Johnny Mathis still making people 'Misty' with his ballads

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A typical day in the life of Johnny Mathis begins with an early-morning trip to the gym -- he used to be a track star, as you may recall -- continues with time at home preparing food for the evening (he knows his way around a kitchen, too) and then moves on to an afternoon at the golf course."It's a full day. It's a great day," he says on the phone from his Hollywood Hills home. "I prefer structure in the day, then I don't lose focus. I keep my mind where it's supposed to be."And many days the 72-year-old singer has a concert on his schedule. He does about 50 each year.Mathis, a Texas native who started performing in 1955 and had his first hit with "Wonderful! Wonderful!" in 1957, is one of the few remaining legends from that era of popular music. Through that endurance run, he's never really taken a break, allowing him to compile a recording catalog of more than 100 albums.Mathis sounds surprisingly youthful on the phone."I was never conscious of the fact that my voice was different from anyone else's," he says. "My dad thought that because I loved to sing that I should study. He found a lady (Connie Cox in San Francisco) who taught me free of charge, so I had a foundation on how to sing."Originally, he wanted to be a jazz singer, but he admits he probably wasn't best suited for that. It was Mitch Miller at Columbia Records who eased him toward the softer ballads and helped create the Johnny Mathis that made the young girls swoon."He thought my voice was suited for ballad singing and steered me in the right direction," Mathis says. "I wasn't cut out to be a jazz singer 'cause I'm really not very good at improvising. He said, 'I like your voice, I don't like what you're singing and I don't like the way you're singing it, so try it this way.' And it kinda worked. It fit my personality. I was always kind of daydreaming, so this kind of music suits me, I think."To this day, he loves going on stage to perform hits like "Chances Are," "Twelfth of Never" and, his personal favorite, "Misty," a song co-written by Erroll Garner and Johnny Burke."I'm lucky because I had some pretty good songs to sing. They were not frivolous and they weren't foolish sounding. They were regular romantic ballads and they've held up over the years. So, yeah, I get tired of that part of the performance where you go, 'Oh, how will I breathe new life into this after the billionth time singing it?,' but you find yourself being a little grateful for it because people love to hear it. That's why they come. They want to be transported to that time when they remember that music. I know how much it means to them."Mathis' last smash hit was the 1978 song "Too Much, Too Little, Too Late" with Dionne Warwick, which went to No. 1. But he continues to freshen the set. His new album, "A Night to Remember," is a collection of love songs from the '60s to '80s performed with the likes of Kenny G, Gladys Knight, Yolanda Adams and Dave Koz. "It's more or less songs made famous by other singers," he says.Unlike Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett, one thing Mathis has not done late in his career is experiment with pop-rock crossover artists."They kind of wanted me to," he says, "but I always wanted to sing with people who have beautiful voices. The rock stuff was good, but I couldn't see myself doing it."Working with someone more polished like Josh Groban, for instance, would be more his speed."It's a trained voice, and he spent a lot of time working hard at it. People like Josh want to be good at their craft. I think sometimes the rockers want to be famous. They want to be hot stuff. For me, it means more when someone puts a little more effort into what they do."Another popular project for a legend like Mathis is the biopic. We've seen them for Sinatra, Ray Charles, Johnny Cash, Bobby Darin. Could there be one in the works for the man who sang "Misty"?"I guess there's been a couple of books written about my life -- nothing spectacular." He adds with a laugh, "I probably should do it before someone else does it and gets it wrong."(Scott Mervis can be reached at smervis(at)post-gazette.com.)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)