by E.A. Radke
What to say of his controlled reach? An instrument that would rise alongside the voices of R&B, Doo-Wop, Rock and Roll, and a Gospel sect conversion into Soul. The male register was lifting in the fifties and John Royce was taking an operatic range and controlled vibrato obtained and exchanged for house chores where no crooner of the day dared. Popular male singers content to lay at a far lower and less expressive range just right for Ike status quo. Under the guidance of impresario Mitch Miller, Johnny Mathis would tear gracefully and ascend vocally from the tether known to his supposed genre and gender.
What to say of his controlled reach? An instrument that would rise alongside the voices of R&B, Doo-Wop, Rock and Roll, and a Gospel sect conversion into Soul. The male register was lifting in the fifties and John Royce was taking an operatic range and controlled vibrato obtained and exchanged for house chores where no crooner of the day dared. Popular male singers content to lay at a far lower and less expressive range just right for Ike status quo. Under the guidance of impresario Mitch Miller, Johnny Mathis would tear gracefully and ascend vocally from the tether known to his supposed genre and gender.
After he had
his way with the Christmas album, everyone that followed was merely cashing in.
My ears were young, and though I’d be off on countless, future occasion on this
point I stood correct at four feet and
rising. He came to my attention first,
like many in childhood by way of the Merry Christmas album. Awed out horse
drawn in a jingle fitted siren transport, cutting through a wonderland of white
and back with a voice thicker than the fog, and warmer than the brandy or
hearth side later past the silver bells
and ivy-snaked railings, you’d curl back down beside the pop, pop, pop and glow
of flames. Pegging Lite-Brite configurations in the darkened parlor lit only by
the decked out artificial fir that waited for its month or so of glory. Exhumed
from the dormant in the closet under the stairs, packed in the desiccant of
mothballs and cold concrete. The tree was erected religiously just prior to the
Boston Globe Christmas party organized by my father. Come the twelfth of
December, the Chairman reigned with hierarchy of our household. Perhaps
Sinatra’s voice was one of a tiny handful of points on which this embittered
couple agreed. For my brother, the significance of Mathis is contained
completely in that recording jacketed with Johnny on the cover. His poles
clutched in his left, skis in his right for the moment instead of a hat and
gloves. John’s holiday offerings were but a small portion of his legend.
Mathis now the upstart and Sinatra for a younger
generation would make the charts of the late fifties his primary address. The
first of its kind, Greatest Hits unveiled in 1957 ( of which maybe one song
showed up as an outtake on some previous album) would take up a 490 week
residence in the Billboard Album Chart a feat matched and bested once by Floyd’s Dark Side. A collection so stellar,
so Wonderful, Wonderful, filled with Chances Are, It’s Not For me To Say, When
Sunny Gets Blue (mum’s favorite), When I Am With You, When I Look At You, a
windy wild aural reward tapped out on some Twelfth Of Never. Festooned with a
Neptune Wooden Angel choir at the prow. Ellis and Coniff sails catching the
wind as Johnny’s strings pull and commandeer
this ship through an odyssey eternal.
For me the fascination would lie dormant with that
tree, until chapter two came upon the Spring of 1994. Many walks past the
record stack and those two legendary covers. Johnny’s bust against gold leaf,
or arms spread out on a gate against the skyline and him decked in
monochromatic white polo and khakis in the cumulus strata. This cool bright of
April I pulled a low-fi version of his
Greatest Hits. Face to face, left to right, radio to hi-fi speaker, record to
cassette, years before the technology improved by way of a direct patch.
Bicycling through the campsite and the Duraflame, more rustic waft the levels
and pops diminished in the transfer but not the effect. A second season fourth
month match and usurp at work, December no longer the only place his voice
belonged.
With the belief
memory hasn’t failed to produce anything prior and between (perhaps there was
another minor exploration in 2000) phase three of Mathis arrives in’05 mid to
late February. During a weekend of song structure experimentation, tiny scenes
of cinema and sleep deprivation my friend
in the gold glint of the blue and white banks visited a record store. A
bargain bin Greatest Hits cassette went back in to heavy spin. One evening my
father, Sinatra incarnate, gave When Sunny Gets Blue an Ol’ Blue Eyes render at
Marshfield karaoke venue. Including the two djs we were among four performers playing to a house of disinterested staff. I
recall Johnny playing between the Smiths by day and blazing discovery of Donnie
Hathaway by night.
Two thousand seven recently removed from the mild
sultry of a friendship turned romance, with
O.C.D., erosion, etched hands, I turned to an encore performance on
P.B.S. With March Madness in mid-tourney, hope muted but Spring and the
darkness still in approach, I watched Johnny roll through his “Big Three”. But
it was Wonderful, Wonderful that began its first notch in me.
On many a car ride, and between the years of ten and twelve, many of
Johnny’s numbers would prominently
stand and feature on the lady’s and my
own mix compilation, with artists of decades often more recent. Her father old
enough to be the son of my father was a fan as well. Emerging from the album
that produced by many accounts Mathis’ most towering and crowned accomplishment
Misty, came the title track and a new argued favorite. Heavenly would catapult
Johnny, as guesses go, and my life in to depths and altitudes my life had never
by my own hands been prepared to be thrown.
Then came the year to obliterate all contenders. Two
thousand fifteen would have stood out in a sea of mini-Greek tragedies. Two
months in to a romance that sprang in the last days of all months April, into a
union blessed, passing in to May came Johnny again and the magnificence of the
Bacharach penned Heavenly. It was one of two cassettes to feature this tune.
Often I tried to inspire and lift the rising action from the piece into my own
work. At a Dunkin Donuts on the north side of the Sagamore between drinking
hours in went the cassette. While I was dealing out a double chute of pain in
multiple directions I was facing what
might be the crush of reality on this affair to end all affairs. Johnny’s voice
drawing out the tears I felt and imagined from eyes other than mine. Being
drawn and halved his voice was the culmination of innocence in this blessed
prophet of child, the warm and tender of a God-empress, best confidant, wife,
friend and mother, and a soul-muse that
drew from elements past into an amalgamation of passion incomparable. On the
12th of May my consumptions led to broken glass and a three week sentence of
incarceration trying to pass for rehab. Johnny’s voice again played in the
prison courtyard. The stroll on the Yarmouth Beach pitched to Wonderful,
Wonderful. The Heavenly lift in the soft
sun-drenched cloud canopy of May and a water tower visible over the barbwire
that beset on all sides this amorous connection. Her pledge in penned scripture
and the constant play of that tape in my absence until “the Twelfth Of Never”
don’t forget”.
So Johnny still haunts and chills in this aftermath
through five of my seven stages, in the steps that rise toward the sky of
ceiling every, morning, afternoon and night.
In one voice, the longing, comfort and the wonder.
