Boulevard of Broken Dreams
Last blast of ‘super racy’ early Hollywood songbook
In 2004 punk band American rock band Green Day released a single called Boulevard of Broken Dreams. Though it did modest business in the UK — creeping into the Top 100 at 99 — it caused a major rumpus amongst British the rock aristocracy. Noel Gallagher of Oasis pointed an accusing finger from his palatial greenhouse, suggesting that he was due a cut of the composition royalties:
“They should have the decency to wait until I am dead [before stealing my songs]. I, at least, pay the people I steal from that courtesy,”[14]
In the ensuing sound and fury few noted a more obvious uncredited influence. The title and arguably the lyrical theme borrowed from a much older song. That Boulevard of Broken Dreams (Warren/Dubin) was not often visited by the angry young men of the early 2000s. Sting had been there though, and this very old guy called Tony Bennett was always banging on about it.
The original song
Harry Warren (music) and Al Dubin (words) were the hottest songwriting partnership in the early years of Hollywood musical. Two Tin Pan Alley veterans, they reunited on a Warner Brother set where another Broadway export, Busby Berkeley was planning a big new singing and dancing extravaganza. Could Harry and Al provide a few new tunes? Big numbers for some fancy set-piece routines?
The songwriting partnership did not disappoint. The box-office busting success of 42nd Street (1933 ) created two popular standards (the title song and You’re Getting to Be a Habit with Me) and lead to a commission for another Warner Brothers musical, Moulin Rouge (1934).
Thematically — and indeed geographically, Moulin Rouge is a travelling troupe comes to New York — we are in the same territory: a musical comedy based around a show where again ‘the underworld can meet the elite’.
The Hays Code
Crucially, the borderline sleaziness was a little more explicit on this occasion. And this proved to be a headache for the producers, as a puritanical backlash against ‘Hollywood babylon’ was gathering pace.
Fearful of a government crack-down, the studio barons had drawn up new rules for cinematic propriety called the Hays Code. The code, which would stay in place for over thirty years, set out acceptable and unacceptable content for motion pictures produced for a public audience in the United States.
Films Moulin Rouge about crazy show folk were clearly on thin ice. An extended dance tango sequence was exactly the kind of salacious material the Hays Code would be gunning for. A year later it would undoubtedly have been toned down for code compliance.
Ironically, Boulevard of Broken Dreams acknowledges the notion of ‘wages of sin’ as Al Dubin’s inspired title suggests. You can have your fun with your crazy dances and louche nightlife but you have signed a Faustian contract Read the small print: there will be price for all those ‘good times’:
The joy that you find here you borrow
You cannot keep it long it seems
Gigolos and Gigolettes
As that encyclopedia of popular song, Mark Steyn points out, the refrain of The Boulevard of Broken Dreams contains a word that even in 1934 was effectively obsolete.
The boulevard of broken dreams
Where gigolo and gigolette
Can take a kiss without regret
In the 1920s the word gigolo came into a vogue — to describe a paid male escort. The gig (!) did not necessarily imply sexual services though there was a raffish undertone. This is hinted at in Boulevard and underpins the more famous Just a Gigolo.
Afterlife
The Boulevard of Broken Dreams remains as where it has always been — on the fringes of the standards repertoire — recorded by many singer including Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole, Billy Eckstine and Diana Krall. It remained a staple of Tony Bennett’s repertoire for 60 years.
On this occasion, the late, great Mr Bennett is joined by Sting.
Just Gigolos? — a linguistic battle of the sexes.
42nd Street — song where the underworld can meet the elite
