Newsweek: Both you and Mr. Kimball are native New Yorkers. Does this have something to do with your fondness for classic pop music? Robert Gottlieb: I think it’s more important that both Bob and I grew up with a piano in the house and a mother who played it while everyone sat around and sang. Everyone had sheet music and songbooks then, and of course there was radio. As New Yorkers, both of us started going to the theater at an early age and saw a lot of musicals early on. So I’ve been fascinated with pop music all my life, through the ’70s anyway. And my interest became revitalized with the jazz anthology I did recently, so Bob and I decided to do this.
How did you work together? I have a vast record collection of works from Vaudeville, Broadway musicals and movies. And I’m always up late at night, so, over a period of weeks, I’d listen to scores of records, take notes, then Robert would come over and we’d go through fifty or sixty things that we liked. He had many songbooks and we looked at those and slowly songs got chosen. Then we realized that we were talking about lyricists as well as lyrics.We gave them brief biographies and arranged them chronologically.
Any surprises? Oh yes, for both of us. We found often that we’d heard of the song and we’d heard of the lyricist, but had never connected them. Peggy Lee is a great singer, everyone knows that, and everyone knows that she wrote some songs. But I had no idea how many were good–and the variety–this woman really was a writer! Same with Johnny Burke. I knew the songs, but I didn’t know they were his. Gus Kahn! What a substantial body of work that was, how simple and perfect. It’s not brilliance…it’s just there. Anyone who reads the book will discover new connections for themselves. You can suddenly see where Dorothy Fields’s place is, and Andy Razaf’s. Anyone can walk through this now and, while some might disagree with some of our choices, see what was accomplished by these people. Singers like Mary Cleere Haran and Suzannah McCorkle have already told Bob about how it’s begun replenishing cabaret. Another surprise is how the book took on a kind of historical sociological subtext. This music is an amazing art form; it’s a substantial cultural phenomonon. As usual with America in the 20th century, it’s the great popular art that has survived–early jazz, music from the golden age of movies. These are the things that America uniquely produced.
Why begin in 1900? We found that the vernacularization of American song began around 1900 with George M. Cohen and Irving Berlin. American writers had their ears to the ground, they picked up on the phrases that were around and this was clever and new compared to the big hits of the end of the 19th century like “Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage.” This type of songwriting evolved into a very complicated craft. It had melody and rhyme and wit. These days, wit has more or less absented itself.
Why stop at 1975? We were going to end it in 1970, but then realized that there were a number of strong musicals [including Sondheim’s “Follies”] that were written from 1970 to 1975. So the book’s span became three quarters of a century. After that you find “Phantom of the Opera.” What happened in the ’70s was that most musicals swung back to operetta and the songs and their lyrics were not distinctive. We don’t say that there hasn’t been good stuff since then, but one of the tests we had was that our choices had withstood time, survived a minimum of 25 years. You can’t tell yet with something written three years ago.
Presenting lyrics all by themselves, almost as poetry, seems like a simple idea. Yes! One would think anybody could have done this. But there is a reason there has never been such a book. It was very complicated and diffcult to get permissions. It was really hard. The only reason it was possible for us to go ahead is that we went to Jay Morgenstern of Warner/Chappell, which is by far the biggest of the music publishers. He liked what we wanted to do and knew we only had modest money. When others heard that Warner/Chappell was on board, most worked with us for the same low fee. With some of course we had to do extra convincing, seducing, charming. But no song that we wanted got away from us.
Do you have a favorite lyric? There are just so many. It’s like betraying the others to pick one. I can’t even say I have a favorite among the lyricists. I happen to love “These Foolish Things” for many reasons. [“A cigarette that bears a lipstick’s traces/An airline ticket to romantic places…”] It just strikes my fancy. But I’ve found the moment you’re listening to a great singer, that’s your favorite song!
