‘Like The Heartaches . . .’

After Tony Bennett died ten days ago, I wandered through the 2,500-odd posts I published between 2007 and 2022 at on my now-deleted blog, Echoes In The Wind, looking to see what I had ever written about the man. It wasn’t much. I highlighted a few of his tracks in several posts looking at a particular year or at covers of a particular song, but I never wrote much about the man himself. I think that Bennett was one of those artists who are so well-known, so huge, that it’s hard to write anything new. All we need to do is listen to the tunes. But I did find one piece from 2018 (I’ve cleaned up a few things and expanded a few others): 

I ran an errand the other day for the Texas Gal, something so routine that I’ve forgotten what the errand was, but it brought me near the new home of Uff Da Records, St. Cloud’s only real record store. So I spent some time leaning over the CD tables. 

Much of what I saw fell into two categories: Stuff I already had and stuff that didn’t interest me. But I persevered, and I found a greatest hits disc by Tony Bennett. 

During the Great Vinyl Selloff a few years back, I sold my only two Tony Bennett LPs. And I’ve not gathered much of his early work for the digital shelves (although I have his 1994 MTV Unplugged and his 2002 Playin’ With My Friends CDs). So, the Bennett CD from Uff Da truly filled a gap, bringing me most of his hits from 1951 to 1972. 

And I’ve realized over the past week that the sound of Bennett’s voice is one of the sounds of my childhood. Whether it was my interest in the easy listening sounds of the time or whether it was hearing the music in the background from adults’ radios and record players, Bennett’s 1960s work pulls me back; I hear “I Wanna Be Around” or “Who Can I Turn To,” and I feel the tug of years handing me memories and feelings that seem so distant and yet so immediate: 

I see my dad sipping a Hamm’s beer as he tends to a bread-and-butter roast on the grill. I recall – as I often do –the dining room at the Ace Bar & Café, with maybe steaks and shrimp on our family’s table and the sound of Bennett or one of his contemporaries coming from the speakers in the ceiling. I recall the sound of my dad’s bedside transistor radio, which he turned on for about thirty minutes just before bedtime, catching a few minutes of KFAM’s middle-of-the-road music (some of it no doubt from Bennett). 

That kind of nostalgia, oddly enough, isn’t triggered by Bennett’s most famous tune, “I Left My Heart In San Francisco.” I guess I’ve heard the track too many times in too many places for it to have the kind of weight that many of his other tracks do. 

One of Bennett’s tracks most laden for me with nostalgia was, for some reason, not on the CD I picked up the other day. The CD, released in 1997, is simply a repackaging of his 1972 two-LP hits album, with the tracks rearranged in chronological order. And it did not include “The Good Life,” which, for whatever reasons, is for me one of the most evocative of Bennett’s singles, as well as one of the more successful: During the summer of 1963, it went to No. 18 on the Billboard Hot 100 and to No. 7 on the chart now called Adult Contemporary.

I must have heard it a lot, because it takes me back to the early 1960s, not to a specific moment but to a sense of the era, a sense of how it felt to be nine years old during a time of Walt Disney, Harmon Killebrew, Lesley Gore and Rod Serling. 

And I never really realized until this week, when I found a copy of “The Good Life” and truly listened to the words, how melancholy the song really is: 

Oh, the good life, full of fun, seems to be the ideal
Mm, the good life lets you hide all the sadness you feel
You won’t really fall in love for you can’t take the chance
So please be honest with yourself, don’t try to fake romance 

It’s the good life to be free and explore the unknown
Like the heartaches when you learn you must face them alone
Please remember I still want you, and in case you wonder why
Well, just wake up, kiss the good life goodbye 

It’s bittersweet, like so much else that’s attracted me over the years. Either I internalized the words without really knowing it, or else life just hands me these things because I need them. Anyway, here it is:

– whiteray