Song of the Week #165
by Gene de Paul and Sammy Cahn
Starting with the A-B-C of it
Right down to the X-Y-Z of it
Help me solve the mys-te-ree of it
Teach Me Tonight...
Sometimes a news item brings some fragment of song bubbling up from the bottom drawer of your mental filing cabinet, and that's the quatrain that swam into mine when I read that Cherie DeCastro, the last surviving DeCastro Sister, had died. Cherie, Babette and Peggy (plus cousin Olgita, who subbed for Babette and Peggy when, for one reason or another, they'd had enough of the act) were a Cuban Andrews Sisters who showed up in Miami in the 1940s. A talent agent brought them to New York and booked them into the Copacabana, with the Will Mastin Trio, which included Sammy Davis Jr, when he was extremely junior. They had a good run: Introduced by Bob Hope, they performed "Babalu" live at the opening of KTLA, the first television station west of the Mississippi; they opened for Noel Coward at Vegas; and they kept going, in slightly alarming flared pantsuits, through the disco era and surviving as a pop culture allusion to be cited on "The Sopranos" as Tony Soprano's mom's favorite group.
Not a bad career. But my first thought whenever I hear the words "DeCastro Sisters" is always of Sammy Cahn on stage doing his and-then-I-wrote show. By that time, Sammy gave the impression he'd much rather be doing and-then-I-wrote evenings than being back at the office writing anything. He loved audiences, and he went to a lot of trouble to make them happy, and he'd put heart and soul and most other body parts into his showbiz anecdotes, his neck twisting up and down out of his bowtied shirt collar like a retractable corkscrew as he recounted some absurd imposition by a studio executive. A slightly goofy looking Jewish songwriter with a light wispy voice, he always wanted to be Frank Sinatra. Instead, late in life, he became a master raconteur telling stories about songs he'd written for Sinatra, and many others. And the one about "Teach Me Tonight" involved Sammy writing the song, forgetting all about it, hearing months later from his publisher that he'd gotten a record on it, and then enquiring by whom. And upon hearing the answer, he'd clasp his cheeks in near-Munch-like fashion and go, "Not the DeCastro Sisters!" And then the vocal gals accompanying him would start to sing, in sweetly cloying fashion:
Did you say I've got a lot to learn?
Well, don't think I'm trying not to learn
Since this is the perfect spot to learn
Teach Me Tonight...
The "Oh, no! Not the DeCastro Sisters!" line always got a laugh, though I never quite understood why. I mean, the record sold five million copies, which means there must be a lot of people who don't think of the gals as a punchline. I saw him do the show in countries where no one's ever heard of the DeCastro Sisters, and it still got a laugh. Some sister acts are just funnier than others: "Oh, no! The Andrews Sisters!" isn't funny; "Oh, no! The McGuire Sisters!" is kinda funny. But the DeCastro Sisters were surefire (although the McGuires subsequently recorded "Teach Me", and not so long ago Phyllis McGuire re-recorded it with Barry Manilow, which ought to be worth a titter or two).
Sammy Cahn was very kind to me when I was starting out. In Paul Zollo's book of interviews with songwriters from Bob Dylan to Alanis Morrisette, Sammy prefaces some or other observation with, "There's a famous writer in London for one of the big newspapers. His name is Mark Steyn..." He said that to all kinds of people. Actually, I wasn't in the least bit famous, and my newspaper wasn't all that big (The Independent) - I was just a broke loser of no consequence whatsoever - but you'd be surprised how many Hollywood bigshots would go, "Oh, yeah, Sammy Cahn said I should make time for you..."
So I always made time for him. He was supposedly egomaniacal, but I always thought him so in a vaguely parodic sense. He had a vast office in a bungalow on the grounds of his home in Beverly Hills and the length of one entire wall was filled from floor to ceiling with Oscars, gold records, and other awards. "Well," he'd say, beaming. "Wouldn't you?" Lunch in New York or London was always very relaxing, because amidst the anecdotage he did a lot of singing over the soup'n'fish, and adjoining tables seemed to enjoy it, which would usually prompt a couple of encores.
So one lunchtime I asked him about "Teach Me Tonight". It began, as is traditional, with a phone call. Sammy had a good line he liked to use whenever he was asked what came first, the words or the music. "Neither," he'd say. "What comes first is the phone call. Do you think I'm walking around all day dreaming up titles like 'Three Coins In The Fountain'? Do I look like I'm nuts?"
In this case, the phone call was from Ed Traubner, his manager, one day in 1952. The composer Gene de Paul (he's best known for the score of Seven Brides For Seven Brothers) was apparently feeling a little depressed and Traubner thought it might do him some good if Sammy were to write a song with him. "Great!" said Cahn. "So then he'll have something new to be depressed about."
Nevertheless, he called de Paul, and invited him over to his office at 20th Century Fox. And gradually they "worked out" (as Sammy put it) a song. Cahn isn't one to labor a lyric. That means at its best his work has a singable looseness - like "Come Fly With Me", one of Sammy's many contributions to the breezy swingin' Sinatra persona of the Capitol years. At other times, it's loose in a slightly more careless way. One of "Come Fly With Me"'s several sequels, "Come Blow Your Horn", comes on full of ring-a-ding-ding swagger:
Make like a Mister Milquetoast
And you'll get shut out
Make like a Mister Meek
And you'll get cut out
Make like a little lamb
And wham, you're shorn
I tell ya, chum
It's time to Come
Blow Your Horn
Make like a Mister Mumbles
And you're a zero
Make like a Mister Big
They dig a hero...
The middle section's not bad, either:
In civilized jungles
The females adore
The lions who come out swingin'
If you wanna score
Roar!
But Sammy doesn't quite see it through to the end. You get the feeling they had to be in the studio that afternoon, or he had a lunch date, or somebody else called wanting some other song, or he just got to the foot of the page and figured that'll do. The idea's never fully resolved in the way "Come Fly With Me" feels. "Teach Me Tonight" falls somewhere between the two. Once Cahn had got the title and worked out with de Paul where it would fall musically he figured out how to write up to it. De Paul had given him a main theme that called for triple, three-syllable rhymes:
Did you say I've got a lot to learn?
Well, don't think I'm trying not to learn
Since this is the perfect spot to learn
Teach Me Tonight...
So de Paul and Cahn now had their premise. A romantic evening: one's the teacher, the other's the pupil. What next?
Starting with the A-B-C of it
Getting right down to the X-Y-Z of it
Help me solve the mys-te-ree of it
Teach Me Tonight...
Cahn wasn't a composer but he had an instinctive sense about tune shaping. And, if he had a rhythmic or rhyme-heavy main theme, he liked to go for a very broad, legato middle section. When he said he and de Paul "worked out" the song, I would bet this bit involved Sammy standing over the piano demonstrating the line until he heard the notes he was looking for. It's the best part, I think:
The sky's a blackboard high above you
If a shooting star goes by
I'll use that star to write 'I love you'
A thousand times across the sky...
About a decade later, Sammy wrote:
Call Me Irresponsible
Call me unreliable
Throw in undependable, too...
"Notice the five syllable words," he'd say. "Not bad for a guy from a one-syllable neighborhood." Yet in "Teach Me Tonight", despite a musical structure that invites three-syllable words, Cahn eschewed them. Instead of "teachable"/"reachable" rhymes, he opted for "lot to learn"/"not to learn", "C of it/Z of it", and finally:
One thing isn't very clear, my love
Should the teacher stand so near, my love?
Graduation's almost here, my love
Teach Me Tonight!
That was the right decision. A showier lyricist would have filled the text with exhibitionist trisyllabic words that made the song sound too clever to be convincing from a supposedly naive young lover. Sammy's approach was just right.
So now he and Gene de Paul had a song. What to do with it? At the time, Cahn's contract with 20th Century Fox gave the studio a right of first refusal. "So they refused it first," Sammy told me. Then a lot of other people refused it. Eventually Gene de Paul found "some girl nobody knew" to record it. "We sold three copies. He bought one, and I bought one, and she bought one."
A couple of years go by, in the course of which Sammy writes a zillion songs and gives nary a thought to "Teach Me Tonight". And then one day he happens to be over at Dean Martin's when Alan Livingston, executive honcho at Capitol Records (and co-author of "I Tawt I Taw A Puddy Tat" for Tweety Pie), calls up to talk Dino into getting into the studio pronto and doing a cover of some song that's about to break really big.
Having caught one end of the conversation, Sammy waits for Dean to hang up and then asks him the name of the song Livingston's so excited about. "Something called 'Teach Me Tonight'," says Dean. "Great," thinks Sammy. "Not only did my "Teach Me Tonight" sink without trace, but now some other guy's hit on the same title and is gonna have a smash with it."
He went to the local record store to see if he could find a copy. Nothing. Nor at any other store. So he called William B Williams, the host of WNEW's "Make-Believe Ballroom", and asked him if he knew of a record called "Teach Me Tonight". "Sure," said William B. "We're getting a lot of calls on it." Sammy asked him what names appeared between the parantheses under the title? "Cahn-de Paul." And then Sammy asked if the disc-jockey could play it down the phone to him. And that's how he first heard the DeCastro Sisters singing his song:
Did you say I've got a lot to learn?
Well, don't think I'm trying not to learn
Since this is the perfect spot to learn
Teach Me Tonight...
It was on the Abbott label. Have you ever heard a less likely name for a record company? Abbott was a country-&-western label that had decided to diversify. So they signed the DeCastro Sisters and, for their first session, recorded "It's Love" (by Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden and Adolph Green from Wonderful Town) and "Teach Me Tonight". "It's Love" was the up number, so they made that the A-side. "Teach Me" got relegated to the B-side and would have lain there undiscovered had not Bill Randle of WERE in Cleveland concluded "It's Love" was a bore and decided to see what the flip side was like. Randle, by the way, was also the man who made our Song of the Week #139 a hit, when he suggested to Don George that maybe he should do a rewrite of that old folk ballad "The Yellow Rose Of Texas": We forget the difference disc-jockeys made in those days. The DeCastro gals' "Teach Me Tonight" got to Number Two in 1954, and, as noted, sold five million copies. And after that, said Sammy, Gene de Paul was no longer depressed.
Jule Styne, who wrote "Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!" and a ton of other songs with Cahn, once made an interesting observation to me. "The problem with Sammy is that he hears everything in that big band sound," he said, "and that's the only kind of song he wants to write." That's not entirely true, but between the Harry James version of "I've Heard That Song Before" and the Sinatra/Nelson Riddle single of "My Kind Of Town (Chicago Is)" is where Sammy Cahn's happiest. But something slightly unexpected happened with "Teach Me Tonight". Among the instant covers of the DeCastro hit was a version by Dinah Washington, which hit the rhythm'n'blues charts at the end of 1954. It became one of Miss Washington's most enduring records, and it resulted in a lot of later singers covering not so much the song but Dinah's version of it. I once said to Sammy that I had an idea for an album called The Rhythm'n'Blues Side Of Sammy Cahn, which would consist entirely of versions of "Teach Me Tonight" by Etta James, Stevie Wonder, Freda Payne, Al Jarreau, Chaka Khan, Marvin Gaye, etc. He seemed bemused by the idea. If I were proposing it now, I'd throw in Amy Winehouse. The Dinah Washington version has spawned a family tree all of its own. One way to tell if a singer's learned the song from Miss Washington (as Miss Winehouse clearly has) is if he or she sings the second quatrain thus:
Starting with the ABC of it
Roll right down to the XYZ of it
Help me solve the mystery of it
Teach Me Tonight...
That "roll" is the Queen of the Blues' amendment to the lyric, but it shows up everywhere. When Quebec's indestructible vedette Michèle Richard recorded the song a couple of years back, she "rolled" with it: Even francophone pop stars learn it from the Dinah remake.
Not that it wasn't sung in a zillion other styles, too - jazz, folk, cha-cha-cha. But eventually Cahn's pal and favorite singer came a-calling. In 1984, Sinatra was making an album called LA Is My Lady. After the hugely ambitious Trilogy and the dark semi-masterpiece She Shot Me Down, this new set was supposed to be a fun, jazzy collection nobody needed to get too hung up over. Quincy Jones conducting a bunch of great musicians - Lionel Hampton, George Benson, the Brecker Brothers - and jumpin' charts mostly of standards Frank had managed not to get to over the years: "After You've Gone", "Mack The Knife" - and "Teach Me Tonight", arranged by Torrie Zito. Now obviously there's something faintly ridiculous about a man whose conquests include Ava Gardner, Lana Turner, Marilyn Monroe, Lauren Bacall, etc, etc, claiming to be a callow, inexpert swain in need of being taken in hand. So Cahn wrote a second chorus of lyrics just for Frank:
I've played love scenes in a flick or two
And I've also met a chick or two
But I still can learn a trick or two
Teach Me Tonight...
You get the idea: No matter how much you know, in this field there's always something new to learn:
I who thought I knew the score of it
Kinda think I should know more of it
Off the wall, the bed, the floor of it
Teach Me Tonight...
If the appeal of the DeCastro version was that its after-hours teacher/pupil scenario was slightly risque for 1954, thirty years on it's all a bit more explicit - and somehow the premise of the song gets a bit lost. When Cahn returns to the schoolroom scenario for the final eight bars, he kind of blows it, attempting the trisyllabic words he wisely steered clear of back when he wrote the original:
What I need most is post-graduate
What I feel's hard to articulate
If you want me to matriculate
Teach Me Tonight.
"Articulate" rhymes with "matriculate", but neither rhymes with "post-graduate". Did Sammy write that? Or did Frank just blow the lyric? Or did Torrie Zito mistranscribe it? Who knows? But, whoever's to blame, it's not good. Had Cole Porter or Lorenz Hart chanced to be in the control room during the recording session, I like to think they would have begun to - what's the word? - "gesticulate", frantically. Oh, well. With a catalogue like his, Sammy Cahn doesn't need to worry about a bum rhyme here and there.
As for Gene de Paul, "I'll Remember April" and "You Don't Know What Love Is" are gorgeous, classy ballads, but "Teach Me Tonight" racks up far more recordings, year on year. And it all started with the DeCastro Sisters. "Oh, no!"
Oh, yes! As Liza Minnelli sings it:
It's feeling to me
Like the chemistry
Is right
Teach Me Tonight!
