Singer Johnny Mathis has a way with words -- especially the ones crafted into romantic songs he has famously caressed with his tenor voice for more than 60 years.
Mathis, who turns 83 on Sept. 30, is bringing his "The Voice of Romance 2018 Tour" to central Arkansas this weekend, and he shows few signs that time has treated him unkindly. He does acknowledge that he has slowed down a tad.
"I used to have a list on my kitchen wall of shows I had lined up," Mathis says from his home in the Hollywood Hills, which was originally built by aviation pioneer Howard Hughes in 1946 and that he had only returned to a month ago after a devastating fire in 2015. "As I've gotten older, I find I can only sing when it's fun and good. I don't want to sing if I'm not feeling well. I have to remember that I'm 82, not 32 or 42."
He says, "I was always the youngest in my family, but now I'm the oldest. I do try to lead a healthy life, thanks to my parents, who were both professional cooks. So I learned to cook quite young, and that has been worth its weight in gold. Years ago, I decided to do my own cooking, which is important if you spend a lot of time traveling.
"Years ago, I decided to start an exercise program, but I had a problem finding a place to do so. I heard about a man who had helped President Reagan, and he was also a golfer, so I went to him to find out what he would suggest I do. He told me he would come up with a program that would take me 15 minutes to do. And when I met him and asked about it, he said he knew I wouldn't have come to talk to him if he'd said it would take more time than that. And ever since, exercise has been an amazing part of my life."
Johnny Mathis
7:30 p.m. Saturday, Robinson Center Performance Hall, Markham Street and Broadway, Little Rock
Tickets: $42-$128
(800) 745-3000
A series of fortunate events had led the young Mathis to choose music over a career in sports. Born in Gilmer, Texas, not far from Texarkana, he moved at an early age with his family to San Francisco, where he excelled at track and field and basketball. He was invited to an Olympic track trial in Berkeley in 1956, but, taking the advice of his father, he opted to keep a date in New York City to make his first recording.
Sports are still central to Mathis' youthful lifestyle. He plays golf almost daily and notes that he recently noticed his game has been improving.
"I recently had cataract surgery, and now I realize how much better I can see," he says. "I love my golf game and the discipline it creates. I get to meet different people there, plus I never know what fellow musicians I might run into, which always leads to the potential of interesting collaborations."
Chances are -- pun intended -- Mathis will deliver a plethora of his pop/jazz/R&B hits Saturday night in Little Rock, especially "Chances Are," "Wonderful! Wonderful!" "It's Not for Me to Say," "Misty" and "The Twelfth of Never," all released in the late 1950s.
He says, "Oddly enough, I only had one No. 1 hit, 'Too Much, Too Little, Too Late,' a 1978 duet with Deniece Williams. No one ever requests that, which seems funny to me. And I could sing her parts!"
In 1958, his fourth album, Johnny's Greatest Hits, was released, and it went on to spend nine and a half years on the Billboard album chart until it was displaced by Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon in October 1983. And while no one ever accused Mathis of being a part of the musical counter culture, the first band he sang with was formed by his high school friend Merl Saunders, later known for his collaborations with Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead. Mathis gave a eulogy for Saunders at his funeral in 2008.
One of the more recent news-making events for Mathis was his release of The Voice of Romance: The Columbia Original Album Collection, a boxed set of 68 of his albums released on the Columbia label. The box includes 67 remastered albums on CD (25 of which are available on CD for the first time), along with the 2017 release, Johnny Mathis Sings The Great New American Songbook, and the previously unreleased album, I Love My Lady, featuring Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards.
Mathis' most recent previous concert in Little Rock was a fundraiser for the Arkansas Cancer Research Center in October 1997. Interviewed before that show, Mathis said that besides recording, golfing and exercising, he had also written a cookbook, Cooking for One, "because of my experiences trying to cook for just myself."
On the subject of a definitive memoir, autobiography, or at least an authorized biography of his life and times, Mathis is undecided what to do.
"Everybody comes to me from all over with proposals on that," he says. "I guess I should do something, do it, get it over with. I should have done it sooner. But I have people around me who can recite all the important things in my life if I try to leave something out."
When he goes on the road, Mathis takes four musicians with him and his organization arranges to hire others in tour cities.
"They find musicians who are very capable," he says. "Those are the string section, harpist and a full set of woodwinds."
The shows also feature a comedian as an opening act, chosen from whomever is available.
"I'm not quite sure which one will be with us on that part of the tour," he explains. "They are among those comics I've worked with over the years, and are not lewd, crude or tattooed."
Style on 09/04/2018