Sinatra

ON HIS 1979 futuristic concept album, Trilogy: Reflections Of The Future In Three Tenses, Frank Sinatra had it all figured out:

And when that cat with the scythe comes tugging at my sleeve I’ll be singing as I leave . . .

By the time the cat with the scythe finally showed up on Thursday night, Frank wasn’t singing too much any more. But he still owed Capitol Records a new album - and that’s all you need to know: he was the only 82-year-old pop singer with a contract with a major record company. He did it his way, and he did it longer and better than anybody else in popular music. He was in the Hit Parade in the Thirties and in the Nineties. He started singing with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey, and, by the end, there was no one left but Pavarotti and Bono from U2, so he sang with them, too.

“Rock’n’roll people love Frank Sinatra,” said Bono at the 1994 Grammy Awards, “because Frank Sinatra has got what we want. Swagger and attitude. He’s big on attitude. Serious attitude. Bad attitude. Frank’s the Chairman of the Bad.” If only 20 per cent of the gossip is true, it was an amazing life: Frank delivering two million bucks in an attaché case for mob boss Lucky Luciano; the horse’s head left in an uncooperative producer’s bed; Nancy and Ava and Lana and Marilyn and Lauren and Mia in his bed, being very cooperative, sometimes (Ava and Lana) simultaneously; even towards the end, when ex-wife Mia Farrow told him of her troubles with Woody Allen, Frank sportingly offered to break Woody’s legs.

But what’s even more amazing than the life is that the records live up to it, and then some. The swagger and attitude, the chicks and mobsters are the incidental accompaniment; the real drama is in the songs. A couple of weeks ago, I was driving out of New York one Friday afternoon when “Come Fly With Me” came on the radio. Billy May wrote the arrangement while drunk, an hour before the recording session, and it still dazzles: the perky intro sort of taxis down the runway and the band lifts off, and there’s Frank - and as you hit the ramp to the Bronx River Parkway, the skyscrapers fall behind you, the highway clears, and all the possibilities of America lie ahead.

When the song ended, I thought of the last time I’d spoken to Sinatra, a few years back. We were talking about Billy May, but Frank was fairly exhausted and distracted and rambling. Everyone in the room wanted a piece of him, and he was finding it hard to concentrate. But a couple of days later there he was on stage, pushing himself through punishing art-song arrangements of “Lonely Town”, that long, complex Bernstein melody from On The Town, and the Soliloquy from Carousel, the role he should have played on film but instead played for ten minutes a night in recital halls and sports arena around the world for half-a-century. Round about that last time we met, I saw some guy sing the Soliloquy in the National Theatre revival of the Rodgers and Hammerstein show: great voice - if you think a voice is about hitting notes and holding them for the requisite length. But the fellow had nothing to say. Sinatra, a couple of years shy of 80, could still make you believe he was a leathery old roustabout, scraping a living along the Maine coast, contemplating the birth of his first child.

Of all the pop idols, from Jolson to Madonna, who’ve crossed over to movies, Sinatra was easily the best. Why would you be surprised by his Oscar-winning performance in From Here To Eternity (1953)? This guy learnt everything he needed to know about building character and creating a role from Rodgers and Hart, Harold Arlen, Johnny Mercer. That’s one reason why, despite a film career that’s little more than a handful of highspots buried between kiddie musicals in the Forties and some shrugged-off Rat Pack capers in the Sixties, Frank’s had more influence on American film acting than most full-time thespians. In the Fifties, he became the first dark celebrity, the glamorous outsider, mostly fatalistic, occasionally bitter, and potentially easy to provoke. He shared more than his hat brims with film noir. In fact, one of the best examples of film noir is his 1981 album She Shot Me Down, an accumulation of regrets, with Sinatra on the cover, wreathed in smoke, hunched in black leather jacket, Jack Daniel’s in hand.

He poured so much of himself into the music that it drained everything else. By the end, he’d given up the high-rolling, the really late nights, the broads and the booze and the cigarettes; he could barely talk. Even “It’s a privilege to be back in your wonderful city” seemed an effort. But, week after week, on stage in some grim rock arena on the edge of a shopping mall in some nondescript suburb, the lights would dim and Sinatra would effortlessly shrink the place to the size of those poky, smoky New Jersey saloons of his youth. Just a voice and an old saloon song in salute of some emblematic long-lost loser whose “chick split, cleaned out his stash and left him with a room full o’ nothin’ cryin’ into a gallon o’ Muscatel” - and underneath him Bill Miller, his long-time accompanist, would begin the bar-room piano intro to “One For My Baby (And One More For My Road)”. The rock crowd – “the guys in the funky shoes”, as he called them - needed dry ice and laser shows to fill the place; Frank made do with the old props - a tumbler and a cigarette.

It was always about the music, even in the beginning. Before Sinatra, male singers aspired to the condition of Bing Crosby, who sang like he played golf: let’s knock it around for a while and get to the clubhouse without breaking into a sweat - 18 holes, 32 bars, hey, what’s the diff? When Crosby sang, that was all he did: sing. If you want an extreme example, try “Home On The Range”. Crosby’s recording says nothing other than, “Ah, let’s gather round the old Joanna and sing a backporch favourite from 1873.’ Sinatra’s version is extraordinary: his home really is on the range, and the deer and antelope are frolicking about 15 yards from the microphone.

Inevitably, there soon was heard a discouraging word: Frank Sinatra sings songs, said one early reviewer, as if he believes them. And he meant it as a criticism. Maybe Stanislavskian identification isn’t such an advantage when you’re doing a song about wanting a home where the buffalo roam, but, as Sinatra emerged from Crosby’s shadow, it was to prove decisive - and, in the long run, render Bing’s approach inadequate.

The Thirties crooners bounced thoughtlessly through romance and glossed over pain. For Sinatra, that was not enough. “Take ‘Fools Rush In’,” he said, by way of example. “The story of the song is in the first four lines: ‘Fools rush in where wise men never go, but wise men never fall in love, so how are they to know?’ But most fellers chop it up: ‘Fools rush in (breath) where wise men never go (breath), but wise men never fall in love (breath), so how are they to know?’ But, if you do it that way, nobody follows the story.” He learned breath control from swimming underwater at Demarest High School in Hoboken and later from Tommy Dorsey’s trombone. Sinatra used to sit on the bandstand behind Dorsey, wondering why the bandleader’s jacket never moved, as it surely would if he was taking even the slightest breath.

But for someone who represents the apogee of popular singing, he was never really, apart from that first flush of shrieking bobby-soxers back in the Forties, a pop singer. Pop is fashion, and Sinatra was usually at odds with whatever the prevailing fashion was. When pop singers were regular guys like Bing, Frank was spilling his guts out and introducing to the Hit Parade such fine emotional niceties as self-disgust. When Eisenhower’s America promoted cosy, domestic, picket-fence family values, he recast himself as a ring-a-ding, swingin’ bachelor. At 50, a time when most celebrities are still pretending they’re 28, Sinatra embraced premature old age and songs of wistful regret: “(When I Was 17) It Was A Very Good Year”. Jerome Kern once gave the young British composer Vivian Ellis a piece of advice: “Carry on being uncommercial. There's a lot of money in it.”

It worked for Sinatra. Back in the Fifties, the smart money was on Mitch Miller, head honcho at Columbia Records, the man who single-handedly produced the worst records of the era and so debauched the currency of mainstream Tin Pan Alley that rock’n’roll seemed a welcome alternative. It was Miller who insisted that Frank record “Mama Will Bark”, a doggy duet with the big-breasted Swede Dagmar, which, as the lyric puts it, is “the doggone-dest thing you ever heard”. Sinatra quit Columbia but never forgave Miller. Years later, they chanced to be crossing a Vegas lobby from opposite ends. Miller extended his hand in friendship; Sinatra snarled, “F*** you! Keep walking.”

F*** you! Keep walking: it could be the tempo marking on any one of those surging big-town swing arrangements. Indeed, his entire oeuvre could be sub-titled “F*** you! Keep walking”. Pop music never really deserved Sinatra, a man whose instincts have invariably been better than anybody else’s. His first starring role was in the film version of Rodgers and Hart’s Higher And Higher (1944). Then he discovered that the studio had slung out most of the score, including one of the finest ballads of the century, “It Never Entered My Mind”. So he went and recorded it as a pointed rebuke to the studio mush-heads. It was to be one of the first “standards” saved by Sinatra. The very notion of a standard - a song that endures and can be re-investigated over and over across the decades - is a Sinatra invention. At the time, Mitch Miller would rather he had sung “She Wears Red Feathers (And a Hula-Hula Skirt)”.

In the Fifties, Sinatra moved on to invent the album, approaching it like a song-cycle, a dramatic journey. His new label, Capitol, would have been just as happy if, like Ella Fitzgerald, he had simply plucked Irving Berlin’s 20 biggest hits and called it a “Songbook”. When you eavesdrop on some of his rehearsal tapes, you appreciate how much he contributes to his arrangements, tinkering with them again and again until he is satisfied. Recording “The Road To Mandalay”, he turned Rudyard Kipling into a finger-snappy swinger anxious to be back east of Suez where “a cat can raise a thirst”. There was a 32-inch gong in the arrangement, which the percussionist Frank Flynn walloped on the line “And the dawn comes up like thunder…” after which Sinatra wrapped up the chorus – “out of China, cross the bay”. But he had problems with the ending, so he told Flynn: “Next time round, really hit that mother.” Flynn beat the gong, Sinatra picked up his hat, threw his coat over his shoulder and left the studio. The band fell around laughing and it took them about ten minutes to realise Frank had actually gone home. He knew that anything after the gong would be an anti-climax. The Kipling estate, in their infinite wisdom, had the record banned throughout the Commonwealth.

On the other hand, I’ve just been listening to “It’s Sunday”, a Jule Styne/Susan Birkenhead song from the early Eighties, with a spare guitar accompaniment. He gave it to several orchestrators - to Don Costa, who did Sinatra’s definitive recording of “Come Rain Or Come Shine”; to Peter Matz, who does most of Streisand’s stuff - but he was never satisfied. “Listen, I think you guys are missing the point,” he said. “It’s an intimate kind of thing.” So he and his guitarist, Tony Mottola, went into the studio and showed them how it should be done. It’s the only Sinatra recording with solo guitar, and it’s beautiful: not a song for swingin’ lovers, but a song for mellow grown-ups, for breakfast in bed with the Sunday papers.

I think it’s great, but it wasn’t great enough for Sinatra, and he wouldn’t release it. He sings standards, and he has standards. In that sense, whatever its merits as a song, “My Way” is no idle boast. In the Seventies, the song became Elvis’s first posthumous hit. What a joke: Elvis never did anything his way, only his minders’ way. The record itself negates the title: he’s stumbling through a song he barely knows in a generic Vegas schlock arrangement that sounds like a karaoke backing track for open-mike night at a Tennessee sports bar.

In the end, Mitch Miller gave “She Wears Red Feathers (And a Hula-Hula Skirt)” to Guy Mitchell and made him a star. But where’s Mitchell now? The vocalists touted as rivals half-a-century ago - Dick Haymes, Ray Eberle - died in obscurity. Only Sinatra endures, the consummate popular singer who survived rock’n’roll and lived long enough to see its leatheriest old rebels defer to his legend: in recent years, Bruce Springsteen would drop in on Frank to sing ballads round the piano; Bob Dylan kept pestering him to make an album of Hank Williams country songs. Stevie Wonder, Gloria Estefan and Luther Vandross joined him for a couple of gimmicky Duets albums. And, although those sets have their embarrassing moments, none of them is Frank’s. The problem is his melisma-crazed partners, such as Patti LaBelle, elongating “lu-u-u-u-u-u-urve” to a seven-syllable word, as if soulfulness is measured by the yard. In this, as in other respects, the rock era has returned us to operetta posturing. Where operatic singing is nothing but generalised vowel sounds, in classic pop all the action is in the consonants. At 80, Sinatra was still the king of the consonants: nobody else got such a kickkkkkk out of “I Get a Kick Out Of You”, riding the rhythm section in 4/4, the all-American time signature, what Nelson Riddle called “the tempo of the heartbeat”. Frank was never a melisma man; as Jule Styne, his longtime composer and one-time flatmate, said to me: “Frank’s figured it out. He sings the words. The other fellers sing the notes.”

Sinatra was adored by his Duets partners for that swagger and attitude - the way he wears his hat, to quote Ira Gershwin - but, alas for popular music, he had no one to pass the hat on to. Towards the end, the gossip columnists wrote that his mental faculties were diminished. Wrong. It’s the music business whose mental facilities are kaput, drowning Sinatra's beauty - Dylan describes his ballad voice as a ’cello - in the half-baked exhibitionism of gangsta rap and the empty bombast of Céline Dion movie themes. Frank would have understood. If you want the entire history of pop music on one single - the tug between its highest aspirations and its basest instincts - Sinatra wrapped it up in 1951 on Columbia 39425: on the A-side, “Mama Will Bark”; and, consigned to the B-side, “I’m a Fool To Want You”, an almost painfully raw rueful reflection which today ranks as one of his finest recordings. It is, supposedly, Frank spilling his guts out about his doomed love for Ava Gardner, but it survives long after Ava and that incendiary romance are forgotten.

So, if we have to make these songs a soundtrack, let’s broaden it a little: it’s not his story, but the century’s. Compared with almost any rock act of the past 30 years, he could not have been less interested in social comment. Yet somehow he’s present at all the great events of our time. In the fall of 1989, Gennady Gerasimov, that slick western media-friendly spokesman for President Gorbachev, announced the new-look, ring-a-ding-ding Warsaw Pact: “The Brezhnev Doctrine is dead,” he declared. “We now have the Sinatra doctrine: you do it your way.” Back at the White House, Vice-President Quayle was encouraged by Mr Gerasimov’s statement but, noting the continued presence of soviet troops in Eastern Europe, urged him to remember the Nancy Sinatra Doctrine: “These Boots Are Made For Walking. This is how its apparatchiks end their empires: not with a bang, or a whimper, but with Sinatra one-liners.

“Frank walks like America,” said Bono. “Cocksure.” Think of the opening titles of the film Wall Street: the commuter trains and ferries and buses and subways feed the workers into the city, thousands of them, swarming up from their subterranean tunnels and on to the sidewalks, anonymous stick figures dwarfed by skyscrapers. And above it all Sinatra sings: “Fly me to the moon, And let me play among the stars…” Without the song, the scene is nothing: for what is drearier and more humdrum than commuting? But Frank Sinatra walks not just for the pedestrian dreamers of Wall Street, but for the highest fliers. When Americans really did fly to the moon in 1969, the astronauts took Sinatra on their portable tape recorder and “Fly Me To The Moon” became the first song to be heard on the moon itself. Any other nation would have chosen the “Ode To Joy” or Also Sprach Zarathustra, something grand and formal. But Buzz Aldrin knew what the sound of our century is: what is the American dream but the breezy confidence of Frank Sinatra in 4/4?

Thanks for the post...it is a great read. Sinatra will always be for me the consumate swing singer. Cool, assertive, with that certain golden something in his voice. Grew up listening to my Mom's Sinatra records..have CD's of most of the albums. Great listening music.

Red

Excellent article. I missed it the first time. In fact, until he started commenting on the Bush campaign (and made an enduring impression on me with his wit, as seemingly the only reporter who had a clue what kind of guy Bush was) I didn't even know Mark Steyn existed.

He learned breath control ...

Listen to Frank's version of Old Man River ... now that was breath control. He sings a couple of slow bars, hits this looooonnnnnnng low note, which would kill most anybody, and then he goes and sings about 4 more bars before he finally takes a breath.

It's an astonishing feat.

Oh, yeah.... "The Concert Sinatra" is one of my favorite albums. His breath control is stunning. (My favorite, though, is one I think is overlooked in favor of "Wee Small Hours" and "September of My Years"...I play "Nice & Easy" over and over. Sinatra's voice was at its peak. Could listen to him sing "How Deep is the Ocean?" and "Fools Rush In" forever.)

Steyn's description of "Come Fly With Me" is perfect.

Sorry to read elsewhere on FR he may have been fired by the NATIONAL POST...didn't David Frum resign from the POST recently? Thanks for posting this great piece. For those of you unaware, Steyn has started doing a weekly appearance on Hugh Hewitt's radio show...not sure what day.

Another thing about Frank was his rythms -- there was nothing at all straightforward about it. I once read a column by a guy who was talking about it -- just try to sing along with him, and stay with him. "I've Got You Under My Skin" is a prime example -- he stretches some notes, compresses others, and gives the song a bounce that mere mortals can't match.

Peter Sinatra, who toward the end led Frank's orchestra, talked about this: it was always a challenge to match up the orchestra with what Frank was doing.

And finally, those horn sections ....

If you haven't read them yet, the books by Charles Granata and Will Friedwald on Sinatra's recordings/recording sessions are great.

My husband plays trombone...he comments from time to time on the brass, etc., when we're listening :). He's also spent some time studying a couple of Riddle's arrangements (obtained from the university in Tucson which has Riddle's collection)...he's been teaching himself arranging as a hobby and is fascinated by that kind of thing. Stories like May arranging "Come Fly With Me" are something else, huh?

My husband plays trombone...he comments from time to time on the brass, etc., when we're listening :).

I always point it out to my kids, in hopes that they'll be interested. My daughter plays trombone, so maybe it'll stick with her.

Great that your daughter plays trombone! It just might stick with her...hearing Sinatra sing "Lost in the Stars" from "The Concert Sinatra" makes me think of my own childhood, because my dad played that a lot :).

I had a pleasant surprise about a year ago, I heard an unexpected sound coming out of my then 13-year-old daughter's room, peeked in and discovered she was doing her homework while her head was bouncing to the rhythm of Frank singing "You Make Me Feel So Young." She continues to "borrow" from our Sinatra shelf on occasion, says the upbeat albums make her feel good :) :).

For one single "Greatest Hits" type compilation I recommend "Classic Sinatra: His Greatest Performances 1953-1960," which came out a couple years or so ago. Should be easy to find (online I like Amazon and Tower Records). It has many of his greatest tracks including a couple of the songs mentioned in posts above.

The thing you do miss out on with a "Hits" compilation, though, is that starting in the '50s his albums were designed with each song chosen to fit a certain theme or mood. You can't go wrong with most of his '50s-'60s albums for Capitol and Reprise. For a single title to get you started I'd go with the upbeat "Songs for Swingin' Lovers!" (This is the one that's my teenager's favorite.)

If you start browsing Sinatra on Amazon you should turn up a couple really good lists by Amazon customers reviewing some of Sinatra's other "theme" albums.

Hope you'll enjoy! :)

The most electrical music moment in my life happened a number of years back. The place was Navy Pier in Chicago. Starting up his live performance, Frank hit the first line in "My Kind of Town" and the crowd erupted like Mt. St. Helens.

For Chicago, Frank may have been an adopted son, but they didn't love him any less than did Hoboken, N.J.

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