Author Topic: "The Ballad of the Sad Young Men" by Fran Landesman  (Read 20035 times)

Offline milomorris

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Re: "The Ballad of the Sad Young Men" by Fran Landesman
« Reply #20 on: October 21, 2013, 11:03:53 am »
The show "The Nervous Set" has been described as a jazz musical, a cynical, intellectual satire about the beat generation, written in 1959.  The context of the song in the show is about a female character's reaction to "wasted lives" of the men she sees around her.  

Thank you. Knowing how the song was originally set helps to understand its meaning.
  The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

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Offline x-man

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Re: "The Ballad of the Sad Young Men" by Fran Landesman
« Reply #21 on: October 22, 2013, 09:09:14 am »
[quote author=southendmd link=topic=50908.msg651706#msg651706 date=1382362068 
It's my belief that works of art, either this song, or our beloved BBM, belong to the world, and can be interpreted by the beholder in any way they desire.  [/quote]

Whatever the intentions of the composer or author, we are legitimately able to look beyond the original setting for a work of literature.  Literature in general derives its meaning from that fact.  Must He Was a Friend of Mine be read only in its original context?  If so, all the audiences in all the theatres who saw BBM were quite wrong in hearing an Ennis telling about a dead cowboy in Texas.

The truth is that Ballad of the Sad Young Men speaks to a lot of gay men who remember the times in their lives when they were most alone, most vulnerable, and most looking for connection.  Like many others, I think of those times in bars, when Last Call was approaching, and you realize you are still alone, still desperate, knowing that if you don't soon find a Friend, you are again destined to go home alone, or to look for what you need in some darker more dangerous place.  And you do need, and you do look.  If you have never experienced that you are either very lucky, or you have closed yourself off, and never risked exposing your heart to anguish.  If the latter is the case, you may have saved yourself some pain in the short run, but it will catch up with you eventually, when you look back at what you have missed.
Happiness is the lasting pleasure of the mind grasping the intelligible order of reality.      --Leibniz

Offline southendmd

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Re: "The Ballad of the Sad Young Men" by Fran Landesman
« Reply #22 on: April 28, 2014, 04:27:33 pm »
Here is Fran's obit from the NY Times:

Fran Landesman, Lyricist With a Bittersweet Edge, Dies at 83
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: August 1, 2011

Fran Landesman made her life into an art form — not least because of the exuberantly public extramarital sex life she delighted in sharing with London tabloids. But her lasting footprint was the mordant, biting, yet strangely tender lyrics she used to chronicle the world’s lovers, lunatics and losers.

Her song “The Ballad of the Sad Young Men” — whom she described as “drifting through the town, drinking up the night, trying not to drown” — was recorded by Roberta Flack, Petula Clark, Rickie Lee Jones and, in an instrumental version, the pianist Keith Jarrett. With music by Tommy Wolf, it became a jazz standard.

Another song she wrote that became a standard — but, like “Sad Young Men,” never a hit — was “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most.” It sprang from Ms. Landesman’s asking jazz musicians to put T. S. Eliot’s phrase “April is the cruelest month” into their own words. Its music was also composed by Wolf. Bette Midler and Sarah Vaughan were among the many who sang it.

Ms. Landesman also published five volumes of poetry, some of it raw. The poem Bette Davis memorized, “Life’s a Bitch” contains the line “First love makes you itch, then it dishes you the dirt.”

Ms. Landesman died on July 23 at her home in London at 83. Her death was announced on her official Web site. She left an epitaph, something she said on more than one occasion: “It was a good life, but it wasn’t commercial.”

Frances Deitsch was born in Manhattan on Oct. 21, 1927, attended Temple University and the Fashion Institute of Technology, and fell in with the group that came to be called the Beat generation. She thought Kerouac was “the best-looking man I’ve ever seen,” and the feeling seemed mutual. He and Allen Ginsberg serenaded her with bongos. “Be my girlfriend, I’m so lonely,” Kerouac pleaded.

But she ended up marrying Jay Landesman, who published Neurotica, a magazine that gave the Beats a platform while seeking to explore America’s “inner darkness.” “He’ll make a good first husband,” she decided.

They were wed for 61 years; Mr. Landesman died at 91 in February. They had a remarkably open marriage in which each brought partners home to sleep in separate bedrooms. Everyone then had breakfast together. Their teenage sons, Cosmo and Miles, were appalled.

In his 2008 book, “Starstruck: Fame, Failure, My Family and Me,” Cosmo Landesman wrote: “The thing that upset me the most was their dress and appearance. I can remember when I thought of having them committed to the Institute for the Criminally Dressed. It was parents’ day at school. They arrived looking like two hippies who had failed the audition for the musical ‘Hair.’ ”

Soon after marrying, the couple moved to Mr. Landesman’s native St. Louis and started a nightclub that became one of the hippest in the Midwest. Called the Crystal Palace, it booked performers like Woody Allen, Barbra Streisand and Lenny Bruce — who, she liked to recall, once urged her to leave her husband and run off with him: “Let’s you and me go on the road and send him a little money every month.”

The Landesmans collaborated with Wolf on a musical called “The Nervous Set” as a vehicle for Ms. Landesman’s lyrics. It was a smash in St. Louis, then flopped on Broadway. They moved to London, where Ms. Landesman continued her career as a lyricist, singer and poet. (Mr. Landesman wrote, founded a publishing company and managed the career of a kung fu stripper.)

Since the mid-1990s, Ms. Landesman, who is survived by her sons, collaborated with the composer and pianist Simon Wallace on some 300 songs and kept performing.

Last March, the singer Shepley Metcalf performed Ms. Landesman’s songs in Manhattan. The New York Times critic Stephen Holden likened the lyricist to “a cranky, jazz-steeped Beat Generation Dorothy Parker.”

He continued, “In those days of hanging out in bars into the wee small hours, dragging home strangers whom you can’t remember the next morning and generally acting in the name of hip, dissipation was a competitive urban sport and Ms. Landesman one of its champion chroniclers.”

But she long ago gave up the sport herself. “When you reach 60 — forget it,” she said in 1998. “I think it’s unattractive after that.”


Offline CellarDweller

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Re: "The Ballad of the Sad Young Men" by Fran Landesman
« Reply #23 on: April 29, 2014, 08:19:55 am »
fascinating Obit, she sounds like a very unique person.


Tell him when l come up to him and ask to play the record, l'm gonna say: ''Voulez-vous jouer ce disque?''
'Voulez-vous, will you kiss my dick?'
Will you play my record? One-track mind!