Word: mckuen
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Nearly everyone has heard of Rod McKuen: he has written 900 songs that have been recorded by other people and sold more than 50 million records; his three books of poetry have sold more than a million copies. In his gritty wreck of a voice, he has recorded 35 albums of his own songs, and last year he wrote the scores for two movies. It was not until last week, though, that McKuen got that ultimate symbol of success: his own TV special, a one-man show on NBC, called "Rod McKuen: The Loner...
...McKuen's absence from the TV screen until then was a matter of his own choice. He had turned down every offer to do a television special until he could do it on his own terms: a half-hour one-man show over which he had total control and no interference...
...show had impressive sparseness. Wearing a formless sweater, black pants and sneakers, McKuen kept the talk to a discreet minimum and spent his time singing his songs-The World I Used to Know, a medley of Stanyan Street, Lonesome Cities and Listen to the Warm -and reciting a poem about one of his few New York friends, A Cat Named Sloopy. He wandered through a set that seemed to have been plucked from a haunted harbor on San Francisco Bay. If the fog spewing out of the NBC special-effects machine looked at times as if it were going...
Rootless Childhood. The "Loner" title was corny but appropriate. McKuen has led his life mostly apart from others. He was born into the Depression in a Salvation Army hospital in Oakland, Calif., shortly after his father had deserted the family. His mother worked as a waitress, a telephone operator and a dime-a-dance hostess until her marriage to a "cat-skinner"-the operator of Caterpillar tractors on Government road projects. McKuen was hauled from one construction site to another throughout the West and Northwest until, at age eleven, he split from his family and spent four years drifting...
Saturday, May 10 ROD McKUEN: THE LONER (NBC, 8:30-9 p.m.). McKuen, poet, songwriter and recording star, puts on a one-man show...