Addiction

11: For All We Know (1934)

This song is now, then, and forever.

The recording history of J. Fred Coots and Sam M. Lewis’s ‘For All We Know’, written in 1934, begins merrily with a version by Hal Kemp and His Orchestra, sung by Bob Allen. Its optimistic trills and honeyed vocals belie the song’s depths.

On the surface, ‘For All We Know’ is about a tentative encounter between two people, about to part on an enchanted night. One person speaks to the other of the fleeting quality of the evening and what the future may or may not hold, pledging their heart and soliciting the other person’s love. When Coots first heard Lewis’s lyrics, he thought they were ‘worthy of great poetry’, and promptly promised him $200 of IOUs.

The verse, as performed by Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin and Bette Midler, locks down the song’s story as one of romantic love (‘A kiss that is never tasted / Forever and ever is wasted’). (Susannah McCorkle and Gladys Knight’s alternative verse intros are variations on that theme.) But Lewis’s words in the choruses are nothing short of a meditation on human existence itself: the experience of love, loss, consciousness, and temporality.

For all we know
We may never meet again
Before you go
Make this moment sweet again

We won’t say ‘goodnight’
Until the last minute
I’ll hold out my hand
And my heart will be in it

For all we know
This may only be a dream
We come and go
Like a ripple on a stream

So love me tonight
Tomorrow was made for some
Tomorrow may never come
For all we know

My favourite versions as of now are by Brad Mehldau, Bill Evans and Jose James and Jef Neve, each one tender and devastating in its own way.

But given the sheer quantity of interpretations, many of them straight ahead – one even by Ken Dodd – it’s weird that the first one I ever heard, again and again, should have been Nina Simone’s radical 1958 reworking. As she put it to Steve Allen in 1964, she interpreted the song in ‘a hymn-Bach-like way’. In her arrangement, whose melody departs substantially from the original, the eighteenth and twentieth centuries touch: a reflection in performance of the lyrics’ attention to endurance and transience.

With Joan Plowright as an elderly widow and Rupert Friend as her surrogate grandson Ludo, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (2005) does much more with the song than simply include Rosemary Clooney’s version in the end credits. Endurance and transience pervade the film: Mrs Palfrey’s recent loss, her arrival in London to stay long-term at a mediocre hotel, her daughter and actual grandson’s neglect, and her accidental encounter with Ludo, which becomes a tender friendship.

The film is uneven and sometimes quite strange, but this scene is lovely. At Ludo’s flat, Mrs Palfrey has reminisced about falling in love with her husband, including a twinkling nod to their healthy sex life, and days out in Beaulieu. Ludo asks her another question, and an unexpected, touching serenade unfolds.

In Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy (1989), set in 1971, Abbey Lincoln’s gut-wrenching interpretation is used repeatedly to speak of the dangerous tenacity of addiction – from the opening sequence, which introduces junkie Bob (Matt Dillon), sweating from a seeming overdose on an ambulance stretcher, to his earlier bus ride back to Portland to enter a methadone programme, to the film’s final moments, which return us to the ambulance.

The first ambulance scene, accompanied by the song, has an ironic, hallucinatory quality, compounded with a cut to a cinefilm of Bob with his crew of fellow addicts and thieves.

Later, Bob gazes silently through the misted, rain-spattered window of the bus at the agricultural landscape around.

Matt Dillon--Drugstore Cowboy

Adrenalised pharmacy and hospital heists, obsessive superstitions, and violence have given way to a more prosaic reality, which the film complicates with the lyric ‘For all we know / This may only be a dream’. ‘We come and we go / Like the ripples in a stream’ plays over shots of street drinkers gathered outside decrepit storefronts. ‘So love me tonight / Tomorrow was made for some / Tomorrow may never come / For all we know’ suggests both hope and desperation as Bob enters his new abode, the St Francis Hotel.

The last moments in the ambulance, as he struggles not with an overdose but a revenge gunshot injury from a dealer, make clear that Bob intends to abandon clock-time and production line work, and return to his life as a junkie. As Abbey Lincoln sings the song’s final choruses, contemplating the ebbs and flows of time and love, Bob explains.

It’s this fucking life. You never know what’s going to happen next. […] See, most people, they don’t know how they’re going to feel from one minute to the next. But a dope fiend has a pretty good idea. All you gotta do is look at the labels on the little bottles.

On his way to ‘the fattest pharmacy in town’, he wants to live. It’s an incredible use of the subtleties of this wonderful song, which can accommodate the paradox of hedonistic control as well as gentle acceptance of the future’s sadnesses and joys, which so quickly become the past.

2: Call Me Irresponsible (1962)

This song is not what it seems.

Scores of versions of ‘Call Me Irresponsible’ have been released since Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn wrote it in 1962. It was prepared for film comedy Papa’s Delicate Condition (1963), in which it appears first as a wordless lullaby played by a child’s wind-up toy. In 1963 alone, at least seven artists recorded it, among them Frank Sinatra, Julie London and Dinah Washington – the exuberant cadenzas that Washington performs at the end of her version since featuring on numerous adverts and television trailers. (The YouTube link below lists its source as Totally Commercials: the Essential Commercials Album, released in 1998.) I’m so familiar with her performance’s passionate take that reflecting on the song recently, I realised I’d never really understood its lyrics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EO8jm9QmEf4

My superficial impression: reckless, spontaneous love!

It turns out the song is not about that.

Two short, magnificently crafted choruses give us an inconsistent character shamelessly cajoling their loved one. The character justifies their sketchy behaviour by virtue of their romantic sensibilities (“Rainbows, I’m inclined to pursue”) and their strength of feeling for the other person. In the extraordinary lines “Do my foolish alibis bore you? / Well, I’m not too clever, I just adore you”, a mere fifteen words deftly establish a relationship history and execute a smooth rhetorical confidence trick.

Set apart from the film, this Academy Award-winning song’s interpretative possibilities arguably range from ‘adorable if unrepentant’ to ‘sociopathic’. Compare and contrast Tony Bennett’s puppyish plaintiveness and Julie London’s Shere Khan.

On this basis, ‘Call Me Irresponsible’ is tough to accept in terms of love – unless being backed into an emotional corner is your thing. In its cinematic context, the song’s story takes on another aspect.

call me irresponsible

Papa’s Delicate Condition centres around the Griffith family and their salubrious small-town life in Texas. Jack Griffith (Jackie Gleason) is a railway superintendent whose excessive generosity and alcohol dependency together engender recurring marital crises. His church-going, recital-hosting wife Amberlyn (Glynis Johns) is status-conscious and controlling, though not without spark. Their teenage daughter Augusta (Laurel Goodwin) is likewise. Meanwhile, Jack is flamboyant and gregarious, qualities which delight their six year old daughter Corinne (Linda Bruhl) – in real life, a silent film actress and author of the memoir on which the film is based.

call me irresponsible

In the opening scene, Amberlyn distastefully removes from the gramophone a recording of ‘Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home‘ (1902) as Corinne protests. The film is critical of Amberlyn – jawdroppingly, in these introductory moments she calls the child “my little consolation prize” directly to her face – but though Jack is its hero, it is not uncritical of him: we first meet him on a steam train, enthusiastically belting out ‘Bill Bailey’ and enjoying the lion’s share of a bottle of bourbon in the company of a driver and stoker.

call me irresponsible

With modified lyrics, a harmonious family rendition of ‘Bill Bailey’ also wraps the whole drama up, raising a great many questions on the film’s uses of that song and their racial and historical politics.

Jack’s ‘delicate condition’ is his regular drunkenness, which leads him to engage in various rash schemes: tricking a man into repainting his ugly house to please Amberlyn, buying a drugstore to rescue a downtrodden assistant from its owner, and finally being hoodwinked himself into purchasing a failing circus so he can give its show-pony to Corinne. This is the last straw for Amberlyn, who gathers up her daughters and flees to her father’s house.

‘Call Me Irresponsible’ marks this moment of abandonment.

This scene – the first and only in this family-friendly comedy in which we see Jack unmistakably drunk – is incredibly sad.

The instrumentation is gentle, but Gleason’s performance of the song is unshrinking. The scene’s visual comparison of the automated and lifeless dolls in Corinne’s room with the bereft husband, his reproachful gaze at himself in the mirror, and his one-sided conversation with his surrogate wife-dummy all speak of patterns of (self) destruction. (The pat to the dummy’s hip is objectionable enough, but in a stunningly aggressive moment directly after this clip, he drops his empty glass into the dummy through its neck.)

By the end of the film, husband and wife will have reconciled. He will be sober; she will have ceded control. But this poignant scene shows the song’s narrative to be based not in the plenitude of love, but a man’s struggle with himself.