Rod McKuen

During the late 1960s Rod McKuen stood among America’s highest-selling poets while simultaneously building a substantial career as a songwriter, film composer, and vocalist. His releases moved between melodic pop numbers built around his verse and direct spoken recitations of the same material, and his more ambitious concert works brought two Oscar nominations plus a Pulitzer nomination. Through his English-language adaptations the catalog of Belgian songwriter Jacques Brel reached new audiences across English-speaking territories. Themes of love, nature, and spirituality ran through his writing, although some critics rejected the work as overly simple or sentimental. Even after his original hippie-era readership matured, McKuen continued to match his productivity with popularity, issuing more than thirty books whose combined sales reached the millions and drawing increasing academic interest.

Rodney Marvin McKuen entered the world on April 29, 1933, in Oakland, California. He grew up with his mother and a stepfather whose alcoholism frequently turned violent, and he left home at age eleven. For the next several years he traveled the length of the West Coast, holding an assortment of temporary positions—ranch hand, surveyor, railroad worker, lumberjack, rodeo cowboy, stuntman, radio disc jockey, and others—while forwarding portions of his earnings to his mother. To compensate for limited formal schooling he began keeping a journal that evolved into a steady writing practice and supplied his earliest poems and song lyrics. He later worked as a newspaper columnist and served in the Korean War as a propaganda scriptwriter. After returning to the United States and settling in San Francisco, he read poetry in the company of Beat figures such as Kerouac and Ginsberg and started singing at the Purple Onion, first performing folk material and then his own songs. Those appearances secured a recording contract and produced several late-1950s pop albums for Decca. He also pursued acting, appearing in the rock-and-roll films Rock, Pretty Baby (1956) and Summer Love (1958), for which he supplied music, and in the Western Wild Heritage (1958). Additional early credits included performances with Lionel Hampton’s band and a move to New York in 1959 to compose and conduct for the CBS television program The CBS Workshop.

McKuen spent the first half of the 1960s chiefly in France, where he encountered many leading French songwriters. He launched an extended effort to render the songs of Jacques Brel into English, an undertaking that helped transform “If You Go Away” into a durable pop standard; Scott Walker later recorded numerous McKuen translations in the late 1960s, and Terry Jacks took the adapted “Seasons in the Sun” to the top of the pop charts. McKuen also supplied English versions of songs by other French writers, among them Gilbert Bécaud, Pierre Delanoé, and Michel Sardou. In the latter half of the decade he began issuing collections of poetry that found a wide following within the counterculture, including Stanyan Street and Other Sorrows, Listen to the Warm, and Lonesome Cities. The spoken-word album drawn from Lonesome Cities received the 1968 Grammy for Best Spoken Word Recording.

McKuen placed most of his spoken-word releases on RCA while directing his musical projects to Warner Bros. Beginning in 1967 he collaborated with arranger Anita Kerr and the San Sebastian Strings on a sequence of mellow vocal-pop albums: The Sea (1967), The Earth (1967), The Sky (1968), Home to the Sea (1969), For Lovers (1969), and The Soft Sea (1970). Songwriting recognition grew in 1969 when Frank Sinatra, after recording “If You Go Away,” commissioned an entire album of McKuen poems and songs issued as A Man Alone: The Words & Music of McKuen and featuring “Love’s Been Good to Me,” which became one of McKuen’s signature pieces. That same year McKuen earned an Oscar nomination for Best Song for “Jean,” the theme from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; Oliver’s recording of the song reached number two on the pop chart. Work on the score of A Boy Named Charlie Brown brought a second Oscar nomination in 1970, while the co-written “I Think of You” became a major adult-contemporary success for Perry Como in 1971. Other widely performed McKuen compositions from the period include “The World I Used to Know,” “Rock Gently,” “Doesn’t Anybody Know My Name,” “The Importance of the Rose,” “Without a Worry in the World,” and “Soldiers Who Want to Be Heroes.”

McKuen subsequently turned toward large-scale classical composition, producing concertos, suites, symphonies, and chamber works. The City: A Suite for Narrator & Orchestra received a Pulitzer Prize nomination in Music. He maintained a steady flow of poetry throughout the 1970s; his 1977 volume Finding My Father, which recounted his search for information about his biological father, contributed to expanded access to such records for adopted children. Occasional recordings continued, among them New Ballads (1970), Pastorale (1971), the country-rock set McKuen Country (1976), and the disco-flavored Slide...Easy In, a playfully camp outing with pronounced gay themes that yielded the European hit “Amor, Amor.” McKuen ceased live performance in 1981; the following year he received a diagnosis of clinical depression, which he confronted for much of the ensuing decade. He nevertheless kept writing poetry and supplied voice-over performances for The Little Mermaid and the television series The Critic. Rod McKuen died of pneumonia in Beverly Hills, California, on January 29, 2015, at the age of 81.