Bert Kaempfert: "Wonderland by Night"

December 5, 1960 (7 weeks)

Over the years, a number of people have opined on the sixties and when they came to an end. The catastrophic and tragic events at the Altamont Festival are frequently cited, as is the Manson Family murder spree. Both happened to take place in 1969 so the calendar helps them along. A more economically thoughtful take is that the decade of peace and love carried over until 1973 when the Yom Kippur War sent oil prices through the roof and led to a slowdown in spending and worldwide recession. But maybe The Simpsons got it right as they so often did: in one episode, Homer meets a pair of hippies who used to know his mother. The subject of the old van they used to drive around in comes up and one of them wistfully mentions that "in a way, the sixties ended the day we sold it - December 31, 1969".

What doesn't tend to get brought up a whole lot is when the decade began. This is more than a little odd since Americans like to make everything about themselves and they could easily point to either the assassination of John F. Kennedy or The Beatles performing on the Ed Sullivan Show as obvious examples. The British also have a pair of events that marked significant changes in the culture: the 1960 trial over the long-delayed publication of D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and the release of the first James Bond film Dr. No. As for me, I dare not suggest a legitimate candidate but I will say that the sixties didn't really begin until some point after "Wonderland by Night" went to number one.

Don't get me wrong: Bert Kaempfert's signature number slaps. Though as smooth as butter, the solos are riveting. I can't find any evidence of such a show but it's easy to imagine Kaempfert and his orchestra stretching it out to ten or twenty minutes the same way Duke Ellington did with the likes of "Sentimental Lady" and "Mood Indigo" in concert settings. It's just impossible to picture the peace and love sixties existing with something like this topping the charts despite the relaxed pace and my suspicion that a fair number of children would have been conceived to it.

I'm something of a jazz fan and it's nice to hear something like this doing so well at such a relatively late stage even if I wish it had been courtesy of Ellington or Louis Armstrong or the Modern Jazz Quartet instead. Mention of Sir Duke and Satchmo reminds me that they would get together for a pair of session dates the following spring. The resulting albums, Together for the First Time and The Great Reunion (later reissued together on CD as The Great Summit), are as brilliant as anyone could have dreamed. Couldn't the CHUM charts have found room for their jaunty version of "Do Nothin' till You Hear from Me" or their rip roaring take on "Cottontail"? Alas, the pop landscape was changing and no longer had space for these two giants. (Full disclosure: while Pops' star would remain bright enough that he would go on to have number ones in both the US and UK with "Hello Dolly" and "What a Wonderful World" respectively, he sadly will not be coming up in this blog)

Kaempfert wore many hats in West Germany's music scene. In addition to being proficient at several instruments, he was a composer, producer and arranger. Though rooted in jazz and easy listening, he was also smart enough not to poo-poo the beat craze of the day (at least not publicly). It was in his native Hamburg that he became aware of some of the English groups who were playing the dive bars around the city's notorious red light district, the Reeperbahn. Based on the recommendation of a colleague, he signed up The Beatles to back stalwart Tony Sheridan to play on his studio sessions which resulted in their first commercially available record "My Bonnie". He would later reach a gentlemen's agreement with fellow broadminded producer George Martin to release them from their German contract. Unbeknownst to Kaempert, The Beatles would usher in the sixties as everyone now remembers them which also closed the lid on songs like "Wonderland by Night" ever breaking through again.

 

Score: 8