"Mr. Sandman" was the most popular song Pat Ballard ever wrote, publishing the sheet music in 1954 and seeing it promptly recorded by Vaughn Monroe & His Orchestra, the Four Aces, the Chordettes, and many others. (The music industry was different then.) The taffy-sweet pitty-pat Chordettes version was the hit and the one I like best, soaring on old-fashioned acapella close harmonies, propelled by a vibraphone, grounded by a waggling sax, and full of bobby-soxer high spirits. The dream they long for has lots of wavy hair like Liberace and the Sandman was there to deliver it all. It went to #1 for seven weeks. In memory, I heard the strange bedtime thing first, but I could well have heard the song as an infant, before memory. The story my mother told was that the Sandman came to sprinkle sand on my eyelids to make them heavy so I would fall asleep. This never made sense, partly because I have a phobia about things like grit near my eyeballs, though recently it occurred to me that the beach activity of burying oneself in warm sand might be conducive to comfortable napping, more or less. Grownups tells kids a lot of weird things they spend the rest of their lives trying to figure out.
Moving forward nearly 40 years, we find Metallica with a spectacularly successful fifth album in 1991, named
Metallica but known as the Black Album and slated to join Carole King's
Tapestry and Pink Floyd's
Dark Side of the Moon for commercial persistence over the years. A generation of kids all agreed on something again. Metallica opened the proceedings with the five-minute track
"Enter Sandman" and this is quite a different view of the nighttime bedroom sleep artist. It steals in like bad weather and grows into an ominous cathedral of dread, pounding and thrashing in the Roman style, with libretto as follows, in part: "Sleep with one eye open / Gripping your pillow tight / Exit light / Enter night." Goodness, I don't recognize this Sandman. What in the world has happened? And what does any of it have to do with the 19th-century German Romantic author E.T.A. Hoffmann and his long, antiquated, disjointed tale? Yeah, I'm getting to that.
