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Jack Jones, a Grammy Award-winning baritone who blended tender sincerity with powerful vocal technique on pop hits in the 1960s as well as the disco-jazzy theme song of the TV series “The Love Boat,” died Oct. 23 at a hospital in Rancho Mirage, California. He was 86.
The cause was complications from leukemia, a cancer of the bone marrow, said his wife, Eleonora.
The son of movie stars Allan Jones and Irene Hervey, Mr. Jones grew up in a rarefied circle of Hollywood. Nancy Sinatra was among his closest high school friends, and he recalled watching in awe as her father sang at a school assembly. Mr. Jones’s own father was a considerable performer in his own right, a wavy-haired leading man who displayed his operatic singing voice in films featuring the Marx Brothers, Abbott and Costello, and other comedy teams of the 1930s and ’40s.
At his father’s behest, Mr. Jones underwent early voice training with an operatic coach, although he said his own musical tastes ran more toward the big-band jazz and Hit Parade songs of his childhood.
The resulting hybrid style, as he emerged to wide attention in the early 1960s, was one of velvety romantic ardor, virile intensity and bright swing that earned him praise from leading music critics. Will Friedwald, one of his most ardent champions among later generations of music writers, once wrote that “for all of Jones’s polish, there’s never an instant when he comes off as merely slick.”
There were many sides and shadings to Mr. Jones’s musical personality, which shape-shifted from show-tune belter to gritty bluesman, from swinging crooner to introspective romantic.
“His weathered voice is filled with seams and crevices,” New York Times music critic Stephen Holden wrote in 2008, reflecting on the talcum-haired singer’s five decades in show business. “His world-weary cragginess coincides with an impulse to take ballads at extremely slow tempos. … Because the lower end of Mr. Jones’s voice has deepened, his sudden flights into a quasi-falsetto are more dramatic than ever.”
His adventurous approach to music – his comfort marrying Afro-Cuban rhythm with 1950s pop standards like “Just in Time” – was not immediately apparent when he burst to national attention in 1961 with “Lollipops and Roses,” a syrupy ballad that earned him the Grammy for best male solo vocal performance. Two years later, he had a Top-20 chart hit, and another Grammy win, with “Wives and Lovers,” a lilting waltz about a dutiful wife who pleases her husband with her well-mixed martinis and her nicely applied makeup.
Feminists denounced the frank chauvinism of those numbers, and Mr. Jones rewrote his lyrics decades later, adding references to Viagra and grooming advice for men (“Hey, little boy, cap your teeth, get a hair piece”).
With his strappingly handsome physique, striking blue eyes and dreamy-jazzy intonation, Mr. Jones became a ubiquitous TV and concert performer, and he continued his prolific recording career through the 1970s with middle-of-the-road pop hits such as “Love With the Proper Stranger,” “Dear Heart,” “Alfie ,” “Girl Talk,” “The Race Is On,” “The Years of My Youth,” “The Impossible Dream” (nominated for a Grammy) and the string-laden “Lady.”
His favorite composers included Burt Bacharach, Marvin Hamlisch, Bert Kaempfert, Michel Legrand, Charles Aznavour, and Marilyn and Alan Bergman. Amid rapidly changing musical tastes, he experimented with covers of songs by the Doors and the Beatles (and later Little Feat, Billy Joel, Sting and Keb’ Mo’, but his approach remained consistently earnest and unironic – a straightforward, adult-contemporary/easy-listening style that emphasized the lyric and mood.
Lyricist Sammy Cahn personally urged Mr. Jones to record “Call Me Irresponsible” in 1963, following Frank Sinatra – an offer that might intimidate any singer. “Frank did a very good characterization on his record, he sort of sang it as if he were a little bit drunk, as if he were the character that the song is about,” Mr. Jones recalled to Friedwald. “It was a great record, but it wasn’t very commercial. Mine was totally pure and right out there. I did it straight, and I think I got the hit because mine was simpler.”
In the mid-1960s, Sinatra declared him the “next major star of show business,” which Mr. Jones took to mean heir apparent.
“I was thrilled,” he told the London Observer in 2002. “There was only one problem: He never retired. When a guy reaches that level of fame, there’s no elbowing him out. A lot of us weren’t willing to give up what Frank did to achieve his mystique. I wasn’t worried about having some great babe on my arm, but that’s important if you want to be a star.” (Mr. Jones did not lack for female attention; one of his six wives was “Bond girl” Jill St. John, and he was in a four-year relationship with actress Susan George in the 1970s.)
Despite his international name recognition and good looks, Mr. Jones never wanted to parlay his musical popularity into a significant acting career. He was wary of movies after what he considered a disastrous appearance in a 1959 musical, “Juke Box Rhythm.” He later starred in a British slasher film, “The Comeback” (1978), but otherwise confined his performances to guest spots on TV variety programs, long-running Las Vegas lounge acts, and the touring musical-theater circuit, performing lead roles in shows such as “Man of La Mancha,” “Guys and Dolls” and “South Pacific.”
His most notable TV credit was as the singer of the theme to ABC’s “The Love Boat” from 1977 to 1985 (Dionne Warwick sang it during the final season in 1986). He lampooned his lounge-singer persona with an unexpected cameo in the disaster-movie spoof “Airplane II” (1982), rendering a few bars from “The Love Boat” as a prison searchlight randomly shines upon him and a gentle ocean breeze caresses his hair.
“So it’s not the greatest song in the world,” he once told a reporter of lyrics that promised a love that is “exciting and new” and “won’t hurt anymore.” “But I think just about every singer would like to have a song with which they’re identified.”
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Show business heritage
John Allan Jones was born in Los Angeles on Jan. 14, 1938 – the day his father recorded his biggest hit, “The Donkey Serenade,” from the musical “The Firefly.”
He described his upbringing as a combination of privilege and melancholy, with outwardly glamorous parents beset by marital problems. He said his father was an alcoholic whose womanizing caused endless family tensions. Around the time his parents separated, Jack was sent away to boarding school.
“At first, I felt that my mom and dad had rejected me,” he told the Sunday Independent of Ireland, “though now I realize they were doing that because they were both in show business and on the road so much and boarding school to them was an easy way of dealing with all that.”
He graduated in 1957 from University High School in Los Angeles and weeks later joined his father’s act, first in Elko, Nevada, and then at Las Vegas’s Thunderbird Hotel. “It was okay, but with my dad I felt like a kid,” he told syndicated columnist Phyllis Battelle. “In the beginning, he kind of wanted me to go in his direction – and I wasn’t really myself.”
He carefully plotted his career and submitted audition records to Capitol Records. “They wanted to make me a rock singer, and I recorded bad rockabilly songs,” he told the Sunday Independent. He was even unhappier with the label’s tasteless treatment of his 1959 album “This Love of Mine,” which featured ballads but incongruously depicted him on the cover as a scantily clad cave man wielding a club and with his foot on top of a buxom woman.
After his stint at Capitol, Mr. Jones had a three-week run at a San Francisco club that drew the notice of a producer with the independent Kapp Records. Not long afterward, his recording of “Lollipops and Roses” launched a vigorous career on the road and in the studio.
By the end of the 1960s, he had moved to RCA Victor and continued his bountiful output of albums and singles. A nondrinker who gave up his four-pack-a-day smoking habit in 1980, he remained in full command of his singing voice well into his 80s and remained in great demand with the proliferation of casino nightclubs.
His prodigious schedule, however, led to “circumstances that set relationships up to fail,” he said. His marriages to model Lee Larance, actress St. John, flight attendant Gretchen Roberts, Kathryn Simmons and Kim Ely ended in divorce. In 2009, he married Eleonora Jung.
In addition to his wife, of Indian Wells, California, survivors include a daughter from his first marriage, Crystal Jones; a daughter from his fifth marriage, Nicole Ramasco; two stepdaughters, Nicole Whitty and Colette Peters; and three grandchildren.
Mr. Jones said he remained an incorrigible romantic onstage.
“In Pennsylvania, I did a concert,” he told the Observer. “The theater manager was going out with the stage manager. He asked me if he could propose in the middle of my show and, because it was such a nuts idea, I agreed. So he did it, and then I came back on. I turned to the audience and I said: ‘Tom Jones gets women throwing their underwear onstage and I get … this.’”