CharlesPaolino's Blog

Bruce Klauber, a journalist, producer, and musician, last year quoted Barbra Streisand as saying, ““There are a number of good singers, a smaller handful of truly great singers, and then there’s Johnny Mathis.” Johnny Carson put it another way after a performance on the “Tonight Show” in which Mathis held the final note of “Pieces of Dreams” for about 30 seconds. “I guess,” Carson said, “that takes care of that song,” meaning, of course, that no one else needs to sing it. One could say that of so many songs that are identified with Mathis, and vice-versa, although his repertoire is so much larger in style and genre than the titles that first come to mind.

My wife, Pat, and I were wondering aloud just the other day how much longer Mathis would continue to tour, and today he answered us, and everyone else, by announcing his retirement. I’m not much younger than Mathis and still working full time, but I’m also at the age when death is no longer an abstract idea. An event such as Johnny Mathis retiring is one more tick of the clock that will not tick forever.

Mathis came into prominence in the mid 1950s, just in time for Pat and me to become fans, an affection we wouldn’t share until we started dating about eight years later. We danced to “The Twelfth of Never” at our wedding; that’s “our song” 61 years later. We have gone to several Mathis concerts including one at which he sang five songs during his encore–a suitable reward, I thought, for the folks who beat it for the exits when he finished his regular set.

I spent many years in the newspaper business covering or supervising coverage of local affairs including municipal and county government. I took advantage of the access that job gave me by developing a sideline interviewing people in entertainment and sports. On one occasion, which happened to be Pat’s birthday, I arranged to attend a “press availability” Mathis was subjecting himself to in advance of a concert here in New Jersey. Without telling her where we were going, I took Pat with me. We were ushered into a room where there were only two other reporters who, it turned out, didn’t seem to know anything about Mathis nor care to find out. They were mute.

Johnny Mathis came into the room, wearing a sweat shirt and a pair of torn jeans, and sat on the edge of a wooden table, and Pat engaged him in conversation. He agreed when she told him that at the beginning of his career he seemed uncomfortable on stage but that he had gradually developed a graceful presence. She asked him if he had ever considered dramatic acting, and he said that he had expressed that ambition but that no one would take him seriously. They went on like that for almost an hour as though they had forgotten that anyone else was in the room until, at one point, Mathis looked at me and said with a laugh, “My God! He’s writing this down!”

We once found on YouTube a long interview with Mathis in which the interviewer asked, in effect, “After making so many recordings over so many years, which ones do you like to listen to most?” “I don’t listen to my records,” Mathis said. “After sixty years, I’m tired of the sound of my own voice!” Well, we haven’t heard his voice as much as he has, but the passage of nearly seventy years now has done nothing to make it any less thrilling and soothing and mesmerizing. Johnny Mathis is retiring, but we have stacks of CDs and vinyls to keep him with us till the ticking stops.