This week in Brett’s Dollar records we meet French chantreuse Claudine Longet. Make sure you check out her wiki page when your done… it’s quite a story.
1960: Actress/singer/dollar-bin-regular Claudine Longet gets her big break in Vegas when crooner Andy Williams (32) spots Claudine (18) on the side of the road having a bit of car trouble. Williams, sensing danger, picks up the teenager, and, by next Christmas, the two are married. Claudine–a petite, French beauty whose big, brown eyes seem to broadcast loops of startled confusion–begins landing bit parts on television dramas, while singing standards in her trademark Paris whisper on her husband’s program. In 1966, Claudine’s airy take on Jobim’s “Meditation” is the highlight of the Season One finale of NBC’s Run For Your Life. The whisper tickles the eardrums of A&M honcho Herb Alpert, to the extent that he signs her in 1967, releasing “Meditation” as the first single. It flops, but the resulting album, Claudine, flies up the charts like a speeding bullet.
Claudine Longet | Lazy Summer Night
Claudine’s formula is repeated for the next four A&M releases: a song or two from popular cinema; some hip tunes (Beatles, Motown, Buffy St. Marie), and a couple numbers in her native tongue. Arrangements are MOR, the singing is 77 percent breath. At best, Claudine’s music is like Isobel Campbell doing sixties karaoke. At worst, it’s like being shot in the abdomen.
Claudine Longet | Everybody’s Talkin’
1970’s Run Wild, Run Free (purchased for 99 cents at The Groove in East Nashville) is about the end of the line for this sort of thing. The selection of freewheelin’, love generation pop hits (A schizophrenically arranged version of “Everybody’s Talkin’” opens the record) is wroght with all the sincerity and insight of Frank Sinatra belting out “See What Tomorrow Brings.” The two songs from Abbey Road are classic dollar bin camp. There’s something not-quite-right about this peppy rendition Harrison’s “Something.” Too many bubbles in the champagne. “Golden Slumbers” is destroyed (murdered, really) as arranger Nick De Caro amputates “Carry That Weight” from the structure and attempts to construct a generic, full-fledged song out of the show-stopping McCartney Side-Two fragment. It’s terrible, but as invaluable for entertaining guests. Listening to the double-tracked-whisper-round-fade-tag here, I can’t help but Wonder: what might Claudine have done with “Junior’s Farm?”
Unfortunately, we’ll never know, as Longet’s career was cut short when she was fatally shot by Mark David Chapman outside her Dakota apartment in December of 1980.
