
The song rings around in my head and I generally obsess a bit over it. Then it goes away or, maybe not completely away, it just sort of retreats to a less obtrusive neural channel.
In the past, this has lead me to spend time which such delightful shows as ‘South Pacific’, ‘Cabaret’, ‘The Music Man’ and even ‘Chicago’.
At the moment, there is a very nice song which I cannot get out of my head.
The way a song like this manifests itself is a little odd. One minute I will care nothing for the song, the next I will seem to know every word in the lyric, never to forget it again.
Anyway, this month’s song is from the longest running musical of all time (at 42 consecutive years, it is a record unlikely ever to be broken). The show is called ‘The Fantasticks’.
The song has been massacred and mangled down through the years. I think what put me on to it was coming across Jerry Orbach singing it on YouTube in a White House concert from some time ago.
Jerry played the Él Gallo’ part originally, it seems. He might be a familiar face from the TV show ‘Law and Order’. He died a few years ago.
He also played Lumiere - the candelabra in Disney’s movie ‘Beauty and the Beast’.
Anyway, his rendition of this song, which has seen so many mawkish and exploitative versions, was so ‘clean’ and ‘pure’ that it fascinated me.
He just let the engaging tune and the tightly-composed lyric do its good work, knowing full well that there is enough sentiment in there to go around - without Gladys Knight or someone else sighing and moaning all over it.
The song is more famous than the show it comes from. It’s called ‘Try to Remember’.
I have known the song for the longest time but I think what has now made it a favourite is an understanding of where it fits within the show. This helps to give a little context to the lyric which was missing before.
For me, there was always a mystery attached to the repeated word ‘follow’. What did it mean?
Knowing now that the song opens the show and that the show is performed with a minimal set and some quite inventive staging tricks, I can see that the character is exhorting to audience to remember things from their own lives to help them to engage emotionally with the play. As the song says, if they remember then they should ‘follow’ (what is happening in the play).
Phrases like ‘tender and callow fellow’ or ‘without a hurt the heart is hollow’ are just great, aren’t they?
Here’s the lyric, reproduced without permission (for educational purposes only) but with genuine respect:
Try to Remember (Words by Tom Jones and Music by Harvey Schmidt)
Try to remember the kind of September
when life was slow and oh, so mellow.
Try to remember the kind of September
when grass was green and grain was yellow.
Try to remember the kind of September
when you were a tender and callow fellow,
Try to remember and if you remember then follow.
Try to remember when life was so tender
that no one wept except the willow.
Try to remember when life was so tender
that dreams were kept beside your pillow.
Try to remember when life was so tender
that love was an ember about to billow.
Try to remember and if you remember then follow.
Deep in December it's nice to remember
although you know the snow will follow.
Deep in December it's nice to remember
without a hurt the heart is hollow.
Deep in December it's nice to remember
the fire of September that made us mellow.
Deep in December our hearts should remember and follow
Good, eh?
And here's a clip of Jerry doing it.
Very nicely, I think.