Covered: Norman Gimbel: 1953-1986

It occurred to me the other day that I have dozens of albums in my Covered series ready to go, but I rarely seem to get around to posting them. So I'm going to make more of an effort to post these. I haven't gotten that much feedback on them, but I think they're pretty unique and interesting. So here's an especially interesting and unique songwriter: Norman Gimbel.

Who would have ever imagined that the same person involved in writing "The Girl from Ipanema" also helped write "Killing Me Softly with His Song" and the theme to the "Happy Days" TV show? That's range. I just found his obituary in the New York Times (he died in 2019 at the age of 94), and that called him "wildly versatile," adding that "Any attempt to categorize [his] musical leanings would be complicated." 

Gimbel was first and foremost a lyricist. He rarely wrote songs on his own. Typically, someone else would write the music while he would write the lyrics. But he also had a specialty of taking interesting songs in foreign languages and coming up with English lyrics for them. 

A typical case was "The Girl from Ipanema." It was written in 1962, with music by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Portuguese lyrics by Vinicius de Moraes. In early 1963, Jobim was recording the song in New York City with Joao Gilberto and Stan Getz when they came up with the idea of doing an English version. Gimbel was rushed in to come up with English lyrics on the spot. Gilberto's wife Astrid Gilberto happened to be the only Brazilian there who could speak English well, so she was drafted to sing the song, even though she had no professional singing background whatsoever. The result was a classic that shall be played in elevators until the end of time.

That collaboration worked so well that Gimbel ended up writing English lyrics to many of the biggest bossa nova classics from Brazil, like "How Insensitive (Insensatez)," "Meditation (Meditacao)," "So Nice (Summer Samba)," and "Drinking Water (Agua de Beber)." "Sway" is another classic that was originally in Spanish. "Bluesette" is a case where he wrote lyrics to an instrumental hit by Toots Thielemans.

But Gimbel just didn't have the skill of writing new lyrics for already existing songs. He often worked with other songwriters to create songs from scratch. His first song here is from 1953, and he stayed active songwriting well into the 2000s. He often co-wrote songs for TV shows, movies, and plays. Five of his songs were nominated for Academy Awards or Golden Globes or both. He won an Academy Award in 1979 for "It Goes like It Goes," the theme to the movie "Norma Rae."

In the 1970s, Gimbel often collaborated with Charles Fox on songs (though not exclusively). This led to the writing of "Killing Me Softly with His Song," which Rolling Stone Magazine has put on a list of the top 500 songs of all time. In the early 1970s, Gimbel and Fox signed an aspiring female musician, Lori Lieberman, to a management contract, promising to write songs for her. Lieberman went to see Don McLean in concert. She was so inspired by one of his songs ("Empty Chair," not "American Pie," though he played that too), that she wrote lots of notes for a potential. Excited, she immediately called Gimbel on the phone and shared her ideas. Gimbel honed them into lyrics, including coming up with the "Killing me softly with his song" line. He later said, "Her conversation fed me, inspired me, gave me some language and a choice of words." He then passed the lyrics to Fox, who wrote the music. 

So far, so good. But the controversy is that Gimbel and Fox took full songwriting credit, even though clearly Lieberman had an essential role in creating the song. Lieberman released a version of the song as a single in 1972 (produced by Gimbel and Fox), but it went nowhere. When Roberta Flack released her version in 1973, it went to Number One on the singles chart in the U.S., and Lieberman got nothing for it. (Flack's version was probably much more successful because she came up with a very different arrangement, even changing some of the melody and the chords.) Adding insult to injury, in later decades, both Gimbel and Fox denied that Lieberman had a role in writing the song, and also denied that it was inspired by a Don McLean concert, even though they'd already been quoted many times admitting both things. Presumably they got scared about being sued by Lieberman for a cut of the profits, but it turned out she never sued them.

You can read the whole story here. It paints Gimbel and Fox in a pretty bad light, especially since Gimbel was married yet having a secret affair with the much younger Lieberman at the time:

Killing Me Softly with His Song - Wikipedia

Also, here's his Wikipedia entry, if you want to read more about him in general:

Norman Gimbel - Wikipedia

Anyway, Gimbel may have done some ethically dubious things, but there's no doubt he was a great lyricist. Fox later said of him, "Norman had the extraordinary ability with his lyrics to capture the human condition with never an excessive word to describe a feeling or an action." He then pointed out how Gimbel could often conjure an entire song with its first line, and he offered examples: "Tall and tan and young and lovely," "Strumming my pain with his fingers," and "If it takes forever, I will wait for you."

This album is an hour and seven minutes long.

01 Ricochet [Rick-O-Shay] (Teresa Brewer)
02 Canadian Sunset (Sam Cooke)
03 The Girl from Ipanema (Astrud Gilberto, Stan Getz & Joao Gilberto)
04 I Will Follow Him (Peggy March)
05 How Insensitive [Insensatez] (Astrud Gilberto)
06 Bluesette (Vikki Carr)
07 Meditation [Meditacao] (Doris Day)
08 I Will Wait for You (Connie Francis)
09 So Nice [Summer Samba] (Astrud Gilberto & Walter Wanderley)
10 Watch What Happens (Lena Horne & Gabor Szabo)
11 Drinking Water [Agua de Beber] (Frank Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim)
12 I Got a Name (Jim Croce)
13 Killing Me Softly with His Song (Roberta Flack)
14 Wonder Woman (John Bahler)
15 Happy Days (Pratt & McClain)
16 Sway (Bobby Rydell)
17 Making Our Dreams Come True (Cyndi Grecco)
18 Ready to Take a Chance Again (Barry Manilow)
19 Different Worlds (Maureen McGovern)
20 It Goes like It Goes (Jennifer Warnes)
21 Only Love (Nana Mouskouri)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/P2BYQLtv

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/MpTyosybz70Db69/file

Gimbel was very private and rarely photographed. The best I could find was a black and white photo from a 1984 awards ceremony. I colorized it using the Palette program, then improved it with the Krea AI program.