Biography
One of pre-rock American popular music’s more eccentric figures, Eden Ahbez earned lasting recognition chiefly by writing “Nature Boy.” The song’s haunting melody and elusive lyrics scored an enormous commercial success for Nat King Cole and later attracted interpretations from Frank Sinatra, John Coltrane, Sarah Vaughan, and the Great Society—the band Grace Slick fronted before joining Jefferson Airplane. Ahbez’s contemporary reputation, however, hinges on a single 1960 LP that fused exotica textures with beatnik verse.
His background proved as singular as the music he produced. Born Alexander Aberle in Brooklyn during the early twentieth century, he adopted his distinctive surname in the 1940s soon after relocating to California. Decades before the hippie movement, he projected a Christ-like visage with shoulder-length hair and beard while insisting he subsisted on three dollars weekly, slept outdoors alongside his family, and subsisted on vegetables, fruits, and nuts.
Ahbez secured his breakthrough by persistently urging Nat King Cole’s associates at Los Angeles’s Million Dollar Theater to consider “Nature Boy.” Some luster faded when a music publisher asserted that portions of the lyric derived from the Yiddish composition “Schweig Mein Hertz,” though the dispute ended with an out-of-court settlement.
He succeeded in placing one additional number with Cole, “Land of Love (Come My Love and Live with Me).” During the mid-1950s he recorded with jazz artist Herb Jeffries and contributed occasional songs and vocals to rock-and-roll novelty discs. His fullest recorded testament arrived with the 1960 album Eden’s Island, which paired Martin Denny-style exotica with Ahbez’s own beatnik poetry. Nat King Cole maintained that the composer’s mystical persona was entirely sincere. Interest among space-age pop collectors revived that desert-island reverie during the 1990s, prompting a CD reissue in 1995.
A 1966 studio photograph of Ahbez alongside Brian Wilson reinforced speculation that the Beach Boys’ leader absorbed exotica influences while shaping Pet Sounds and SMiLE. Ahbez died in 1995 following an automobile accident.
His background proved as singular as the music he produced. Born Alexander Aberle in Brooklyn during the early twentieth century, he adopted his distinctive surname in the 1940s soon after relocating to California. Decades before the hippie movement, he projected a Christ-like visage with shoulder-length hair and beard while insisting he subsisted on three dollars weekly, slept outdoors alongside his family, and subsisted on vegetables, fruits, and nuts.
Ahbez secured his breakthrough by persistently urging Nat King Cole’s associates at Los Angeles’s Million Dollar Theater to consider “Nature Boy.” Some luster faded when a music publisher asserted that portions of the lyric derived from the Yiddish composition “Schweig Mein Hertz,” though the dispute ended with an out-of-court settlement.
He succeeded in placing one additional number with Cole, “Land of Love (Come My Love and Live with Me).” During the mid-1950s he recorded with jazz artist Herb Jeffries and contributed occasional songs and vocals to rock-and-roll novelty discs. His fullest recorded testament arrived with the 1960 album Eden’s Island, which paired Martin Denny-style exotica with Ahbez’s own beatnik poetry. Nat King Cole maintained that the composer’s mystical persona was entirely sincere. Interest among space-age pop collectors revived that desert-island reverie during the 1990s, prompting a CD reissue in 1995.
A 1966 studio photograph of Ahbez alongside Brian Wilson reinforced speculation that the Beach Boys’ leader absorbed exotica influences while shaping Pet Sounds and SMiLE. Ahbez died in 1995 following an automobile accident.
Albums