When I first encountered the name of Vic Damone, it was in my dorm-room at university in late 2017 or early 2018. I was trawling through various related YouTube videos showcasing excellent singers from the period. At the time I had just discovered the American Broadway star Robert Goulet. His dark, operatic baritone was all I wanted to imitate. I must have listened to his rendition of ‘If Ever I Would Leave You’ a thousand times. His version of that famous number from ‘Camelot’ (the show that propelled him into stardom when he played the dashing Sir Lancelot) is still definitive. However, one day I came across Damone’s version on YouTube and was struck dumb. His light, lyrical baritone has a velvety timbre akin to Sinatra’s, yet had a considerable amount of the operatic power that made Goulet’s voice so powerful. Goulet now had a close rival for his affections. It was around this time that the news broke of his passing away, aged 89, after a long and lustreless obscurity. Even now, he is remembered more for his multiple disastrous marriages than his artistry. Yet, believe it or not, I listened to very little of Damone immediately after that. It would be almost two years later before I would lend an ear to much more of his recorded output.
I have just gone back to his 1960 recording of ‘If Ever I Would Leave You’. Goulet’s version is a strident, loud, almost manic, appeal to the heart of his beloved. In contrast, Damone strikes a tender, more vulnerable note of the kind that was very much in keeping with my own youthful, lovelorn longing at this tempestuous time of my life. Both are valid interpretations. Perhaps Goulet’s is more accurate for the character – Lancelot is an raging egomaniac, his boldness in courting the (married) Queen Guinevere a mark of his own self-righteous streak. He displays in this serenade an entirely self-exculpatory attitude towards the thorny ethics of pursuing the wife of your king. But Damone, a man who knew all the ups-and-downs of love with an adolescent intensity, transforms this into a very different kind of torch song, one that perhaps invites more sympathy for the sufferer. He must have injected a great part of his personal pain at his bitter parting from his ex-wife Pier Angeli into this recording.
Damone began his career in the post-war period, when crooning was still very much in fashion. Fellow Italian-Americans Al Martino and Tony Bennett were also seeking to make a name for themselves in the singing business around this time. Perry Como discovered him and pushed him to continue his singing lessons – the famous story he often told of meeting Como by chance in an elevator and halting its descent until he had had a chance to demonstrate his singing chops does not need to be recounted. Success came to him eventually – recordings like ‘On The Street Where You Live’ (from the musical ‘My Fair Lady’) brought him chart success and a degree of exposure to the market. However, the competition was tough, and he never shook off the impression that he was simply a Sinatra clone. When I hear him, I simply can’t hear that in him. Besides the fact that they were both lyric baritones with a silky timbre to their voice, they couldn’t have been more different. Sinatra could croon and swing with equal ability. Damone was never rhythmically convincing – he was best with the ballads. He was unlucky enough to live in an era where so many talented ballad singers had been able to corner a market that was fast dwindling in any case – with the advent of rock and roll from the ’50s, Damone’s career came to a screeching halt. He hopped from one label to another hoping to restart his chart success, but he just wasn’t selling. This interview from the ’80s, by which time he’d been reduced to singing on cruises for want of a popular audience, was quite telling of the state of traditional American pop music:
I am yet to fully explore Damone’s patchy discography, which is generously provisioned on Spotify. Nevertheless, I have had a lot of fun going back to him over the past several years, listening to old favourites and discovering new ones. When I was finding my own singing voice, he was one of my major inspirations. Imitating other singers is never to be recommended, but in a strange way, trying to copy his own style is what made me realise just how much operatic ‘heft’ I had in my own voice. In that regard, he has been an important part of my own artistic self-discovery. I sound nothing like him – I am a bass-baritone with a dark timbre, whilst he has a mellow, soft-timbred lyric voice. I am nevertheless grateful to him for the contribution he has made to to my own singing adventure.
His work remains criminally underrated and neglected. Considered old hat even in his own time, when the standards of the Great American Songbook were fast falling out of favour, he is in danger of being forgotten forever. I hope this blog post will play some role in arresting that.
This will not be exhaustive, but I think it is worth looking at this 1962 album ‘Linger Awhile’, what I think is a shining pearl in his work. The title song is a masterpiece of interpretative nuance. In this and in so many of the other recordings, he weaves effortlessly back and forth between hushed pianissimos that communicate a heartfelt, erotic intensity, and loud, insistent declarations of romantic obsession. The arrangements by Jack Marshall are terrifically lush, and more musically complex than the pleasing, easy-listening style immediately suggests. ‘Close Your Eyes’, linked below, is a very good representative of this – the close connection between the singer and his beloved is mirrored in the stepwise motions of the melody, the teasingly suspenseful tempo creating anticipation for the blissful moment of consummation, and Damone’s breathy vocals wafting past it all with effortless seductive power.
As aforementioned, Damone was not in the same league as Sinatra or Bennett when it came to his sense of swing, yet in this album, he is able to do so competently. One cannot resist the urge to get out of one’s seat and snap and clap along as he goes along. It is no doubt one of the best albums he ever recorded, if not the best.
His 1965 album, ‘You Were Only Fooling’, is perhaps a less successful effort. With his record sales faltering, it was thought fit that he record some contemporary hits such as ‘I’ll Never Find Another You’ by The Seekers. Having heard both versions, Damone’s loses nothing of the emotional sincerity of the original. The whole album is an assortment of contemporary songs such as these, and old classics from earlier in the century. A personal favourite, for all of its soppiness, is ‘The Thrill of Loving You’. There is a decent cover of country singer Hank Locklin’s ‘Please Help Me, I’m Falling (In Love With You), and a much less successful cover of Tom Jones’ ‘It’s Not Unusual’. Listening to the album, it is clear that Damone’s handlers were trying to recreate the sense enjoyed by the likes of Dean Martin and Al Martino with their country-pop arrangements, complete with guitar and 4/4 percussive bass lines. It didn’t work, but at least they tried.
For all its flaws, I remain fond of this album. It is a mish-mash of different things that didn’t coalesce into a coherent whole, or save Damone’s faltering recording career, but one can’t say he didn’t try. A late-life renaissance like that of Tony Bennett’s didn’t happen for him – he spent his declining years playing golf with Donald Trump, marrying then divorcing Diahann Carroll, and living in seclusion after the tragic passing of his son, Perry (named after Perry Como) from cancer in 2014.
I don’t like to think of Damone in connection with all the misfortunes of his personal and professional life – I prefer to celebrate the artistry of a much-neglected talent, one that never got his due. Thanks for everything, Vic!