Made Men

by Glenn Kenny

  “Knowing her fate”—that is, she’s going to sink—“Atlantis sent out ships to all corners of the Earth/on board were the twelve/the poet, the physician, the farmer, the scientist, the magician/and the other so-called gods of our legends/though gods they were.”

  In the GQ oral history, Illeana Douglas recollects that Scorsese was particularly keen on getting “though gods they were” heard, as the whacking of Batts was the onset of this crew’s Götterdämmerung. But more crucial to the scene is the portion of the song after the recitation, when it rocks out to the chanted refrain of “Way down/below the ocean/where I wanna be/she may be” sung by Donovan and backup singers with the lead man vamping and comping and keening in the bars between those words. “The repetition of the phrase ‘Way down below the ocean where I want to be’ [conveyed] the hypnotic nature of what they were doing, that they couldn’t stop themselves,” Scorsese told GQ. As will be the case with the Cream song later in the picture, it’s a perfect juxtaposition, a thoroughly successful counterintuitive placement.

  When Henry takes a mistress, he and the gang see Jerry Vale at the Copa. As a 2019 piece about Scorsese’s use of Jerry Vale in The Irishman detailed, the singer looms large in the director’s consciousness. Genaro Louis Vitaliano was a Bronx-born first-generation American, the child of Italian immigrants, only twelve years Scorsese’s senior. But the singer was the biggest one in Scorsese’s childhood. “Aside from Sinatra, Tony Bennett was the authority,” Scorsese told the New York Times. “He had such an extraordinary range and was top of the line. And of course, Dean Martin and his coolness. But it was Jerry Vale who we listened to pretty much all the time.” Of these men, only Dean Martin was not a Columbia recording artist in the ’50s; Vale differed from labelmates Sinatra and Bennett in several respects. While Frank and Tony styled themselves as worldly saloon singers with sensitive sides, Vale was all sincerity, all heartbreak, and a lot of Italian songs. His tenor was both more “widescreen” and more lugubrious than his chief competition; his delivery was often so infused with heartbreak that it bordered on schmaltz. This is particularly evident on “Pretend You Don’t See Her,” the song that hypnotizes Henry, Janice, and even Tommy when Vale croons it at the Copa.

  The style has an aspect that’s paisan-like, as well. Scorsese said to the Times, “He sounded like as if my uncle sang, or the way my brother could sing. Of course Jerry is a hundred times better, but he felt like that person in the room who would break into song. It was like a family member in a way; that voice was so familiar and comforting.”

  That comfort descends like a blanket as the sun comes up outside Janice’s apartment building. It’s a unique moment in the film.

  * * *

  Another #6 on the Billboard charts, Bobby Darin’s 1959 recording of the Charles Trenet song “La mer,” transformed in English translation (by Jack Lawrence) to “Beyond the Sea,” conveys the relative breeziness of Henry’s prison life as his cellmates prepare a lavish dinner. (Preceding this are Aretha Franklin’s “Baby I Love You,” an entirely different song than the one made famous by Phil Spector’s girl group the Ronettes, and “Remember (Walking in the Sand),” another near-hysterical minimelodrama from the Shangri-Las and Shadow Morton.) In 2002 the critic and historian Will Friedwald wrote at length about the song for Vanity Fair (the Darin song was and remains an especial favorite of the magazine’s then editor-in-chief, Graydon Carter, with whom Scorsese would work on Public Speaking, a 2010 documentary about their friend the writer Fran Lebowitz).

  “‘Beyond the Sea’ is one of the few works of world culture that have held entirely different meanings for different groups of people,” Friedwald explained. “In France the song is known as ‘La mer,’ and it is significantly different from the better-known ‘Beyond the Sea.’ In stark contrast to Darin’s impudent version, ‘La mer’ is, for the French, an ongoing source of Gallic pride—the best-known work by a beloved son of France, one of the country’s most celebrated singer-songwriters, Charles Trenet. Far from background for lindy-hopping teenagers, ‘La mer’ is generally performed with all the solemnity of a national anthem. In America, the song has become an anthem of another sort, a call to arms for retro swingers (such as the Royal Crown Revue) who may be conscious that, by summoning up the ghost of Darin, they are bringing together two generations and two genres—the Sinatra thing and the Elvis thang—but remain unaware that they’re also uniting two countries and two cultures.” The ostensible impudence is no doubt what made it ring for Hollywood music supervisors of this time—the song appears on the soundtracks of two other films in close release-date proximity to Goodfellas, the fish-out-of-water crime picture Black Rain and The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, a pastiche comedy starring the then-novelty “blue” standup Andrew “Dice” Clay.

  Once Henry gets out of prison, the songs come at you almost nonstop, and they’re always, always pointed, not just atmospheric. Tony Bennett returns with “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” a standard whose title may be taken as a foreshadowing despite its playing at the celebratory scene of Henry’s welcome-home dinner (of sorts) at Paulie’s house. “Boulevard” was one of the songs Bennett used for a demo tape for Columbia Records, and Bennett writes in his autobiography that Mitch Miller was sufficiently impressed by his singing that Miller signed Bennett to the label “sight unseen.” It was Bennett’s first single.

  After Henry lies to Paulie’s face about dealing drugs, the movie cuts to him at Sandy’s place, where “Gimme Shelter,” the apocalyptic leadoff track from the Rolling Stones’ 1969 album Let It Bleed, blares. We whip-pan, aurally, again when Henry shows off his new respectable home with his actual wife, and Jack Jones sings his counsel to the ladies, reminding them that “wives should always be lovers, too/run to his arms the moment he comes home to you.”

  “Wives and Lovers” was written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David as a tie-in for the 1963 romantic comedy film of the same name, but isn’t heard in that movie. (The songwriting duo did the same deal for the 1962 John Ford picture The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.) The only reason that the “this was the crew that Jimmy put together” scene has no song is because said crew is in a bar watching a basketball game, which they’ve probably all got bets on.

  After which we are back to the Stones with another Let It Bleed cut, “Monkey Man.” Scorsese told Christie and Thompson, “Sometimes we put the lyrics of songs between lines of dialogue so they commented on the action; for example, when the baby is put in the pram for the drug smuggling, you hear the Rolling Stones’ ‘Monkey Man,’ and the first lyric is ‘I’m a flea-bit peanut monkey and all my friends are junkies.’”

  Scorsese has been accused of overrelying on the Stones; as has been noted in the last chapter, “Gimme Shelter” is a song he frequently turns to. It does not register quite as strongly in Goodfellas as it does in The Departed. “Monkey Man,” though, is a tune this movie gets the most of, in part because of what Scorsese says. The actors preparing the infant to be a distraction from cocaine trafficking are “adorable,” fresh-faced as they wax smug about their masquerade. The line in “Monkey Man” that follows “all my friends are junkies” is “that’s not really true.” The song is a burlesque, singer/lyricist Mick Jagger taking his band’s reputation for self-destructive behavior for a spin, having a laugh while trying to deflate some myths. But then again, founding member Brian Jones was fired from the band and then died, drowned in his own swimming pool.

  In these scenes Henry talks about how his cocaine business is a very lucrative one; and for him and Lois and Karen and sometimes Sandy it’s kind of fun, too. “I am just a monkey man/I hope you are a monkey woman, too.” Here monkey Henry has three monkey women.

  The Christmas party where Jimmy chastises his heist crew for imprudent spending gives us a double hit of Phil Spector’s Christmas album; by this time the record has had a renaissance thanks in part to a rerelease by Apple Records, a label owned by the Beatles. (Who allied with Spector for
a salvage job on the unsatisfactory 1968 Let It Be sessions; John Lennon and George Harrison had Spector produce their early solo albums, as well.) The songs are the Ronettes’ “Frosty the Snowman” and “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” from Darlene Love, their good cheer providing seasonal indifference for Jimmy’s burgeoning homicidal resentments.

  The killing of Stacks is gruesome, and made more eerie by the strains of the Drifters’ cover of “The Bells of St. Mary’s.” When Henry confronts Jimmy and Tommy about Stacks’ whereabouts, the jukebox plays “Unchained Melody,” another very-often-covered ballad. This version is by Vito and the Salutations, a white doo-wop group that had its not particularly distinguished heyday in the mid-’60s. Positioning these two songs back-to-back, Scorsese notes a distinction that might be lost on the lay viewer/listener. “Even the music becomes decadent. When Stacks gets killed and Henry comes running into the bar, Jimmy and Tommy tell him to drink up and not worry. What you hear at this moment is an incredible version of ‘Unchained Melody’ by Vito and the Salutations. It’s degenerated from the pure Drifters of Clyde McPhatter singing ‘The Bells of St. Mary’s’ to the Italian doo-wop of Vito and the Salutations,” he told Christie and Thompson.

  In the same section of Christie and Thompson’s book, Scorsese elaborated on his philosophy of using songs in his films, and the rules he set for this one. “A lot of music is used in movies today just to establish a time and a place and I think this is lazy. Ever since Who’s That Knocking and Mean Streets I wanted to take advantage of the emotional impact of the music. Some of it even comes from the ’40s. The point is that a lot of places had jukeboxes which were still carrying Benny Goodman and the old Italian stuff when the Beatles came in. On Goodfellas the only rule was to use music which could only have been heard at that time. If a scene took place in 1973, I could use any music that was current or older.”

  “Sunshine of Your Love” was a critical tune for Cream. The British trio formed in 1966 and allegedly took its name from the phrase “cream of the crop.” The guitarist Eric Clapton had become a sensation with the Stones-ish Yardbirds, but quit that group because he objected to its Top-of-the-Pops direction. His cachet increased with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. His soloing had a fluid facility and expressiveness and a real grounding in American blues music. Bassist Jack Bruce was also a blues guy, albeit one with jazz and classical influences, while Ginger Baker had been for a time a pure jazz drummer, albeit a very busy and idiosyncratic one. Baker and Bruce had played together in the Graham Bond Organization, a quartet fronted by singer/organist Bond and featuring John McLaughlin, who would go on to play with Miles Davis and help invent electric jazz fusion, for better or worse (his Mahavishnu Orchestra was for a time a shining example of “better”). Cream went heavy on the blues jams, and their original songs leaned heavily on older licks (“Strange Brew” was derived from “Hey Lawdy Mama,” by Chicago bluesmen Junior Wells and Buddy Guy). But swinging London and its lysergic experimentations demanded more “far out” material. Working with beatnik poet turned lyricist Pete Brown, Bruce, consciously or not, took up the challenge. Bruce biographer Harry Shapiro wrote of this song’s composition: “After one particularly difficult night when nothing was happening, Jack started playing a riff of syncopated eighth notes all on the offbeats, almost in a fit of desperation. Pete was looking out the window at the time, and muttered: ‘It’s getting near dawn/When lights close their tired eyes.’ Jack had composed ‘Sunshine of Your Love,’ one of the most recognizable rock riffs of all time.” The origins of Baker’s unique beat are in contention; Tom Dowd, the American recording engineer of Disraeli Gears, the album on which “Sunshine” appears, recalled giving the drummer a suggestion to “play as Indians in American Westerns did.”

  The song was not universally well-received. There was building hostility within the band and from their record label about Bruce’s knotty, sometimes dissonant compositions. When Felix Pappalardi, the musician who produced Gears, played “Sunshine” and “Tales of Brave Ulysses” for Atlantic label executive Jerry Wexler, he dismissed both songs as “psychedelic hogwash.” (Himself an admirer of Bruce’s songs, Pappalardi would lead his own band, Mountain, in covering Bruce and Brown’s “Theme from an Imaginary Western,” a Cream reject that, in this version, yielded some of protean guitarist Leslie West’s best soloing.) The single nevertheless stayed on the US charts for twenty-six weeks, peaking at #5. And it did become a jukebox classic, so there you have it.

  * * *

  The use of the piano coda from “Layla” over the discovery of Jimmy’s murderous handiwork can be heard as the opening of a suite titled “Henry’s End.” An end not in death, but in a stopping of the music, a burial and rebirth as a schnook.

  In her book, Delta Lady, Rita Coolidge writes that after she and Jim Gordon cowrote the piano chords and countermelody that would become the final portion of “Layla,” she and Gordon played the song for Eric Clapton and left a demo cassette with him. This was in early 1970. Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs was recorded from August until October of that year, and released in November. “I was infuriated,” Coolidge writes. “What they’d clearly done was take the song Jim and I had written, and tacked it on to the end of Eric’s song. It was almost the same arrangement.”

  Still. “I had to admit it sounded stunning.” She sought ways to get songwriting credit, but was stifled at every turn. The song as she completed it was eventually recorded by Booker T. Jones (onetime bandleader of Booker T. and the MGs and an early vetter of “Sunshine of Your Love”—he and Otis Redding gave it more of a thumbs-up than Jack Bruce’s bandmates did) and Coolidge’s sister Priscilla on the 1973 album Chronicles.

  Could it be possible that Gordon, in the fevered atmosphere of the Layla sessions, pulled the tune out of a back pocket, forgetting its origins? Coolidge does not think so, and there’s no real evidence that this was the case. But Gordon was a volatile guy who at the time was suffering in a way that nobody around him fully understood. Gordon beat Coolidge one night on tour—“that’s not something that should happen even once,” she writes—and she recalls the “empty look” on his face before hitting her. “There was no light, it was pure darkness.” Gordon, like everyone else at the time, was doing a lot of cocaine. Coolidge tried to put it down to that. “What nobody knew at the time about Jim, however, was that he was an undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, and the symptoms of his disease, probably exacerbated by the drugs he was taking, were becoming very hard to conceal. He was hearing voices. And gradually, he just went away—the golden boy with the twinkle in his eyes was gone. Five years later, those same voices that had likely told him he should hit me as hard as he could commanded him to enter his mother’s house and bludgeon her with a hammer; when the hammer failed to kill her, he switched to a carving knife. He was convicted of murder and is serving a life sentence at a psychiatric prison in Vacaville, California. In 2013, his attorney’s more recent request for parole was denied—in part because Jim resists taking his antipsychotic medication, according to the parole board’s decision—and he won’t be eligible again until 2018.” As of this writing, Gordon is still in prison.

  “If I sound bitter, I’m not,” Coolidge writes. “‘Layla’ has generated hundreds of thousands in songwriting royalties—maybe millions—over the years for Eric. But I know that part of Jim’s share actually went to his daughter, Amy. And that, finally, was how I was able to deal with it, just knowing she had something from her dad.”

  * * *

  Gordon is the drummer on Harry Nilsson’s “Jump into the Fire,” the nervous rocker that kicks off the May 11 sequence. He is hence tied with Eric Clapton for the Most Frequently Heard Musician on the Goodfellas soundtrack. Gordon and Clapton both play on “Layla,” of course; Clapton is on “Sunshine,” Gordon is on “Jump,” and they reunite on another song in this sequence, George Harrison’s “What Is Life.” The star player on “Jump,” however, isn’t Gordon but bassist Herbie Flo
wers. His appropriately jumpy bass line opens the song; by the end of the orgiastic rave-up he’s detuned his instrument. That portion’s not heard distinctly in the sections of the movie in which the song is used, but is arguably a spectral presence in Henry’s fall.

  The music is increasingly used in fragments here. Mick Jagger’s indolent “Memo from Turner,” here heard in its Performance soundtrack version, features a backing band with Ry Cooder on slide guitar and Randy Newman on piano (a version featuring some of the Stones, or possibly—and in fact more probably—members of Traffic, is on the Stones’ compilation Metamorphosis). The standout aural feature in the seconds-long portion is the greasy slide guitar, signaling a kind of heedlessness. But Henry has to snap to attention when he almost slams into a car ahead of him. The Who’s “Magic Bus,” from Live at Leeds, yammers “I want it” over and over again, Henry slamming the brakes as drummer Keith Moon goes ballistic. A vision of clear blue sky occasions Muddy Waters’ observation “everything gon’ be all right this morning” from a recording of the classic “Mannish Boy” made with a band fronted by albino Texas blues-rock guitar phenom Johnny Winter, then, just like that, the song is jettisoned in favor of George Harrison’s “What Is Life.”

  Clapton’s on guitar, Gordon’s on drums...and Phil Spector’s producing. This is a variant on his “wall of sound” technique, this time using orchestral overdubs and pushing the rock band up front. There are also a lot of tambourines and the people playing them are highly energetic. It is, on examination, an absurd setting for a sincere declaration from the “quiet Beatle”: