‘Bond. James Bond’

 by whiteray

I had a huge James Bond jones when I was a kid. 

I was eleven in 1964 – in sixth grade – when the growing popularity of the novels by Ian Fleming and the first two films based on those novels, Dr. No and From Russia With Love, burst into full-blown Bondmania with the release of the third film, Goldfinger. 

I wanted to see the movie, but my parents weren’t sure. After all, the ads looked like they showed a naked woman painted gold. I won’t deny the attraction that held, but it was truly the story of 007 saving the world – or at least the world’s gold supply – that grabbed me. But the folks said no, a little regretfully, I’ve always thought. 

They also weren’t sure that I should be allowed to read Fleming’s novels; Dad bought a copy of Goldfinger to see if it would be appropriate for the somewhat precocious urchin I was, but he read it in the evening, just before retiring, and he read at most four or five pages at a time. I despaired as I saw his bookmark make slow progress into the middle of the book. 

Then the Minneapolis Star, an evening paper that no longer exists, began to print excerpts from The Man With The Golden Gun, the final novel Fleming completed before his death in August of 1964. My parents saw how avidly I read the twelve or so excerpts, which had to be okay – after all, they were in the evening paper. And I think they began to think that the books might be okay for me, after all. 

But the bookmarker still moved slowly. And one day, I heard on the radio the main theme to Goldfinger, with the vocal performed by Shirley Bassey. We belonged to a record club, so I ordered the soundtrack to the movie, and once it arrived, I would sit by the stereo, trying to imagine the scenes that went with John Barry’s sometimes lush and sometimes sparely powerful music. I especially liked the instrumental version of the main theme, with its lead and rhythm guitars, its surging horns and its insistent percussion. 

Eventually, Dad’s bookmark reached the end of the book, and with a sigh at my impatience and a shrug, he handed me Goldfinger, which I devoured in only a few days. (It was, like almost all of Fleming’s Bond novels, only 191 pages.) 

I moved into seventh grade and met a classmate named Brad, who was also a Bondhead. The film version of Thunderball came out; we went to it and I bought the soundtrack. We spent an afternoon at a double feature of Dr. No and From Russia With Love. We devoured movie magazine pieces about the now-departed Sean Connery (who in my mind will always be James Bond although I admit that Daniel Craig comes close). And we saw Goldfinger when it was re-released. 

At the local toy store, where we raced model cars on the big track – we did have some interests beyond Bond – we looked at the items marketed under the 007 license: toy guns, board games, secret agent kits, trick briefcases, and more. As we looked, we wondered: Who would buy this stuff? Well, we would have, had our parents been more indulgent. 

Secret agents were so cool. Not just James Bond, but Napoleon Solo and Ilya Kuryakin, the men from U.N.C.L.E. And John le Carré’s Alec Leamas, who was The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, as well as Len Deighton’s nameless agent in The Ipcress File. My dad took me to see the films based on the latter two books, and I read a few books of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. series. A copy of the book Dr. No showed up in my Christmas stocking, and I devoured that as rapidly as I had the first book. 

I got two more records: one a low-budget item titled Thunderball, which had a bunch of jazz guys performing themes from all the various secret agent movies and programs, and one called Sounds For A Secret Agent, on which David Lloyd and his London-based orchestra (a jazzy group, despite the word “orchestra”) offered their versions of themes from the four existing Bond films as well as themes for most of the Bond titles that had not yet been made into films. Brad and I thought that was a great idea, and the music was pretty good, too. 

And then, it ended. When eighth grade began, Brad had moved out of town; I never knew where. And although spies and agents were still cool for a while, by the time 1967 rolled around, other things – the rise of the hippie, for one – captured the public’s imagination. I finished reading Fleming’s novels, and I enjoyed them, but about the time I finished the last one, my sister brought home a copy of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, and I had a new world to explore. 

So, what remains of my adolescent Bondmania? Well, the books left me with an awareness of epicurean food and drink that I’ve never really indulged. Two items come to mind: Someday, I will have a bartender create for me the Vesper, the martini from Casino Royale that Bond famously orders to be “shaken, not stirred.” (Stirring, if I recall correctly what Bond says, “bruises the gin.”) And someday, perhaps, I will eat a marrow bone as Bond’s boss M does in Moonraker. 

Then there was geography. Bits and pieces of Bond’s travels kept popping up during my college year in Europe. Again, two come to mind immediately: As I wandered the neighborhood near London’s Regent’s Park, I tried to figure out which of the taller buildings nearby would be the home of Universal Export, the fictional firm Fleming used as a cover for the British Secret Service. And I was delighted to learn one evening that the train I would be riding overnight from Munich to Paris was actually the famed Orient Express, which features hugely in From Russia With Love. 

But mostly it’s the music. I’ve supplemented the four original LPs with CDs of John Barry’s work on Goldfinger, Thunderball, and From Russia With Love. I’ve ripped the low-budget jazz LP to mp3s and found a copy online of someone else’s similar efforts with the David Lloyd LP. 

And during the heyday of file-trading and -sharing in the early years of this century, I got hold of mp3s of the soundtracks of many of the later films in the series, some by Barry and some by other composers, and I found mp3 rips of numerous easy listening albums from the early and mid-1960s with tracks related to James Bond or some of the other spys of the era. That leaves me, for example, with thirty-some versions of Monty Norman’s archetypal “James Bond Theme,” recorded by artists ranging from Count Basie through Ferrante & Teicher to the Ventures. 

Sometimes I seek that stuff out as I listen to music at the computer, but more often I let it fall in my lap randomly. I’ve also pulled bits and pieces of those albums into my iPod for my portable day-to-day listening. And still, fifty-seven years later, my favorite piece of all that music – and my favorite reminder of the days when the world of James Bond was my passion – is John Barry’s instrumental version of the theme to Goldfinger: