Rod McKuen, Oscar-Nominated Songwriter And Bestselling Poet, Dead At 81
NEW YORK (AP) — Rod McKuen, a husky-voiced “King of Kitsch” whose avalanche of music, hymn and spoken-word recordings in a 1960s and ’70s impressed vicious hoax and done him an Oscar-nominated songwriter and one of a best-selling poets in history, has died. He was 81.
McKuen died Thursday morning during a reconstruction core in Beverly Hills, California, where he had been treated for pneumonia and had been ill for several weeks and was incompetent to digest food, his half-brother Edward McKuen Habib said.
Until his sabbatical in 1981, McKuen was an astonishingly successful and inclusive force in renouned culture, branch out hundreds of songs, poems and records. Sentimental, aspiring and unashamed, he conjured a New Age suggestion universe that perplexed those who didn’t usually like “poetry” and those who craved service from a war, assassinations and riots of a time.
“I consider it’s a greeting people are carrying opposite so many stupidity in a world,” he once said. “I mean, people are unequivocally all we’ve got. You know it sounds kind of corny, and we suspect it’s a cliche, though it’s unequivocally true; that’s usually a approach it is.”
His best-known songs, some created with a Belgian composer Jacques Brel, embody “Birthday Boy,” ”A Man Alone,” ”If You Go Away” and “Seasons In a Sun,” a chart-topper in 1974 for Terry Jacks. He was nominated for Oscars for “Jean” from “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” and for “A Boy Named Charlie Brown,” a pretension lane from a dear Peanuts movie.
Frank Sinatra, Madonna, Dolly Parton and Chet Baker were among a many artists who available his material, nonetheless McKuen mostly rubbed a pursuit himself, in a hushed, guttural character he honed after an early life as a stone thespian burst his healthy tenor.
McKuen is credited with some-more than 200 albums — dozens of that went bullion or gold — and some-more than 30 collections of poetry. Worldwide sales for his strain tip 100 million units while his book sales surpass 60 million copies.
He was generally prolific from 1968 to 1969, releasing 4 communication collections, 8 songbooks, a soundtracks to “Miss Jean Brodie” and “A Boy Named Charlie Brown” and during slightest 10 other albums. Around a same time, his “Lonesome Cities” manuscript won a Grammy for best oral word recording and Sinatra consecrated him to write element for “A Man Alone: The Words and Music of Rod McKuen.”
With his neatly split blond hair, sneakers and jeans, McKuen was famous worldwide and thrived in each medium: movies, music, books, television, stage. When not essay or recording, he seemed on “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson and other speak uncover programs, shaped a film prolongation association with Rock Hudson and toured constantly until he took an extended mangle in 1981.
“I was tired. we peaked. we left when we was on top,” McKuen told a Chicago Tribune in 2001. “One year, we did 280 concerts.”
He had no grave low-pitched or literary training, though mostly incited out a strain or poem per day and prided himself on essay hymn that anyone could understand. The work seemed to call for accompaniment by a single, unhappy guitar or a pathetic carol of strings. Among his many quoted phrases: “Listen to a warm” and “It doesn’t matter who we love, or how we love, though that we love.”
The difference created about McKuen were as important as his own. Often compared to “Love Story” author Erich Segal, he was dubbed “The King of Kitsch” by Newsweek, while a repository Mademoiselle elite “Marshmallow Poet.” A National Lampoon satire interspaced ridicule verses with dollar signs.
The escapism of his work was contrasted by an early life good in need of escaping. Born in Oakland in 1934, he frequency knew his father, who left a family when he was a baby, and McKuen removed being shocked of his alcoholic stepfather. By age 11, McKuen had run divided and he would spend his teenagers doing all from ranching to roping horses in a rodeo, while essay communication in his giveaway time.
After portion as a promotion author in a Korean War, McKuen wound adult in San Francisco, where his crony Phyllis Diller helped him find work in a flourishing nightclub scene. He went on to sing with a Lionel Hampton band, acted in a handful of cinema and TV shows, review communication on a same check as Jack Kerouac and other Beat writers and had a teenager strike singular in a early 1960s with a dance satire “Oliver Twist.”
Without vicious capitulation or a book or recording contract, McKuen valid that an artist could flower on word of mouth alone. He sang in bowling alleys to foster “Oliver Twist,” and his self-published collection of poems and lyrics, “Stanyan Street and Other Sorrows,” sole tens of thousands of copies before Random House acquired it.
McKuen slowed down over a second half of his life, and many of his books fell out of print. But he continued to tell poetry, remastered aged low-pitched recordings and gave occasional concerts. He supposing voiceovers for a Disney film and TV array “The Little Mermaid” and seemed during Carnegie Hall in 1995 for an 80th birthday reverence to Sinatra. Artists continued to record his songs, including a former Gene Ween, Aaron Freeman, who in 2012 expelled an manuscript of McKuen covers called “Marvelous Clouds.”
McKuen did during times take on amicable and domestic issues. He against a Vietnam War, wrote a poem about a Watergate liaison and upheld polite rights and equal rights for gays. Often described as a loner, he was demure to plead his possess regretful preferences over observant he did have them.
“Cats have it all,” he once wrote, “admiration, an unconstrained sleep, and association usually when they wish it.”
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Associated Press author Robert Jablon contributed to this news from Los Angeles.
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