My all-time greatest albums, part five 

If you asked me to list the best guitar players when I was 12 or 13, the only names I knew were George Harrison, the Ventures and Wes Montgomery. 

My first exposure to Montgomery was probably on December 12, 1967, when Herb Alpert hosted The Hollywood Palace with a lineup of acts taken mainly from the roster of his A&M label: Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66, the Baja Marimba Band, Boyce & Hart and Montgomery. 

A&M’s signature style back then was a cool, jazzy easy listening vibe, and signing with the label was surely intended to introduce Montgomery to a wider audience beyond the jazz-head subscribers to Downbeat magazine who annually voted him the best jazz guitarist on earth. 

Looking to hit with the pop market, Montgomery began covering safe pop music that adults could dig, like California Dreamin’ and Goin’ Out of My Head. On Hollywood Palace, he played Windy from his new album, A Day In The Life. 

Which cued my interest. You mean this older black guy in the tuxedo (he was 44 at the time) had recorded his own version of what was at the time the coolest, most progressive song on the planet, A Day In The Life? 

The album was recorded at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Englewood Cliffs, NJ, on June 6 and 26, 1967. The liner notes say Montgomery hadn’t heard the Beatles song before recording it, which I guess is possible given that Sgt. Pepper was released on June 1. Certainly Herbie Hancock, who plays piano on the cut, was familiar with it. Hancock was 27 at the time, 17 years Montgomery’s junior. 

A Day In The Life opens with Hancock’s prowling cocktail lounge piano and while it swapped the overpowering orchestral sound of the original for strings that push the song into Mantovani territory, overall it worked. Call it psychedelia for suburbanites. 

The album also included Montgomery’s takes on When A Man Loves A Woman, Eleanor Rigby and one weird choice, Leslie Gore’s California Nights. And I admit to being familiar with Watch What Happens and Anthony Newley’s The Joker, some adult gravitas that I knew from our kitchen radio and from watching God knows how many television variety shows. 

One year after recording A Day In The Life, Montgomery was dead of heart failure. A heavy smoker, you’ll note the irony of the album cover, a collection of cigarette butts in an ashtray. Surely, and unfortunately, representative of a day in Montgomery’s life.