Andy Williams passed away last night aged 84. To mark his passing, RTÉ Ten remembers this interview with the great crooner from 2001
Andy Williams is one of the great crooners, singer of such classics as Moon River and Music to Watch Girls By. Alan Corr talks to an old world charmer about his music, sartorial elegance and why he doesn’t wear jeans
Cast your mind back to an age where martini glasses clinked late into the night, men had the manners and dress sense of Cary Grant, women the eyes of Ava Gardner and the music was well, just swinging.
There up on stage you'd find immaculately-dressed crooners like Andy Williams sailing smoothly through the likes of Can’t Get Used to Losing You and the magical Moon River.
That was quite a while ago but Mr Williams has recently found himself championed by the lounge core generation, twenty-somethings seeking to recreate the golden age of Sinatra, Bacharach and Andy himself. At 73, he's tickled pink by this rehabilitation and he'll tell you that he's got no plans to retire. These days Andy spends his time holed up in his three-level Moon River Theatre in Branson, Missouri, entertaining capacity audiences of over two thousand on a daily basis.
Alan Corr: Can’t Get Used to Losing You is one of your great songs but I believe you weren't that keen on it at first
Andy Williams: “I didn't think it was going to be a hit. I didn't want to record it but Bob Mercy who did the strings insisted that I do it. He was very bright but I thought the song was dumb and it wasn’t until I heard the orchestration and those plucking strings that it made any sense, without that it wasn't much of a song. It turned out to be a hit, and the b-side was Days of Wine and Roses.”
It seemed to be a golden age for music. Is that gone forever?
“I think so. There are no more Cary Grants around and the movies always led the way, the glamour and what people wore and how they carried themselves and the kind or promotion that the studios gave them, everything was above board. Now everybody produces their own pictures and they're not working for the big studios and nobody tells them what to do so they wear whatever they want to and it’s a completely different situation than it was before.”
Do you think people are looking for a nostalgia fix when they come to see you?
“I think that's certainly part of it. The people who come to my shows here in Branson dress differently than the people who come to the country music shows that play here. They're not going to dress in shorts and a tank top even in the summer, they wear shirts or a pair of slacks or jeans but they won’t come sloppy, awful. They’re just a different kind of crowd that comes here and then in the Fall they actually dress up.”
Would you like to be renowned for your sartorial elegance?
“Well no, but I am a little bit. I don’t wear jeans and it's not because I don't feel comfortable in them. I just don't like them on me, I don't mind other people wearing them. I don't mind if they're worn with a blue blazer, if they're pressed. The ones that bop down around the shoes and get all baggy around the tennis shoes, I don't like that look. It’s the grunge look and I grew up in a different era and I wanted to get my clothes made where Cary Grant and Peter Lawford got their clothes made. I got my clothes made in New York. l cared about that and I do now but I also have three dogs and they slobber. They’re German shorthaired pointers and I'm used to having slobber on my pants.”
When you were working with your brothers back in the 40s and 50s, what was your earliest musical memory?
“I remember The Music Goes Round and Round (proceeds to sing it). It's a dumb song and it was considered a popular hit and our family, we didn't like it very well because we were still singing hymns and doing folk songs and we thought it was kind of trashy but it wasn’t long before we started liking it.”
How did you feel when you went solo and left your brothers. Did you want to be out on your own?
“I didn’t want to be on my own at all. My brothers wanted to break up because we’d been doing it since I was eight years old and my older brother had a wife and three children and he didn't want to go on the road anymore. We were on the road with Kay Thompson and he just decided he wanted to stay home with his kids and he got a job as an insurance man and just got out of the business, and my brother Don always wanted to be an actor so he tried that but ended up being an agent, and my brother Dick wanted to be a band singer so he went with Harry James for a couple of years and then he was also on The Tennessee Ford Show when he was doing The Steve Allen Tonight Show. I didn't know what to do when we broke up. I just knew I could sing and decided to give it a shot. It was quite a shock because I had been part of this very successful act. I went out on my own and nobody knew who the hell I was and it was very, very difficult for several years until I got on television with Steve Allen.”
You're working with Glen Campbell in some of your shows. He’s had some difficult times in the late 60s, early 70s with drink und drugs and marital problems. Did you ever have a crisis like that?
“No. I don't mean that I've been as pure as the driven snow but I never had to write a book about it. I don't really know about Glen back then, I’ve known him a long time but I wasn’t really close to him during all that. He stayed at my house in Palm Springs when he was going through all his druggy bit and stuff but I just sort of stayed away from him.”
A lot or singers don't like being identified with one song in particular. Do you have that with Moon River?
“No I think that’s stupid. Unless your hit song was Itsy Bitsy Polka Dot Bikini but if you have a good song like I Left My Heart in San Francisco you want to hear Tony Bennett do it and I know people want to hear me sing Moon River or they aren’t getting their money's worth. They want to hear the record they dated to or got married with. Certain songs mean a lot to certain people and Moon River is certainly one of them.”
What did you think when you saw Audrey Hepburn sing it in Breakfast at Tiffany’s?
“I got it from Henry Mancini the night after they recorded her in the movie and he said this is a song for you and I said I love your stuff anyway and I took it back to the head of the record company and he said I love Henry Mancini. I had recorded one of Henry’s songs before called Dreamsville. The guy in the record company didn’t like the line `my huckleberry friend', and didn’t think it would ring true with teenagers so I never recorded it until I was asked to sing it on the Academy Awards and we knew it was going to win. The next day it sold it almost half a million albums and I then made it the theme of my television show. But Danny Boy was what I was about at that time.”
They called Mel the Velvet Fog but did they have a nickname for you?
“In England they call me The Emperor of Smooth. Hahahaha. I had two big hit records in England that were 30 years old, Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You and Music to Watch Girls By. I was very surprised. It was wonderful. At the same time these nightclubs called lounges became very popular and people were dressing up and having cocktails with their dates and smoking cigars, not in jeans. They thought I was cool. They were playing Up, Up and Away. I became the coolest cat around.”
You had a spot of vocal chord trouble this year . . .
“I did. I didn’t sing for a year. It was terrible. I was afraid that if I had an operation on it I might not sound the same. It was a rather large node on the vocal chord and I couldn’t sing. It’s like two rubber bands, those vocal chords, and they make the sound by rubbing together and if there’s a bump no sound comes out at that point. It doesn’t hurt but I didn’t want to go through the operation and I found this guy who said maybe you won’t have to. He was one of the top guys in the country so he didn’t need the business. He said if you shut up for six months, don’t talk, don’t sing, it may go away and if it doesn’t we can operate in July and you can still open in September in your theatre. He told me to go play golf and don’t yell fore and I was fine.”
So what’s your secret?
“Hahaha. I have no secret. Luck I guess. I look pretty good, I take care of myself. I drink too much sometimes. I drink wine, stay away from beer because it’s fattening. Nobody wants a fat singer up on stage. Tom Jones was getting a little pudgy.”
Will we ever hear of your retirement?
“No. During the last year when I couldn’t sing at all. I came to two conclusions. One is that I didn't want to retire, and two I didn’t want to work. So I decided to sing only three and a half months a year. That’ll be it. No more touring and I’ll just come over to England to watch Wimbledon.”
Alan Corr
