Rod McKuen, 81

I read the news online. The local papers did not carry it. Those putting the dailies together around here probably thought that nobody would care to read about it. Rod McKuen died last Thursday, Jan. 29. He was 81 years old. I am sure that many cared. I read and I cared and these were the first words that came to mind. From Song Without Words:

“I wanted to write you some words you’d remember

words so alert they’d leap from the paper

and crawl up your shoulder and lie by your ears

and be there to comfort you down through the years

but it was cloudy that day and I was lazy

and so I stayed in bed just thinking about it.”

As the millions who read his works and listened to his music all over the world doubtlessly know, McKuen did not stay in bed just thinking about it. Instead, he wrote and he wrote, and he sang and he made lots of music and did so many other things besides. He was, in truth one of the most successful and most prolific writers of the 20th century. 

McKuen did all kinds of work to survive as a young man. He was ranch hand, disc jockey, stunt man, journalist, etc., etc. He started out in the music business as a rock singer. It was while singing with a loud band night after night that he developed the raspy voice that later became his trademark. It was as a hit songwriter of ballads though that McKuen had greater success. Foremost among these were the English lyrics he wrote to the works of the Belgian composer Jacques Brel like the No. 1 seller Seasons In The Sun by Terry Jacks and the much-covered standard If You Go Away.

On his own, he wrote songs and did music for the movies. There was Me Nathalie which included We and I’ll Catch The Sun. There were the Academy Award nominated scores for A Boy Named Charlie Brown and The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie that starred Maggie Smith, which had the Oscar-winning theme song Jean. The song was recently heard in the soundtrack of the film Zodiac which was set during McKuen’s heydays in San Francisco during the ’70s.

McKuen recorded a number of albums that range from his own songs to classical pieces like Rodrigo’s Concerto de Aranjuez to tone poems like The Sea, The Sun, The Sky and many others. His songs had been recorded by the biggest names — from Barbra Streisand to Perry Como to Johnny Cash. In fact, Frank Sinatra himself recorded an entire album of his songs, A Man Alone, The Words And Music Of Rod McKuen that included the sweet and lilting Love’s Been Good To Me. He is also a Grammy winner for his reading of his work Lonesome Cities for the Best Spoken Word Recording.

Those songs will live forever but I think it is as a poet that McKuen will be most lovingly remembered. I do not know how many volumes of poetry he wrote. I just have three favorites, Listen To The Warm, Come To Me In Silence and Stanyan Streets And Other Sorrows that I seem to have had for ages. To this day though, I still come across volumes of his works that I had not seen before. He certainly wrote a lot. I read somewhere that he had sold over 60 million copies of his books. That was how much everybody loved his poems.

McKuen died of pneumonia in a rehab facility in Beverly Hills California. I guess this officially ends the age of kitsch as remembered from the ’60s and ’70s eras. That was what critics called his poetry then, kitsch. Millions disagreed and bought everything he released making him that rarest of creatures, a rich poet. The Chicago Tribune described his home as an “eight-bedroom, 15,000-square-foot mansion filled with more than 100,000 CDs and half a million records.”

The words to his poems remain beautiful but these are not the same anymore. I am now only able to relate to McKuen’s poetry when immersed in memories from the old days. But then this past week, when I think of McKuen passing and ending his time of kitsch, I hear the old warm again and I admit, it is such a nice feeling. From In Someone’s Shadow:

“There is no right side nor wrong side

No misery in not being loved only in not loving

I learned these truths myself to tell them to you now

As you go sailing through the sun on your way toward life.”