“The Mere Idea Of You”-With Billie Holiday’s The Very Thought Of You In Mind –Take One   

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

A while back I wrote about a guy named Otty Venise (not Otto as a number of people assumed including school teachers who from first grade on thought he was just misspelling his own name from what he told me one night sitting at Charley’s Den on Charles Street in the Back Bay sipping low-shelf whiskies since we were both in some financial difficulties). I had run into Otty in the early 1980s when I lived on Beacon Hill in Boston and he lived in a small studio apartment below me while working his way up the banking food chain. Otty while a good guy to have a few off-hand drinks with was a great deal younger than I was and so he had the inevitable woman troubles that I had put behind me a bit then (two marriages and two divorces behind which explains low-shelf whiskeys and financial difficulties forcing me to live in a studio apartment on the Hill for a while when the rents weren’t sky high like now).

That little sketch I wrote about Otty had to do with one way that he dealt with, maybe got through is a better way to say it, his miseries with woman. See Otty had been in the dumps back then about his latest flame, this Laura Perkins, who he said was five feet six inches of slender brunette pale blues eyes and heartbreak, and who had him jumping through hoops. Nothing new there since Otty said he had probably jumped through more hoops for more unrequited love women than any seven men around Carver about thirty miles south of Boston where he had grown up, maybe around Massachusetts. And with every single one of them, or at least as far back as he could remember Otty said he would feel just a little bit better if he listened, endlessly listened as if time did not matter, or if time actually did stand still, when he played his old time collection of four two-pocketed double-sided albums of Miss Bessie Smith which he had inherited from his uncle when that uncle unexpectedly passed away in 1971.

Here is what didn’t figure, didn’t figure to Otty, and certainly didn’t figure to me about his Bessie affliction. Here was a white guy, a guy who before he got out of high school and went to work at a downtown Boston bank in the junior exec program did not know one black person personally and who moreover did not know squat about the roots of black music in slavery times, in Mister James Crow times, in the great migration to the industrial North times but who could only find solace in the raspy-throated voice of a black back forty acres and a mule Southern Delta 1930s woman when he was in one of his periodic dumps.

And that is my jumping off point. See I would have figured, maybe to test out my own theory of Otty’s love depressions that one Miss Billie Holiday, a certified torch singer is the one whom you would think would sent those blues away. But she did not do so. Did not get him out of his dumps. No, Miss Billie was reserved for when Otty and his latest flame were heating up their affair, when some sweet woman was “curling his toes” as he always liked to put the matter about his bouts of love-making. So I want to tell you the Billie part of the Otty love triangle, the part when his and Laura’s love was in its spring. Want to tell as maybe an exercise in full disclosure about that mad young man especially since he held me to no confidence in the matter and while I will not go into detail about that “curling his toes” business since you can figure that out yourselves I can set the mood, the Billie mood for you.

Of course Otty’s whole thing with Laura read like an adventure not written in the stars. He had run into her at the Surf Ballroom in Hull hard by the Atlantic Ocean. He had gone there with Jimmy Eaton and couple of other guys whom he had known in high school from the days where they had hung out at Jimmy Jack’s Diner on Thornton Street over by the Town Hall in Carver. He was in need of some distraction after he had broken it off with Jeanie Callahan (no Bessie needed on that one since he knew from the beginning dating the sister of a friend of his, Jack Callahan, as a favor when he had nothing better to do was not made in heaven) to listen to the latest break-out cover group, The Rambling Jets, who played a hard rock and roll sound that despite his Bessie mood thing was his natural musical base. As usual as such places the Surf was filled on a Friday night with clots of single hanging out guys and girls. He had simply asked Laura to dance, she consented, and that was the start.

Sure there was plenty more to fill in. About how well Otty and Laura got along at first, how she had stayed the night a few times in his Beacon Hill studio apartment to seal the deal, how they had certain plans once she finished school at Bridgewater State in her hometown, and he moved up the banking ladder. Plenty too about the little fights about who he, or who she could and could not see until that time. The usual boy-girl stuff going on since they invented that boy-girl controversy stuff. It had all started when Laura began having second thoughts about her old beau, Bart Webber, just back from a tour of duty in the Army having been stationed in Germany. He had called her and talked to her about getting back together. Otty had said to Laura no dice to them even talking. Somehow though Laura and Bart had reconnected as Otty found out the hard way seeing them one Saturday afternoon having lunch together at the Sea and Surf in Hull when he and Laura had a date for the Surf that night. After a couple of weeks of explosions on both sides Laura gave Otty his walking papers.       

That was at the end though but I want to go back to those nights Laura stayed with Otty on Beacon Hill, or rather the first night they “did the do” as the old scat blues singer Howlin’ Wolf would say. Like I said I won’t fill in the sex details because you can figure that on your own but just tell how he, a bottle of wine (white and pretty cheap from what he said), a couple of joints (when that was still cool to do before “cocaine all round your brain” became the drug flavor of the month) and of course Billie, Billie before the pusher man got to her bad, put her on the nod, cut her torch voice into little pieces at the end. Billie when she could make the angels cry about their vocal inadequacies when they heard that voice.

See Laura knew from nothing about Billie so Otty just ran the rack with LP album after album on his stereo and they just drank that wine and smoked that dope until Billie’s The Very Thought Of You came busting into the room and pulled something in Laura’s usually semi-frozen heart. And that was that, they messed up the sheets a bit that night (you know what I mean, right). So, yes, I can see where Miss Billie Holiday might do, might do very well in the throes of love department. Although frankly Billie as an aphrodisiac was a new one on me then.   

But that is not the end because the night Otty told me this story he also said that he had written something about one of Billie’s albums, some kind of review for a local paper or something I forget, and about the effect had on him. Here’s what he had to say:

“In my book, and I am hardly alone on this, Billie Holiday is the torch singer’s torch singer. Maybe it is the phrasing on her best songs. That well-placed hush. Maybe it is the unbreakable link between her voice when she is on a roll and the arrangements. Hell, maybe in the end it was the dope but, by Jesus, she could sing a modern ballad of love, lost or both like no other. And if it was the dope, let me say this- a ‘normal’ nice singer could sing for a hundred years and never get it right, the way Billie could get it right when she was at her best. Dope, or no dope.

Was she always at her best? Hell no, as the current compilation makes clear. [Otty was reviewing a then recently released “greatest hits” compilation.] These recordings done between 1945 and her death in 1959 for Verve show the highs but also the lows as the voice faltered a little and the dope put the nerves on edge toward the end.

Many of the songs on the current compilation are technically sound, a few not, as is to be expected on such re-mastering. You will like Come Rain or Come Shine, Stars Fell On Alabama and Stormy Blues. A tear will come to your eye with Some Other Spring and East of the Sun. The surprise of the package is Speak Low, a sultry song with tropical background beat. That one is very good, indeed.

One last word- I have occasionally mentioned my love of Billie Holiday’s music to younger acquaintances. Guys and gals at work or at a couple of place where I do volunteer work. Some of their responses reflecting, I think, the influence of the movies (especially Lady Sings The Blues) or some black history up-lift looks on her life have written her off as an addled doper. Here is my rejoinder- If when I am in the mood for love and need a pick-me-up and put on a Billie platter then, my friends, someone who can do that for me I will buy them, metaphorically of course, all the dope they ever need. Enough said.”

I can add no more.