by Alan Herrick
I am all for the new revival and the current popularity of lounge music that's for sure. It may very well be due to the fact that now when I have a party I can put on cheesy lounge albums, sip my cocktail, and entertain my friends and no one will say, "What the hell are you listening to...turn it off...do you have anything that rocks." Now that lounge is hip I can rest much easier. The appeal of the lounge revival has many facets. For the past 15 years or so my generation has been crowding into overstuffed clubs so we can stand there, hold a bottle of beer and watch some wanna-be rock artists as they beg and plead to their audience and any record company reps who happen to be watching to glorify and popularize them and make them stars so they can rocket up to fame and spiral downwards into the dark chasm of drug addiction, hotel room thrashing, lawsuits, or best yet suicide. Now, these fifteen years were not without their charm. There have been a few diamonds in the rough, very few, that have stood out from the "anyone can play guitar and write a rock tune" masses. We have also been given ample opportunity to chuckle repeatedly throughout many an evening as our legs go numb during the two hour standing stints sipping at that $4.00+ bottle of beer.
For years I have loved lounge music.....the good...the bad...and most of all the ugly. Martin Denny is all well and good but the true cheese factor and aural stimulation comes from masterminds of production such as Ray Conniff or Esquival. Drop the needle down on one of those old Ray Conniff albums and the depth, warmth, and the sensually sweet tones of his singers fill your room. No one produced records this well and I will take on any argument that states differently with a vengenace. This eargasm could be purchased for a mere 10 cents at your local thrift store or garage sale. NOW.....all that has changed. Those lounge albums that littered the bins in the local record stores and thrift stores are all but extinct in the current wave of lounge popularity. What really hurts is walking into a major record store chain only to see those old classics rereleased on CD, displayed next to the coolest trip hop and techno CD releases with that good old $15 price tag on them. My mind just reels.
I am not sure that purchasing lounge music on a reissue CD is the best. I am not even sure that it is as satisfying as purchasing those 10 cent records at the thrift store. The records had a soul that the new CD reissues do not. Each record sleeve graced with a beautiful woman, powdery white skin, wide hips, and impeccable 50's-style makeup told its own story. When you pull one of those records out of the bin it's history unravels before your third eye. The slightly moldy smell of the cardboard, the water stain ring where someone had set their highball glass down on the record sleeve...this is what the lounge music purchasing experience is all about.
Who set that highball glass down on the record sleeve? Well, you may not want to face some of these facts. Swinging Sounds for Hi-Fi Living!! Hi-Fi Bachelor Pad Music!! Wait a minute! Those swingers, those hi-fi bachelors, those wide hipped, powdery white, torpedoe braed women - they were our parents! Arrrrrgh! The revival of this music could possibly let loose a vast army of skeletons from the old family closet. These thoughts are much scarier than those associated with the disco revival. A lot of us remember older brothers and sisters donning their disco garb, as ridiculous as it was, running around enjoying the sexual revolution, snorting too much coke, dating the guy or gal your parents didn't approve of, staying out too late and eventually pulling out of it all to have kids and work 9-5 for Corporate America. Harmless enough?
When we think back to the roots of the cheesiest of the lounge music we have to keep in mind that this all came about as entertainment for our parents (now I am talking about those of us over 25). Our parents were living through the Jam Handy media onslaught, the promise of the kitchen of the future, the vision of automated freeway systems, the dawn of the electric can opener. The world was advancing technologically by leaps and bounds. Our parents were digging in, finding their place in the world. While the citizens of this Hi-Fi world a few years older than them were settling into the suburban bliss of white picket fences and nuclear families. Those that were single adopted the lounge lifestyle, listened to their favorite Martin Denny album, sipped cocktails and glanced out across the neighborhood smirking at the surrounding families as they dug their bomb shelters and stocked up on freeze dried food in the shadow of the Red Menace's threat.
Without consulting vast volumes of historical reference with regard to lounge music we can assume some very simple facts rather comfortably. To do this we should examine three very distinct items ifd we want to scare ourselves sufficiently. Where were most lounges? Who went to most lounges? What happened in most lounges?
The most popular of today's newest lounge acts don't really follow in the tradition of the live lounge acts of the past. Here in San Francisco we are frequently treated to fine lounge, swing jazz and the like in such pleasant venues as Cafe du Nord, Bimbos, Deluxe, or Brunos. Each of these locales is finely decorated and pleasantly staffed. Many of the earliest lounges were dens of iniquity attached conveniently to Holiday Inns, dusty grimy motels, and local bowling alleys. I have yet to see an ad for Combustible Edison performing at a Holiday Inn lounge off in the San Francisco suburbs.
Gathered in these lounges across America was an unlikely assortment of seedy characters - large groups of men in fez's gathered for the weekly lodge meeting, their mistresses kept secret from the wife, as well as traveling salesmen who were behaviorally accountable to no one as they were only in this town, in this lounge, for 3 or 4 days at the most. Scattered in this mix were the singles, the swingers, the hi-fi bachelors and bachelorettes, sipping martinis and clouding their judgement, dancing wildly, and placing the stresses of "keeping up with the Jones's" on a toothpick and soaking it in a fine gin. It is no wonder these individuals were the spawn of the disco generation. Is it possible that our parents could have been these flammably intoxicated, sexually reckless, participants heavily involved in weekly rituals of donning Hawaian shirts, cowboy hats, tafita, and stylishly gaudy suits? - Um - Yes?
Next time you do manage to find that old Esquival album in a thrift store bin, take a good look at that stain on the cover from the highball glass. Soak it up, learn every detail of it. That highball glass stain is as much an integral part of your parent's past as the shake from cleaning seeds out of bad brown Colombian marijuana nestled tightly in the crease of that gatefold Pink Floyd album cover is to ours. Give your parents a hearty smile and a firm handshake the next time you see them and thank them for passing down such a fine and delightful lifestyle from their generation to yours. At least you have somewhere to take your parents when they come to town to visit. Maybe they will look past all of those tattoos and the hardware stuck in the faces of you and your peers and feel more at ease because you are enjoying something they enjoyed in their past. Then again it could remind them of how seedy their pasts were and make them worry about you even more. Its your call......All I have to do is wonder what our children will write about when their generation resurrects a questionable media form from our past.
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