How Eden Ahbez got “Nature Boy” into the hands of Nat “King” Cole is one of the great mysteries in pop music history. Stories vary. Mythologies abound. Most, however, contain one or two common details. Notably, that a soiled lead-sheet was left unsigned, and that Cole’s management had to put out a search to find its…
For those who haven’t seen it yet, an interview with Eden Ahbez from the early television program We the People was recently posted to YouTube. See it here: Though scripted, Ahbez’s words are effective, and seem to confirm what we know of his biography up to that point. In the clip, he also meets Nat…
Over the years, there’s been a ton written about when, where and how Eden Ahbez got “Nature Boy” into the hands of Nat “King” Cole. Several Cole biographies suggest it came through his manager, Carlos Gaston, whom Ahbez handed off a tattered lead-sheet to at the Orpheum Theater in Downtown L.A. Others say it was…
Keyboardist Dale Ockerman recorded with Eden Ahbez during the early 1980s—a notably dormant time for the pioneering counter-culture composer. In the aftermath of George Benson’s 1977 hit version of “Nature Boy,” Ahbez recorded a lone single: 1982’s “Divine Melody,” a flexi-disc on Elefunt Records. In between the Benson hit and the flex-disc, Ahbez recorded briefly…
10. “Yes Master!” — How serious should we take this one? That’s your call. A sense of humor is surely required as “Yes Master!” is without doubt Eden Ahbez at his most salacious. It could easily have been the soundtrack to some pagan burlesque scene from a tropical B-movie of the late 1950s, what with that…
Well, not really news… Unless you consider a re-post of Nat “King” Cole’s memories of how he discovered Eden Ahbez’s “Nature Boy” in 1947 to be novel. Apparently NewsFour in Dublin does! An Irish columnist named Noel Twamley knew Nat Cole himself, as well as a few chums of the late jazz crooner, who’d heard…
EDEN’S ISLAND 