I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #50:

“The older [studio musicians] said, ‘He still sings great.’ The younger ones said, ‘He’s a Gas.’”

I’m thinking maybe Helium, although the liner notes of Hey Jude/Hey Bing! don’t go on to claim balloon abuse as the cause of Bing Crosby’s famous crooning warmth sounding so chipper or high-pitched on the 1969 album. The problem might be with my turntable, or it might be the practice of the times — artificially speeding up recording to conform to radio's Top 40 assembly-line pace. Not where I'd expect to find this singing legend, one of the most influential and popular vocalists of the 20th century. It just never occurred to me that The Road to Morocco could detour into the The Road to Rock ‘n’ Roll. Where’s Bob Hope? There’s gotta be ‘Ol Ski Nose on the credits somewhere, and Dorothy Lamour…

Then again, when der Bingle covered das Beatles in the late '60s, he didn’t stick to choosing the usual suspects — no “Yesterday,” “Michelle,” no Sinatra-sanctioned “Something” by George Harrison (which Ol’ Blue Eyes notably mis-credited to Lennon-McCartney). No, the crooner tackled the more formidable “Hey Jude,” but the first thing you’ll want to know is that, coming in at a mere 3:47, the judicious Bing Crosby did not opt for the full-length, three-minute phrasing and fade out (na-na-na-na na-na-na-na...). Instead, he consolidates it niftily into a token pum-pum-pum-pum pum-pum-pum-pum that eerily pre-figures his “Little Drummer Boy” duet with David Bowie shortly before dying in 1977.

As for what he does with the sum and substance of the Beatles' classic, Crosby — especially in stark contrast to the much too bombastic Jimmy Bowen Orchestra and Chorus — goes through the motions with his insouciance intact and ascot scarcely askew. For a singer who’s supposed to be the source of inspiration for another yearning “to make it better,” he’s instead the one “making his world a little colder.”

Bing, on the album's closer, fares a little better with what is another Apple-related track, Mary Hopkin’s sentimental Slavic-style sing-along “Those Were the Days,” which had actually knocked the Beatles' own "Hey Jude" out of the number one position in the U.K. Crosby finds a nostalgic and heartfelt spark in this most bittersweet of tunes, and indeed “Days” sees him in full complement with the band as many traces of the song’s roots as a Lithuanian folk song are stripped away to make way for a rousing Americanization — Dixieland, ragtime and all. 

That too-little, too-late success is not enough, however, to warrant the Beatle-esque book-ended Hey Jude/Hey Bing! that exclamation mark in the title — and neither are the other Country-Pop tracks on the album, such as “It‘s All In The Game,” Sonny Curtis’ “The Straight Life,” and the to-the-core pablum of “Little Green Apples.” I don’t know anything about the being and nothingness of "make-believe, puppy dogs, and autumn leaves," nor do I care how much the much-covered hit was a staple of the Contemporary Codger Music scene. I would rather have relinquished the grooves of the sap-happy “Apples” to the "Cool Cool Cool" that coulda-been: a full-length “Hey Jude” fade with every nuance and na-na-na-na in force.