The Stages With Mathis

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. 

 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.