Bobby Darin: "Mack the Knife"

October 12, 1959 (2 weeks)

One of my favourite films of all time is Quiz Show, the 1994 Robert Redford picture about the game show fixing scandal of the late fifties which stars Rob Morrow, Ralph Fiennes and John Tuturro. Not only does it have masterful performances by everyone involved, including the unfairly overlooked character actor David Paymer, but it also tells a bleak tale of American might laying waste to everyone who attempts to challenge it — as well as anyone who even tries to cozy up to the establishment. None of its main characters — Morrow's Richard Goodwin, Fiennes' Charles Van Doren and Tuturro's Herb Stempel — are conventional losers, all are highly intelligent and ought to be thriving in Eisenhower's America. Some of them eventually do okay for themselves but by movie's end all three have been chewed up and spat out by the system.

Quiz Show opens with Goodwin in a Cadillac dealership where he can't help but be impressed in spite of his wry cynicism ("it used to be the man drove the car, now the car drives the man"). Turning on the automobile's radio, he and the salesman are taken aback by the beeping sound that greets them. A voice comes over announcing that "this is the sound of Sputnik" and concluding that "all is not well with America". Modern viewers may shrug this moment off but it acts as a portents of things to come. Then, the opening credits begin, soundtracked by the bouncy and dramatic "Mack the Knife" by Bobby Darin.

Taken from the Bertolt Brecht-Kurt Weill "play with music" (gosh, I could've sworn there's a word for that) The Threepenny Opera, the song originally known as "Die Moritat von Mackie Messer" in German is sometimes described as a murder ballad. Others dispute this since the character of Macheath is meant to be a gangster who only kills out of revenge. (Murder is still murder) Since Brecht was of the left, though, there's every chance that it's in fact about capitalism leaving its victims for dead. While I'm not so sure that's how Darin approached for his 1959 recording, perhaps this was one of the reasons this German tune from the thirties suddenly became relevant in fifties' America.

Bobby Darin had started out as a jobbing songwriter but he had ambitions to record himself. After numerous unsuccessful singles, he finally struck gold with the novelty pop number "Splish Splash". If anyone's maiden hit suggested a flash in the pan, it was this one. Yet, he kept it up with further Top 10 hits "Queen of the Hop" and "Dream Lover", the latter of which climbed all the way to number one in the UK. It also happens to be a perfectly fine pop song, one that made it clear there was far more to him than a silly little comedy hit. All that said, no one could have anticipated what would be coming next.

The mid-to-late fifties and the arrival of rock 'n' roll led to changes for some in the jazz world. Artists with an already sufficient following like Miles Davis and Chet Baker were in the clear but others chose to embrace some of the new sounds. Darin, however, seemed to be operating in a parallel universe in which rock was fading and jazz was on the rise once he'd shaken off his earlier hits. "What the hell is this nutcase thinking," wondered DJ's like Dick Clark at the time, "he's squandering his promise in order to sound old fashioned!" But somehow Darin knew he was on to something.

There are many superb versions of "Mack the Knife" out there. Louis Armstrong's cover which made the US Top 20 in 1956 set the standard and Satchmo became so fond of it that it remained a part of his incomparable concert setlist for the remainder of his life. (I am unable to find them on YouTube but I am especially fond of recordings from his remarkable Live at the 1958 Monterey Jazz Festival CD and one from a January, 1959 show in Stockholm on the four disc In Scandinavia compilation) Ella Fitzgerald's live recording in Berlin from 1960 is also a delight, in spite of (or perhaps because of) her forgetting everything beyond the first verse; even though she's just improving, her name-dropping of both Armstrong and Darin seems to match the part of the song in which some of Macheath's victims are listed which really shows you how she knew what she was doing even on those rare occasions when everything could come undone.

But with all due love and respect to Satchmo and Ella (oh, why didn't they try it out on one of their amazing duet albums?), no one has ever come close to Darin's version. The young singer clearly took a page from Frank Sinatra's book but added a heretofore unheard ferocity (Tom Breihan says "he comes across as a motherfucker" which is hard to argue with). This isn't Satchmo having a bit of fun, this is serious stuff. I'm not convinced the muderousness is especially important, more the tough as nails ambition from the sort of person who would kick his mother into the dirt and steal gruel from orphans if it helped him get to the top. In the beginning, he's simply a confident young go-getter but by song's end he'd tearing everything down, ripping the whole of Manhattan to shreds. It's the American Dream, brother!

Musically it's as jazzy as possible with no acknowledgement of rock whatsoever. I'm tempted here to discuss Quiz Show further with some commentary about how jazz was by then the establishment's music while rock 'n' roll was a teenage pursuit. There may be some truth in this assertion but these blog posts of mine are already far too anecdote heavy. More importantly, a big band setting just suited Darin's voice and the song itself far better than anything a fifties' beat group could get out of it. Just as significantly as their refusal to bend to hip trends, Darin, along with famed Atlantic Records producers/executives Jerry Wexler and Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun, was uncompromising in meeting the then-popular easy listening genre halfway as well. Between the fierce vocals and a sub-Ellingtonian arrangement, "Mack the Knife" became as hardcore as eighties' LA punk.

Quiz Show concludes with Goodwin's investigation being hailed as a success even though it becomes clear to him that his aims were only achieved because they ended up crushing two individuals ("we thought we were going to get television," he glumly observes to a colleague, "but television's going to get us") while the network and advertisers got away scot-free. Van Doren and Stempel exchange a glance for a fleeting moment, the two adversaries at last having empathy for one another. It is at this point that the end credits roll along with a song called "Moritat" by country crooner Lyle Lovett starts to play. Not that this is in any way a country song; it's more like an atmospheric, slow-paced Blue Nile tune though it does build from there. It is in fact a reworking of "Mack the Knife" done as a pitiful lament. And bloody hell, it's gorgeous. It even rivals those early recordings by Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald which, granted, makes it an also-ran compared to Bobby Darin.

Score: 10