This post originally appeared in The Good Men Project
You’ve probably never listened to—or heard of—Paul Mauriat and his Dynamic Orchestra. And, really, this is okay. Musically, you’re not missing anything. But, let’s be realistic: we are always missing something.
Paul Mauriat, a classically trained French composer, died at 81, releasing over 120 records in a career that spanned almost a half-century. He died in 2006. His “official international” fan site stopped being updated less than a year later.
His musical career was predicated on one simple strategy: take chart-topping pop songs, and re-record them with classical orchestration. He didn’t try to reinvent the songs, nor was he paying his dues so that he could debut his original work. No—when he covered Sonny and Cher’s “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” he replaced drums with tympanis, and Cher’s androgyny with strings. In the end, though, the only reason you might know this song is because you’ve seen Kill Bill—which is actually Nancy Sinatra’s version, not the original, and definitely not the version by Paul, and thus shows him for what he really was: a soon-to-be-forgotten artist covering soon-to-be-forgotten songs.
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Dear Paul,
You were French, but your fan club site is written in Japanese. Even though they abandoned you a year after you died, I bet it would feel good to look at a page you didn’t understand, but knew that the whole thing meant: We like you.
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I am 29. I do not have a fan club, and so I don’t have to worry about them abandoning me. Also, despite a few leads and always-ending temp projects, I am an unemployed father trying to figure out the next move. This isn’t foreign territory: in the last eight years, my wife and I have moved nine times.
I have no idea what kind of hopes for a legacy Paul Mauriat had, but discovering him reminds me not that the world will forget me, but they will most likely not even know I’m there to forget.
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Dear Paul,
I grew up in a nondenominational, evangelical Christian context—a worldview that taught me I am precious and unique in God’s sight, but also that, as the writer of Ecclesiastes says in chapter 1, verse 2, “Everything is meaningless,” and later,
Sometimes people say, “Here is something new!” But actually it is old; nothing is ever truly new. We don’t remember what happened in the past, and in future generations, no one will remember what we are doing now. (Ecclesiastes 1:10-11, New Living Translation)
With this in mind, I can’t help but wonder how you finished so many things. I released a record once, as part of a highly regrettable Christian brit-pop band. Inside the CD jacket, the words “Summer Squash” were written at the end of the credits, because I thought it would be “so random” and “hilarious, man.” In the end, that’s what we wrote, but we forgot to put in our names. At the time, it felt like the first real thing I’d finished in my life, but it shall forever remain nameless.
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I was in a record shop in Gloucester, Mass., when I first discovered More Mauriat, an album Paul released in 1967. Well, one of them. He released four more that year. I was pawing through the “free bin” and buzzing on a double espresso from a nearby coffeehouse that blasted Rammstein over the speakers, and was staffed by a teenager wearing an “I Dig Albanian Chicks” t-shirt.
Seeing those records, I felt as if I was staring at a box that said, “Free Kittens.” Or, “Free Kittens—That Will Contract Cancer Tonight Unless You Save Them. Your Move.”
My wife Natalie and I were getting ready to move out of our apartment, so I knew I couldn’t save them all. By the end of the day, I walked out hugging Below the Salt by Steeleye Span, the Ben Hur sountrack, and More Mauriat: The Dynamic Paul Mauriat Orchestra Doing the “Now” Scene!
Frankly, I wanted to know about this “now” scene, and if “dynamic” was in reference to the orchestra, or to this guy Paul. And why every other word on the record sleeve was in quotes. I scanned the tracklist, and barely recognized any of these “now” scenesters. I suddenly knew this would be a record I’d never forget, even though I might be the only one on earth to make that specific claim.
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Dear Paul:
One of your 120+ records went gold, but who heard it? What I mean is, was it simply the act of playing familiar songs in a less-familiar way that wowed audiences? I don’t mean to denigrate it. In fact, it’s kind of genius. Maybe you didn’t create art, but you were an artist, and your medium was nostalgia. You kept songwriters like Bobby Hebb and Los Bravos on life support longer than the doctor’s anticipated—just enough to raise eyebrows, but not enough to change the outcome. People may not have recognized you, but they recognized who you were copying. When you died and were forgotten, did anyone actually know who it was they were forgetting, or were they just forgetting who you sounded like?
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Paul’s music is layered in strata of the forgotten. He brought his classical training to pop music, something that perhaps hadn’t quite been done yet. But, ultimately, it proved to be an experiment in a pointless, or at least skin-deep direction. On More Mauriat, songs are pulled from the recent pop charts—things like “Black is Black,” “Sunny,” and “Theme from Is Paris Burning.” The songs were new enough only to create the appearance of newness. Paul was not keeping up with the “now scene!” at all, but was instead perennially three months behind.
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Dear Paul,
You are the antidote to Ecclesiastes. If there was nothing new under your sun, then you simply pointed at what everyone saw all the time—the coffee stain on the table, the newspaper on the doorstep, anything the sun keeps us from forgetting. You are Christ-like in your obsession with “the least of these” and saving the things most people overlook.
Oh, I almost forgot. Natalie and I are probably moving again. I’m not sure I will find a job that will allow us to stay where we are. Within those 120+ albums, did you ever feel uncertain? Not about the placement of arpeggios, but where your life was headed, and whether forward movement is possible when you’re only chasing after “now.” Your gold record was called Love is Blue. Things must not have gotten much better, because nine years later, you released Love is Still Blue.
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Really, the least important part of Paul’s career was what the music sounded like. It wasn’t about the melody, but the preexisting idea of melody. Even the people writing copy for his records seem to constantly avoid any kind of concrete description. They say his version of “Sunny” is a “near-classic arrangement.” Even more vague, and perhaps passively insulting, take this:
There is a pleasantly humorous rendering of the New Vaudeville Band hit, “Winchester Cathedral”—which is, by anyone’s standard of measure, the most famous British landmark today.
It didn’t matter who Paul was, or what the product involved. All that mattered was that there was a product, something to be handled and spun by strangers across the world. If you look at the bulleted list of Paul’s releases, you’ll understand why he was called “dynamic,” even though he actually did the same thing over and over again. The list may impress you in its size, but so would a list of cars your mechanic has worked on.
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Dear Paul,
When we move, we will throw things away. While I’m a minimalist in my head, I’m an archivist at heart. Your career was about more, more, more, Mauriat, and you never worried about the stuff you’d accumulated. It always had a place. I’m afraid that things we get rid of will lose their chance to be remade.
I know, how Christian of me, all this saving of things. I want to save them, but I don’t want to be their savior. Do you think those things can be separated?
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It is maudlin narcissism to worry about being forgotten, about wanting to leave artifacts behind for people to find you through. But, what we leave is not the stuff that a few people loved. Tragically, the people’s faces you remember most, said C.S. Lewis, are the people you barely knew, not your most beloved. The ones you love are too, and I hate to throw this word in again, “dynamic”—their faces are oceans in our memory, and yet we never stop trying to hold onto a wave.
The last paragraph before the bio on the record sleeve, asks, “How do you title a collection done in such a dynamic way? It was difficult, so we simply called it, ‘More Mauriat.’” What they mean to say is that forgetting does not mean we are forgotten. Forgetting is an active fading, a process that says we are losing, but we are also fighting back.
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Dear Paul,
I will get a job, we will move, and your record will stay in my collection. I will tell my son about it someday. Even though you are the John Lennon—well, the Ringo Starr—of elevator music, you won’t be forgotten. But, I promise I will keep forgetting.