Claudine Longet — Claudine

Earlier this year, when things were opening up again and Forever Changes was getting back to normal (¯_(ツ)_/¯ emoji) with a monthly pop-up at Steel City Coffeehouse here in Phoenixville, I was digging through the dollar bin. Now, even his dollar bin is curated. It’s not for records no one wants — it’s for records only weirdos like me will want, priced accordingly. Would I pay $7 or $8 for a Claudine Longet album? I would not. But if it’s $1, or $2 or $3, can I leave it behind? I cannot. Claudine deserves better, after all.

Growing up in the ’60s, Claudine was a TV presence, a personality, most famous for her performances on The Andy Williams Show, a pinnacle of squareness. She was married to Williams, so it seemed like a little nepotizz to begin with, and her voice was such a wisp that I never cared even slightly for or about her.

Unfortunately, she then became even more famous, and the butt of terrible jokes (in retrospect) for fatally shooting her then-boyfriend, Olympic skier Spider Sabich, in 1976. She claimed it was an accident and received the lightest of penalties in court, but it ended her career. Now, of course, we would probably question exactly what would drive a woman to shoot her boyfriend and perhaps treat her with more sympathy, but at the time, the jokes on TV were cruel and relentless. And while I had seen many of her records in the used bins over the years, never once did I think to actually give her a try. My memory of her was just that she was not much.

Fast forward to a much older me, a me who is now quite enamored of breathy French female pop, of the Francoise Hardy and France Gall variety, and this me finds Claudine records in the dollar bin and thinks: this may be completely in my wheelhouse. And so it is. Her voice is thin, breathy, simple, in the French pop tradition of the ’60s. The songs are very stock ballads of the day, heavily over-orchestrated but . . . fine. It’s really quite a pretty little album, for what it is, a little 1967 pop time capsule, and I’m glad I grabbed it from the bin.