![]() After his mother died, he was placed in an orphanage before being fostered, at the age of nine, by a family in Kansas. ![]() It is one of those songs that transcends time and space: not just because of the sentiment, or the seductive swoon of Cole’s original, but also because of ahbez, who tapped into the deep longings that have always lain underneath the surface of mass culture.Īhbez was born George Alexander Aberle in mid-April 1908, to a poor Brooklyn family. Nature Boy has gone on to become a 20th-century classic, with numerous cover versions recorded by artists as diverse as Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Mantovani, Grace Slick, Frank Sinatra and David Bowie. He lived rough even when the royalties came in – camping under the Hollywood sign As ahbez rides on to the stage on his bicycle and then assumes a yoga position, he makes it clear that he will not conform to the values of corporate America: in his sheer strangeness, he is a harbinger of things to come. It’s no small irony that this devotee of simple living – albeit with an entrepreneurial side – is being presented on a talkshow on a major US network, produced by Life magazine and sponsored by Gulf Oil. ![]() To the incredulity of the host, ahbez announces that he has “not much use for money”. Reading from prepared scripts, these two outliers – a proto-hippy and an early African American crossover artist – tell the story of how Cole discovered the song, after it was delivered on spec to the Los Angeles theatre where he was performing. In archive clips of the episode, eden ahbez (the lower case was preferred) has hair down to his shoulders and wears loose-fitting clothes his style is nearly two decades ahead of his time. After Nature Boy became a hit, in an appearance on the CBS show We the People, Cole finally met the man who had written his song, the year’s bestseller.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |