Max, “Quero E Não Quero” (1956)
from Portuguese Fados: Authentic Music of Today’s Portugal
Capitol T10013
Capitol’s “Capitol of the World” series comprised some 250 titles from the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s. The Strangelovian series logo hints at the sort of global domination that was all the rage at the time, but really these albums are simply cheap and easy plunderings of the back catalogs of overseas labels passed off as exotica. Not there’s anything wrong with that. Charles Trenet cannot be repackaged too much, and Christmas in Sweden is too precious a cultural artifact in my family circle to ever make light of. Still, for every genuinely interesting release—Fats Waller in London; ragas by Ravi Shankar—there are dozens of recordings made in beer halls, at polka festivals, or pulled from the EMI vaults of those dark, pre–Mersey Beat days: Norrie Paramour’s Moods, International Vibrations!by Ray Martin and the Piccadilly Strings, Rockin’ Violinsby Eric Jupp.
Based on the wacky FADOS! logo on the back cover, the designer seems to have thought fado was a dance craze like MAMBO! or CHA CHA CHA! rather than an indigenous Portuguese music that revolves around the emotion of saudade, which loosely translates as longing or melancholy. And the less said about the “Hello, Portuguese sailor!” cover, the better.
Of Max, all the album says is that he “got his start, at 15, at the Hotel Bela Vista in Funchal.” The title of this song means “And I Do Not Want,” and it ends with a gorgeous Beatlesque chord.
After supper I take the dog for a walk. He is young, and he his willful, and he has just started marking, so smells are very important to him. And, with a singularity of purpose few can match, he pulls.
There is a small wood near our house that fills with snow in the winter. In March, when the thaw comes, it empties and sends a stream meandering down the street. So when the dog pulls, he pulls me across this stream and through puddles.
Now it is just light enough after supper that these puddles are not pools of ink but mirrors showing clouds and stars and yellow lights of dusk. And I wonder, does he notice this, does he think he is walking across a wet sky?
And so “Waters of March” comes to mind. After Tom Jobim and Elis Regina’s joyous, untouchable original, my favorite version is this wisely faithful cover by Cibo Matto and Sean Lennon. The song suits their homemade aesthetic warmly, and they don’t English the lyrics. Some things are simply better, or more wonderfully inscrutable, in Portuguese.
Someone, I forget who, observed that both Jobim and Brian Wilson wrote water music, inspired by the beach, the surf, and the cultures—in Hawthorne or Ipanema—that grew up near the ocean. I was about to extend that idea to this song, and to waters created by the thaw, when I remember that in Brazil, March marks the end of summer and not the beginning of spring.
I’m not sure, when it’s sung in Portuguese, it makes any difference.
Nothing at all creepy about a father and daughter singing about incipient adultery. Yet the clavinet somehow takes the funkiness of the situation, makes it literal, and all moral queasiness is banished: Alchemy.
And put your hands together for the Ovation Records logo. They don’t make ’em like that anymore.
I’m guessing at 1956: It was Mason’s entrepreneurial peak, having that year produced and cowritten the film Bigger Than Life and starred in the short-lived James Mason Show on TV. This LP was probably a spin-off from or tie-in to the latter, which also featured his wife and daughter. It was part of a minor Cold War fad of having distinguished British actors intoning Bible verses on LP. Laughton did it, Olivier did it, God knows who else did it, but many cut albums aimed at wringing some easy coin from the US heartland for an afternoon’s work in the studio. This seems a slightly more thoughtful, charming, and heartfelt effort, given the involvement of the whole family, the original score, and the artwork. No credit on the script is given; perhaps Mason wrote that as well. He was a conscientious objector during World War II, implying some ethical or religious underpinnings to the man.
The LP is even more a Cold War relic than it first appears. While Laughton was on Decca and Olivier was on Mercury, Mason’s effort ended up on PRI Records, “a division of Precision Radiation Instruments Inc,” which, this page tells us, was a manufacturer of Geiger counters that had entered the record business. I smell tax write-offs, but who knows?
Mason’s television and recording career may not have survived 1956, but his movie career went from strength to strength: North by Northwest and Journey to the Center of the Earth in 1959, Lolita in 1962, etc. Then came an expensive divorce from Pamela and the need to pay for it, leading to a filmography notable more for quantity than quality and episodes such as a commercial for Thunderbird—the wine, not the car—which Mason apparently scripted himself. Sadly for Mason’s posthumous reputation and hilariously for the rest of us, it seems to have inspired this uncanny bit of impersonation/character assassination from Jon Hamm.
That’s a long way from Genesis.
Credited as engineer on the record is Bones Howe, in what must have been one of his first assignments at Hollywood’s Radio Recorders at the beginning of a storied career (the Turtles, the Association, the Fifth Dimension, Tom Waits, etc.).
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