In the summer of 1964, the most powerful force in popular music was four young men from Liverpool, and the least likely challenger imaginable was a forty-seven-year-old crooner who had not had a Top 40 hit since 1958 and openly could not stand rock and roll. Dean Martin’s weapon was a song he had already sung on the radio sixteen years earlier, a song that had been recorded by Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee and done nothing for either of them, a song his own pianist had written and that Martin was talked into recording mainly to fill twelve minutes of empty album space. Everybody Loves Somebody is the great accident of Martin’s career — the filler track that dethroned the Beatles, revived a supposedly finished singer, and became so completely his that its title is carved on his tomb.
Written for Sinatra, Sung by Everyone, a Hit for Nobody
The song was written in 1947 by lyricist Irving Taylor and pianist Ken Lane, originally with Frank Sinatra in mind — who duly recorded it, to no effect whatsoever. (Sam Coslow shares the credit, an arrangement made after a phrase in the song’s bridge was found to resemble one of Coslow’s earlier compositions, Midnight Moon.) Peggy Lee cut it first, in November 1947, with Dave Barbour’s orchestra; Dinah Washington and others took their turns. Nothing happened, anywhere, for seventeen years. Even Martin had already had a go: he had sung the song on Bob Hope’s radio programme back in 1948, in the Martin and Lewis era, and promptly forgotten it.
By 1964, Lane was Martin’s pianist and musical shadow, and Martin was two years into his contract with Sinatra’s Reprise Records, making records that sold politely to adults while the charts convulsed around the British Invasion. The irony nested inside the story deserves a moment: the song that would revive Martin had been written for the man who owned his label, and Sinatra’s own recording of it had gone nowhere. Reprise existed, in large part, so that Sinatra and his friends could record what they liked, the way they liked — and what Martin liked, in the spring of 1964, was quiet. He set out to record Dream with Dean, an intimate, fireside album — standards sung quietly over a small jazz combo. Producer Jimmy Bowen set a moody, low-lit atmosphere in the studio, and Martin, Lane, guitarist Barney Kessel, bassist Red Mitchell and drummer Irv Cottler settled in to record twelve songs. There was a problem: between Martin and Lane, choosing the programme at home, they had only settled on eleven.
The Twelfth Song
Accounts of what happened next differ in the details, as good show-business stories tend to. In one version, the sessions found themselves an hour from the end with one song still missing, and Lane proposed his own old tune; Martin and Lane even telephoned Irving Taylor to confirm the correct lyric. In another, it was Martin’s wife, Jeanne, who settled the argument — the song had long been a favourite of hers, and her enthusiasm cinched it. What is certain is the result: the small combo gathered around Lane’s piano and recorded Everybody Loves Somebody in the same hushed, unhurried style as the rest of the album, Martin crooning it like a confidence shared at the end of the evening. It was, by design, the least important track on the record.
Reprise heard it differently. The label sensed hit potential in the old warhorse and moved fast: in April 1964, Martin re-recorded the song, this time with a full orchestra and chorus and a contemporary arrangement by Ernie Freeman, whose heavy, modern backbeat gave the croon a spine that radio could hold on to. Reprise’s confidence was such that the label named the accompanying album after it: Everybody Loves Somebody, a hastily assembled collection that would climb to No. 2 on the album chart. Both versions survived, side by side, as a kind of before-and-after of Martin himself — the small-combo original on Dream with Dean for the connoisseurs, the orchestral remake for the world. The intimate album version is the one many admirers now prefer, but it was Freeman’s bigger, brighter remake that went out as the single, and it changed the terms of Martin’s career in a single summer.
Knocking the Pallies off the Charts
The single was released in June 1964, and here the story passes from accident into legend. Martin’s teenage son — a Beatles worshipper, like every teenager in America — had been stinging his father with the new music, and Martin, who genuinely resented rock and roll, had made the boy a promise: “I’m gonna knock your pallies off the charts.” It was a joke, a father’s bravado. Then the record started climbing. It entered the Hot 100 at the end of June and marched steadily upward through July, past the beat groups, past the girl groups, past everything the British Invasion could put in its way.
On August 15, 1964, Everybody Loves Somebody reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 — displacing, precisely, the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night. It also spent eight weeks atop Billboard’s Pop-Standard Singles chart, the crooners’ own league table. A forty-seven-year-old Italian-American bar singer, with a seventeen-year-old song written for Sinatra and saved from an album that needed twelve tracks, had done what no American act had managed all year: faced down Beatlemania at its flood tide and won. Martin’s career, commercially dormant since the 1950s, reignited on the spot — the follow-up single, The Door Is Still Open to My Heart, built on the same formula, reached No. 6 before the year was out — and the template set by Freeman’s arrangement, under producer Jimmy Bowen, defined the easy, swinging sound of every Martin record that followed.
There is one more graceful footnote to the partnership behind the song. Ken Lane, the pianist who had carried Everybody Loves Somebody around in his catalogue since 1947 and finally talked his boss into recording it, did not fade into the credits. He became the musical director and on-screen straight man of Martin’s television show, the man at the piano whom Dean ribbed weekly for years — the co-writer of the theme, sitting in shot, while the whole country hummed his seventeen-year-old tune.
Why did it work, this antique, in the year of the moptops? Partly the lyric, which is indestructible: a simple observation — everybody loves somebody sometime — turned into a hopeful personal application, sung by Martin not as a young man’s plea but as a grown man’s shrug of contentment. And partly the record itself, which threaded a needle nobody else had managed: Freeman’s arrangement gave adult music a young record’s pulse without sanding off any of the croon, so teenagers heard a beat and their parents heard Dean. For one week in August 1964, both generations were buying the same single.
Carved in Stone
The following year, NBC launched The Dean Martin Show, and Everybody Loves Somebody became its theme — piped weekly into American living rooms for the better part of a decade, until the song and the singer were no longer entirely separable. It was not his biggest-selling record across a career that included That’s Amore and Volare, but it became the one that answered the question of who Dean Martin was: the relaxed charmer who could walk into a room full of teenagers’ idols and stroll out with their chart position, drink in hand, apparently without trying.
When Martin died on Christmas Day 1995, his family chose the epitaph for his crypt at Westwood Village Memorial Park in Los Angeles. It does not mention the Rat Pack, or the movies, or Las Vegas. It reads simply: “Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime.” The filler song — written for his best friend, rejected by the decade, rescued by his wife or his pianist depending on who tells it, recorded in leftover studio time — became the sentence Dean Martin left on the world. And the world, by then, had spent thirty years agreeing with it.
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