Salve for a Broken Childhood: The Phenomenon of Rod McKuen

Bobby Dylan is protesting and I’m not.
—Rod McKuen, 1967

The poet and songwriter Rod McKuen passed away in January at the age of eighty-one. McKuen has practically disappeared from the consciousness of the present generation, but in his time he was one of the most commercial and creative enigmas of late-1960s popular music and poetry—dismissed by serious writers, embraced by the masses, tolerated by the counter-culture folk singers of the day; yet respected by the elite of pop and country music.

McKuen’s thirty poetry books sold 60 million copies and were translated into eleven languages, making him the most commercially successful poet in history. Yet the US Poet Laureate Karl Shapiro, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, said, “It is irrelevant to speak of McKuen as a poet.”

As a recording artist, he was considered a purveyor of pap and cheesy easy-listening, the “King of Kitsch”, yet McKuen wrote over 1500 songs, and is associated with sales of over 100 million records. He collaborated and co-wrote with the French chanson singer Jacques Brel for years. His songs were performed by Barbra Streisand, Dusty Springfield, Johnny Mathis, Johnny Cash and Frank Sinatra.

As a musician, he composed film scores, Academy Award-winning songs and larger-scale orchestral compositions, writing concertos and symphonies, including The City: A Suite for Narrator & Orchestra, nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Who was this strange blip on the musical radar screens of the late 1960s, that flickered for a decade and then vanished? Rod McKuen, as popular as he was in his day, even garnered insults in his obituaries. What kind of paradoxical person affects people like this?

McKuen was born in 1933, in Oakland, California. He had an extremely traumatic childhood, sexually abused by an uncle at age seven, with frequent beatings. In an interview with People magazine, in 1982, he said:

The fact that my stepfather had beaten me up when I was a kid wasn’t hard for me to talk or write about. I had both arms broken and my ribs caved in several times, but physical injuries on the outside heal. Before now, though, I have never been able to come forward and talk about having been sexually abused when I was a child. Those scars have never healed, and I expect they never will.

He ran away from home at eleven. He later joined the US Army and saw service as a propaganda writer during the Korean War. After the war, he settled in San Francisco, and began writing poetry, performing his work at gatherings and readings, sometimes alongside Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. He sang songs in bowling alleys to promote his early work, and his self-published collection of poems and lyrics, Stanyan Street and Other Sorrows, sold tens of thousands of copies before Random House acquired it.

In the early 1960s he moved to France, where he met Jacques Brel. He was enchanted by Brel, who was himself a kind of kitsch version of the great Edith Piaf, and they began collaborating on songs.McKuen translated one of Brel’s classics, “Ne me quitte pas” (literally, “Don’t Leave Me”)—based on a musical theme from Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 6—into English, retitled “If You Go Away”. The original stands out for its almost self-humiliating bleakness and emotion, but McKuen’s watered-down American version contrasts what might happen if the lover goes away, with what could be possible if she stays. McKuen somehow even manages to remove the poetry from the title. Something closer to the intent of the original would have resembled more the blues song, “Baby, Please Don’t Go”.

Still, McKuen’s translation is considered a pop classic, with versions recorded by Dusty Springfield, The Seekers, Shirley Bassey, Tom Jones, Brenda Lee, Frank Sinatra, Neil Diamond, Nana Mouskouri, Ray Charles, Julio Iglesias, Cyndi Lauper, Madonna, Barbra Streisand and Eartha Kitt. McKuen often sang the song himself in performance, in the throaty speaking-style he was forced to use, after early life as a rock singer destroyed his natural tenor. At one point, he was touring 280 days a year.

Frank Sinatra was so impressed by McKuen’s writing that he requested an entire album of songs. McKuen wrote:

You can imagine how excited I was when Frank Sinatra asked me to write an original album for him. What could possibly be nicer, more flattering and challenging than being commissioned by the world’s most inventive and popular singer to write and compose something, let alone a whole album, for HIM. It was like winning the Nobel and the Lottery on the same afternoon. Scintillating and scary.

The album was call A Man Alone, subtitled “The Words and Music of McKuen”. One of the songs, “Love’s Been Good to Me”, is considered by many to be McKuen’s finest:

I have been a rover,

I have walked alone,

Hiked a hundred highways,

Never found a home,

Still in all I’m happy,

The reason is, you see,

Once in a while, along the way,

Love’s been good to me.

“Love’s Been Good to Me” became a natural follow-up hit for Sinatra after his previous Ervin Drake classic, “It Was a Very Good Year”. The album itself, however, was savaged by critics. Stephen Thomas Erlewine, in All Music, wrote:

McKuen’s musical contributions amount to tone poems more than songs. Six of the pieces are actual songs, with the remaining tracks being spoken word pieces with instrumental backdrops, including one number that is half-sung and half-spoken without any instrumental accompaniment at all. Certainly, with all this emphasis on words, A Man Alone was intended to be a serious statement, but much of it comes off as embarrassing posturing. McKuen’s compositions are lyrically slight and musically insubstantial, but what saves A Man Alone from being a total failure is the conviction of Sinatra’s performance, as well as Don Costa’s skillful arrangements. Although he’s not able to recite the poetry convincingly, Sinatra’s singing is textured and passionate, drawing more emotion from the lyrics than are actually there. As it stands, the album is an intriguing listen, but ultimately a failure.

Part of Rod McKuen’s reputation as a poet, rather than simply being consider a songwriter, came from a quirk of the time. In the late 1950s, McKuen had probably intended to be a serious writer. The bohemian lifestyles of the beatniks, and the hippie movement to follow, made it loud and clear that anyone who simply declared themselves a poet was indeed a poet. (The loud declamations in the media from Bob Dylan come to mind.) But, like Leonard Cohen, who gained recognition first as a poet, and as a songwriter second, a unique polymathic gift for music, and the resulting great commercial success of the songwriting, overwhelmed his budding poetic ability, and McKuen simply stopped doing the hard work required to improve at the craft.

Confusion in the media was also compounded by a blurb that appeared on one of McKuen’s poetry books, The Sea Around Me … The Hills Above, by the poet W.H. Auden:

Rod McKuen’s poems are letters to the world and I am happy that some of them have come to me and found me out.

Although it cannot be proved or disproved that Auden actually said this (let’s give him the benefit of the doubt), the sentence was rewritten at least twice for subsequent reprints of the book:

Rod McKuen’s poems are letters to the world and I’m happy that many of them came to me and found me out.

Rod McKuen’s poems are love letters to the world and I am happy that many of them came to me and found me out.

Although McKuen drew a sharp line between the kind of songs he was writing and those of Bob Dylan’s social activism, he wasn’t afraid to address political issues. He opposed the Vietnam War. Here is the complete lyric to one of his protest songs:

Soldiers Who Want To Be Heroes

number practically zero,
but there are millions

who want to be civilians.

He supported civil rights and equal rights for gays as early as 1953 and was a delegate at the Mattachine Society convention in Los Angeles, one of the first gay rights organisations in America. He wrote a song protesting against the anti-gay campaigner Anita Bryant and to draw awareness to AIDS.

Although he never came out publically as gay or bisexual, he once described himself as “an adult who practices several kinds of sex and will do so until he gets one right”. In 2004, he wrote:

Am I gay? Let me put it this way. Collectively I spend more hours brushing my teeth than having sex so I refuse to define my life in sexual terms. I’ve been to bed with women and men and in most cases enjoyed the experience with either sex immensely. Does that make me bi-sexual? Nope. Heterosexual? Not exclusively. Homosexual? Certainly not by my definition. I am sexual by nature and I continue to fall in love with people and with any luck human beings of both sexes will now and again be drawn to me. I can’t imagine choosing one sex over the other, that’s just too limiting. I can’t even honestly say I have a preference. I’m attracted to different people for different reasons. I do identify with the Gay Rights struggle, to me that battle is about nothing more or less than human rights.

He became known, derisively, in the popular media, as the “King of Kitsch”. The term kitsch was coined in the Munich art world of the 1860s. It referred to cheap and marketable paintings, artworks or objects, considered to be in poor taste due to excessive garishness or sentimentality.

Hermann Broch said that “the essence of kitsch is imitation: kitsch mimics its immediate predecessor with no regard to ethics—it aims to copy the beautiful, not the good”.Walter Benjamin wrote that kitsch was a “utilitarian object lacking all critical distance between object and observer” offering “instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, without sublimation”.

Whether due to the endless barrage of negative press, or the damage to his voice, McKuen stopped his prolific touring in 1981. The next year he was diagnosed with clinical depression, which he fought for ten years. However, he continued to give an annual birthday concert at Carnegie Hall.

In January 2015, McKuen died of heart failure, attributed to decades of too much drinking, and complications from pneumonia, in Beverly Hills, California. Carlos Cunha, in the LA Review of Books, wrote:

Today, the harder I look at McKuen’s poetry, the harder I find the task of defending it and, instead, fall to wondering dismally about the shabby flimsiness of the stuff that feeds our illusions when we are still green, and how that makes us no less fervent about them, even willing to kill and die for them in wars and jihads. Still, what of McKuen’s tone, cadence, rhythm, vision, attitude? Can I not still discern some artistry there? I certainly believe McKuen had a distinctive poetic style and persona, and both seemed very modern at midcentury, or thereabouts, and deft enough to beguile millions of modernity-loving readers.

I asked around of some of my friends and associates in the folk music and poetry worlds who might have remembered McKuen in his heyday. Eric Bogle, writer of the iconic “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda”, bought a book of McKuen’s poetry for $1 in a second-hand shop, read it in an hour, and says, today, he can’t recall a single line. Bogle’s sister, who was a fan of McKuen, commented to him on the sincerity of McKuen’s live performance:

She came home from the concert on a huge high, told us he’d spent most of the concert sitting at the front of the stage with legs dangling over the edge just chatting to the audience and reciting his poems, had everybody “in the palm of his hand, he was so natural and so sincere”, to quote my sister … she was a head-mistress of a local school and was no intellectual or artistic barbarian, and she loved him.

Judy Small, one of the most beloved singer-songwriters in Australia, who retired from professional music some years ago to become a judge of the Federal Circuit Court, said:

I do recall hearing some of his poetry on the radio but I wasn’t impressed at all and remember none of it, I’m afraid. Not my cup of tea I’d have to say. I was more into Peter, Paul & Mary, Dylan and The Seekers in the 60s.

Margret RoadKnight, another longtime and popular folk singer, from Melbourne, who had a top-forty hit with “Girls in Our Town”, replied:

Afraid Rod McKuen’s influence & merits (or lack of) has never engaged my mind … my admittedly uninformed impression: extremely prolific, slight, sentimental, stretching the definition of “poet” (always happy to be persuaded otherwise).

Andrew Pattison, artistic director of Melbourne’s longest running and most celebrated folk music venue, The Troubadour, admired McKuen:

I liked his stuff a lot, especially “Love’s Been Good to Me” by Sinatra. I used to sing it out loud to some curious sheep as I tramped the last two miles home down a snow-covered country lane after hitching a lift part of the way back to my rented shared mill house when I was an impoverished student chartered surveyor in Banbury, Oxfordshire, around 1970.

Finally, Dr Dave Mason, ex-Poet Laureate of Colorado, commented:

Haven’t thought about Rod McKuen for years. I know he wrote some good songs, and some good poems, but the only poem I recall is used in textbooks as a dreadful example of sentimentality—it’s about roadkill, dead kitties and things like that. I don’t know if it’s fair to him or not, but it’s pretty bad. On the one hand, I think of him as a figure who was lucky to strike it rich in the 60s, riding a sentimental wave of good vibrations. On the other hand, the derision of the academy strikes me as something one possibly ought to court and not be afraid of …

Personally, I didn’t care for Rod McKuen’s poetry at the time and I still don’t. Songwriters, from the 1960s onwards, have seemed to be in love with the idea of being a poet, but few musicians are prepared to put in the commitment required to write credible poetry and actually learn something from the great writers who are all around them, and who have gone before.

Rod McKuen was, in reality, a very good songwriter, who declared himself a poet. It would be no different if Paul Anka had decided to put out a book of his song lyrics and call it poetry. McKuen’s books were, in fact, only musings and diary jottings, but the public wanted to spend time with him. So they bought his books—by the truckload.

McKuen’s life story is fascinating and worthy of a revisit. He certainly made a mark on popular culture. His particular style of chanson was a salve for his broken childhood and perhaps a reason why it resonated with so many others:

Once I wrote a song.
Almost.
Sixteen lines that walked
Up from my belly to my head.

As I stood waiting for the light to change,
And making up a melody,
A yellow bus passed by slowly.
Looking up I lost the lines I thought I’d learned,
And several more that never came,
All because a bus passed by,
And someone smiled from out a yellow window.