The following article appeared in
New York Press the week of December 27, 1995:The Too Many Sides of Bobby Darin
By Dawn Eden
"Not to denigrate other artists," Dodd Darin says of his father, "but other people of that early-Sixties era, they just faded, because they really were kind of homogenized. This artist, my dad, was different. He came from the gut. Because he didn't have a great voice, he didn't have Fabian or Presley's looks. But what he had was the desire and charisma and talent. When you saw him on the stage, he was ten feet tall. All that came through in the music."
Rhino's long-awaited Bobby Darin boxed set is called As Long As I'm Singing: The Bobby Darin Collection. If they'd asked me, it would be Bobby Darin: Too F---ing Cool For You.
You groan. Rhino hears you. If anything, they overprepared for the naysayers. If you subtracted all the defensiveness from the box's 60-page booklet, the remaining text would fit on the inside of the box itself. This, despite the fact that anyone willing to buy a collection of 96 Bobby Darin songs probably doesn't need to be convinced of the artist's worth.
Admittedly, in this modern age, it takes more than the average amount of cultural literacy to appreciate Bobby Darin. For starters, he had the misfortune to be named "Bobby" in an era when the name was synonymous with seemingly pre-fabricated, post-Elvis popsters; Rydell, Vee, ad infinitum. And, during those Elvis-in-the-Army years, when rock desperately needed a savior, Darin switched over to an adult cabaret act.
True, his 1966 recording of Tim Hardin's "If I Were A Carpenter" earned him some grudging hipster respect, if ony because it insured that Hardin would no longer have to worry where his next meal was coming from. But even then Darin couldn't pry himself away from from the middle of the road. Eight months after his album If I Were A Carpenter came Bobby Darin Sings Doctor Dolittle, which he made against the wishes of everyone close to him, including even his record label. If his rock'n'roll credibility wasn't shot by then, it was by '68. That was when, sporting a freshly-grown mustache, he went full-steam into the singer-songwriter bag—two years after it was fashionable. Shortening his name to "Bob" didn't help.
Less than two years later, when he reverted to 'Bobby,' taking his tux and Vegas schtick out of mothballs, there was general snickering. They couldn't have known that he was doing it largely so that, in his words, he "wouldn't have to wait in line for medical treatment." His longstanding heart condition caught up with him soon afterward; he died in '73.
In the Tin Pan Alley Fifties, the maxim was it's the song and not the singer; by the '60s, a performer was supposed to have his own artistic and political integrity. As Long As I'm Singing demonstrates that, while Darin's musical heart was most closely tied with Tin Pan Alley—even his folk/protest compositions are tightly structured—as an artist he was determinedly modern, with an eye on the integrity of his entire oeuvre. (Listening to the ironic, self-parodying ad libs he stuck in old-time songs like "How About You", you may find him a bit postmodern as well.) What seemed like trendy style-shifts were in fact genuine stages in Darin's artistic development. It was only during the three years before his death that he found a way to successfully integrate all of those apparently conflicting sides into his stage persona. The result was strange, to say the least—the same man who belted "Beyond The Sea" ending his Vegas set with "Simple Song Of Freedom"—but the strength of his convictions held it all together.
Dodd Darin has written a book about his father's ill-fated marriage to Dodd's mom, Sandra Dee, called Dream Lovers (Warner Books). By telephone from his Los Angeles home, he offers a perspective on his father's personality that's reflected in his career. "One thing that's important to know is that he never forgot where he came from; poverty, the Bronx, and real medical problems. This is the person who overheard a physician tell his mother that he would not live to be 16. So he never forgot where he was from. He was always equally comfortable with Louie and Nicky on the corner as he was with Princess Grace at a Monaco ball, and that came through in the music. That was real, and that's not something you can manufacture."
As Long As I'm Singing goes some way to demonstrate what Darin fans have been saying for years: everything the man attempted, he mastered. His own songs like "Dream Lover" (an unreleased demo appears here) show that he knew how to write a heartfelt rock ballad on the order of Buddy Holly and Ricky Nelson. (Nelson in fact did a hit cover of "Dream Lover" a few years after Darin's death.) Other originals like "When I Get Home" (a hit for the Searchers) show what a debt British beatsters owed him. On the two discs of pop tunes, tracks like the fantastic unreleased live version of "My Funny Valentine" show how ahead of his time he was, presaging big-band efforts by the likes of Harry Nilsson and even Tom Waits.
I tell Dodd about a friend of mine who saw his father in June 1960 at NYC's Copa (then the leading nightclub in the country). My friend spoke of how the charismatic singer broke the cabaret's seemingly iron "fourth wall," interacting directly with the patrons at ringside tables. Dodd informs me that Darin's manager, Steve Blauner, fought with the Copa to get the tables right up to the piano, so that he could both break attendance records and work face-to-face with the crowd. Dodd wasn't born until a year after the Copa gig, but he did see his father perform at the Las Vegas Hilton in August of '73. It would be Darin's last show.
"He just worked the room and had the crowd in the palm of his hand. It was very seductive and it was very magical. There was no question in my mind that he was larger than life and something very special."
Dodd's memory of his father that stands out most in his mind is "a wonderful trip to New York in 1972. I don't know if he knew that the end was near or not; that would certainly make it more dramatic. He took me to the Bronx and we went to his old stomping grounds; public school, the Bronx High School of Science, where he lived, where he played his first gigs. The point was to say, 'Hey, sheltered L.A. private-school kid, child of privilege—this is where I'm from.'
"There was a moment which was seared into me. Charlie, whom we considered his father [Bobby Darin was an illegitimate child and never knew his biological father], was driving us. When we stopped at a light, my dad looked over and said, 'What do you think of that?' I looked over and there was a kid of about eight or nine, shining shoes. I said, 'Not much. Where's Yankee Stadium?'
"He was crushed. He looked at me, and I'll never forget, he said, 'If it weren't for me, you'd be a waif.'
"I didn't know what the hell it meant, but I could see that he was very upset, and it was very disturbing to me. Years later, I realized that he was saying, 'Look, this is what I had to do. This is what I went through. This is what life's like for a lot of kids, and you don't even get it.' Now, I shouldn't have gotten it. I was a product of my environment, a kid from Beverly Hills. But the reality is, he was devastated."
The boxed set booklet quotes songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller as saying together, "People who knew him used to say about Bobby Darin that success never went to his head, that he was just as arrogant a little SOB before he cut his first record as he was after becoming a headliner." I observe to Dodd that Bobby Darin's unusually high level of drive must have been difficult for those around him to understand.
"Very, very unsettling," Dodd agrees. "That's where you get adjectives like 'brash,' 'arrogant.' This is all you have to know: He knew he was not going to live a full life, and he was not going to waste one moment's time. He was going to leave something behind, he was going to achieve, and, if he stepped on you, or if he didn't suffer fools lightly, so be it. He saw himself at the end of a tunnel, and there was light there. He was in that tunnel, there was nothing around him, and he was headed right for the light. So people were offended....
"He could be very dark and cruel. Don't kid yourself; there's a real Machiavellian side there that would justify a lot. On the other hand, if you were his friend, he would go to the mat for you. He had a tremendous sense of loyalty. And a sense of honesty. He was honest to the point where it would get him in trouble."
Take the "Bob Darin" phase. Dodd says that, despite the seeming trendiness of his father's "real me" stance, it came from a genuine desire to strip himself of loungey pretense. Unfortunately, it was the last thing that his core audience wanted.
"He once learned something: people hear what they see. He could go out to Vegas in '68 and do an act in his jeans, with no hairpiece, and they'd walk out. He would go back six months later, do the exact same show—not change one note—wear a tuxedo and the rug and be 'Bobby Darin': standing ovation."
He also says his father spent much of '68 being "Bob Darin" because he was shattered by the death of his favorite Bobby.
"My father was with Robert Kennedy the day before he was killed. He was an absolute believer in Robert Kennedy, and that death profoundly changed him. He sold all his possessions, moved to Big Sur. He became 'Bob Darin,' took off his toupee and tuxedo, and started singing what I call the 'protest music.' He only came back to being 'Bobby Darin,'" his son says, "because he needed to pay his medical bills."