Enoch Light
As lounge music, favored by “mature” listeners of the 1950s, finds a new audience in the post-baby-boom set, a flood of imitations, compilations, and reissues has rushed in to meet the revived demand. Central to the trend is a renewed fascination with the idea of the space-age bachelor pad–the legendary souped-up penthouse into which a playboy of the late 50s might lure young women in order to seduce them. As an ad for DCC’s Music for a Bachelor’s Den series admonishes, “Enter at your own risk…honey.”
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One of the most telling bits of nostalgia dredged up from the original bachelor-pad era is Persuasive Percussion, which was the first in a ten-year string of hit records for easy-listening producer Enoch Light. When it was originally released in 1959, a year after the introduction of the stereo long player, it was a bit of an oddity for the easy-listening genre, combining the lazy tropical kitsch of Martin Denny with an almost martial precision in the percussion department. The songs–versions of “I’m in the Mood for Love,” “I Surrender, Dear,” and “Orchids in the Moonlight,” for instance–were obviously chosen for their seductive reputations, but they were arranged in such a way as to test various functions of the owner’s hi-fi. So at any moment the spell could be broken–if, say, your speakers weren’t properly balanced or your tone arm were binding on the inner grooves. The contradictory functions of the record may seem odd, but they made it a best-seller–and they parallel certain contradictions of the bachelor-pad myth.
Playboy habitually addressed its readers–including the more than 53 percent of them who were married, according to the magazine’s own surveys–as bachelors. Playing upon the pressure married men felt as sole breadwinners, it demonized wives as “money-hungry” gold diggers and lazy “parasites.” It celebrated the joys of unencumbered living and multiple sex partners. The monthly centerfold offered visible confirmation of its readers’ heterosexuality, and the wholehearted embrace of capitalist consumerism banished the specter of communism. By 1956 circulation had passed the million mark, and a decade later the ideas Playboy espoused were common in popular culture: in the 1965 comedy How to Murder Your Wife, Jack Lemmon pleads guilty to the title crime but asks the jury of married men to acquit him “on grounds of justifiable homicide–and not for my sake [but] for yours.” The message to men was increasingly that the high life was just one wife away–better start furnishing that space-age bachelor pad now. Persuasive Percussion, a seduction sound track disguised as a stereo test record (or maybe vice-versa), was designed to give dad something handy to do as he dreamed of ditching the family for swingin’ digs and a steady supply of trim.
It’s unclear what they hope to accomplish by this, but there are hints here and there. Writes Hume at the end of Organ & Bongos: “Why don’t the heavyweights in the liquor and tobacco industries poke their heads up out of their bunkers and take note of this phenomenon called ‘Cocktail Culture’ that’s bucking all the other trends unfavorable to their interests? Then they might consider how to divert some of the money they waste trying to look like they’re against teenagers using their products–which nobody believes anyway–and spend it in ways that would allow someone like Joey Altruda to put his Big Band together and even take it on the road, spreading the Gospel of Lounge throughout the nation. Perhaps Mr. Altruda wouldn’t mind being pigeonholed so much if the hole were just big enough–as it could be if it received sufficient backing.” Because they lack even the unrealized economic potential of the 50s breadwinners, neoloungers can only wait for the corporate mother ship to come down and take them to the next level.
