The 1985 Project Part 17: Lost in the Stars: The Music of Kurt Weill

How I learned to love songs from 1920s German theater, among other things

If you’re just joining us, the purpose of the 1985 project is to talk a bit about the records released that year, starting with the 40 albums that placed in the Village Voice Pazz and Jop Poll, and then moving on to some yet-to-be-determined system for continuing on.

Though enough people must like them as they continue to be churned out year after year, multi-artist tribute albums are among the most derided concepts among fans of recordings. I’ve always had a warm enough spot in my heart to check them out, even if the return on time invested rarely pays off. But I think I’m prone to believe in the idea of assembling a bunch of fresh takes on a single artist’s music because the first ones I encountered were all produced and collated by Hal Willner.

I think he invented the tribute album in 1981 with Amarcord: Nina Rota, an album of mostly jazz versions of music from Fellini films. I don’t think I heard this one until after Lost in the Stars came out in 1985. But I was very familiar with the 1984 double album That’s the Way I Feel Now: A Tribute to Thelonious Monk. Here we find a mixture of jazz and rock artists pushing the interpretations of Monk’s classic compositions into all sorts of new approaches. I’m not sure whether or not this sold well, but Willner was given bigger budgets to handle the next couple of tributes he had up his sleeve.

Everybody my age and above, and a significant number of the rest of Americans, knows at least one Kurt Weill song, “Mack the Knife.” I am reasonably sure I knew the Sinatra version of “September Song” before this album came out, too. But beyond that, all I knew of Weill was he was a German theatrical composer. Lost in the Stars: The Music of Kurt Weill exposed me to the breadth of Weill’s music. These songs were from German or Broadway musicals, not the kind of things I was interested in. But if you put Stan Ridgway, Richard Butler, Marianne Faithfull Tom Waits, and Lou Reed to the task of singing something outside my realm of experience in 1985, I was more than willing to give it a shot.

Willner’s approach to the tribute album was different from what would become the norm. He wasn’t looking for people who would obviously be connected to the musician being honored. He was very much not interested in faithful reproductions of what the original records had been. He wanted creative people, often in combination with equally creative people who didn’t know each other, to dig into the music and see what they could come up with to make it entertaining in a new way.

The original LP of Lost in the Stars had sixteen tracks by twenty-four credited artists. When it was re-issued on CD later, four more tracks brought two more artists to the mix. The CD version is the one that currently streams, and since it includes Henry Threadgill’s amazing arrangement of “The Great Hall,” which has something to do with The Threepenny Opera but I don’t know what, that’s the version I listened to for this review.

I played the LP a lot back in 1985, and a handful of previously unknown to me songs – “The Cannon Song” here done by Stan Ridgway and the still unknown to me otherwise Fowler Brothers; “The Ballad of the Soldier’s Wife” by Marianne Faithfull and Chris Spedding (though I’ll be damned if I can pick out his guitar playing); “Alabama Song” by Ralph Shuckett of Utopia and Richard Butler of Psychedelic Furs and at least a couple singers I can’t identify (I had certainly heard the Doors version of this song, but I never much cared for them, and had probably forgotten it); and “Surabaya Johnny” by Dagmar Krause who I knew a little bit from the group Henry Cow and would later realize was a great idiosyncratic singer in her own right – all became instant favorites. Lou Reed’s exuberant take on “September Song” was what I liked more than anything.

The album holds up as an enjoyable listen start to finish. Willner was also adept at sequencing songs from different sources in the artist’s career played in different styles to achieve a nice flow. Instrumental takes on tunes are interspersed between the vocal numbers; jazz flows into rock which might be followed by whatever you call the highly arranged and wonderful stuff Van Dyke Parks provides which comes just a couple songs before John Zorn cuts up and wacks out on another piece. Most of the songs are sung in English, though there is some German thrown in here and there.

Willner got to do one more tribute for A&M – Stay Awake – Various Interpretations of Music from Vintage Disney Films – which might be even better than Lost in the Stars. He produced a number of records for individual artists, my favorite being Strange Weather by Marianne Faithfull in 1987. He was the sketch music producer on Saturday Night Live until his death in 2020 as one of the first victims of Covid-19. He also produced the TV show Night Music, originally called Sunday Night and hosted by David Sanborn. This was probably the greatest musical television series in history. In the 21^st century, he did projects on the Harry Smith Anthology, T. Rex, and pirate music, among other ideas. I think he was one of the most important and inspirational compilers of music in my lifetime.

I will give this compilation 9.5 points out of 10 as well. Heck, even Sting singing “The Ballad of Mack the Knife” works well here.