Between the rock and a soft place Nellie McKay, Rod Stewart, Bobby Darin, and Caetano Veloso bridge the ages BY FRANKLIN SOULTS

From Jack White to Rufus Wainwright, Old 97’s to OutKast, it seems that more musicians than ever have come to view the past the same way Willie Sutton long ago viewed robbing banks — "That’s where the money is." Some want to loot prefab styles for their nostalgia, but even more may just be after the fundamental paydirt of form following function, from rock that rolls to love songs that are lovely. As Nellie McKay comments about classic pop revivals when I catch her by phone as she’s heading unhappily toward the Sundance Film Festival, "I guess you could have really crappy contemporary songs or you could have decent renditions of really good songs. That’s better. That sounds good to me."

In case you missed the long review in the New Yorker back in May, the profile in the New York Times magazine last month, or the reams of stories in every other media outlet in between, McKay is the hottest, youngest old-timer of last year, plying styles on her excellent double CD of original songs, Get Away from Me (Sony), that recall prim pre-rock singers Julie London and Doris Day but spiked with a bad-girl rap here, a really good Pet Shop Boys rip there, and sly political barbs everywhere. In part, she was such a sensation because her music took the obsession with the past one step beyond, begging the question of how low you can go on pop’s history ladder while remaining within shouting distance of the present, or for that matter without losing your grip.

It has become the norm to play down the gulf between the pre-rock era and today, just as it’s currently fashionable to see the American electorate as a modulated shade of purple instead of red and blue. Yet both those dualities arose for reasons that can’t be altogether discounted. That is, there’s an elemental difference between Kerry and W. voters and between, say, Sinatra and the Stones, between traditional "values" and the subversive streak that’s essential to the rock attitude.

Nellie McKay was only one artist who tried to straddle this historical chasm in 2004 and whose effort was as noteworthy for the divisions it highlighted as for the bridges it built. At the end of the year, Kevin Spacey came out with Beyond the Sea, a bio-pic as dazzlingly odd as its subject, Bobby Darin, the last performer since Elvis to act as if the divide between pre-rock and rock didn’t exist. Then there was celebrated Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso, who dabbled in A Foreign Sound (Nonesuch), his first all-English album, which was recorded from a vantage point so distant, it spanned the historical divide the way we span æons when we gaze into the night sky.

But in a way, the biggest pre-rock shock of the last few years has come from Rod Stewart. Last fall, a quarter-century after his previous #1 album, the aging rake climbed to the top of the pops again with Stardust . . . The Great American Songbook Volume III (J Records), his third release of warm and easy crooner standards in as many years. Much of the credit for the entire series’s success — 10 million albums sold and counting — goes to J Records founder and industry legend Clive Davis, who supplied various savvy marketing techniques and one crucial musical insight. As Bill Zeheme writes in the first volume’s liner notes: "It was Davis who suggested the deliciously bright tempo that floats and shimmers above and below so winningly," pronouncing, " ‘I want this to sound like Fred and Ginger! I want this to sound like Fred and Ginger!’ "

Stewart went straight to the source on the series’s first volume, 2002’s It Had To Be You . . . The Great American Songbook (also on J), offering a soft-shoe rendition of "They Can’t Take That Away from Me," which was penned by the Gershwins for the 1937 Astaire-Rodgers picture Shall We Dance? The problem was, Astaire wasn’t just a dancer but a singer, and he imbued that number with what it seemed to call for in 1937: a melancholy undercurrent of loss that makes the theme of savoring a lover’s memory more poignant. It’s the same tone that has characterized adult art across the ages, but most rock-bred pop stars don’t accept defeat while they indulge in pleasure. So whereas Astaire’s simple, sad delivery hones the melody’s lilting shape and gives it emotional weight, all Stewart goes after is amorphous vocal seduction, creating a compassionate conservative cousin of "Hot Legs."

That explains why the entire series feels slightly vapid, and also why it’s such a commercial success. By Davis’s standard, Volume III is its pinnacle, nudging the insouciant mood to a sustained pitch of mellow, playful reverie. Which doesn’t mean it’s all that good — beyond the recurring shortfall in meaning, there’s the annoyance of Stewart’s rubbery vowels, the dentist-office-ready arrangements, the unvarying tempos. Even so, Volume III’s broad updates avoid Broadway’s sanitized styling and the swing revival’s reactionary swagger. If nothing else, that makes them honest gauges for how much mass tastes have changed between the rock and a soft place.

That in turn is why Kevin Spacey’s mission to revive Bobby Darin from obscurity feels so quixotic. In the liner notes to Beyond the Sea: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (Atco/Rhino), Spacey claims that, aside from Sammy Davis Jr., Darin was "the greatest nightclub entertainer we ever had," forgotten only because of his death 1973, at age 37, from heart failure. For all I know, he may be right. As the Beyond the Sea soundtrack proves too well, performing and recording are distinct skills. Spacey’s singing and dancing in the film — enhanced by Technicolor glow and period-piece glamor — go above and beyond the call of duty. But on the soundtrack’s intelligently selected re-creations (superbly produced by Phil Ramone, who co-produced Stewart’s first two Songbook volumes), Spacey’s careful training can be heard for what it is: the most intelligent karaoke performance of all time.

It’s a more fitting tribute than Spacey may have intended. His imitation makes you itch to get at Darin’s original genius, but Rhino’s 2002 Hit Singles Collection reveals that Darin himself was playing at karaoke by mimicking big bands, Elvis, Fats Domino, Ray Charles, and folk music as they struck his eager fancy. Unlike Spacey, Darin was a born musician, but he was also born on the wrong side of the rock divide to be able to compete for Sinatra’s crown. "Mack the Knife" is a classic, and several other performances are almost as fine, but none of them transcends early trifles like the hallucinogenic Darin-penned Jerry Lee Lewis ripoff "Splish Splash" and the bouncing, opportunistic amalgam "Queen of the Hop," because these novelties belong to that moment in 20th-century popular music when rock and roll exploded as a common street language almost any non-square could speak. The price was, those who picked it up were imprinted with its vulgar accent forever.

That includes Nellie McKay, and that’s the key to her debut’s excitement — its spiraling play between edgy rock attitude and plush pre-rock comfort. On the one hand, her cabaret craft as writer and performer is part and parcel of her debut’s satirical skewering of decorous privilege. It starts with Get Away from Me’s title, a play on Norah Jones’s Starbucks-ready smash Come Away with Me, and it includes skewering herself as a neurotic Type-A artist as anxious about her place in the world as any sensitive college freshman who’s discovered Noam Chomsky. On the other hand, the album’s panoply of richly textured styles is McKay’s own act of karaoke devotion, a tip to her influences, and it’s clear she loves nothing so much as old pop. To judge from our harried interview, that’s partly because new pop is radically different in a way that triggers a deep antipathy. "I got into Jerry Lee Lewis before Doris Day, and that’s interesting that you’d say that one was a reaction to the other, because for me, listening to her was certainly a reaction to listening to him."

In short, she discovered Jerry Lee Lewis was a brutal bastard, and so she shrank from everything he represented, including the leering sexuality that he and every other rocker brought to the fore with unprecedented force. "You know, I’ll go to a protest, but I’m going to wear a suit. In some ways, it really bothers me to read my press, because I’ll talk to someone like you in a totally different voice than I’d talk to somebody like my Auntie Chrissie. And if I talk to my Auntie Chrissie, I just want to be a nice, clean, upstanding young lady."

As Frank Sinatra knew, rock and roll was not for nice, clean, upstanding young ladies. "Rock ’n’ roll smells phony and false. It is sung, played, and written for the most part by cretinous goons, and by means of its almost imbecilic reiteration, and sly, lewd, in plain fact dirty lyrics, it manages to be the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the earth." That famous quote is included in the gorgeous CD booklet to Caetano Veloso’s A Foreign Sound (Nonesuch), as are a dozen more provocative, contradictory statements about various aspects of American pop. But the CD disturbs by laying out the styles as if they were all the same. Slipping softly from fully orchestrated renditions of Irving Berlin and David Byrne to stripped-bare versions of Cole Porter and Kurt Cobain, the 62-year-old singer deconstructs the songs just by loving every one of them tender (including "Love Me Tender"). It doesn’t all work, but maybe Veloso didn’t expect it to, risking not only an Arto Lindsay art-noise blowout with full orchestra but also the dread "Feelings." The reason for some of these choices is just personal ("Feelings" was, after all, composed by a Brazilian, Morris Albert), but the emotional revelations that he gets are as thick as the music is delicate. Stewart and Darin are stuck in their age, and McKay makes the most of playing off differences, but Veloso floats free like the international bohemian he is. No matter what historical ages come and go, black sweaters are always in.