"Let's Get Lost": Song History, Commentary, Discography, Performances on Video

"Let's Get Lost"

sheet mucic for
"Let's Get Lost"
on the cover l.-r. : Dick Powell, Betty Hutton, Mary Martin, Eddie Bracken,
and Rudy Vallee --
from the 1943 movie Happy Go Lucky

James Gavin
Deep in a Dream
The Long Night of Chet Baker
New York: Alfred A Knoph, 2002
(paperback edition shown,
published by Vantage, 2003)

"Let's Get Lost," the song, was recorded by jazz trumpeter and singer Chet Baker only once, for his album Chet Baker Sings and Plays, released in 1955. (Listen to that recording below in the Record/Video Cabinet, this page.) The song is, nevertheless, associated with Baker more often than with any other artist. This association came about only after filmmaker and photographer Bruce Weber borrowed the song's title and used it for the title of his 1988 documentary film on the life of Baker. Only after that did the song become so powerfully identified with Baker and elements of his life. The connection was so powerfully, in fact, that many assumed the song's origins were connected to Baker. Some have even thought Baker wrote the song and/or that the song was a key work in his repertoire. Neither of these assumptions is true. In fact, the song "Let's Get Lost" itself is barely heard in Weber's film (as a few seconds of background music during the film's opening sequence) and was not a particularly important performance piece for Baker. Apparently when the powerful images of Baker losing himself in jazz as well as in his drug addiction were taken in by viewers of the documentary together with the film's title being the same as the song's, these misconceptions and exaggerations took root. That the song's lyric begins with the title line "Let's Get Lost" has also helped to facilitate the mistaken notion that the song is about what the film Let's Get Lost is largely about; however, if one is paying attention to the lyric as it unfolds beyond the first line, it quickly becomes clear the song is a proposal by one lover to another to get lost in an all encompassing world of romance not in music or drugs.

Let's get lost Lost in each others arms.

There are other lines in the lyric that could be construed as connected to a drug induced high or other related state, lines such as "Let's tell the world we're in a crazy mood" along with a proposal to "defrost" in a mist, but the inferences that can be drawn from passages such as these to support connections with Baker's (or anyones) use of drugs are less convincing when we hear it is a "romantic mist." Lyricist Frank Loesser was writing the words for a romantic ballad in a romantic comedy and he was nothing if not a very careful wordsmith. That Baker himself ever saw the lyric as being related to drug use is at best speculative.

No doubt filmmaker Weber was attracted to the title because Baker and his quartet recorded the song on their first album and the song's title, taken by itself, fits the image of Baker as a pied piper figure leading himself and perhaps others into a state of being lost through the use of drugs, an inescapable theme at the heart of Weber's film.

"Let's Get Lost," (the song) was, in fact, written for a film but not one connected in any way to Baker or his life style. The song began its life as a romantic ballad written for the score of the 1942/43 Hollywood movie, Happy Go Lucky, a romantic comedy about characters who find themselves not so much lost but rather as far from home trying to have a good time on a Caribbean island. "Let's Get Lost" (the song) was written by Jimmy McHugh (music) and Frank Loesser (words) some twenty years before Chet Baker ever recorded it and over forty years before Bruce Weber made his film. It was sung in the 1942/3 movie by none other than Mary Martin who shared top acting credit in the movie with Betty Hutton, Dick Powell, and Rudy Vallee.

During the last few months of 1942, just before Frank Loesser joined the army to serve in WWII, he joined his frequent writing partner, composer Jimmy McHugh, to collaborate on the score for the Paramount Pictures movie Happy
Go Lucky. During the years just before U.S. involvement in WWII, McHugh and Loesser were successful songwriters for a number of Hollywood movie musicals. Loesser at this point in his songwriting career was primarily a lyricist who had seldom written both words and music as he did later when he joined the ranks of such songwriters as Irving Berlin and Cole Porter doing both, most notably for such magnificent Broadway scores as Guys and Dolls. Eventually he became far more well known for his Broadway work than for his movie lyrics -- even though many of the movie songs had become standards. One notable exception for which he did words and music during this early portion of his career was the sad and lonely almost down and out "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year" for one of the few noirish Christmas movies, Christmas Holiday of 1944, where it is sung by Deanna Durbin. (See the lists of song titles written, both together but mostly separately, by Loesser and Mchugh, included in the Cafe Songbook Catalog of The Great American Songbook.)

McHugh's biographer Alyn Shipton considers McHugh's and Loesser's "Let's Get Lost" as one of the two best songs from the very good overall score for Happy Go Lucky. (The other one was "He Says, 'Murder,' He Says," sung in the movie by Betty Hutton in a skit that like the song itself plays around with the hipster slang of the day.) "Let's Get Lost," though, was according to Shipton, "the finest, as well as one of the last, of all the numbers McHugh and Loesser wrote together" (Alyn Shipton, I Feel a Song Coming On: The Life of Jimmy McHugh p. 170, hardcover Ed.).

"Let's Get Lost" was created for the movie as a seduction song. Mary Martin sings it as part of her character Marjorie's attempt to lure an eligible millionaire, played by Rudy Vallee, into marriage. It's difficult, however, to experience Martin's performance because she never recorded "Let's Get Lost" and the movie itself is not easy to find. (Amazon lists it as "currently unavailable.")* The film is set on what appears to be a Caribbean Island, an island apparently untouched by the war. During 1942, of course, World War II was devastating many less fortunate islands around the globe, especially American ones in the South Pacific. But on the island in the movie the only troubles are romantic and financial, in other words troubles in paradise more or less. The story develops as Marjorie runs into an acquaintance, the smooth talking Pete Hamilton (Dick Powell), who concocts a plan for her to convince millionaire Alfred Monroe (Vallee) to marry her, and in the process make some money for himself. As part of the seduction plan, Marjorie and Alfred find themselves alone in an isolated grove with only a radio and each other for company -- a radio that is evidently plugged in somewhere and tuned somehow to an English language station quite conveniently playing an orchestra-only vocal accompaniment arrangement of "Let's Get Lost." The music is performed, as the radio announcer informs us, by The McHugh-Loesser Orchestra -- no doubt an in-joke among those making the movie. Also conveniently, Marjorie knows the lyric and uses the so-called "McHugh-Loesser" ensemble as back-up for her performance. Such was the "official" debut of "Let's Get Lost," courtesy of the magic of Hollywood.

In fact, Martin's performance of "Let's Get Lost" in the movie is not quite its first. Happy Go Lucky was released on Jan. 1, 1943, notably after several other versions of the song had been recorded and released during 1942. It was not unusual, for PR purposes, that movie companies made sheet music for songs featured in their films available to generate advance interest both for the films and for the songs in them. The Kay Kyser and Jimmy Dorsey orchestras with their respective vocalists had not only already released recordings of "Let's Get Lost" but their records wound up making the charts before Happy Go Lucky itself even opened. (Listen to those recordings in the Cafe Songbook Record Video Cabinet, this page). So no doubt "Let's Get Lost" was already familiar to many of the moviegoers in the audience by the time they heard Martin give the song its official "debut." About the same time the movie opened, Vaughn Monroe's recording was released, and it quickly rose to number one on the charts suggesting the movie was helping sales of the record as well as vise versa. (Listen to Monroe's recording in the Record Video Cabinet, this page). The PR ploy had worked like a charm.

Martin's rendition is a lovely one completely appropriate for a relatively innocent romantic ballad performed in a romantic comedy. It was not, like Baker's 1955 recording, a jazz version or even a jazz inflected one. It did, however, fit a subtext of Happy Go Lucky that could be related to Bruce Weber's movie: Escape. In Happy Go Lucky it is an escape for the audience from the constant pain and turmoil associated with the war with Japan raging across the American islands of the South Pacific. It wouldn't have been easy for an American audience contemporaneous with the first run of the movie to miss the contrast between what was going on in the very serious even tragic context of the broader world of their lives and the make-believe world of the island in the film. And it would have been easy and no doubt a profound relief for that same audience to get lost in the world they were viewing up on the screen.

Similarly, in Weber's documentary, Let's Get Lost, it is equally difficult to miss the escape theme in his account of Baker's life. Indeed the story of "Let's Get Lost," at least in this story, is a tale of two movies.

*1. The movie Happy Go Lucky (starring Mary Martin, Betty Hutton, Dick Powell and Rudy Vallee) runs 2 hrs. As mentioned above, it is currently hard to find. We came across it at the address below. The URL is for the Russian social media site, ok.ru. about which we know little except what's in the Wikipedia article for it. We were able to watch the movie without experiencing any problems.

2. Lets Get Lost (The Bruce Weber documentary) is embedded just below on CafeSongbook.com from YouTube. You can view it below or directly on YouTube.

In the the liner notes for the 2007 anthology album Chet Baker Too Cool, Ricky Wright comments on the "Let's Get Lost" track, a track that appeared originally on the album Chet Baker Sings and Plays, 1955). Wright makes a fascinating comparison between Frank Loesser's rhymes in his lyric for "Let's Get Lost" and Baker's singing and horn playing in his recording of the song:

Broadway and Hollywood kingpin Frank Loesser could rhyme to comic effect like few other musical wordsmiths. "Let's Get Lost" is beyond clever, his giddily deployed rhymes (defrost/mist/crossed/list) capturing the state of wanting to be with only a new flame. It's a great pick for the insouciant Baker who matches his singing with two assured trumpet solos. Bruce Weber's 1988 film documentary portrait of Baker (a tragic figure in the most basic sense) borrowed the song's title, giving it a mordant twist. That portrayal was seemingly another lifetime after these giddy minutes [i.e. Baker's recording of "Let's Get Lost"] were captured. --Ricky Wright

Wilfred Sheed, The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty,
New York: Random House, 2007 (paper-bound ED. 2008 shown)

Fran Loesser in Hollywood
album includes Betty Hutton
performance of
"Murder, He Says"
along with 47 more
Loesser songs written for the movies.
(2 CDs).

"After Guys and Dolls hit Broadway in 1950, there was a lot of talk about Frank Loesser being the new Irving Berlin or Cole Porter, the songwriter who was spectacularly good at both words and music, but it was as if everybody forgot he was already "the best or second best lyricist in Hollywood depending on how you rate Johnny Mercer" (Wilfred Sheed, The House that George Built, p.276 hardcover ED.).

Sheed continues, Loesser's "words were not just clever but musical. They made the tunes they were with sound their absolute best. Songs like Burton Lane's 'The Lady's in Love with You,' Victor Schertzinger's 'Sand in My Shoes,' and almost everything he wrote with Jimmy McHugh--'Let's Get Lost,' and 'Say it (Over and Over Again)' -- are good songs that sound like great ones because of Loesser's touch. . . . A Loesser lyric is a poem that you forget is a poem because there's so much else going on. Not even Mercer could sound so natural while being so literary. 'I've Got Spurs That Jingle Jangle jingle.' Who else on Tin Pan Alley ever wrote a song about his spurs or packed so much music into a verbal phrase?'

"The other thing that [Loesser's] Hollywood years revealed was that Loesser didn't turn his ears off when he crossed the Hudson. He continued to pick up phrases from all over, including places he'd never been. 'Small Fry' (music: [Hoagy] Carmichael) is so all-American that people assume it must be one of Mercer's and 'Murder, He Says' (music: McHugh [like 'Let's Get Lost' also from Happy Go Lucky in which it is sung by Betty Hutton] remains the best guide we have to the slang the kids were using in World War II. . . ."

Betty Hutton, introduced by Bob Hope, sings the
Jimmy McHugh / Frank Loesser song"He says, 'Murder,' He Says" (originally from the 1943 movie, Happy Go Lucky)
on the Armed Forces Radio program "Command Performance"
(November 13, 1943)

Max Wilk, They're Playing Our Song: Conversations with America's Classic Songwriters (originally published 1973 as They're Playing Our Song: From Jerome Kern to Stephen Sondheim—The Stories behind the Words and Music of Two Generations), New York and Stratford, CT: Easton Studio Press, 2008.

The songs that Loesser wrote in those pre-World War II Hollywood years are remarkable for their strength. The ordinary idea, the shortcut, the triumph of technique to cover the absence of an idea -- none of that for Loesser. He was on the prowl for a brighter notion, a stronger line. Certainly he could turn out an "I've Got Spurs that Jingle, Jangle Jingle" -- that was part of the job. For Betty Hutton he could turn out dynamite material, "Poppa, Don't Preach To Me" and "He Says, 'Murder,' He Says." And he was already coming up with gems such as "I'd like to Get You on a Slow Boat to China." But listen to his ballads-- the haunting " Sand in My Shoes " (which he did with the late Victor Schertzinger ) or " Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year ," "Let's Get Lost," " I Wish I Didn't Love You So ,"or " What Are You Doing New Years Eve? " They reveal the deep strain of romanticism that underpinned his later work. (Wilk, pp. 122-23, paperback Ed.)

The Party's rather dull,
Isn't it?
We'd love to steal away,
Wouldn't we?
So let's not even ask,
'Should we or shouldn't we?'.

Although Jimmy McHugh (music) and Frank Loesser (words) created a verse for "Let's Get Lost," it was not sung by Mary Martin (or anyone else) nor played by "The Loesser-McHugh Orchestra" (as the accompanying ensemble is billed during the film Happy Go Lucky). Quite a few independent recordings, however, do include the verse. Listen, for example, to the version below by Lina Romay for a 1943 "Soundie,"

Lina Romay performs "Let's Get Lost"
including the verse) for a 1943 "Soundie," filmed in the same year as the movie Happy Go Lucky in which Mary Martin premiered the song without the verse -- but Martin never recorded it .

Other recordings that include the verse and which are featured in the Cafe Songbook Performer/Recording Index (on this page) are Vaughan Monroe (1943); Chet Baker, who omits the verse in his 1954-5 vocal but it can nevertheless be heard in Russ Freeman's piano line; Wesla Whitfield includes it in her recording from 2000; Aaron Weinstein alludes to the verse on his violin as he opens his 2005 recording on which he is accompanied by a John Pizzarelli vocal that itself does not include the verse; In 2008 Rebecca Kilgore and Dave Frishberg sing and play the verse as Loesser and McHugh wrote it; Cyrille Aimée emphasizes the verse by slowing down its tempo in both her live and studio versions of 2016. The remainder of the recordings in our Index simply drop the verse as so many performers, both live and in the studio, do.

The refrain carries forward the idea that the party a couple finds themselves at is "rather dull" so they need not concern themselves about telling anybody they are going to "steal away." The only excitement that the party might in fact generate are the "alarms" that will be sent out when it is discovered they are missing. They may be thought "rude" but they are in too much of a "crazy mood" to worry about not being invited to any more parties because of their lack of manners; in fact, they like the idea of being "crossed off everybody's list." It is no matter to them because on "this night we found each other, [so] mmm, let's get lost." Their solution to the problem of being stuck at a dull party (perhaps read "dull and phony life" for "party") is to"get lost in each other arms." 'The delicious irony created by the tension between "found" and "lost," between having found something that yields the desire to get lost, and coming at the very end of the refrain produces the cool, laid back energy on which the song rides. And it t is this laid back energy out of which a musician and singer like Chet Baker made his reputation -- which, incidentally, is quite a way from the reputation of the song's first singer, Mary Martin, which was more on the hot and sassy side. The song through the use of its title by filmmaker Weber has gotten tied to a theme of getting lost in a world of drugs, a substitute for love in Baker's world.

• Cyrille Aimée: WNYC
• Let's Get Lost (the documentary): Mabel Bruni
• Let's Get Lost Lina Romay: Bill A
• Betty Hutton ("Murder, He Says"): Anne E. M.
  

Notes

• Frank Loesser in Hollywood An anthology of various artists performing songs written for Hollywood movies with lyrics by Loesser.
• Click the Amazon link below for a selection of albums featuring the songs of Jimmy McHugh
• currently unavailable at Amazon
• Alyn Shipton, I Feel a Song Coming On: The Life of Jimmy McHugh, University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 2009.
• Other songs written for Happy Go Lucky currently included in the Cafe Songbook Catalog of The Great American Songbook : none
• For a complete listing of songs written for or used in this movie, see IMDB Soundtrack .
• Movie Poster for Happy Go Lucky
• Chet Baker Sings and Plays from the film Let's Get Lost (tracks from the documentary film -- on vinyl)
• Let's Get Lost (Documentary film on Baker by Bruce Weber )
• "Let's Get Lost": A Tale of Two Movies
• Here are the two movies in full :
• Let's Get Lost, the 1981 Bruce Weber Documentary on Chet Baker (The film runs 2hrs.)
• Chet Baker Too Cool
• Words to the verse for "Let's Get Lost" :
• Robert Kimball and Steve Nelson, Eds., The Complete Lyrics of Frank Loesser . New York: Alfred A. Knoph, 2003.

Cite this page: "Let's Get Lost": Song History, Commentary, Discography, Performances on Video, Cafe Songbook, https://greatamericansongbook.net/pages/songs/l/lets_get_lost.html