Cole wows fans with Nature Boy
Seventy years ago, jazz great Nat King Cole came to town for a twoweek gig at the Palomar Supper Club.
Cole was so big at the time that The Sun dispatched a writer to meet him when he arrived at the Great Northern train station.
“Usually we come here on a onenight stand,” said Cole on Aug. 31, 1948. “This time, we’ll get a chance to see what Canada looks like.”
His Palomar appearance came soon after one of his biggest hits, Nature Boy. It had sold one and a half million copies at the time of his Vancouver shows, and for fans like late Sun columnist Denny Boyd, it was a touchstone.
“In its time, it was the cultural equivalent of puberty, it was that meaningful,” Boyd wrote on Jan. 22, 1983.
“We’re talking 1948, when all songs ever did was rhyme. Jimmy Webb and message songs were 20 years down the line. But Nature Boy spoke to us from a pulpit and told us to love and be loved.
“The song was written by a oneshot genius named eden ahbez who was, I insist, the western world’s first observed hippie. Ahbez was a bearded, sandalled, robe-wearing young long-haired ascetic whose home address was a sleeping bag in a wooded Los Angeles suburb.
“He left the pencilled first copy of Nature Boy with the doorman of a Hollywood theatre, with instructions to deliver it to Cole. Cole recorded it, it became a monster hit, but ahbez, the gentle mystic, never had another song recorded. He simply vanished. Perhaps he didn’t need to make another statement.
“The religious overtones of Nature Boy overwhelmed us 18-yearolds, the simple story of the boyman who was ‘a little shy, and sad of eye, but very wise was he.’ It was easy enough to recognize that we were hearing a Jesus pop song.
“But if the boy in the song were an allegorical Jesus, who was the man who wrote it? Was eden ahbez — bearded, gowned, sandalled, long of hair and sad of eye, who appeared abruptly, left us a message of love and vanished — was he…?”
In fact, eden ahbez was born George Alexander Aberle in Brooklyn, N.Y.
According to a 1977 Los Angeles Times story by his sister-in-law, when he adopted his new name he chose small letters, “because he believes only God and Infinity should be capitalized.”
His L.A. Times obituary in 1995 said he was a cohort of a bohemian named Gypsy Boots who was in “the vanguard of the health food faddists” in California in the 1940s. Gypsy Boots’ followers had long hair and beards and ate raw fruit and vegetables, hence were nicknamed Nature Boys.
When Cole recorded Nature Boy, his record company went looking for ahbez, and found him living under one of the “Ls” in the Hollywood sign.
Despite what Boyd wrote, he was a celebrity for a time, and had songs recorded by artists like Sam Cooke, Doris Day and Eartha Kitt. He even recorded a solo album, Eden’s Island, in 1960.
But nothing ever matched the success of Nature Boy. According to the website secondhandsongs.com, it has been covered by 365 different artists after Cole, including Frank Sinatra, Miles Davis and Diana Krall. Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga did a duet of Nature Boy in 2014.
Nat King Cole appeared several times in Vancouver between 1947 and 1964, when he was on Jack Cullen’s radio show and got into an on-air argument over when Cole made his first recording.
“Back in 1936 when you made your first record ...” Cullen began. “It was 1939,” said Cole.
“It was 1936,” said Cullen. “May to be exact.”
“It was 1939.”
Cullen delved into his archives and emerged with the 1936 record, Plenty of Money and You. Cole was dumbfounded.
Cole also broke the colour barrier in the major downtown hotels in the 1950s. Black people couldn’t stay at the Hotel Vancouver and the Hotel Georgia until promoter Hugh Pickett talked friend Bill Hudson into booking Cole into the Georgia. Pickett told Hudson it was time to break the ban, but said if anyone complained, he wouldn’t ask again. When he phoned Hudson later to see if there were any problems, Hudson said the only issue was that everybody wanted Cole’s autograph.