On Saturday, August 15, 1964, the biggest song in America was a love ballad written seventeen years earlier.
Billboard’s new Hot 100 put “Everybody Loves Somebody” at number one, above every rock and roll record in the country.
The singer was Dean Martin, forty-seven years old and written off as yesterday’s man by the record business.
He had not placed a record in the top forty since “Volare” back in 1958.
The song it displaced was the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night,” the anthem of a very loud summer.
That summer belonged to Beatlemania, to screaming teenagers and four young men from Liverpool.
Yet the record America bought most that week belonged to a tuxedo, an orchestra, and an unhurried piano.
Martin had cut the song almost by accident, in the spare hour left over from another album session.
Its writer was no hungry newcomer but his own pianist, a patient man named Ken Lane.
The song had already been offered to the world by Peggy Lee and Frank Sinatra, to almost no response.
Months earlier, Martin had jokingly promised his young son that he would knock the Beatles off the charts.
His son Dean Paul adored the Beatles, the way nearly every American kid seemed to that year.
There was just one problem.
Nobody around Martin, least of all the chart experts, believed a crooner could stay there.
The British Invasion had buried every singer of his generation under guitars and harmonies.
The whole improbable week began with a song nobody had wanted for seventeen years.
Left for later, it arrived right on time.
What happened next turned a throwaway take into the signature of a lifetime.
A Song Written in 1947
Lyricist Irving Taylor and pianist Ken Lane wrote the song together in 1947.
Lane was a Brooklyn-born pianist who built his career behind other people’s voices.
The pair shaped it as a gentle plea from somebody still waiting for love to arrive.
A curious footnote would attach a third famous name to the song years later.
Lane had borrowed a phrase in the bridge that echoed veteran songwriter Sam Coslow’s “Midnight Moon.”
Rather than risk a courtroom fight, Taylor and Lane agreed to give Coslow a writing credit.
The shared credit appears on the record labels, though the song itself belongs to Taylor and Lane.
It was, in every way, a standard written for the age of the big ballad singers.
Taylor made his living writing words for other men’s melodies, mostly for films and band singers.
In 1947, a slow romantic ballad was the standard calling card of every crooner in America.
Record men treated such songs as catalogue furniture, useful for filling out albums.
What it lacked, for seventeen long years, was a singer who could make it matter.
Tried by Lee, Sinatra, and Washington
Peggy Lee made the first recording in November 1947, backed by her husband Dave Barbour’s orchestra.
Two weeks later, Frank Sinatra recorded it for Columbia with Axel Stordahl conducting.
Sinatra’s version was shelved for months before Columbia finally released it in mid 1948.
Dinah Washington also took her turn at the song during those early years.
None of the versions became hits, and none became identified with its singer.
The song simply waited in publishers’ files while musical fashion changed around it.
Oddly, Martin himself had sung it on Bob Hope’s radio program back in 1948.
Each new recording arrived quietly in the shops and departed the same way.
Record buyers of 1948 had dozens of crooners competing for the same slow dance.
By the early fifties, the song read like a finished minor entry in three careers.
He had no way of knowing the tune would one day rescue his own career.
The Pianist at Martin’s Elbow
Ken Lane did not just write the song and wave it goodbye in 1947.
His full name was Kermit Lane, though the whole business knew him as Ken.
He also arranged music for Hollywood films during the nineteen forties.
He became one of the working pianists who orbited the great singers of the era.
By 1964 he was playing piano at Dean Martin’s own recording sessions.
Martin trusted Lane’s touch, that light, unforced swing behind a relaxed vocal.
America would later know Lane’s face from the piano bench of Martin’s television show.
On that show, the two men traded easy duets like old friends at a living room piano.
Few television viewers realized the quiet pianist had written the program’s theme song.
One Song Short
In the spring of 1964, Martin was recording an intimate album called Dream with Dean.
The sessions favored a small combo and the close, late-night sound of a club.
With about an hour of studio time remaining, the album stood one song short.
Lane spoke up and suggested the singer try the old tune he had co-written.
They telephoned Irving Taylor to confirm the correct words before the tape rolled.
Piano, guitar, bass, and drums settled behind Martin’s unhurried baritone.
The take was quiet, almost conversational, and nothing like a record aimed at teenagers.
Sessions like these were built on trust between a singer and four backing musicians.
Martin liked records that sounded like a man thinking aloud after midnight.
He had always distrusted fuss, in studios as much as anywhere else.
When the small version was finished, everyone in the room sensed something larger.
A Second Take, with Strings
Almost immediately, Martin recorded the song again, this time with a full orchestra and chorus.
That grander arrangement was recorded on April 16, 1964, with producer Jimmy Bowen supervising.
The orchestral version carried the easy confidence of a man in no hurry at all.
Bowen, a young Reprise producer, specialized in giving veteran singers modern frames.
The chorus answered Martin like a roomful of old friends.
Engineers at United Western in Hollywood captured the session for Reprise.
Reprise Records heard hit potential where the intimate first take suggested only charm.
The label moved quickly and issued the orchestral recording as a single in June 1964.
Martin, by then, had gone six years without a top forty single in America.
His label mates could hardly have picked a less likely challenger to the Beatles.
An Album Built in a Hurry
Reprise then assembled an entire album around the single and named it for the song.
The album Everybody Loves Somebody was stitched together from earlier sessions and recent B-sides.
Its cover proudly announced that it contained the hit version of the title song.
The rush job still reached number two on the Billboard album chart.
It went gold and outsold the polished studio album released beside it.
It even outsold Dream with Dean, the careful studio album released on the same day.
Radio programmers, meanwhile, were discovering that adults still bought forty-five singles.
Reprise had signed Martin in 1960, hoping his nightclub fame would sell albums.
For four years the label had waited for a single to justify that faith.
The Boast at Home
At home, the summer’s soundtrack was a small domestic argument about the Beatles.
Martin openly resented rock and roll and the noise now filling his own house.
His twelve-year-old son Dean Paul worshipped the Beatles like millions of other kids.
Dean Paul was not just a fan; he would soon sing in a teen group himself.
The boy’s record collection was the sound of a generation changing the guard.
The father looked at the boy and delivered the most famous joke of his career.
“I’m gonna knock your pallies off the charts,” he told him.
The line survives through biographer Nick Tosches and the Martin family’s retelling.
It was teasing, but it was also the competitive pride of a dismissed generation.
Few fathers have ever been handed so perfect a chance to keep a joke.
August 15, 1964
The single entered the Hot 100 in late June, down at number seventy-two.
Week by week it climbed through a chart crowded with British guitar bands.
On August 15, 1964, it stood at number one on the Hot 100.
It had pushed “A Hard Day’s Night” out of the top spot after two weeks.
The same week, it topped Billboard’s Pop-Standard Singles chart, built for grown-up records.
It held that adult chart for eight weeks, long after the headlines faded.
Martin now had his first number one single since “Memories Are Made of This” in 1956.
The crooners’ trade papers treated the week like a small restoration of order.
Cash Box magazine put the record at number one on its own chart as well.
It also peaked at number eleven in Britain, against the invasion’s home guard.
In Australia and New Zealand, the record climbed into the top three.
The Signature He Sang Every Week
The song promptly replaced “That’s Amore” as the record most identified with Martin.
When The Dean Martin Show began on NBC in 1965, the song became its theme.
Every week, America heard that melody while its host ambled into the living room set.
Ken Lane, the man who wrote it, sat nearby at the piano for the nation to see.
The program ran nine seasons, from 1965 to 1974, usually among television’s most watched.
For a generation, that tune meant laughter, guests, and a host who never hurried.
A song once filed away in 1947 had become the sound of appointment television.
Its opening bars became as familiar as any signature tune on television.
Schoolchildren who never bought his records could hum his theme by heart.
Immortality, Formally Noted
In 1999, the 1964 recording was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
The honor confirmed what audiences had decided thirty-five years earlier.
Every later singer who attempts the song is measured against Martin’s recording.
The title words of that song were later chosen for his grave marker in Los Angeles.
It was perhaps the plainest possible summary of what the record had meant.
The record also earned platinum certification in America for a million copies sold.
British listeners eventually gave the recording a silver certification as well.
You may know that wait yourself, the long season when your best work sits unnoticed in a drawer.
And you may know the stranger joy of watching it matter, suddenly, to everyone at once.
Left for later, it arrived right on time.
Patience, in the end, outsang the loudest summer.
Dean Martin: The King of Cool
Dino of Steubenville
Dino Paul Crocetti was born on June 7, 1917, in Steubenville, Ohio.
His father, Gaetano Crocetti, was a barber who had emigrated from Montesilvano in Italy’s Abruzzo region.
His mother, Angela Barra Crocetti, was an Ohio-born daughter of Italian immigrants.
His father’s barbering kept the family fed and rooted in the neighborhood.
An older brother, William, shared the small house and its two languages.
The boy sang around the house long before he sang for money.
The household spoke Italian, and Dino spoke only Italian until he started school.
He was five years old, suddenly surrounded by a language he could not speak.
Classmates at Grant Elementary ridiculed the boy for his broken, hesitant English.
The teasing left a mark on a child who would grow famous for effortless ease.
He quit high school in the tenth grade, convinced the classroom held nothing for him.
Steubenville was a smoky steel town strung along the Ohio River.
Work there meant mills, mines, and the rough trades of an immigrant city.
Kid Crochet and the Casino Years
As a teenager, Dino boxed as a welterweight under the name Kid Crochet.
He later joked that he had won all but eleven of his twelve bouts.
The fights left him with a broken nose that surgeons eventually straightened.
He also worked in the steel mills his hometown was built upon.
Another job put him behind a tobacco shop, dealing cards in an illegal casino.
He served as a roulette stickman and croupier while singing with local bands at night.
For the stage, he first called himself Dino Martini, borrowing glamour from an opera tenor.
His crooning owed early debts to Bing Crosby, Perry Como, and the Mills Brothers.
For a time in New York he shared a cheap apartment with singer Sonny King.
They reportedly charged visitors a fee to watch the two of them box bare-knuckle.
Nothing about those years suggested the polished ease he would one day sell.
A Bandleader Gives Him a Name
His break came singing with the Ernie McKay Orchestra on the regional circuit.
By late 1940 he was the featured singer for Cleveland bandleader Sammy Watkins.
He worked Cleveland’s Vogue Room at the Hollenden Hotel with the Watkins band.
Watkins suggested a new stage name, and Dino Martini became Dean Martin.
Martin stayed with the Watkins band into 1943, learning the trade night by night.
That autumn he moved on to performing in New York, the industry’s capital.
His wartime army service ended early, after roughly a year, on medical grounds.
New York nightclub work followed, steady but far from stardom.
In those rooms he watched audiences and learned exactly how little effort should show.
Martin and Lewis
In 1945, Martin met a skinny young comedian named Jerry Lewis.
The two began stepping into each other’s acts, and the interference delighted audiences.
They made their official debut together at Atlantic City’s 500 Club in July 1946.
The first show went so badly that the owner threatened to fire them that night.
Huddled behind the club, they rebuilt the act around pure, unscripted chaos.
The second show that evening launched the most successful comedy team in America.
Martin played the unflappable straight man, singing calmly through Lewis’s mayhem.
Radio, early television, and sixteen films together made them a national institution.
At their peak, they were arguably the biggest act in American show business.
The partnership ended in July 1956, a decade after the two men first teamed.
Their films together included My Friend Irma and a long line of service comedies.
The split, when it finally came, was bitter and played out very publicly.
The Voice Steps Forward Alone
Long before the split, Martin’s records had been quietly building a second career.
“That’s Amore,” written for the 1953 film The Caddy, peaked at number two that year.
Jerry Lewis had secretly paid its writers thirty thousand dollars, hoping for a Martin hit.
The song earned an Academy Award nomination and became his first signature tune.
“Memories Are Made of This” then topped the Billboard chart for five weeks in 1956.
It also gave him his only number one single in Britain that same year.
His Italian-flavored “Volare” reached number fifteen in America and number two in Britain in 1958.
Capitol Records built whole albums around his relaxed way with a standard.
He also cut “Sway” in 1954, another record built for slow dancing.
Those Capitol years made him a singer who headlined rooms without his partner.
He could not read music, yet the records kept finding their audience.
The Actor Nobody Expected
After the split, Martin took a fraction of his old salary for The Young Lions.
The 1958 war drama paired him with Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift.
Critics who expected a lounge singer discovered a genuine dramatic actor.
He followed it with Vincente Minnelli’s Some Came Running, opposite Frank Sinatra.
In Rio Bravo, Howard Hawks cast him as Dude, a deputy fighting his own demons.
The 1959 western, starring John Wayne, is now counted among the genre’s finest.
Comedy hits like Who Was That Lady? kept his lighter gifts on display.
Bells Are Ringing paired him with Judy Holliday in a Broadway transplant in 1960.
Slowly, the nightclub crooner had become one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars.
The Rat Pack
In Las Vegas, Martin’s closest circle became show business legend under one nickname.
The Rat Pack gathered Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop.
The name itself was borrowed from an earlier circle around Humphrey Bogart.
Sinatra led, Davis dazzled, and Martin simply declined to compete with either.
Their Sands Hotel shows mixed songs, jokes, and the illusion of a party.
Audiences paid simply to watch famous friends enjoy themselves onstage.
Films like Ocean’s 11 carried that private chemistry into cinemas in 1960.
Martin’s persona within the group was the calm center everyone orbited.
By many accounts, the famous stage glass often held apple juice rather than liquor.
Cool, for Martin, was a performance of control disguised as carelessness.
The Sixties Belonged to Him Anyway
By the mid-1960s, Martin stood as a star of records, films, television, and nightclubs.
The 1964 comeback single began a run of easy-listening hits for Reprise.
“The Door Is Still Open to My Heart” and “Send Me the Pillow You Dream On” followed it up the charts.
“You’re Nobody till Somebody Loves You” and “I Will” kept his name on the radio through 1965.
His son’s own group, Dino, Desi and Billy, was meanwhile charting songs for teenagers.
He recorded thirty-five studio albums across his career, most of them in this relaxed mold.
Four Matt Helm spy comedies turned him into a box-office fixture of the decade.
Each film let him play the spy as a man permanently amused by danger.
Yet the job that defined his sixties happened one night a week on television.
His Reprise albums arrived steadily, genial records built for adult record buyers.
The Show That Never Rehearsed
The Dean Martin Show premiered on NBC in September 1965.
Martin set conditions he later admitted he expected the network to reject.
He demanded a huge salary, Sundays-only work, and no weekday rehearsals at all.
NBC accepted everything, and the supposed bluff became a nine-season arrangement.
A stand-in blocked the guest scenes while Martin played golf through the week.
He arrived Sunday, glanced at the cue cards, and taped with a single rehearsal.
Guests adored the looseness, and the mistakes often stayed in the finished show.
Ken Lane sat at the piano, duetting with his host like a trusted old friend.
In the show’s final season, celebrity roasts became its most talked-about feature.
The roasts continued as television specials for another decade, until 1984.
The show finished many seasons among the ten most watched programs in America.
Producer Greg Garrison became his partner in the venture by a simple handshake.
The Long, Quiet Unwind
Martin’s film pace slowed as the seventies settled into television and Las Vegas residencies.
Airport, the 1970 disaster hit, reminded studios of his dependable screen presence.
The Cannonball Run films of the early eighties let him coast on pure charm.
Even the celebrity roasts wound down as tastes in television comedy changed.
Golf remained his true second career, complete with a PGA Tour event bearing his name.
His son Dean Paul died in 1987, and the loss visibly deepened his withdrawal.
In 1988 he briefly toured with Sinatra and Davis, then stepped away from the road.
He spent his final years in quiet retirement in Beverly Hills.
Dean Martin died on Christmas Day 1995, at the age of seventy-eight.
That night, the lights of the Las Vegas Strip were dimmed in his honor.
He made the hardest work look like leisure.
Return to that August Saturday in 1964, and the chart nobody at Reprise predicted.
The Beatles would retake the top within weeks, and history remembers their decade.
But for one week, the gentlest record in America belonged to a barber’s son from Steubenville.
The boy who once could not speak English had sung his way past the loudest band alive.
Left for later, it arrived right on time.
Somewhere tonight, a pianist is playing those chords in a quiet room.
And somewhere, a voice is leaning back against them, unhurried as ever.
It still sounds like a man with nowhere else he would rather be.