PRESENTS

Welcome to my op-ed page, The Grapevine News & Views. I started this section in 2002 so that I'd have a place to air my views on my own website. (Go figure.) Who knew blogging would become such a phenomenon! If you've sought this page out, here you will find my views about anything I find or am sent about Johnny Mathis on the Internet and elsewhere, that had been overlooked by the "official" sites. I also find Mathis connections, people, places, and events that have been touched by the influence of Johnny Mathis, and oftentimes I simply ramble. So thanks for reading what I have to say, and thanks for coming by.

VOL. 6 NO. 1 - FEBRUARY 2007

TIME FLIES I'm getting to be as bad as the people at the official site, almost three months into the year and haven't updated! Here we go...

JIMMY'S RAP One has to have been living on a desert island not to have heard of the movie sensation, Dreamgirls, based on the 1982 Broadway play of the same name. It got snubbed for an Academy Award best picture nomination, but I am telling you there have already been accolades for it all around the world. Golden Globes, BAFTA, Screen Actor's Guild, the Cinema Audio Society, and on the night of Feb. 25, of course, two Oscars were added, one for the outstanding screen debut of young Jennifer Hudson, an absolute sweetheart with a rising star and God on her side. As of this writing, after only 10 weeks, Dreamgirls has grossed $101,233,784 domestically, $128,914,694 worldwide, and about $9 million of that was grossed during the first weekend!

I saw the movie like everybody else did, on Christmas Day, the day we lost "The Godfather of Soul," James Brown. In the movie, Eddie Murphy gave a strong performance as the tragic figure Jimmy Early, who was stylistically based on James Brown. I was shocked to hear a reference to Johnny Mathis in one of the film's musical numbers, "Jimmy's Rap", where Jimmy has to break out and get funky after rejecting an attempt to get him to adopt a softer sound, such as the kind that's more palatable to older white people. "Sooner or later, the time comes around for a man to be a man and take back his sound! I gotta do something to shake things up - I like Johnny Mathis but I can't do that stuff 'cause Jimmy's got soul, Jimmy's got soul," Jimmy Early defiantly sings. Nobody else has even acknowledged the reference, oddly; recently, Mathis was on CBS Sunday Morning saying when he heard his name being mentioned in the film, Diner, which apparently nobody close to him had ever told him about, he then "had this little grin on my face for the rest of the day". Well, if he's seen the movie, Dreamgirls, which is a fabulous homage to the Supremes that the producers don't have anything to apologize for, in my view, he should be having palpitations! "Jimmy's Rap" is of course available on the wonderful Dreamgirls soundtrack.

ENCHANTING ART Art Garfunkel is still alive, kicking, and singing the standards. He's got a new CD out called, "Some Enchanted Evening". Imagine my surprise upon finding this homage in his liner notes: "In this album, I confess I am under the sway of two magnificent singers, Chet Baker and Johnny Mathis." Wow! He's using producer Richard Perry for this album, who not only produced Garfunkel's stellar "Breakaway" album in 1975, but earlier worked with Johnny Mathis on the You've Got A Friend album from 1971. In Mathis' words from a 1972 article in the defunct After Dark magazine, Mathis says, "Richard Perry did about five songs on my You've Got A Friend album, but all he did was just technical stuff. He turned the dials. As far as my needs go, the producer does the technical end of the work. I get the arranger and the conductor, and the producer doesn't tell me to do anything....I put my foot down on Perry because I cannot work with him. It takes him two weeks to do what I get done in two days, so I think it's all a waste of time..." Apparently, Mathis found Richard Perry somewhat of a chore to work with, but for Art Garfunkel, I think he's produced a really sweet recording! And maybe Mr. Garfunkel is a bit more patient in the studio; at any rate, Art gives credit where credit is due, and I like that!

WONDERFUL! WONDERFUL! After the supreme letdown of those so-called 50th Anniversary efforts that former fan club president Maria Niemela was so proud of (well, she got her name on it and the DVD, so it was a banner year for her), I seriously thought that there wouldn't be anything else to honor my guy with. Chances were blown big time with this one, in my view, both from an educational and promotional standpoint. I was profoundly saddened by the lack of care regarding what 50 years was supposed to mean to a person's career.

Then I get a call from my best bud, saying, hey, I pledged and got the Mathis DVD, the one they're not going to sell anyplace but PBS. Oh? I told him to let me know how it is. I'd already seen the 'GBH abbreviated version with the telethon all through it, but I knew the PBS version would at least be complete. The one in the stores was supposed to have been released before my birthday in mid-December, but you know they have to do things right where Johnny Mathis is concerned (she says sarcastically) and so here it is almost March and no one has seen it.

I think it was a stupid thing to do in the first place, creating two separate DVDs for the people who want to see Johnny Mathis in concert, just so they could bait people to pledge. You had to fork over at least $100 to get the full thing with all the extras, and the one they were going to sell, say, on Amazon.com in December was a kind of "Reader's Digest" version with parts taken out of it. I think that's crap! I sincerely hope that they've changed their mind about this, and that this is the reason they've postponed the release date on this DVD. The fact that the track listing on the SonyStore website shows the listings of the full, uncut DVD gives me hope. Maybe they will have done something right, for a change, because I'm here to tell you, the uncut version of this DVD will have been worth the wait.

What do you get for $100 (or hopefully less on Feb. 27)? You see a very short clip of a noticeably younger Mathis (although it wasn't that long ago) in the studio with Chip Davis of Mannheim Steamroller. Another short clip of an even younger Mathis with his famous, but not-too-bright sheepdog on the Johnny Carson show.

They made a short photomontage accompanied by Mathis singing "Wonderful! Wonderful!" followed by great anecdotes, and I agree with a friend of mine who said they should have introduced the DVD with to set the tone for the rest of the video.

There is a cool five and a half minute tour of the house he's lived in forever. I think it shows more than the Access Hollywood piece from about ten years ago, back when they were promoting Because You Loved Me. I have to say I love to look at Johnny's house, because every time they show it, there's something new to see. I remember first seeing the house featured in an article in Architectural Digest back in 1970 or '71, and I'd always thought the house was a split-level, but the house apparently now has a second story where he has his bedroom and a second kitchen with a great view of the hills. I noticed a blue KitchenAid mixer in that second kitchen, which is decorated in what looks like a very blond granite and open cabinets and a green kitchen sink. Not at all as dark as the other kitchen, which I remember from Ebony magazine a few years ago. In fact, the whole house is very light, with a very open design, I would even call it Asian in the way it incorporates some of the outdoors from within.

The infamous pool area, seen in the book, Havens, from a few years ago, is pretty much a "Florida" room. He has a marbled fireplace there, flanked by HUGE cactuses, and a seating area that looks straight out of Pier 1 Imports! There are cactuses flanking the front door, too, like rather imposing sentries, and a couple of life-size giraffe sculptures nearby! The arched roof of the pool area doesn't have the shade anymore; it apparently got ruined by someone fixing a leak in the glass part after the floods. Whoever was running the camera really had a fixation on the orchids in the room!

For the first time that I can remember, the front of the house is shown. And, every now and then you see a man walking around in the background. It's not enough to have a house, Mathis says; he likes pretty things. Boy, I'll say! He has an older lamp-style iMac that someone besides him uses, "because he doesn't use the computer at all". He has lamps that look like pineapples flanking a large Toshiba plasma television, and it looks as if he has a JVC DVD player. Fascinating!

As great as it is seeing how Mathis lives, though, in my opinion the coup de grace is the thirty-minutes of San Francisco memories as recounted by Johnny Mathis, worth every dollar all by itself. It's amusing and fascinating to just listen to Mathis talk, ungoaded, unrehearsed, and thankfully unscripted about growing up in San Francisco. They just let him talk, and it's great, because it's things nobody ever asks him about, things that were important and poignant, things he still remembers. It brought back memories for me, too, because I remember a lot of the places I saw and described in my 2000 Journey to San Francisco piece...I remember being in Richmond and walking down to Golden Gate Park. I remember walking down Post to Japantown; I remember the gorgeous blue flowers I wish I new the name of that are ALL over the place on the campus of San Francisco State University; and it would have been cool if he could have gone to see the mural. He talks about the finger he smashed and lost a fingernail on, which has never quite grown back; he talks and talks about his beloved father, who once worked at Bethlehem Steel, and he shows how close one of the places he lived was to his high school (and it still amazes me how, in the years before the Brown case, he was able to enjoy an integrated high school!). He talks about taking the streetcar to the bridge, then getting on the bus to Oakland...as a woman, I cannot even imagine allowing my young pre-teen child to go that kind of distance by himself, I don't care how trustworthy he was! And, he talks about his extraordinary mother, who in his words, did the things that women did then, and gave advice without attitude, and always made sure her boy's pants were properly creased. Most interesting was how he referred to--or didn't--his former manager; it reminded me of someone referencing "she who will not be named"! Hysterical! No grudges here, folks! He mentions everybody else by name, except her, and of course we all know of whom he is referring! Most fun is seeing that he wears a Boston Red Sox cap throughout the film; not a Giants or a Dodgers one. Mathis has always been fond of Massachusetts, and what an homage to the Bay State! Johnny Mathis has given us all a wonderful gift with this "tour".

Now, about the music! You get your choice of seeing the concert as seen on the pledge drive either with or without the Mathis anecdotes interspersed within. You get bonus performances of Johnny Mathis singing the "Mancini Medley": "Two For The Road", "Charade", "Days of Wine and Roses", and "Moon River". You get extra performances of him doing "It's All In the Game", with a pre-recorded Take6 in the background, "Let Me Be The One", "Fly Me To The Moon (also called "In Other Words")", "Young and Foolish", "Sands of Time", "Felicidade", and "Toyland". You get the full version of "Pure Imagination", which they oddly thought to end the show with. (Mathis has NEVER ended a show with this whenever I went to see him!) And then there is the concert favorite, "Too Young", for a change with longtime guitarist Gil Reigers tucked away in the background where he belongs.

The concert has been shown on Public Television in the east and west coast since October of last year. We here haven't seen it on TV yet, as our pledge drive doesn't start until March. People may find the concert a little out-of-sequence, as in putting "Pure Imagination" at the end rather than where it usually is in a Mathis show. I would have liked for the bonus concert footage to have been reincorporated into the main show, so it could feel more like a real Johnny Mathis concert, instead of having to select the songs in order to play them. It's not that important, really. For those who have never yet been to a Johnny Mathis concert, and I don't know what they are waiting for still, this is about as good as it's ever going to get.

Mathis is in fine form, sonically, and physically. The makeup he's using makes his face a little weird, but it's OK. I can forgive him a few quirks at his age. It's poignant, though, when they show him nine years ago, the year I started The Mathis Chronicles, with him on Live By Request, and cut to him in present day and I think, wow, has he aged that much in that time? Well, he is over 70 now, still a good-looking 70, and I hope he lives to the age of the late Frankie Laine, whom we lost only a couple of weeks ago. It makes me a little sad, frankly, seeing the older Mathis, with greying temples and thinner hair, but his resonant speaking voice is still there, though, not an old man's voice at all, and when I hear him, I still think of the fifty-something I first discovered back in 1984.

Independent Lens ran an important film a couple of weeks ago about the life of Billy Strayhorn. 40 years after his death, younger people might ask, "who's that," but actually, so might older people. (To those who indeed have to ask, he was pretty much orchestra leader Duke Ellington's personal creative genius.) As I watched "Lush Life", I thought constantly about Johnny Mathis. Left in the hands of people who aren't exactly forward-thinking, I fear his legacy will suffer much the same fate. I can see people saying 40 years from now, who was Johnny Mathis, and why should we care?! Who will be around to say, well, this was one of the greatest singers who ever lived? What will there be to show of this career and this person?

At least now and forever there's Johnny Mathis Gold (oddly enough, it's not called Wonderful! Wonderful!, because that was the title of the PBS presentation: weird). Here is a DVD almost devoid of goofiness, no cheesy lipsynching to a younger voice, just the real deal in concert, and the real deal reminiscing. See what he can do if he just takes things into his own hands! Johnny Mathis, I believe, can be proud of this work. I'm proud of it, because it's the first thing they've come up with in months that actually feels like a celebration, like someone actually cares that this man has been around as long as he has! And thanks to a Valentine's gift from my sweet bud Jon-Daniel, I know own that DVD for which he paid money he shouldn't have to WGBH! And I'm here to tell you, THIS DVD, the one they made for supporters of PBS, is the one to get. If they had released this DVD alone, without the travesty that was the so-called 50th Anniversary CDs, it would have been enough. 50 years from now, if they can even find a copy of those CDs, people will ask, what in the world was this a celebration of? But the DVD, Johnny Mathis Gold: A 50th Anniversary Celebration....THAT's the keeper, the jewel in the crown! This video will stand the test of time long after Johnny Mathis has returned to the "broader matrix of matter/energy/time/space," as another interesting friend of mine would put it. If this were in a time capsule, and 100 years on it were opened, they would learn a lot about Johnny Mathis, and THAT is something worth celebrating.

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