Eddie Arnold

We went on a whim. None of us had family anywhere nearby, and we thought it would be a good time to visit Sin City while everybody else was off being virtuous with their families. G and I had stopped there briefly on our way across the country, but driving there after spending two days in the canyon country of Utah was just a little too surreal and we basically ate dinner and went right to bed, overwhelmed by the stimulus. This time, we were determined to do a little gambling.

We all read up on the different games on the drive out and had settled on blackjack as the most likely game to master. The play was simple and the odds favorable and we all felt fairly confident. Especially after practicing in the hotel room and making a couple of thousand dollars in theoretical money, following the system. But there’s often this annoying gap between theory and practice, and nowhere is that more true than in Las Vegas. After finding a five dollar table, I sat down and proceeded to drop $60 in about ten minutes. Geoff, always the overacheiver, managed to lose something like 17 hands in a row. It’s amazing how often the dealer pulls 20 or 21, and within an hour, I had used up my gambling budget for the trip. Undaunted, and using the time tested Vegas logic, I just upped my gambling budget, figuring I couldn’t lose forever. Ha ha ha.

Part of the problem was the song that was stuck in my head. While Patrick was getting on everybody’s last nerve singing Anytime over and over again, I had my own private tape loop repeating in my head. And the name of this jaunty little tune? I’ve Got the Will to Fail, an oddity from Katie Lee’s Songs of Couch and Consultation album – a bizarre collection of peppy songs about psychiatry and the like. I’ve Got the Will to Fail was included in the entertaining first volume of Incredibly Strange Music, compiled by the culture vultures at Re:Search, which helped kick off the nostalgic easy-listening space age bachelor pad mini-boom that happened during the early 1990s. Fun, funny, ironic stuff, but still discouraging to be singing about what a undermining loser I am while giving all my money to some stone-faced Korean woman dealer who turns over her third blackjack in a row. I’d much rather be singing Eddie Arnold’s Anytime.

Since I grew up in an anti-country music environment, I had never heard of Eddy Arnold. In fact, I still hadn’t heard of him until right before the Vegas trip, when Eric’s fiancée Susan, a Texas girl (take that as you will) was feeling nostalgic and pulled some old Eddy out, he being a favorite of her father. Eric, like millions before him, was smitten by Arnold’s smooth baritone and catchy/corny tunes. (Microsoft Word, ever helpful, has just suggested that I may want to rewrite the previous sentence so that it says “Arnold’s smooth baritone smote Eric, like millions before him”). Dutifully, Eric turned me (and Patrick) on to him too, and we were both swept up in Eddymania.

As it turns out, Eddy Arnold is perhaps the most successful country musician of all time (who knew?). He is one of the very few people to hit the charts in five separate decades (the 40s through the 80s) and has sold in excess of 85 million albums. More than anybody, he was responsible for bringing country music out of the country and polishing it up for city folks. Many country fans rankled at the new production sounds pioneered by the likes of Patsy Cline’s producer Owen Bradley, feeling that the lush strings and cocktail piano arrangements watered down the emotional purity of songs played on guitar and sung with a maximum of emotional gusto and a minimum of citified polish, but it did open up new markets and helped country music on its way to becoming one of, if not the, major American musical forces today.

Of all of Arnold’s wonderful songs, none is as simultaneously sublime and ridiculous as Cattle Call. Its exaggerated yodeling is so far over the top that it never fails to make me stop whenever I hear it, chills running up and down my spine. When I first tracked it down, I put this song on a tape and listened to it over and over again in the car, screaming along badly, glad the windows were up and nobody else had to hear it. The polished production, the Mitch Millery gang of back-up singers (or hummers, to be more accurate) and cathedral echo don’t really fit the song, which you imagine is supposed to be sung intimately around a campfire (although with its stratospheric range, I don’t know who would be singing it, unless the Three Tenors were having a barbecue), but somehow the incongruity of it all works. There are a number of great songs in Eddie’s arsenal – besides Cattle Call and the irritatingly catchy Anytime, I also really like Make the World Go Away, I Really Don’t Want to Know, and the sublimely corny The Last Word in Lonesome is Me (which is not to be confused with The Second Word in Lonesome is On or The Antepenultimate Word in Lonesome is So).

After shaking the will to fail and down $200 (twice my gambling budget), I sat down at a table about an hour before we had to hit the road and let it all hang out. Fortunately, Lady Luck smiled on me (I doubled down and split two aces on the one hand that I braved a $25 bet instead of my usual $5 or $10 and blackjacked both of them), and I made all my losings back just before we had to get in the car.

For years, Patrick was just Eric’s younger brother. I would see him only very occasionally and didn’t have much of a relationship with him beyond that enthusiastically agreeable guy that Eric tolerated. But that all changed when I moved to LA. Patrick was also interested in editing and had made it out a year or so before I did, and was unreasonably generous in helping me get on my feet. He worked hard to get me on a crew with him (my one union gig) and was always ready with advice. Even (especially) if I didn’t want it. Years of shared dinner parties (often featuring his notorious eggplant parmesan, which is delicious – especially because, no matter when he started cooking, it usually wasn’t ready until midnight) and poker nights (I am Armando!) and shared lunches and bachelor parties (no, no, honey, they call it a lap dance because the dancer is from Lapland) have brought us close together. And since Eric couldn’t make it work in LA and has moved on to bigger and better things in the great northwest and I rarely get to see or talk to him, it’s more like he is Patrick’s brother than the other way around, if you know what I mean.

I once read that Eddie Arnold was slated to do an album with Esquivel and had actually recorded a few tracks with the Mexican madman before his conservative sensibilities got the better of him and he cancelled the date and walked out of the studio. If only…