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My First Music: “I Have Confidence” from The Sound of Music by Rodgers & Hammerstein and the Day I Moved to NYC, 3 June 1973

And right around the time in history James “Smiling Cobra” Aubrey was turning MGM’s historical music scores into LA landfill and my beloved John Wilson was home in Gateshead falling out of his baby chair in excitement over the brand-new BBC news theme, forty-five years ago today—even down to the day of the week—I fled Minneapolis for New York and took a shared room at Sage House, a genteel women-only boarding house on 49 West 9th Street in Greenwich Village, New York.

With 2 meals a day included it came out to $33 a week. You read that right. A place in Greenwich Village, breakfast and dinner, for thirty-three dollars a week. Try to imagine the mischief I got into with all the money I had left over from my weekly paycheck from my first job as a solfeggist at ASCAP, that it’s summer in NYC, it’s 1973, I’m eighteen, cute as a button and old enough to drink, and gorgeous men are everywhere. And imagine too that I’m singing a song (in my heart and sometimes aloud while bounding down the street) that every American girl of my generation inspired by Julie Andrews sang:

I have confidence in confidence alone
Besides which you see I have con-fi-dence in meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Sage House NYCAbove my old abode: “I Have Confidence” sung by Sierra Boggess backed by John Wilson and His Eponymous Orchestra , 2010.

FULL DRESS // A gifted mesmerist—a sinister composer—a naive young conductor from the north…inspired by an episode from the life of Rachmaninoff // DOWNLOAD FREE BOOK POSTER

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Casablanca Suite Composed and Orchestrated by Max Steiner, Played by The John Wilson Orchestra and Conducted by My Beloved John Wilson, 2013

Steiner’s suite (written score here) is clearly patched together from various melodies in the film Casablanca, including the Nazi drinking song “Die Wacht am Rhein” (Schneckenburger/Wilhelm, 1853); “La Marseillaise” (de Lisle, 1792); and, of course, “As Time Goes By” (Herman Hupfeld, 1931). And is that a little of Steiner’s own King Kong? The Warner Bros Pictures music theme at the beginning is entirely Steiner’s composition. (Most of the) orchestration by Steiner’s frequent collaborator, Murray Cutter.

John Wilson 2019-1
I feel a raging, yearning, unchaste tenderness for my beloved John Wilson when he conducts schmaltzy pieces like this, which sort of makes up, as I say, for the times his fatuous pronouncements exasperate me. Above John: Steiner’s Casablanca Suite.

Click here to see John in action with The JWO in 2013.

The entire 2013 BBC Proms concert Hollywood Rhapsody with The John Wilson Orchestra is available here

FULL DRESS // A gifted mesmerist—a sinister composer—a naive young conductor from the north…inspired by an episode from the life of Rachmaninoff // DOWNLOAD FREE BOOK POSTER

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My First Music: “Donkey Serenade” Sung by Allan Jones in The Firefly (MGM, 1937)

Another MGM musical, pre-Freed Unit. Music by Bob Wright, Chet Forrest and Herbert Stothart (adapted from “Chanson” by Rudolf Friml); lyrics by Bob Wright and Chet Forrest, who would go on to adapt the music of Rimsky-Korsakov for the 1953 Broadway musical Kismet.

Two years earlier Allan Jones made a big splash as Kitty Carlisle‘s tenor squeeze in the Marx Brothers romp A Night At the Opera. Here he is in a clip on my YT channel movie-romancing a reluctant Jeanette MacDonald, who was smack in the middle of a fraught but passionate affair with a baritone with a thrilling voice and a black temper—Nelson Eddy, who, upon learning that Jones was putting the real-life moves on MacDonald, crashed the cast party of Firefly, collared Jones and beat him to a bloody pulp. Now that’s love.

Donkey Serenade.jpegPlayed the violin part in this in my junior high school orchestra. Liked it more than Bach. Above: “Donkey Serenade” by Oscar-winning MGM musical director, Herbert Stothart. Stothart, recently deceased, was paid tribute to by incoming MGM musical director Johnny Green in his 1954 MGM Jubilee Overture, the signature tune of my beloved John Wilson and his Orchestra.

FULL DRESS // A gifted mesmerist—a sinister composer—a naive young conductor from the north…inspired by an episode from the life of Rachmaninoff // DOWNLOAD FREE BOOK POSTER

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