Garland’s rising star would have been badly dented by revelations of an affair with an older married man, so Mercer was unable to talk about his great lost love - even in a song about getting a load off your chest. Instead, he wrote a song about talking about a lost love that never does actually talk about it:

Sinatra got to it in 1947, and it’s okay. You can tell he likes the song, but it’s like a lot of other stuff he was trying out in that period: he knows something’s in there, but he hasn’t found the key to the door. He knows it’s a guy, it’s a vignette, it's a little noir drama. Axel Stordahl gives him some rinky-dink saloon piano, and Frank whistles into the distance as the number ends. But he hasn’t cracked the code.

A decade later, he did. By then, he’d hooked up with Miller, and they were, musically, inseparable. For Only The Lonely, there were two “One For My Baby”s. On the first night, the band repaired to some little joint and asked Joe to set ’em up, and Bill and Frank stayed behind in the studio and blocked out a terrific intense take of the song. It’s not just Miller’s sensitivity to Sinatra’s phrasing, but the strong harmonic support he provides. The next night they redid it with the Nelson Riddle arrangement – a gossamer hint of strings plus Gus Bivona’s alto. That’s the take they put on the album. But the solo with Miller was the version insiders talked about, and over three decades later Capitol finally released it.

By then it had become a high point of the Sinatra act. He called himself a “saloon singer”, because that’s where he used to sing, in Jersey juke joints and road houses long ago. But, week after week through the Seventies, Eighties and into the Nineties, in some grim rock stadium on the edge of a strip mall in some nondescript suburb, the lights would dim and Sinatra would effortlessly shrink the place to the size of those poky smoky New Jersey saloons of his youth. There were the old props – the tumbler, the cigarette – and the banter about some emblematic long-lost loser whose “chick split, cleaned out his stash and left him with a room full o’ nuthin’ cryin’ into a gallon of Muscatel” – and underneath Bill Miller would begin the tinkly tipsy piano intro and Frank would invite us to “assume the position of the bartender” and listen to the old, old story:

It’s quarter to three
There’s no-one in the place
Except you and me…

The closest relationship of Sinatra’s life was not with any composer or arranger or (for Kitty Kelley fans) mob bosses or First Ladies but with Miller, “my partner at the piano”, as Frank called him. And when they had a falling out for a few years Sinatra closed the book on “One For My Baby”. There were other pianists – Vinnie Falcone – and some things didn’t swing quite like they used to, but they were good enough, and there was new stuff they could use. But “One For My Baby” was special, and so it stayed in the box till Miller returned in the mid-Eighties for “One For My Baby” and one more decade on the road.