And how about this rhyme? Spring, Spring, Spring is a catalogue song, a laundry list of the joys of the mating season when “the barnyard is busy / In a regular tizzy.” But, after getting through the various habits of the birds and the bees, the fish and the fowl, Mercer throws in this:
To itself each amoeba
Softly croons “Ach, du liebe . . .”
A biological and bilingual rhyme: that’s positively Porteresque.
Mercer wrote Spring, Spring, Spring and Summer Wind and always wanted to write a Christmas standard but never managed it (though his recording of Jingle Bells is terrific). But what he really liked was autumn. Lyric-wise, he got old early, and intimations of mortality hang over a lot of his work from the late forties on. Yes, the days grow short when you reach September and dwindle down to a precious few and whatnot, but Mercer chose to embrace (as one of his titles has it) an “Early Autumn.” Thereafter came Autumn Leaves and When the World Was Young and . . .
The Days of Wine and Roses
Laugh and run away
Like a child at play . . .
The lonely night discloses
Just a passing breeze
Filled with memories . . .
Memories that, as in Laura, “you can never quite recall.” Mercer became near obsessed with the elusiveness of memory, of love and youth. Along the way, there was a lot of wine at night, and roses the morning after. He was the nicest guy, and the nastiest—once the bottle got south of two inches from the bottom. The following day, he’d feel bad about being a mean drunk to a close friend or a casual acquaintance or the cocktail waitress, and many florists benefited from his guilt. But, as Jo Stafford said to him as he staggered up to her one evening, “Please, John. I don’t want any of your roses in the morning.” If he’d been sober, he’d have written that down as a potential title, the way he did with Goody Goody and P.S. I Love You. But he was sufficiently self-aware to get more than a few songs out of it:
“Drinking Again
And thinking of when you loved me
Having a few
And wishing that you were here
Making the rounds
And buying the rounds for strangers . . . ”
Sinatra liked that one, and he loved Mercer’s all-time great saloon song:
It’s quarter to three
There’s no one in the place except you and me
So set ’em up, Joe
I got a little story you oughtta know . . .
Supposedly he wrote that as catharsis after a doomed affair with Judy Garland, but we only found that out years later. Like he said:
Could tell you a lot
But you’ve got
To be true to your code
Make it One For My Baby
And One More For The Road . . .
Thinking about Mercer songs for this column, I remembered a night long ago when, a mere slip of a lad, I took a gal I adored to a country club dance I couldn’t really afford. Johnny Mercer saved the night for me: the master of ceremonies announced a competition. To win, you had to answer a simple question:
“How wide is Moon River?”
“Wider than a mile,” of course. We won a magnum of champagne, and the waiters treated us like royalty. A magical night. But the days of wine and roses laugh and run away toward a closing door, a door marked “Nevermore . . . ” Conjuring up that evening for the first time in years, I wondered about my lost love, and whether that country club was still there. But then I remembered Mercer had got to all that, too:
There’s a dance pavilion in the rain
All shuttered down . . .
Not long before his death in 1976, he said that in 50 years’ time the best of Porter and Hart and Gershwin will be “studied and taught in schools, and collected . . . and forgotten.” But we’re getting mighty near 2026, and we’re still singing Johnny Mercer. It’s quarter to three, and somewhere out there Willie Nelson’s promoting his new record of Come Rain or Come Shine and Michael Bublé’s doing his hugely successful if somewhat vulgar revival of Mercer and Mancini’s Meglio Stasera from The Pink Panther.
Set ’em up, Joe . . . and drop another nickel in the machine.
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