Johnny Mathis Has Been Maybe More Important Than We’ve Thought
Frank Sinatra couldn’t stand Mitch Miller and this is why.
When Miller ran A&R (Artists and Repertoire) for Columbia Records in the early 1950s, meaning he essentially dictated who recorded what, he told Sinatra to ditch those creaky old standards and sing the catchy novelty songs Miller was sure the listening and buying audience really wanted.
The first chance Sinatra got, he bolted Columbia for Capitol Records, where he immediately began singing standards again. It worked out okay for him over the next 40 or so years.
Johnny Mathis loved Mitch Miller and this is why.
When Miller ran A&R for Columbia Records in the mid-1950s, he told Mathis to stop trying to become a jazz singer and instead record the smooth romantic pop ballads Miller was sure the listening and buying audience really wanted.
Mathis dutifully cut “Chances Are” and “The Twelfth of Never” and “Wonderful! Wonderful!” and “It’s Not For Me To Say” and “Misty” and over the next 70 or so years, things worked out okay for him, too.
Different strokes for different folks, eh?
When Sinatra died in 1998, his admirer and sometimes-friend Jonathan Schwartz suggested this marked the symbolic musical end of the 20th century.
When Johnny Mathis announced his retirement from public performing last week, it wasn’t quite that apocalyptic. But in its own way, it feels like the end of an era, because he’s quietly made himself a significant part of his musical era.
What sometimes get overlooked when we frame the 1950s as the explosive dawn of rock ’n’ roll, which it was, is that the popular charts were equally packed with catchy pop ballads. While Mitch Miller struck out on rock ’n’ roll, his instincts about catchy pop ballads weren’t wrong.
Even to children of the 1950s who loved rock ’n’ roll, the soundtrack of those years always includes the likes of Nat King Cole, Perry Como, the McGuire Sisters, Connie Francis, the Platters and, yup, Johnny Mathis. If you were a teenager then, you knew someone for whom “Chances Are” was an “our song.”
After the ’50s morphed into the Beatles, Motown and Bob Dylan, Johnny Mathis defied the laws of show biz and kept going. He only had one more №1 hit — a duet of “Too Much, Too Little, Too Late” with Deniece Williams in 1978 — but he placed 70-plus albums on the Billboard charts over the ensuing decades. The 1958 album Johnny’s Greatest Hits stayed on the charts for 490 weeks, which is nine and a half years. He sang pop songs from Fats Waller to “Eleanor Rigby” and standards from “Stardust” to “Lovely Way To Spend An Evening.” He sang lots of Broadway. And of course he was a fixture on the radio every Christmas, starting with “Sleigh Ride” and “Winter Wonderland.”
He also developed a nightclub-style stage show, which meant he could play Vegas or he could play Radio City.
It helped that he insisted he never got tired of the songs that got him there. In a 1998 interview, he talked about how he grew up on the likes of Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney and he just really loved pure pop music.
“I started out as a jazz singer because that’s what [legendary producer] George Avakian wanted me to be,” he said. “But I wasn’t a jazz singer. Fortunately, Mitch took me under his wing, gave me some ballads and the rest is history.”
That history stretched further because right up to the end, Mathis could still sing. He said matter of factly in 1998 that he could no longer hit some of the high notes he could hit 40 years earlier, but that was never the essence of his appeal.
My wife and I went with friends to hear his Christmas show last December. This elicited the inevitable “You mean he’s still alive?” response from other friends, and fortunately the answer was yes, because otherwise it would have been a pretty dull show. The real takeaway was this: The tone and timbre of his voice remained so familiar that, as one of our attendee friends said, you could close your eyes and easily imagine hearing “The Twelfth of Never” on the radio in 1957.
If Johnny Mathis didn’t define an era, the way Sinatra did, he was arguably the last voice standing from a pretty rich time for romantic pop ballads.
Being that this is show biz, none of this success insulated Mathis from personal and professional troubles along the way.
He did time in rehab for both alcohol and prescription drug addiction. He managed to keep it largely on the down-low until 1982 that he was gay, and didn’t formally confirm it until 2017, by which point it was a non-issue. That would not have been the case in 1957.
Musically, the way he straddled the line between Golden Age standards and contemporary pop left a number of critics and radio personalities cautious about exactly how to regard him.
Schwartz, who spent years playing and promoting Golden Age popular standards on New York radio, would not play a Mathis record, even when he was doing a song like “The Way You Look Tonight” that Schwartz would readily play by other artists.
“I don’t like his voice,” Schwartz said. “There’s something about it I just can’t listen to.”
Mathis drew some similar reactions — perhaps not widespread, but out there — with his nightclub act. Those who came to his nightclub shows expecting everything to reflect the pristine purity of his love ballads were at times taken aback by the raunchy banter and jokes.
And then, on a minor and perhaps revealing note, there was Harlem’s Apollo Theater.
Soon after Mathis decided not to try out for the 1956 Melbourne Olympics as a high jumper and instead launched a professional singing career, Bobby Schiffman of the Apollo heard him, loved what he was doing and signed him — still an unknown — to be on an Apollo show after his first record was released.
As Schiffman recounted it, Mathis became extremely nervous about the tough reputation of the Apollo audience, especially since he’d never played to a basically black crowd before.
Not a problem, said Schiffman. The Apollo audience loved him, just as it had loved balladeer Billy Eckstine before. And then, after three shows of the 31 for which Mathis was contracted, he walked out.
Asked about this in 1998, Mathis said it was the format, not the theater or the audience.
“It was like slave labor,” he said. “They wanted you to do five shows a day. You’d finish the last one at midnight and have to be there at 9 or 10 the next morning to start again. It was pretty hectic and I wasn’t having any fun, so I told them I was leaving.
“They had 15 acts on the bill, so I figured no one would miss me. It was just a bad experience.”
As soon as he could, Mathis turned his career into the kind of experience he wanted. He eventually traveled with his own orchestra, and he was a shrewd businessman who parlayed those early hits and his velvet voice into a very comfortable life.
He’s retiring now, he says, because of age and memory problems. His farewell concert will be May 18 at the Bergen PAC in Englewood, New Jersey — a venue that didn’t exist until Johnny Mathis was 69 years old.
Asked in 1998 how he looked back on his career, he said, “I’ve been fortunate to keep a fairly steady course. I haven’t had vocal problems. I do vocal and physical exercises and I’ll sing as long as I’m able. Beverly Sills said it: You go until it just doesn’t sound good any more. When that happens, and I’m no longer having fun, I’ll be the first to know.
”Some nights on the stage, it’s magical. Some nights, it’s another performance. You live for the magical ones.”
