You Gotta Have Faith

Percy Faith - "Summer Place '76" (1975)

Though I’m pretty firmly agnostic, and claim no affiliation with any specific form of organized religion, you could definitely say I’m a Man of Faith.

Percy Faith, that is.

Sure, the Canadian-American bandleader, orchestrator, composer and conductor specialized in a soft-serve form of easy listening that was never anywhere near as hip as the stuff dished out by Esquivel or Henry Mancini, and the omnipresence of his LPs in thrift shop bins can certainly be wearying at times. But unlike with such other Goodwill perennials as, say, Ed Ames and John Gary, there’s some serious gold lurking amid the squaresville stinkers in the Faith catalog…

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My first real awareness of Percy Faith came via his version of Max Steiner’s “Theme from A Summer Place”. The biggest-selling US single of 1959, and still the 23rd biggest song from the first 60 years of Billboard’s Hot 100 chart (where it’s wedged between Boyz II Men’s “I’ll Make Love to You” and Chic’s “Le Freak”), Faith’s rendition became the “Stairway to Heaven” of easy listening/Adult Contemporary/“Music of Your Life” radio stations, though its immense popularity also caused it to pop up on the oldies channels of my youth with startling frequency.

(Fun fact: Faith’s recording of “The Song from Moulin Rouge” was the best-selling US single of 1953, making him the only artist to have a best-selling single of the year during both the pop singer era and the rock era; according to Wikipedia, he is also one of only three artists to have the best-selling single of the year twice — the others being Elvis Presley and The Beatles.)

“Theme from A Summer Place” is the first easy listening tune I recall actively enjoying. (Well, maybe Ferrante & Teicher’s “Theme from Exodus” qualifies as the first, but that’s anything but an “easy” tune.) Something about that “Chopsticks”-like piano figure and those impossibly smooth strings just made time wonderfully stand still for me; it was the aural equivalent of climbing into the heavily air-conditioned backseat of my grandfather’s Buick LeSabre after a long and happy afternoon at the pool.

Even before I really knew anything about mid-century architecture, design or culture, “Theme from A Summer Place” spoke to me of impeccably mixed cocktails and cleanly elegant spaces lit by the sun’s languid movements through clerestory windows. During the seven years I co-owned a home in Palm Springs, “Theme from A Summer Place” became, unsurprisingly, a regular fixture of my poolside mixes.

I always figured that the rest of Faith’s material would be about as straight and smooth as “Theme from A Summer Place,” and the few early-sixties thrift shop LPs I’d found bearing his name certainly reinforced this assumption. It wasn’t until about five or six years ago that I actively began exploring his late-sixties and early/mid-seventies recordings, and wound up finding several extremely pleasant surprises in the process. Because somewhere around 1968 or so, Faith started to become a little bit hipper and much more adventurous.

1971’s Black Magic Woman is probably the coolest album Percy Faith ever made, and that’s not me damning it with some faint praise — it would be a cool record under anyone’s name. The LP finds him taking on Santana’s covers of Fleetwood Mac’s title track and Tito Puente’s “Oye Como Va,” as well as other such Latin-flavored jams as Gerald Wilson/El Chicano’s “Viva Tirado,” Edu Lobo’s “Reza” and Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Wave,” some contemporary AM radio gold by Bread (“If”), Joni Mitchell (“Big Yellow Taxi”) and the Jackson 5 (“Never Can Say Goodbye”), and a few left-field choices from the Beatles (“The Sun King”) and Harry Nilsson (“The Wailing of the Willow”). And it’s all delivered with a lightly groovy yet gloriously cinematic touch that’s fairly reminiscent of the now highly sought-after “library music” produced by Britain’s KPM label during the same era.

While Black Magic Woman may be the only Faith LP from this period that’s unassailably awesome all the way through, all of his seventies albums have some genuinely great moments, like this tense take on Isaac Hayes’ “Theme from Shaft,” included on his 1972 album Joy.

Or, speaking of blaxploitation soundtracks, how ‘bout this Faith-driven rendition of Curtis Mayfield’s “Superfly,” from 1973’s Clair?

Or, from the same year, this mightily tasty rendition of Lalo Schifrin’s theme from Enter the Dragon, as featured on his Corazón album…

And dig, if you will, his 1974 rendition of the “Fifth Movement” from Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells” — especially the seriously funky break that happens around the 1:40 mark!

There’s more prize Percy in them thar wax stacks, too; you just have to be willing to look (or listen) past the Fiddler on the Roof medleys, novelties like “Duelling Banjos” and schmaltzfests like “My Special Angel” or “Feelings”. (Check out this site for a thorough guide to his discography.)

But as much as I love the aforementioned cuts, the Faith discovery that has brought me the most joy is “Summer Place ‘76,” in which his dreamy 1959 smash is retrofitted for the mid-seventies dance floor. Recorded in September 1975 for the album of the same name, “Summer Place ‘76” came close on the heels of his previous Disco Party, which beat the disco cash-in rush by a good three years. But there’s as much cop-show funk as disco going on here — it’s like something you might have heard on a mid-seventies episode of The Rookies — and it all adds up to four minutes and 23 seconds of sheer delight for yours truly.

(I also really love the Italian picture sleeve pictured at the top of this newsletter, which features what looks suspiciously like a judiciously-cropped outtake from a mid-seventies Penthouse photo session. The US version of the 45 sadly only came in a plain sleeve; so yes, the Italian version has now been added to my Discogs wantlist — and if, by any chance, any of my readers have a copy that you’d be willing to part with, please hit me up!)

“Summer Place ‘76” would be Faith’s final hit (#13 on Billboard’s Adult Contemporary chart); he died of cancer in February 1976, just five months after its recording. Some folks I’ve played it for have expressed sadness and pity that the last single of Faith’s lifetime was a disco reworking of his greatest hit, but I think it’s beautiful that the guy launched this playful party grenade at us on his way out the door. Good on ya, Percy; I’ll be thinking about you — and listening to this jam — this weekend, when I’m kicking back and grooving at my own “summer place”.