Bobby Darin — Mack the Knife

There are some great Bobby Darin classics on this disc from 1997 but the recording quality is lame. It sounds live, and maybe even bootlegged. I didn’t buy this album. When I was working at The Motley Fool a year or so after the dotcom bust I wandered up to one of the then-empty floors. I saw this CD sitting on a long-abandoned desk. I decided to relocate it to my desk on the one floor of our office building that held the lay-off survivors. After the first listen I could see why it was left behind. It still sounds as bad as I remember. The Fool on the other hand has only gotten “harder, better, faster, stronger.”

The title track, “Mack the Knife,” has an interesting story behind it. The Delancey Place newsletter recently emailed an excerpt from The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross. It discussed how strange and unlikely it is that this song, essentially a psychotic murder ballad, eventually became a pop standard sung by Darin, Sinatra and others.

More about Bobby Darin