The Sounds Of Day, The Sounds Of Night - Rod McKuen

 

The Sounds Of Day, The Sounds Of Night

The Sounds Of Day, The Sounds Of Night

Rod McKuen

Picwick/33 STEREO SPC-3225

1969

From the back cover: If Jack Kerouac was the poet laureate of the beat generation, nobody has spoken so eloquently on behalf of the hippie subculture as Rod McKuen – and then gone on to speak to and about the rest of America. McKuen, probably the most read poet living in America, is in the tradition of the late Carl Sandburg – a farm hand at 11, playing Shakespeare at 16m a stint in the army, playing in a rock band, bumming around Europe on his own, a brief Hollywood career making B movies, a disc jockey in his 20s, Rod McKuen already had lived several lifetimes – and he's not yet 40.

McKuen rose to fame on the West Coast as a poet. It wasn't long before his fans discovered that he could write the music as well as the lyrics for penetrating hit songs. Besides singing them himself, McKuen wrote compositions which said something to artists like Frank Sinatra and Andy Williams, who promptly included them in their own repertoires. During his various trips to Europe, McKuen ran across the bittersweet song-poems of Jacques Brel, who he admits influenced his own poetry. When he returned, he produced songs which bear a strong resemblance to those of Brel, with their subtleties of shading in the meaning of words, the melodies and harmonies he selects to accompany them.

It wasn't until The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, however, that McKuen won national acclaim as a composer.  He was asked not only to provide  a title song for the movie, but to score it throughout – a score which ideally fitted the unusual subject matter of the film. McKuen today is a show business phenomenon – a best-selling poet, television personally, serious composer and hit record-maker, a man with plenty to say and the ability to reach the mainstream of America with his message. – Robert Angus

The Sounds Of The Day

Happy Times

Desire

Hudson Street

The Bird Boy

Holiday

Tokyo

Breaded Ladies

Back To Sausalito

The Sounds Of Night

The Rock