Rod McKuen

McKuen was born as Rodney Marvin Woolever on April 29, 1933, in a Salvation Army hostel in Oakland, California Per The New York Times, he had "two birth certificates, each giving conflicting dates and spelling his father's name different ways." He never knew his biological father, who had left his mother. raised by his mother and stepfather, who was a violent alcoholic, McKuen ran away from home. He drifted along the West Coast, supporting himself as a ranch hand, surveyor, railroad worker, lumberjack, rodeo cowboy, stuntman and radio disc jockey, always sending money home to his mother. McKuen worked as a newspaper columnist and propaganda script writer during the Korean War. He settled in San Francisco, where he read his poetry in clubs alongside Beat poets like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. ==Discovering Jacques Brel==

In the early 1960s, McKuen moved to France, where he first met the Belgian singer-songwriter and chanson singer Jacques Brel. McKuen began to translate the work of this composer into English, which led to the song "If You Go Away" – an international pop-standard – based on Brel's "Ne me quitte pas". McKuen translated Brel's song "Le Moribond" loosely into "Seasons in the Sun", and British folkbeat group The Fortunes charted with the song in the Netherlands in 1969. In 1974, singer Terry Jacks turned McKuen's "Seasons in the Sun" into a best-selling pop hit, and also charted with a cover of "If You Go Away." McKuen also translated songs by other French songwriters, including Georges Moustaki, Gilbert Bécaud, Pierre Delanoé, and Michel Sardou. In 1978, after hearing of Brel's death, McKuen was quoted as saying, "As friends and as musical collaborators we had traveled, toured and written – together and apart – the events of our lives as if they were songs, and I guess they were. When news of Jacques' death came I stayed locked in my bedroom and drank for a week. That kind of self-pity was something he wouldn't have approved of, but all I could do was replay our songs (our children) and ruminate over our unfinished life together." ==Poetry==

In the late 1960s, McKuen began to publish books of poetry, earning a substantial following among young people with collections like Stanyan Street & Other Sorrows (1966), Listen to the Warm (1967), and Lonesome Cities (1968). His Lonesome Cities album of readings won a Grammy for Best Spoken Word Recording in 1968. McKuen's poems were translated into eleven languages and his books sold over 1 million copies in 1968 alone. McKuen said that his most romantic poetry was influenced by American poet Walter Benton's two books of poems. McKuen sold over 60 million books worldwide, according to the Associated Press. ==Songwriting==

McKuen wrote over 1,500 songs and released up to 200 albums which have accounted for the sale of over 100 million records worldwide according to the Associated Press. In 1961, he had a hit single titled "Oliver Twist". He co-wrote it along with Gladys Shelley and the Spiral label-issued single reached No. 76 on the Billboard pop chart. His hoarse and throaty singing voice on these and other recordings was a result of McKuen straining his vocal cords in 1961 due to too many promotional appearances. He collaborated with numerous composers, including Henry Mancini, John Williams, Anita Kerr, and Arthur Greenslade. His symphonies, concertos, and other orchestral works have been performed by orchestras around the globe. His work as a composer in the film industry garnered him two Academy Award nominations for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) and A Boy Named Charlie Brown (1969), McKuen's Academy Award-nominated composition "Jean", sung by Oliver, reached No.1 in 1969 on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart and stayed there for four weeks. In 1971, his song "I Think of You" was a major hit for Perry Como. Other popular McKuen compositions included "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". During the 1970s, McKuen began composing larger-scale orchestral compositions, writing a series of concertos, suites, symphonies, and chamber pieces for orchestra. He continued publishing a steady stream of poetry books throughout the decade. In 1977, he published Finding My Father, a chronicle of his search for information on his biological father. The book and its publicity helped make such information more readily available to adopted children. He also continued to record, releasing albums such as New Ballads (1970), Pastorale (1971), and the country-rock outing McKuen Country (1976). McKuen continued to perform concerts around the world and appeared regularly at New York's Carnegie Hall throughout the 1970s, making sporadic appearances as recently as the early 2000s. ==Later years==

In 1973, at 40 years of age, McKuen radically changed his outward appearance: he no longer bleached his hair and he grew a beard. In August 1974 he delivered a memorial service eulogy for his long-time friend Clay Shaw. McKuen retired from live performances in 1981. The following year, he was diagnosed with clinical depression, which he battled for much of the next decade. He continued to write poetry, however, and made appearances as a voice-over actor in The Little Mermaid and on its spin-off TV series, as well as on the TV series The Critic. 2001 saw the publication of McKuen's A Safe Place to Land, which contains 160 pages of new poetry. For 10 years he gave an annual birthday concert at Carnegie Hall or the Lincoln Center. He released the double CD The Platinum Collection and was remastering all of his RCA and Warner Bros. recordings for release as CD boxed sets. In addition to his artistic pursuits he was the Executive President of the American Guild of Variety Artists (AGVA), a post he held longer than any other man or woman elected to the position. McKuen lived in Beverly Hills, California, with his partner Edward Habib, whom he called his "brother", and four cats in a large rambling Spanish house built in 1928, which housed one of the world's largest private record collections. He died of respiratory arrest, a result of pneumonia, at a hospital in Beverly Hills, California, on January 29, 2015. ==LGBT activism==

McKuen never publicly identified with a particular sexual orientation, though he did describe his sexuality by saying, "I can't imagine choosing one sex over the other, that's just too limiting. I can't even honestly say I have a preference." He was active in the LGBT rights movement, and as early as the 1950s, was a key member of the San Francisco chapter of the Mattachine Society, one of the nation's earliest LGBT advocacy organizations. McKuen often avoided gender references in the lyrics of his love songs. the can was a pastiche of Crisco – then widely used by gay men as a sexual lubricant for fisting– with the label instead reading "Disco". An inscription on the cover stated "this was a project everyone had to get into; not just on the surface, but deeply—and together. If you don't feel "easy in" then perhaps your threshold of pain or pleasure needs looking into." Until 1976, the Ansonia had been home to the Continental Baths, a gay bathhouse and dance club. ==Criticism==

Despite his popular appeal, McKuen's work was never taken seriously by critics or academics. Michael Baers observed in Gale Research's St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture that "through the years his books have drawn uniformly unkind reviews. In fact, criticism of his poetry is uniformly vituperative ..." In a Washington Post obituary, Matt Schudel suggests that McKuen's commercial success engendered a backlash from the literary community. McKuen himself quipped that "The most unforgivable sin in the world is to be a bestselling poet". Frank W. Hoffmann, in Arts and Entertainment Fads, described McKuen's poetry as "tailor-made for the 1960s ... poetry with a verse that drawled in country cadences from one shapeless line to the next, carrying the rusticated innocence of a Carl Sandburg thickened by the treacle of a man who preferred to prettify the world before he described it". and, at the height of his popularity in 1969, Newsweek magazine called him "the King of Kitsch." Writer and literary critic Nora Ephron said, "[F]or the most part, McKuen's poems are superficial and platitudinous and frequently silly." Pulitzer Prize-winning US Poet Laureate Karl Shapiro said, "It is irrelevant to speak of McKuen as a poet. His poetry is not even trash." In a Chicago Tribune interview with McKuen in 2001 as he was "testing the waters" for a comeback tour, Pulitzer Prize-winning culture critic Julia Keller claimed that "Millions more have loathed him [...] finding his work so schmaltzy and smarmy that it makes the pronouncements of Kathie Lee Gifford sound like Susan Sontag," and that his work "drives many people crazy. They find it silly and mawkish, the kind of gooey schmaltz that wouldn't pass muster in a freshman creative-writing class" while stating that "The masses ate him up with a spoon, while highbrow literary critics roasted him on a spit." She noted that the third concert on his tour had already been canceled because of sluggish ticket sales. In May 2019, Backbeat Books published A Voice of the Warm: The Life of Rod McKuen by Barry Alfonso. This was the first in-depth biography of McKuen. In his introduction to the book, singer and music historian Michael Feinstein wrote that McKuen's life and work held a significant place in pop culture: "[McKuen] knew how to create something that made a reader or listener say, 'That's me.' Like Gershwin's, his work is a document of the time in which it was created. But what he did also transcends that time and still speaks fundamentally to the things that matter to people: romance, relationships, the human condition. Those things don't change. He used the vernacular of his time to reach the widest audience. But at its essence, his work is still valid and, I think, timeless." ==Bibliography==