Those who follow this column will have understood that I really like concept albums, those albums that have a precise thread that binds one song to another. It is a concept today perhaps a bit dusty, perhaps associated with progressive rock, but in reality it dates back to a long time before, in the 1940s, the years of the birth of long playing itself. In the pre rock’n’roll era, any singer recital had to be a “concept album”: Christmas songs, songs about spring, songs about alcohol, about sports, about travel, about the beginning of a love, about the end of a love, about the absence of love … in short, any excuse was good to put together an imaginative program, possibly with a cover with beautiful vivid colors, perhaps made by some famous illustrator of the movie posters.
When, in the mid-1950s, composer and arranger Gordon Jenkins (1910-1984) began to put together a micro-musical called The letter doesn’t have Judy Garland in mind yet. Her idea is to describe, on the two sides of an LP, a modern love story in New York. Against the backdrop of Greenwich village and its premises, a young couple meets each other and pours out their feelings in a letter on a rich orchestral background. Side A was supposed to be his letter and side B her answer.
Jenkins’ career in those years was going very well: it is the name on which all the great singers of the time counted for having the richest and most sumptuous orchestral arrangements. People like Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, the Andrews Sisters and Frank Sinatra have great successes thanks to her musical direction. In the thirties, Judy Garland, still very young, was also directed by him for a radio special. But above all Garland records with him, in 1957, what is considered the best studio album of her discography: Alone. Listen here Little girl blue: Garland’s personal life is already falling apart and his now famous substance addiction problems are all there, but his voice is still intact and the harmony with the Jenkins orchestra is miraculous. When Capitol, Garland’s label, finds out that Jenkins is working on The letter suggests that he make an album expressly written for Judy Garland. Jenkins throws away all the work done and rewrites his micro-musical from the girl’s point of view, and begins rehearsals on the piano right at the diva’s house.
Now there are no longer two letters but only one: that of him that is read by the perhaps too impassive and robotic voice of the actor John Ireland. The music instead goes all to Judy, who through ten simply perfect musical numbers comments on the various stages of her love story with this gentleman who, compared to her, can only seem terribly dull. The two get to know each other in the Village and the spark is immediately struck, as in the best romantic comedies of those years. He writes that meeting her was on the 4th of July (fireworks) and Christmas morning (the irrepressible joy of a child), and she replies with Beautiful trouble, in which he says he understood that he is in trouble but in the end he hopes to end up more and more. The two lovers kiss for the first time under the Washington square arch, which seems not to be wide enough to contain their enthusiasm. The album is recorded all live with the orchestra and a small choir in the studios of the Capitol Records tower in Los Angeles in just two days. The only ones overdub there are some traffic noises and the ambient sounds of a club, all the rest is recorded live as it was then. Arriving at the kissing scene, Garland, to make it more realistic also on record, approaches Ireland and really kisses him in front of the astonished eyes of the orchestra. Gordon Jenkins, recalling that moment, thinks that the one between his two artists was the only real kiss ever captured on record. Who knows if it’s true: surely in the next fifty years on record orgasms of all kinds, real or simulated, have been captured.
Each musical number is a picture. When the couple take refuge at Rick’s, their secret spot in the Village, a band is playing the blues. In the background, you can hear the voice of Charlie LaVere, a jazz pianist very close to Jenkins and at the time musical director of the Horseshoe at Disneyland. The couple flirts while LaVere sings his song (Charlie’s blues) and in Garland’s slightly harsh voice you hear that something is starting to go wrong between the two. Already in the second side of the album, things turn for the worst, with the extraordinary That’s all there is, there isn’t anymore. But she has already moved out of town. What better metaphor for the end of a youthful love than escaping New York? Garland reads his letter from a house in the suburbs that we imagine as neat and tidy like those in some 1950s ads but devoid of joy. Between the lines we read that New York (the cumbersome third wheel in this love story) is also changing. Rick’s has closed “its magic door” and the neighborhood is changing face. Evidently gentrification was already a problem in 1959.
He walks alone in Central Park and keeps thinking about her. When he describes a little girl with a red balloon, Garland responds with one of the best songs on the album, The red balloon, in which those who listen today cannot help but hear her true voice, that of the former child star, chipped by bitterness and disillusionment. Vocally Judy Garland has never been this fit, but there is that something beginning to meander in her voice that here she painfully pushes up, like the balloon escaping from the little girl’s fingers. The tone, however, changes immediately, listen The letter it’s really a roller coaster ride, and we relive a fight between them that takes on decidedly comic and kitschy contours: the problem seems to be her hat so he asks if it wasn’t Halloween.
Between ups and downs we arrive at the happy ending. In the middle of the quiet suburban evening, heralded by a drum roll, a phone call comes and Judy replies, “Oh yes, yes, yes” to a blaze of orchestra and choirs from the celestial spheres. With those yeses, those almost sobbing yeses, it all ends, on a note that should be joyful but that can’t hide the dull pain of the real person who utters them. The greatness of the mature Judy Garland is all here: even on a bright and romantic canvas like The letter his voice is marked by a shadow and that something elusive and disturbing reaches everyone. Even today, after more than sixty years.
The recording sessions of The letter they finished around midnight on January 16, 1959. Jenkins remembers the whole orchestra standing up to applaud Judy Garland and the other performers. Just like at the theater, except they were all locked in a Los Angeles recording studio late at night.
One last curiosity for album fetishists: the first edition of The letter (recorded in mono) came with an envelope glued on the cover with a folded sheet inside with the full text of the letter that is read on the disc.
Judy Garland
The letter
Capitol, 1959