Listen to Bob Dylan's Take On "My One and Only Love"

For his forthcoming work, Bob Dylan seems to have let his edge go, opting instead for a dreamy nostalgia. The song “My One and Only Love,” from the first disk of his forthcoming first-ever triple album Triplicate, was most famously performed by Frank Sinatra.

Dylan’s cover is awash with that flavor of romance that, in the hands of a lesser singer, would be written off as kitsch. Dylan, however, deserves credit for bringing attention to the song’s vivid imagery, written years before his own Nobel Prize-winning work. The track is a low-risk interpretation of a very good song.

Listen to the track below, and learn more about Dylan’s three-disk set, to be released March 31, here. You can also watch Paste Cloud video of Bob Dylan performing circa 1988 further down, and read Paste’s reviews of Dylan’s previous Sinatra covers albums Shadows in the Night and Fallen Angels here and here Unblocked Games 333, respectively.

Entry 14: Why it’s not helpful to divide artists into heroes and villains.

Frank Sinatra in 1968.

Photo by AFP/Getty Images

Dear Lindsay and Julianne, as well as Jack, Jewly, Craig, and Chris, the Slate Music Club upper echelon (not for no reason)—

Your posts this last round brought me back neatly to where I began, thinking about voices. I opened our discussions with a reference to Frank Sinatra’s centenary this month, but now I have to admit I’ve never been able to sign up with the cult of Ol’ Blue Eyes as one of the great 20^th-century pop singers. Even though I do realize that technically it’s as near an objective truth as these things get.

I always heard Sinatra as the voice of self-satisfied, postwar-establishment, white American masculinity, exactly the kind of fella who’d be nicknamed “Chairman of the Board” and make racist jokes about Sammy Davis, Jr., even while singing alongside him onstage (often “Me and My Shadow”). Even as a straight, cis, white guy, neither my childhood on the bullied geek-to-sissy spectrum nor my later post-punk subcultural (and, probably, Canadian) attachments allowed me to comprehend ranking Sinatra’s singing anywhere near as soulful or empathic as that of Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, or Billie Holiday, or Paul Westerberg or Patti Smith, for that matter.

Picking out cultural heroes and villains too quickly is usually an obstacle to hearing music, not a help.

Of course, the facts about Italian immigrant assimilation and Frank’s own innovations on the mic and in the studio are more complicated. But I still saw him as the nemesis, marked out for piss-takes (Iggy Pop dubbing himself “the chairman of the bored,” Sid Vicious singing “My Way” with the blank idiocy it deserves). Whenever he played the wounded party, in his streetlamp ballads, I assumed someone else was paying the price, long before I heard the stories—Sinatra allegedly throwing a woman through a plate-glass window at a party, for example—that give that impression weight. I simply heard entitlement in his general ease, the fist inside the velvet glove.

Today, however, I understand a lot more about my own entitlement, and that of the more alienated, introverted, twisted-intellectual white boys whose songs I often preferred. My type is often guilty of equally vile behavior under the cover of self-assumed sensitivity and niceness. And male musical aggression, especially coming from men in underclass and outsider positions, involves a series of defenses, strategies, and masks produced by the present and the past. So I try not to have kneejerk reactions to the ugly aspects of Future’s lyrics that Jack discussed, for example—picking out cultural heroes and villains too quickly is usually an obstacle to hearing music, not a help.

Still, that’s why I appreciate all the sounds that project music outside the presumptive moral and biological lines, as in (as Jack said) the messy, post-human-humanity of the technologically distorted vocal tones that we get from Future, Young Thug, and many other young rappers (which is why 808s and Heartbreaks remains to me Kanye’s most salient moment among so many), and in the lysergic dandyism of ASAP Rocky. The ghost of history is in the machine, along with the ghost of the never-arriving future.

I hear that as well in an album that hasn’t gotten as much love on year-end lists, by the unclassifiable Scottish black-and-brown trio Young Fathers, under the deliberately identity-disobedient title, White Men Are Black Men Too. Second-generation strangers in a kind-of familiar land, their words and sounds carry on the projects of ensembles such as Mass Attack and TV on the Radio, attempting to find an outside to the outside even while knowing that the systems are rigged.

The further reaches of that approach are audible in the digital music that Philip Sherburne’s great year-end essay on Pitchfork as well as Andy Battaglia’s for NPR identified as a crucial 2015 tendency, full (but not exclusively) of queer, trans, and otherwise non-binary producers, composers, rappers, and performers, including Arca, Mykki Blanco, Anonhi (whom I mentioned in my opening post), Le1f, Rabit, Lotic, Elysia Crampton, M.E.S.H., and Amnesia Scanner, as well as somewhat more recognized figures such as Holly Herndon and Oneohtrix Point Never.

In a year when the discipline and punishment of inhabiting a black body, a refugee body, a female body, a trans body, and in the Paris attacks also a musical and sociable body, were so often on our minds, it feels very worthwhile to have music that also says that in general, as Battaglia does in opening his piece, “It’s odd to have a body.” Songs can probe each of those specifics, but sound can do it more generally.

It can do that, for instance, with juddering stops and starts, plasticine bulges and breaks, waxy buildups and waning sighs, blood rushes and dripping excretions. All of which is quite distinct from and corrective to, as Matthew Phillips wrote in his piece about 2015’s “Neofuturist Aesthetic”, the techno-fascist “singularity” fantasy of transcending the body and its sympathetic human vulnerabilities—which Phillips memorably sums up as being the drive behind the EDM bass drop. Instead, he says, this music operates within fissures and cracks. (I’ll keep reading Phillips as well because he directed me to the Polish folkloric-psych wonders of Stara Rzeka’s Zamknely Sie Oczy Ziemi, which seems to be more about the folds of shared or made-up memory and belief.)

Much of this is present, too, in the works of the controversial PC Music and the affiliated (and recently New York Times–praised) producer Sophie. But there I would say it’s more of an old-fashioned Pop Art, Warhol-esque combination of consumerist critique and surrender. It isn’t as fresh, but it’s also the flickering edge between what Julianne called “bad poptimism”/“rotten capitalism” and ecological nihilism, so I think it remains worth hearing.

Finally, this is why I would disagree gently with Julianne’s statement that Vulnicura was not “Bjork’s best album musically.” It’s definitely short on hooks, but what it does musically is frame Bjork’s very personal, even diary entry–like account of her marriage’s dissolution within this electronic format of doubt about the fixity of human experience, partly in collaboration with Arca: Today it is like this, but what is “today”? It seems to me like a stroke of sonic genius equivalent to Joanna Newsom’s depersonalizing of her experience into the cosmic-dust strobe of her compositional style on Divers, which if you cornered me I would probably call my single favorite record of the year.

Like Grimes’ album, as well as Buffy Sainte-Marie’s, these are statements about women’s own autonomy over their music making, technologically, at a time when the will-to-pop is affording excess credit to male producers. But I also agree with Jack and the New York Times’ Ben Ratliff that there was something especially significant about the immersive long-form record this year, about “muchness,” including from Bjork and Newsom, as well as in Titus Andronicus’ Most Lamentable Tragedy, Kamasi Washington’s The Epic, Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, and before that D’Angelo’s very-late-2014 Black Messiah, most prominently, though I could also name Miguel’s and Iris DeMent’s records, or Future’s never-ending stream of production, among many others. It might be about saying “Why not?” in the face of music’s basic unprofitability no matter how it’s packaged. But I think it was also resistance to the niching and atomizing of life and time itself by social media, tabloid scandal, and other forms of goldfish-like attention. If we’re going to do it, these albums say, let’s do it. To hell with any listeners’ or critics’ values of tight digestible statements. Emotionally, ethically, the era demands scale.

And on that note, please let me carve all your faces on a peak the size of Mount Rushmore, stalwart Music Clubbers. I am so grateful you gave up your time in this crazily busy season to ruminate on the year’s sonic detritus with me. Hell, when some combination of us regroups next year, it will be under a new U.S. government-elect, hopefully not of the too-much-more batshit variety. How will that bring us new noises, and what are your other forecasts for 2016?

Swoonatra

Reveille with Beverly is a now largely forgotten 1943 film starring Ann Miller and the great Franklin Pangborn. Worked up from an equally forgotten US radio series it’s a corny but percipient tale about a spunky young DJ who’s hep to the vital Swing rhythm the kids all dig, and the stuffy station owner who wants no part of her indecorous jive. Miller, as the wide awake DJ, specialises in the wake-up call requests of local servicemen, and the film was a big hit with US military personnel stationed overseas during the Second World War: ‘Gooood morning, Potsdam!’ Forgotten it may be, but Reveille has one of the all-time great soundtracks: Count Basie, Duke Ellington, proto rock’n’roller Ella Mae Morse doing ‘Cow Cow Boogie’, and, in his Hollywood debut, a slender young reed called Frank Sinatra.

Frank Sinatra in 1950

 

Even at the time, Sinatra’s cameo didn’t cause much of a stir, and Reveille doesn’t feature in many official filmographies; but it did mark, in its modest way, the inception of Sinatra’s solo career. He had just left the Tommy Dorsey band, had a slick new press agent called Milton Rubin, and the beginnings of what we would now call a posse. It was a personal turning point for the young man Jimmy Durante dubbed ‘Moonlight Sinatra’, at a moment when bigger changes were in the air. This was an era when audiences bugged out to live music, rather than losing themselves in recorded sound. Vocalists had little real power: they were smiley, yes-sir emblems over the arch of touring big bands. But a hesitant jockeying for power had started up among band leaders, singers, agents and arrangers,and what came next would surprise nearly everyone.

When Sinatra’s new booking agency, GAC, persuaded the owners of New York’s Paramount Theatre to add him to its big New Year show, their driven young client had none of the star power of already signed performers like Benny Goodman and Peggy Lee; his billing read ‘Extra Added Attraction’, and for Sinatra this particular gig was a pretty big deal. As Donald Clarke puts it in All or Nothing at All: A Life of Frank Sinatra (1997), the Paramount Theatre was ‘one of the shrines of the Swing era’. And so, on 30 December 1942, Sinatra was brought onstage, in an almost desultory way, by Benny Goodman. ‘And now, Frank Sinatra …’ The 27-year-old Francis Albert Sinatra stepped up, and history turned a small corner. He was met by a tsunami of hysterical screams from a passel of young female fans. Goodman was initially thrown, completely struck dumb in fact, then looked over his shoulder and blurted out: ‘What the fuck is that?’ Clarke: ‘Sinatra laughed, and his fear left him.’
Sinatra may have left damp seats and shredded hankies in his skinny-bod wake but he was nobody’s idea of a teenager. By the time of the Paramount ‘Swoonatra’ incident he was four years married to his first wife, Nancy, with one young child (Nancy Jr) and a second (Frank Jr) just about to arrive. He dressed like other adults of the time. (His sole concession to dandyism was a lasciviously Borromean, outsize bow-tie.) His day-to-day social intercourse was conducted among hard-bitten, resourcefully cynical musicians – we can just imagine the ribbings they dished out to young Francis about his undiscerning new fan base. Sinatra’s bandmates were actually more bewildered than bothered by this latest development: despite his major rep as a real ladies’ man, no one had him pegged as the next Valentino. This was a scrawny, underfed-looking Italian kid with big ears: there was definitely something of a semolina dough Mickey Mouse about his looks. But he obviously gave off some subtle radar peep of rapt carnality, equal parts vulnerable boy-child and lazily virile roué. Unlike the pendulum-hipped Presleys up ahead, he could intimate sexual confidence with his eyes alone. His sexual charge was like his song: underplayed, tinged with unflappable cool picked up second-hand in the shady cloisters of jazz. Just as he could mine exquisite sadness from superficially happy songs, he managed to suggest bedtime fevers with a barely perceptible finger’s brush of his microphone stand.
As Clarke points out, none of this was entirely new: there had been previous scenes of clammy hysteria triggered by male musicians and screen stars, from Franz Liszt to Rudy Vallée. But these hormonal crazes tended to fizzle out, often ignominiously, even if (like Sinatra) you had a resourceful press agent hyping the script. This was a watershed moment between the insider hegemony of jazz-inflected Swing and the wider plains of Elvis-era pop music. The ‘Swoonatra’ craze might easily have been a barrier to wider public acceptance for Sinatra, but as it transpired he made the coming decade entirely his own. In conventional sales-ledger terms it was his starry apotheosis.
Working the road in the 1930s and 1940s with the Harry James and Tommy Dorsey bands, Sinatra acquired a lot of jazz life knowledge by osmosis. (Jazz inflections peppered his speech for the rest of his life: ‘I’ve known discouragement, despair and all those other cats.’) He learned what not to do: how to hold back, live in the space between instrumental arcs. By Sinatra’s own account, the three main figures who shaped his navigation of song – how to float and sustain and linger – were Tommy Dorsey (‘the General Motors of the band business’), Billie Holiday and Bing Crosby. Anyone surprised by the inclusion of the latter should do a bit of digging: Crosby is a fascinating character. As well as a subtly revolutionary singer he was a technophile obsessed with recording techniques, and with how best to refine and update them to suit the new, softer style of singing and playing. Crosby was the original ‘crooner’ when the world was full of vocalists who belted out songs to the back of the hall. An old-school jazz fan like Sinatra, he worshipped Louis Armstrong and closely studied Satchmo’s self-presentation and singular way with a tune. Crosby’s delivery was ‘cool’ in a way that was entirely new to the mainstream, studded with jazz tics such as unexpected pauses and slurred or flattened notes. His understanding of microphone technique meant he could step back and let the audience come to him. He was a pivotal figure on the journey of cool jazz tones from a largely black, underground world into the mainstream, and a big influence on younger acts like Sinatra.
In the 1998 Arena documentary The Voice of the Century, Sinatra talks about how he first learned to sing by listening to horn players ‘and how they breathe’, the way certain jazz musicians can make us feel a melody as something both impossibly fragile and finally unbreakable. He mentions Tommy Dorsey again (‘I may be the only singer who ever took vocal lessons from a trombone’), and Ben Webster (one of the first acts showcased on Sinatra’s own Reprise label). But a third influence is more notable, and an indication of just how deeply jazz was lodged in the young singer’s soul: the tenor saxophonist Lester Young. Young was Billie Holiday’s musical other half, a quiet innovator and, ultimately, a rather tragic figure. In life and music the dandyish Young pushed softly against the macho grain: he could be dainty, impossibly sweet and tender, almost defenceless. His musical tone was airy, elusive, a musical braille. Towards the end of his life, so the story goes, ‘Prez’ (as Holiday dubbed him) would sit in his cheap hotel room and robotically drink and stare out into the New York air and play Sinatra records over and over again.

The young Sinatra certainly imbibed much from the jazz-world exemplars of Cool, but perhaps we can also hear the influence of another quasi-masonic clique, one Sinatra’s name was often linked with. Consider the following, from Cosa Nostra (2004), John Dickie’s history of the Sicilian Mafia: ‘Anyone who was worthy of being described as mafioso therefore had a certain something, an attribute called “mafia”. “Cool” is about the closest modern English equivalent.’ Discourse among ‘men of honour’ was all about ‘great reserve, the things that are not said’. They communicated in ‘code, hints, fragments of phrases, stony stares, significant silences’. What this definition of ‘mafia’ suggests is almost a kind of illicit soulfulness. The rock’n’roll era’s new decadents may have crashed expensive rides into pools and used TV sets for drunken target practice, but Sinatra’s offstage associations spoke of an altogether more serious class of transgression. He hung out, it was whispered, with real adepts of dark illegality: Murder, as the phrase had it, Incorporated. This was likely a dream come true twice over for the young Hoboken kid who looked up to iron-willed ‘men of honour’ and admired professionals of every stripe, from whiskey-bar waiters to world statesmen. (Sinatra was always a devil for the small-print detail of how jobs got done.) Here was the quasi-mythic Sinatra of a thousand headlines to come: a figure who commingled gentle songs of heartache with rumours of drunken vulgarity and unspeakable violence. It’s debatable how much harm the Mafia rumours did to his public image in the long run. For some fans, it was an undeniable (if ethically troublesome) lure that lent his music a kind of infernal gravitas. Some association with Mafia guys was probably all but unavoidable, given their omnipresence on the live music scene: the clubs they owned, the quid pro quo favours they expected.

The Mafia connection had relatively little exposure early on, but the gossip-column sorority had plenty of other tut-tut material to expose: his flagrant extra-marital promiscuity; an often ill-advisedly haughty attitude to what was not yet termed the media; and a rather too convenient, for some, 4F status which exempted him from action in the Second World War. OK, he did have a punctured eardrum. But ‘psychoneurosis’? (Sample headline: ‘Is Crooning Essential?’) He was given a lot of grief for being adult in ways that didn’t accord with the party line drawn up by the era’s self-appointed moral arbiters. They wanted: a politically neutral homebody and popular music puppet. He proffered: a volatile, sleep-around, finger-pointing Democrat. Much of the press antagonism also involved more or less sub rosa forms of racism and class-based snobbery. A largely middle-class, faux-genteel, Wasp-ish media was never going to take this working-class, Italian Catholic, faux wiseguy at his own estimation. Anyone who thinks there has never been a subtly hierarchical class system in America might consider lines such as the following, quoted by Kitty Kelley in her 1986 no-turn-left-unstoned Sinatra biography/exposé, His Way. In 1943, a writer for the New Republic wrote of Sinatra’s Paramount coup: ‘Nearly all the bobby-soxers whom I saw … gave every appearance of being children of the poor.’ E.J. Kahn Jr, writing in the New Yorker, added his five cents’ worth: ‘Most of his fans are plain, lonely girls from lower-middle-class homes.’ Kelley herself occasionally sounds just the tiniest bit snippy: ‘Through marriage, the Sinatras had elevated themselves socially, so there were few traces left of the showgirl in a feathered headdress … or the saloon singer with the grade school education.’ Material aspiration may be the very hub and hothouse of the American Dream – just don’t aspire too high or you might embarrass yourself. You get the distinct feeling Kelley disapproves of Sinatra’s fourth wife, Barbara, because she insisted on giving millions rather than thousands to certain charities, such as a programme for sexually abused children. A lose-lose situation: keep your money to yourself and you’re pilloried as the unfeeling rich; spend all your time working for the less fortunate and you’re caricatured as one of the brittle porcelain-doll Ladies Who Charity Lunch.

Kelley also quotes a 1979 Washington Star editorial on Sinatra, dizzy with its own mock perplexity: ‘That such beautiful music should emerge from such vulgarity is one of the great mysteries of the age.’ Again, just a hint of class sneer: how dare this nouveau riche non-Wasp possess a working soul! It’s important to keep in mind that he was only one generation removed from Ellis Island: Sinatra’s father arrived from Sicily in 1903. One version of the origins of the slur ‘wop’ figures it as an Ellis Island acronym: With Out Papers. (This is now disputed by etymologists, but even as apocrypha seems telling.) In the early 1960s, a lot of the onstage humour Sinatra indulged in with his Rat Pack buddies exploited a kind of third-drink détournement of such racial epithets. Why, there was manly solidarity in mutual ribbing! We got something like a rainbow coalition here! Two wops, a nigger kike, a Polack and a token Wasp! The most convincing take on this touchy matter is provided by Sinatra’s long-time (African-American) valet, George Jacobs. In his immensely entertaining memoir Mr S: The Last Word on Frank Sinatra (2003), he defends Sinatra and the other Rat Pack roustabouts, and says the only people he ever got a real nasty sizzle of racism from were a few Mafia bosses, and the dependably unpleasant monster-patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy. Jacobs paraphrases the Rat Pack’s foreign minister without portfolio, Dean Martin: ‘Wops, nigs, hebes, what the fuck was the difference? We were all up against the wall and fucking well better stick together.’

As with Elvis Presley and Charlie Parker, you feel Destiny’s real leg-up was provided by the ferocious will of Sinatra’s mother. Most people seem to have regarded Dolly as the real man about the house: Sinatra’s father, Marty, an easy-going ghost, barely registers in most biographies. As an Italian-Catholic working-class woman, Dolly Sinatra née Natalina Garaventa had innumerable counts against her. Yet by fair means or foul, she charmed and blustered and backhanded her way through until she was as near to a female version of a ‘man of honour’ as made no difference. Dissatisfied with the doll’s house limitations of conventional wifely behaviour, she successfully hijacked the rough, violent and Irish-dominated world of local Democratic politics. She also dabbled on the side as the local Hoboken abortionist. First Dolly, then Ava Gardner – his second wife, genuinely wild, guiltlessly Dionysian – overshadowed, shaped and furrowed Sinatra’s life. Similarly boozy, foul-mouthed and wilful, Ava and Dolly got on like a hen-house on fire. Dolly was one helluva guy’s guy’s doll; just as her precious only child could often present as an oddly haunted and feminine guy: as much as he was undoubtedly the big boss man of myth, he could also be prissy, neurotic, remote. Even into late middle age, even for his closest buddies, carousing with Sinatra was a serious three-line whip: beg off early, fall asleep, order a coffee instead of Jack Daniels, and you risked expulsion, exile, the Antarctica of his disaffection. He could not abide the ends of days: it was one thing he had no control over. So he made an enemy of the clock, of merely human time, each night’s feeble apocalypse: that dire moment when the ring-a-ding bell must be wrapped in cotton wool and stowed away. Then came the risky, occluded territory of sleep. Sinatra seems to have shared a pathology with Kingsley Amis: a fear of the shadows at the end of the night-time tunnel. What was hiding there he was so reluctant to explore?

Sinatra had none of the nice-and-easy-does-it spirit of his pal Dean Martin. He was also deathly serious about his craft. That may ultimately be what differentiates him from more than capable contemporaries like Tony Bennett and Mel Tormé: with Sinatra there’s less obvious technique on show and more personality. Except, what is most characteristic about that personality is how unshowy it is: how it often feels deeply submerged, and hard to touch. He can sound on the edge of something trance-like, ‘lost in a dream’. Our favourite singers often have some scintillant flaw or uniquely cracked marker: hints of an old accent poking through; sudden unpredictable breaks in the calm, confident voice; cynicism interlaced with giggly childlike joy. You hear nothing like this in Sinatra: at times his song is closer to a kind of resplendent anonymity; he never makes things too obvious, italicising what he thinks the listener ought to be feeling. It’s notable for its lack of conspicuous drama, the antipodean opposite of today’s showboaty X Factor model.
Sinatra Sings Great Songs from Great Britain (1962) isn’t one of the more celebrated Sinatra collections, but it’s a tribute to how the music business operated in that era that something knocked out in three days sounds the way it does: note-perfect, rococo, panoramic. Today, such a project would gobble up egos, itineraries and budgets. (The year 1962 saw the release of six new Sinatra long players. This seems inconceivable now, but was not far removed from the contemporary norm.) Sinatra may have riled a whole army of newspaper columnists with his wise-guy intransigence and superstar ways, but when it came to certain matters he was all business. One of the extras inside the sumptuous new box set, Sinatra: London, is a lovely fold-out photo of Sinatra at work in the CTS Bayswater studios in June 1962: 360 degrees of hard-nosed session guys, flawless casual wear, high-tar cigarettes, music stands. The hard work of Easy Listening.

Sinatra opens his British sortie with a familiar move: just his supple, unaccompanied voice stating the main refrain. Here it’s ‘The Very Thought of You’, but he’d pulled the same trick the year before with the line ‘Never thought I’d fall’ in ‘I’m Getting Sentimental over You’, which opened the memoir-in-sound I Remember Tommy. Listen to how he strings out the word ‘ordinary’ in the line ‘the little ordinary things’, thereby making it far from ordinary. Then with the line ‘the mere idea of you’ he draws out the word ‘mere’ as though it were the sweetest qualifier in the world: dissolving ‘mere’ into ‘idea’ he makes the very idea of ‘mere’ sound transcendent. It is subtly erotic and boldly unshowy. It calls to mind another such moment in the song ‘It Was a Very Good Year’ (1966): when he sings ‘with all that perfumed hair, and it came undone’ he stretches out the word ‘came’ into an arc and tumble of rapture, so that it feels as if the word itself has been unzipped, and is about to fall undone.

Elsewhere on GB, Sinatra manages the unthinkable and pulls us happily into the shallows of that doughty standard ‘We’ll Meet Again’. To redeem something stultifyingly over-familiar: this is the acme of interpretative singing. Sinatra takes soiled £5 words and makes them glisten like mystic opals, his voice like spring light clarifying a dusty catacomb. One slice of the Sinatra: London box set is a Frankophile’s delight: a separate CD comprised of outtakes from the studio sessions for GB. Sinatra is relaxed, polite, perfectionist. ‘Hold it, hold it. May we please do an inter-cut from bar 55?’ Whatever the aural equivalent of ‘hawk-eyed’ is, here is a peerless example.

When Sinatra says ‘Great Britain’ he means London, and for London read a certain stratum of high society – the kind of fine gin fizz evenings that end with Princess Margaret at the Steinway. Sinatra’s Great Britain is an Impressionist painting in sound: a mise-en-song of dawn and dew, lanes and lawns; nightingales doing their solo act in rain-iced gardens; autumn among indecisive leaves. Firelight glows and magic is abroad. Angels have reservations at the Ritz. ‘The hush of the silver dew,’ he sings, sounding hushed and dewy. Strings shiver and slide.

Sinatra was one of the first musicians to see the long-playing album as an opportunity for sustained mood music: a pocket of time focused entirely on one defining concept or tone; a quasi-cinematic reverie for listeners to sink into and dream along with. You could make a case for Sinatra as one of the original ‘ambient music’ theorists, mixing up discrete tones into one balmy cocktail. For the music business the switch from live music to recorded in the 1950s was as much of a revolution as Hollywood’s changeover from silent cinema to the talkies. A singer bellowing before a big band on stage was one kind of music; Sinatra and one of his favoured arrangers piecing together polyvalent tone poetry was something else altogether. It’s no coincidence that so much music from the next decade sounded so good, and still does, half a century on. At this make-or-break point, many jazz-schooled musicians saw which way was up and swapped the marriage-destroying purgatory of touring for well-remunerated union-protected session work. This meant you might find the same artfully capable background players on a Sinatra album, a Phil Spector 45 and a Brian Wilson pop suite, as well as anything from supper-club Soul to Exploitation soundtracks and misty Exotica. The Second World War had also worked a kind of happy miscegenation into America’s alienated micro-cultures: people from different backgrounds met in the services and found they liked each other’s homegrown musics. (After the war the ‘hillbilly’ Chet Baker ended up playing cool West Coast jazz, while Miles Davis huddled with Gil Evans and exulted in European melancholy.) Air travel became cheaper and more widely available, and Sinatra slipped easily into the role of poet laureate of the new global leisure; think of all those great songs celebrating aeroplane take-offs and spicy foreign affairs, flighty fun in foreign places.

Using the two-sided forty-minute album, Sinatra began to spin his needle around a compass of different themes: travel of course (Come Fly with Me, 1958), time and mortality (September of My Years, 1965), inner/outer space (Moonlight Sinatra, 1966), and most of all, romance and its discontents. In lonely-guy collations like In the Wee Small Hours (1955), Sings Songs for Only the Lonely (1958) and (my personal favourite) No One Cares (1959), he makes wilting neurasthenia seem like the height of enviable urban glamour. You want to be this white-gabardined, sad-eyed figure: a lovelorn cipher nestled among loveless shadows, crying into his shot glass, sighing under impervious stars. You want to tarry inside the ports of call on the album sleeves: wood-panelled saloon bar, modern apartment, skyscraper’s embrace. And, behind the endless itinerary of glamorous jetset destinations, the key topography at the heart of it all: the space of recording itself.

It’s maybe no coincidence that Sinatra’s take on the torch song aesthetic occurs at precisely this postwar moment. The rise in sales of long-playing albums and the idea of entertaining ‘at home’ made perfect sense in the buoyant Eisenhower economy. As Peter J. Levinson puts it in September in the Rain (2001), his useful biography of Sinatra’s arranger, Nelson Riddle: ‘It was the decade of the suburban house, the six o’clock cocktail shaker and the regulation grey flannel suit … Beautiful love songs served up with lush string backgrounds perfectly reflected the quiet and serenity of the decade.’ Global conflagration was over and people turned inward. There’s an implicit edge to the idea of ‘home’ on Sinatra’s torch song trilogy: this is no longer a small-town white-picket defence, the family at the heart of the community; this is a big city hangout, a coldly seductive swinger’s pad. You’ve just moved to the big populous city, but feel more lonely than ever. ‘Uneasy, in my easy chair …’ The core paradox of much Easy Listening from the 1950s and 1960s: it was often a pendant to very un-easy, asocial states of mind.

The sleeve for the UK edition of In The Wee Small Hours (1955) provides an interior snapshot of an era, a line-up of allegorical consumer objects. At the centre of the front-room still life is a stately radiogram, anticipating our own scene of listening. A thick onyx ashtray, already lined with butts. A clear Pyrex cup. (Cappuccino tonight, not booze: insomnia not blissfully sloppy blackout.) Art Deco clock, reading somewhere around 2.39 a.m. LIFE magazine with a Marilyn cover. Selection of shiny LP sleeves scattered over the rug. Best of all – there among them is the original US sleeve of In the Wee Small Hours! All these hallowed objects add up to something like an Eisenhower-era retouch of Dürer’s Melancholia: alchemical union under the cold urban stars.

The songs on In the Wee Small Hours flicker and return, time and again, to figures of sleep, dream, waking, hallucination. ‘Deep in a dream of you … The smoke makes a stairway … I wake with a start … I close my eyes and there you are …’ The threshold state of torch: a strange mixture of wooziness and clarity, scepticism and passivity. The prickly valetudinarian ache of the torch singer, forever taking his own pulse. For all that the torch mood – especially in Sinatra’s habitual rendering – is associated with enthusiastic drink-downing, I’ve always thought the mood was far more opium pipe reverie than another round of boilermakers. ‘Shadows gathered in the air …’ In his pioneering study Elevator Music (1994), Joseph Lanza writes perceptively of Nelson Riddle’s work and how a ‘standard Easy Listening formula’ frequently gives way to something far more uncanny, even sinister. ‘This is music in suspension where drowning is only a sensual slumber … songs of time travel into amniotic bliss.’ Riddle was adept at complementing moony or upbeat material with barely detectable and often deeply unnerving bittersweet undertones. His note-perfect arrangement of In the Wee Small Hours turns what could have been simply a very good collection of future standards into a self-contained 48-minute song suite: echoes of Ravel and Debussy in the service of moody American song. (Stanley Kubrick was such a fan of In the Wee Small Hours that he hired Riddle to score his film of Nabokov’s Lolita.) The emphasis is on overall texture (glancingly light, but anchored in deep pulls and purrs of bass) rather than instrumental solos. And quite an odd texture it is too, involving a whole sonic lacework of woodwind, harps, chimes and rustling seven-string guitar. Glacial strings. Beatless languor. The title song begins with a susurration of chimes echoing like church bells in the quiet midnight air. After just a minute and a half, Sinatra falls silent, as if he’s broken off teary-eyed to stare at an old photo or refill his glass: for nearly thirty seconds he disappears completely.
In a 1993 essay, ‘How We Missed the Saturday Dance’, Gore Vidal revealed that his own special Rosebud, a personal mnemonic for loss in general and one particular person lost to the Second World War, was the old standard ‘Don’t Get around Much Anymore’. There’s a clue here to how it is that a lot of supposedly lightweight Easy Listening, far from being merely divertingly kitsch, can contain a whole world of stronger, darker currents. How it often feels, as Apollinaire said of De Quincey, like a ‘sweet and chaste and poisoned glass’. On GB the horns and strings are sheer Tommy Dorsey phantoms: we might be back in the 1940s, at a ball at the embassy when bombs start to fall. Lyrics that initially seem a bit corny slowly reveal an oblique postwar mood: gratitude tinged with melancholy, love vamped by desperate nostalgia. You’ve survived – but others haven’t. You’ve survived – but maybe everything seems a bit pale now. Time creeps. Once you bear this in mind, all sorts of innocent-seeming lines take on a different air: ‘Now is the hour when we must say goodbye … I’ll miss you far across the sea … until our hearts have learned to sing again … roses will die with the summertime … our roads may be far apart … when you come home once more …’ A key lyric here is Noël Coward’s ‘I’ll Follow My Secret Heart’, and a line which suggests both in-the-closet romance and devious spycraft: ‘I’ll keep all of my dreams apart … No matter what price is paid.’ (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Singer.) This is the feeling you get from so much of Sinatra’s singing: it too has a secret heart.

Sinatra combined all the contradictions of postwar America into one immaculate figure. Public confidence and private terrors. Great distances and perplexing intimacy. Single malt and double lives in Miami, Washington, London, Rome. Sinatra is the Cold War torch singer par excellence: unreliable narrator, star witness, mole in his own life. What better song to soundtrack the early 1960s than Sinatra’s ‘How Little We Know’ (1963), which works as a breezy allegory on head-in-the-sand hedonism (‘How little we understand … how ignorant bliss is’), nuclear realpolitik (‘that sudden explosion when two tingles intermingle’) and early Mad Men-style fatalism: ‘The world around us shatters/How little it matters.’ As JFK-approved envoy for the New Frontier, Sinatra would seem a gift for Western propaganda, a walking billboard for Kapital’s ‘good life’. But there are many moments in his catalogue – from The Manchurian Candidate (1962) to his strange Cheever-esque musical novella Watertown (1970) – when the rosy façade falls away, revealing something far more ambiguous and often pretty gruesome. He was, I think, a man drawn to expressing something light-filled and democratic and orderly, while being all the time acutely aware of the dark chaos within, just below the well-groomed skin.

*

I’ve always found Sinatra most seductive, and most disquieting, the softer and more liquidly rapt he gets. The breakthrough work for me, the first Sinatra LP I truly madly fell for, was Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim (1967; fallen for circa 1983): one of the quietest albums ever made and – appropriately enough, given its shoreline feel – one of my own Desert Island discs. Ten songs, 28’05”, voice never raised above a murmur: utter perfection. A music barely there, like pollen on a summer breeze, the drowsy strings not slathered all over everything, but coming and going like midnight optimism. Sinatra sings lines like ‘tall and tan and young and lovely’ – all these clicky, tricky consonants like soldiers on guard duty – and yet when you recall his voice it’s a soft, uncurling wave.

With bittersweet songs like these, Sinatra never drags you down and empties you out. It’s only in the closing years of his career that he brushes against a deeper sadness; there are moments on later albums such as A Man Alone (1969), Watertown (1970) and She Shot Me Down (1981) that do skirt some kind of awful resignation. But if Sinatra can deliver a suicidal lyric without making you feel at all suicidal, it was something he first learned at the feet of his idol among vocalists, Billie Holiday. From Holiday, Sinatra learned a whole new grammar of pause and air: singing aimed not at the big empty auditorium of old but a hypothetical low-lit 3 a.m. room. They were both drawn in song to a certain borderline mood or place: dusk and dawn, beaches and docks, empty streets, lonely horizons. The falling dark, and the becoming light. Songs that map some in-between state close to sleep but wide awake.

Despite all the success and acclaim, there does seem to have been a salt-lick of bitterness about him in the twilight years. My own feeling is that this unhappiness first surfaced in the mid-1960s. There were signs of a breach in his formerly impregnable taste. He recorded songs he really shouldn’t have. He married someone he probably shouldn’t have. The 1966 Mia Farrow union baffled nearly everyone around Sinatra, even if they didn’t say so at the time. We don’t know what Dolly Sinatra made of the 21-year-old Farrow’s interest in yoga, macrobiotics and ESP. She was almost a cartoonist’s caricature of a Hollywood hippie girl, palpably the very opposite of everything Sinatra had ever bared his desiring teeth at in the past. ‘Ha!’ Ava Gardner quipped, ‘I always knew Frank would end up in bed with a little boy.’ She also called him a ‘scared monster’ – but scared of what? Disappearing youth and virility, the bony spectres of mortality? Was Farrow a stick-figure symbol of time(s) both lost and longed for, a fond idea of rejuvenation, of reaching for sweet young flesh like a quirky health-food panacea that might shake him out of a certain unanticipated stasis, when the manoeuvres that had always worked before now just made his Jack hangover feel ten times worse? The melancholy that used to be intermittent now settled in like a permanent crease in his daily fabric. What kind of a world did he look out on, now?

In his half-brilliant Sinatra résumé, All or Nothing at All, Donald Clarke is curtly dismissive of albums such as A Man Alone and Watertown – works I revere like holy objects. Clarke is great on early and middle period Sinatra but I think he misreads those late works. I can’t disagree with him on one thing, though: Sinatra’s worst missteps in the second half of his career nearly always involved his covering ill-chosen contemporary pop. It can’t have been happenstance that made his mid-1960s attempts at ‘happening’ rock/pop music (including Joni Mitchell’s ‘Both Sides, Now’ – surely a Mia suggestion?) complete flops, whereas more reflective and fatalistic works like A Man Alone and Watertown sound disarmingly convincing. On Strangers in the Night (1966) there is a bizarre version of ‘Downtown’: the first time I heard it I took it to be a record company mistake, a bum take let through by someone at Reprise who wasn’t paying enough attention. ‘Downtown!’ he choruses, then he makes this strange back-of-the-throat gurgle – eurrrgh – like something sour brought up by that morning’s hangover heave. But things are rarely accidental in Sinatra land: that ‘eurrrgh’ may well be his eyebrows-raised verdict on the song itself, on all those cockamamie songs some suit has obviously suggested he try. There’s an equally wince-making version of ‘Mrs Robinson’ on My Way (1969), where his flatline ‘woe woe woe, hey hey hey’ is the first and last time on record that he sounds utterly disengaged, almost robotic.

Unsuitable material doesn’t always produce unmitigated disaster. Given a rich lyric like ‘Send in the Clowns’, which, strictly speaking, doesn’t really suit his voice or persona, Sinatra can still mine the song’s emotional core. There’s an obvious point here which I think Clarke fudges. He writes of the music as if it were entirely separate from the life, as if the air doesn’t feel different at the age of 55 from the way it feels at 21. Well, it does, it feels entirely different. The vividly wistful tone Sinatra manages to infuse his late work with is not quite clowntime happy, but never quite I-give-up depressed. He admits tenderness without admitting defeat. Under it all remains the figure of the only child of immigrant parents, an always gregarious but forever lonely boy. Did it all go back to the over-zealous Dolly and the nebulous Marty? Her love often indistinguishable from censure, his a form of pained absence.

Sinatra kept up a busy itinerary to the very end, singing live at the drop of a hat, trying out new things, doing favours, arranging galas, flying round the world. He got the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1985 and became something of a Reagan presidency insider. (He became such a White House fixture that he even got his own, slyly perceptive, Secret Service codename: Napoleon.) When he died in 1998, aged 82, it felt oddly anti-climactic. His final recorded works, Duets and Duets II (1993/94) were, at best, a well-meant misfire, some of the guest performances literally phoned in. But there is one final near-great moment right at the end of Duets, when Sinatra waves adieu to his life in song with a deeply affecting ‘One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)’: ‘Could tell you a lot, but you’ve got to be true to your code.’ Certain secrets went safely to the grave.

*

This year takes in the centenaries of both Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday: 7 April for Billie, 12 December for Frank. As well as updated biographies and ‘officially approved’ photo albums, there will doubtless be ‘tributes’ galore: female vocalists risking ignominy with versions of songs Billie made her own; TV-pop alpha males putting on their shiniest shoes and cheesiest grins and all manner of postmodern ritz to ‘do a Sinatra’. And it might take another book-length study to work out why all of this is so fruitless and vainglorious and doomed: why none of it feels in the least bit convincing.

When today’s stars try to pull off an imitation of old-style song craft they may get the surface details right, but they completely miss the centre of gravity, or sense of connective purpose. They can’t locate Sinatra’s lightness of touch, or his deep seriousness. They can’t ‘do’ Sinatra because the latter didn’t ‘do’ easy, imitable exaggerations. His tone was toned right down; his slow-burn intensity came from somewhere deep inside. Even in his own era, when most MOR acts would usually opt to open out a song, inflate the hook, make everything big and brassy, Sinatra would take the mood down a notch, hypnotising the song’s back brain with hints of smoke, perfume, shoreline air. Sinatra held the melody like a Fabergé egg he was turning about in his palm, assessing it from every angle, seeing how light dipped or flared in different positions, exploring the weave of word and melody.
None of this can be applied like spray tan. It’s probably not something that can even be ‘learned’ any longer. Instead, our TV ironists ape the outermost skin: the ‘iconic’ package of Sinatra’s ring-a-ding profile and razor-blade hat brim and cheesy ‘Hey now!’ persona. Starting in the late 1960s, Sinatra did occasionally cede flashes of send-up fun with his own persona; but fundamentally, he may be the last big mainstream entertainer to perform without carefully applied quotation marks. We are probably not far off a time when he will seem, to many young pop consumers, as singularly odd and inconceivable a figure as a long-ago scrivener or apothecary.

During the final ebb-tide years Sinatra would close all his concerts with a little speech in which he offered the audience his own special seigneurial benediction: the same kind of luck he’d had, peace of mind, an enduring song of love. ‘And may the last voice you hear be mine …’ From anyone else it might seem a bit hokey and presumptuous, but from Sinatra it felt like the punchline to a fondly shared and long-cherished gag. He was speaking to everyone in the audience who’d grown up with that voice and grown old with that face, and forgiven their owner’s many trespasses. He’d been their fall guy and idol, political bellwether and stand-in Las Vegas libertine. They’d played his records on first dates and then later at wakes for army buddies and others gone too soon. No one else’s voice seemed to play just so on so many different occasions. ‘In the roaring traffic’s boom, in the silence of my lonely room …’

Perhaps Sinatra’s voice will increasingly come to seem like one of the last things nearly everyone could agree on, and rough out some kind of aesthetic consensus around, in the final flicker of modernity’s embers. It’s doubtful any singer will ever again possess that kind of sway. Who could reign as monarch of so much territory, and certainty, ever again? Maybe he is our last voice, at that.

Did Sinatra Really Bad Mouth Elvis and His Music in ’57?

“His kind of music is deplorable, a rancid smelling aphrodisiac. It fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people.” — Frank Sinatra, 1956

Some time ago, on another Elvis web site, I came across this alleged Frank Sinatra quote about Elvis, allegedly from 1956. The italicized words are required because no source reference was provided for the statement. Where did Sinatra say it? And when, exactly, did he say it? In what publication did it first appear?

When I inquired, the web site owner referred me to another site where he found the quote. On going to that other site, I found the quote, but—surprise—no attribution there either. It’s a perfect example of the bad side of the internet. Certainly, the web has been a boon to Elvis Presley fans. We can find out so much more information about the man and his music than was ever available to us before. However, we have to be careful because a lot of distorted and downright phony information about Elvis is circulating out there on the web. That’s why I always try to provide the sources for the information I pass along on Elvis-History-Blog.com.

• Sinatra quote is a distortion from 1957, not 1956

I happen to know that the alleged quotation attributed to Frank Sinatra above is a distortion, because I came across it while doing research for my book, Elvis ’57: The Final Fifties Tours. So let’s see if we can’t set the record straight about what Frank Sinatra really said about Elvis in the 1950s.
While in Paris, France, in the fall of 1957, Sinatra wrote a short article about American music that was printed in the French magazine Western World. An Associated Press article that focused on Sinatra’s comments about rock ’n’ roll in the French magazine appeared in many U.S. newspapers in late October 1957. The following two paragraphs were quoted directly from Sinatra’s article in the October 28, 1957, edition of the Los Angeles Mirror News.
“My only deep sorrow is the unrelenting insistence of recording and motion picture companies upon purveying the most brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious form of expression it has been my displeasure to hear—Naturally I refer to the bulk of rock ’n’ roll.
“It fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people. It smells phony and false. It is sung, played and written for the most part by cretinous goons and by means of its almost imbecilic reiterations and sly, lewd—in plain fact, dirty—lyrics, and as I said before, it manages to be the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the earth … this rancid-smelling aphorodisiac I deplore. But, in spite of it, the contribution of American music to the world could be said to have one of the healthiest effects of all our contributions.”

• Why were Sinatra’s words twisted against Elvis?

It's obvious that whoever first floated the opening alleged Sinatra statement about Elvis took two passages from Sinatra’s complete statement above (in which he referred to rock ’n’ roll in general), and added “His kind of music … ” at the beginning to make it appear Sinatra was speaking about Elvis. In fact, Frank had not named any specific rock ’n’ roll singer in his article.
What’s to be gained by distorting Sinatra’s statement to make it appear as if he wanted to criticize Elvis Presley? It’s a psychological ploy that some Elvis pseudo-journalists like to utilize and one to which many Elvis fans fall prey. Build up Elvis by knocking down his competitors. Want to promote Elvis as a rebel in the entertainment world? Then demean the power players around him, like Sinatra, even if you have to make up stuff to do it. Really, Elvis’s accomplishments were impressive enough without having to embellish them with phony, distorted claims.
Let’s complete the Sinatra-Presley story from 1957. When Elvis held a press conference in Los Angeles on October 28, 1957, prior to his appearance that night at the Pan-Pacific Auditorium, he was asked his reaction to Sinatra’s comments about rock ’n’ roll. From the press reports in several LA newspapers the next day, it’s impossible to know exactly what Elvis said in response, since various reporters translated their notes differently. Still, all reports were consistent about the tone of his response. In his Herald-Express article of the 29th, Gerry McCarthy quoted Elvis as follows:
“He has a right to his opinion, but I can’t see him knocking it for no good reason. I admire him as a performer and an actor but I think he’s badly mistaken about this. If I remember correctly, he was also part of a trend. I don’t see how he can call the youth of today immoral and delinquent. It’s the greatest music ever and it will continue to be so. I like it, and I’m sure many other persons feel the same way.”

• Elvis fans rose up against Sinatra

McCarthy also asked one of Elvis’s female fans what she thought of Sinatra’s comments. “He’s had his day, and his day is past,” she said. “Long live Elvis.” The ire of other Elvis fans came down on Sinatra in the Herald-Express letters-to-the-editor column. The excerpts that follow come from a letter printed on November 5, 1957.
“Why don’t you and that old bag Frank Sinatra keep your mouths closed? Frank Sinatra thinks he’s something, but he’s just a crabapple. Elvis Presley is a gentleman and if you and others had brains, you would know that he wiggles around because he shows what’s in his heart. The reason Frank Sinatra doesn’t like Elvis is because he can’t wiggle around and he’s just jealous. Why? Because he’s an old croney. So I suggest that you would keep your mouths shut, and tell Frank, Frank Sinatra, the great, the baldheaded ape, to do the same.” — Estella and Sarah

Sinatra had his defenders too. One letter, written in response to Estella and Sarah, was printed in the paper’s November 15, 1957, edition. It read in part:

“So they called Sinatra a crabapple. Well they can call me a crabapple too, if they wish, because I sincerely hope they will be on hand to see Elvis Presley run out of town by citizens who prefer to be entertained. Frank Sinatra can probably wiggle around just as much as Presley, but he knows how to express his feelings for a song without going into vulgar and derogatory motions.” — R.S.

• Frank: Elvis has “natural, animalistic talent

So, what did Frank Sinatra really think about Elvis Presley in 1957? In a short article in Variety on June 5, 1957, Sinatra, then on the set of Pal Joey in Hollywood, was asked to comment of Presley’s singing ability. He responded:
“Only time will tell. They said I was a freak when I first hit, but I’m still around. Presley has no training at all. When he goes into something serious, a bigger kind of singing, we’ll find out if he is a singer. He has a natural, animalistic talent.” — Alan Hanson | © August 2009

Frank Sinatra

Frank Sinatra easily ranks among the greatest singers to grace a stage in Lake Tahoe and Las Vegas. In Nevada, he achieved this status despite an often-cantankerous demeanor, run-ins with casino executives and state officials, and onstage struggles as he played major showrooms long past his peak. He also set a new standard in defining what was "cool," enhancing Las Vegas's image on the national entertainment scene as the de facto leader of the Rat Pack in the early 1960s with fun-loving cohorts Sammy Davis, Jr., Dean Martin, Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop.

Yet when Sinatra first arrived in Las Vegas, his career was at a low point. Born in Hoboken in 1915, and a singer with Tommy Dorsey's orchestra, he had been a rail-thin pop idol in the 1940s, particularly with "Bobby Soxers" (young women so-called for their low socks and saddle shoes). His marriage was on the rocks and his new relationship–stormy in its own way–with screen goddess Ava Gardner was generating fodder for gossip columnists. Not only did he leave his wife and three children for her, but they also fought regularly and publicly.

Gardner's career was doing far better in 1951 when Sinatra, by then considered a fallen idol, made his Las Vegas debut on September 4 at Wilbur Clark's Desert Inn. The local press gave him mostly positive reviews. Sinatra's divorce was finalized under quickie Nevada laws and he soon wed Gardner. He played the Desert Inn once more, in July 1952, and a modest newspaper ad proclaimed him "America's foremost balladeer singing the songs you want to hear."

In 1953, Sinatra returned to play the newly opened Sands Hotel's Copa Room, the town's most popular showroom, just as he was about to become the Strip's hottest star. Sands general manager Jack Entratter's progressive vision for the Copa Room generated the biggest-name headliners Las Vegas had hosted, including singer Johnny Ray, comedian and television star Danny Thomas, and the comedy team of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Sinatra respected Entratter, a former New York Copacabana nightclub executive who reportedly stood by him during his worst days. The Sands became Sinatra's personal playground, on and off stage. If he acted as if he owned part of the place, he did: Sinatra held a two-percent interest in the hotel that increased to nine percent before he had to sell it.

Meanwhile, Sinatra's popularity grew. His career turned around, and Las Vegas both contributed to and benefited from it. He fought for and won the role of Maggio in the 1953 film, From Here to Eternity, receiving an Oscar for his performance. He signed a new record contract with Capitol Records, and teamed with young arranger Nelson Riddle on a series of best-selling, critically acclaimed albums. Sinatra's Las Vegas shows drew Hollywood stars and high-rolling gamblers, generating climbing revenues for the Sands.

His stardom hit a new high in 1960. Several years earlier, actress Lauren Bacall had used the words "Rat Pack" to describe those hanging around with her husband, actor Humphrey Bogart. Bogart's death made Sinatra–the most prominent film or recording star in the group–their leader. From January 26 to February 16, 1960, he headlined the "Summit at the Sands," shows in the Copa Room featuring seeming ad-libs and sundry mischief from Martin, Davis, Bishop, Lawford, and any other celebrities who showed up–including future president John F. Kennedy, Lawford's brother-in-law. The Rat Pack would work days filming the crime caper Oceans 11 at the resort, retire to the steam room for a couple of hours, then put on a pair of shows that became the hottest ticket in town.

But Sands bosses sometimes resented Sinatra's behavior. In the late 1950s, he forced the casino's managers to let Sammy Davis, Jr. become the first African American entertainer to stay at the resort; Sinatra allegedly threatened not to perform there any more. The performer's mercurial ways, often aided by alcohol, included legendary post-show parties at the Sands and loose playing at the blackjack tables; Sinatra's losses were reportedly written off in exchange for the thrill patrons had in seeing the star at the tables.

However, not everyone appreciated his attitude and alleged mob connections. In 1963, the Nevada Gaming Control Board moved to revoke Sinatra's gaming license at the Cal-Neva resort straddling the state line at Lake Tahoe. The board claimed that the singer gave "red carpet" treatment to known Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana, who was in Nevada's Black Book or List of Excluded Persons and thus ineligible to set foot in a casino. Sinatra cursed out the state's top gaming regulator, Control Board chair Ed Olsen, in a heated phone call. Olsen divulged none of the details at the time, but later published a memorandum of their conversation that included Sinatra swearing at him and verging on threatening him physically. Sinatra surrendered his license rather than go through a public hearing.

Shortly thereafter, the Rat Pack lost much of its luster. Lawford's failing marriage and Sinatra's inability to keep out of gossip columns drove a wedge between the group and the Kennedy administration, and thus between Sinatra and Lawford. Other acts began garnering attention, nationally and locally: the Beatles' performances at the Las Vegas Convention Center drew considerable notice. But Sinatra's career continued to climb with the 1966 release of Sinatra at the Sands, recorded with the Count Basie Orchestra, and he remained a viable headliner for decades to come.

Sinatra's split with the Sands after its purchase by Howard Hughes points out how difficult the star could be. Hughes cut off the singer's credit line at the hotel and a drunken Sinatra confronted Sands executive Carl Cohen in a hotel restaurant. After Sinatra toppled a table and apparently swore at him, the usually easy-going Cohen, who weighed about 250 pounds, punched Sinatra in the face, bloodying his nose and knocking out two front teeth.

Sinatra left the Sands cursing and driving a golf cart through a front window. The next day he signed with Caesars Palace across the street. Other confrontations would follow, including one in which a hotel security guard pulled a gun on the singer. Despite the altercations, Sinatra remained a top draw at Caesars Palace until announcing his retirement at age fifty-five in 1971.

Sinatra returned to Caesars in 1974, saying his retirement "seemed like a good idea at the time." He reclaimed much of his former luster. Sinatra helped local charities, sometimes quietly, sometimes in benefit performances, prompting the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, to give him an honorary doctorate in 1976. In 1981, the Nevada Gaming Commission approved Sinatra as an entertainment consultant for Caesars Palace–nearly two decades after he had to surrender his previous license.

Sinatra remained elusive to the press and continued performing at various hotels well past his prime, forgetting the words of songs despite using teleprompters. In 1992, his troubles with lyrics and his declining voice made his seventy-seventh birthday performance at the Desert Inn disappointing. Sinatra's final Las Vegas show came on May 29, 1994, at the MGM Grand.

While audiences were forgiving of his diminished skills, Sinatra never returned to Las Vegas. He died at his home in California on May 14, 1998, prompting Las Vegas Strip hotels to dim their lights in his honor. Sinatra's career in Las Vegas and Northern Nevada casinos assured his legendary status as the last of the great "saloon singers." - See more at: http://www.onlinenevada.org/articles/frank-sinatra#sthash.P1HAlQV8.dpuf

Frank Sinatra Jr. endures a frightening ordeal

Frank Sinatra Jr., who was kidnapped in Lake Tahoe, California, on December 8, is allowed to talk to his father briefly. The 19-year-old man, who was trying to follow in his father’s footsteps by pursuing a singing career, was abducted at gunpoint from his hotel room at Harrah’s Casino and taken to Canoga Park, an area of Southern California’s San Fernando Valley. After the brief conversation between father and son, the kidnappers demanded a ransom of $240,000.

Barry Keenan, the young mastermind behind the scheme, had also considered abducting the sons of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. But he and his partners decided upon Frank Sinatra Jr. because they thought he would be tough enough to handle the stress of a kidnapping. Although the crime was originally scheduled for November, President Kennedy’s assassination delayed their plan.

Immediately following his son’s abduction, Frank Sr. received offers of assistance from Attorney General Robert Kennedy and Sam Giancana, one of the country’s most powerful organized crime leaders.He declined and instead accepted aid from the FBI. After a series of phone calls, the kidnappers revealed the drop point for the ransom money and said that Frank Jr. could be found on Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles. In an attempt to avoid a public scene, law enforcement officials picked the young Sinatra up and brought him home in the trunk of their car.

Within a couple of days, John Irwin, one of Keenan’s partners, turned himself in to the San Diego FBI field office and confessed to the crime. By December 14, all the perpetrators had been located and arrested.

During the trial, which took place in the spring of 1964, controversy erupted when the defendants claimed that Frank Jr. had orchestrated the abduction as an elaborate publicity stunt. Gladys Root, a flamboyant Los Angeles attorney, pursued this line of defense, despite the fact that there was no evidence to support the accusation. Even after Keenan and the others were convicted, the rumors persisted. For his part, Keenan served 4-and-a-half years in federal prison. After his release, he became a successful real-estate developer.

The Frank Sinatra we remember

Frank Sinatra records the song “Close to You” in 1956. (Frank Sinatra Enterprises/Courtesy of Capitol Photo Archives)



By George F. Will Opinion writer December 9

In today’s culture of hyperbole, born of desperate attempts to be noticed amid the Niagara of Internet and other outpourings, the label “genius” is affixed promiscuously to evanescent popular entertainers, fungible corporate chief executives and other perishable phenomena. But it almost fits the saloon singer — his preferred description of himself — who was born 100 years ago, on Dec. 12, 1915, in Hoboken, N.J.

It is, however, more precise and, in a way, more flattering to say that Frank Sinatra should be celebrated for his craftsmanship. Of geniuses, we have, it seems, a steady stream. Actual craftsmen are rarer and more useful because they are exemplary for anyone with a craft, be it surgery or carpentry. Sinatra was many things, some of them — libertine, bully, gangster groupie — regrettable. But he unquestionably was the greatest singer of American songs.

George F. Will writes a twice-weekly column on politics and domestic and foreign affairs. He began his column with The Post in 1974, and he received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1977. He is also a contributor to FOX News’ daytime and primetime programming.

How should an artist’s character and private life condition our appreciation of his or her art? How, say, should knowledge of T.S. Eliot’s anti-Semitism condition one’s admiration for his poetry? With Sinatra, tune out the public personality and listen to his music as Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Gerry Mulligan and Oscar Peterson did. They all, according to the culture critic Terry Teachout, named Sinatra their most admired singer.

For decades he was, Teachout says, “the fixed star in the crowded sky of American popular culture.” It speaks well of Sinatra, and reveals the prickly pride that sometimes made him volcanic, that he refused to adopt a less Italian name when ethnicity was problematic in the waning days of America’s Anglo-Saxon ascendancy. Anthony Dominick Benedetto (Tony Bennett) and Dino Paul Crocetti (Dean Martin) adjusted. Sinatra was an unadjusted man.

In spite of the spectacular vulgarity of Sinatra’s choices of friends and fun, he bequeathed to postwar America a sense of style, even male elegance. His Las Vegas cavorting with “The Rat Pack” (Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Joey Bishop, Peter Lawford) was an embarrassing manifestation of 1950s arrested-development masculinity — adolescence forever. But never mind his toupees and elevator shoes, his loutish flunkies and violent bodyguards, his many awful movies and public brawls, his pimping for Camelot. And never mind that the comedian Shecky Greene was not altogether joking when he said: “Sinatra saved my life in 1967. Five guys were beating me up, and I heard Frank say, ‘That’s enough.’ ”



Never mind the tawdriness so abundantly reported in the recently published second volume of James Kaplan’s 1,700-page biography (“ Sinatra: The Chairman”). But you must remember this: In a recording studio, Sinatra, who could not read music, was a meticulous collaborator with great musicians — including the Hollywood String Quartet — and arrangers.

For Sinatra, before a song was music, it was words alone. He studied lyrics, internalized them, then sang, making music from poems. His good fortune was that he had one of the nation’s cultural treasures, the Great American Songbook, to interpret. It was the good fortune of that book’s authors — Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Johnny Mercer and many others — that Sinatra came along to remind some Americans and inform others of that book’s existence.

This is one kind of popular music:

“I can’t get no satisfaction,

I can’t get no girl reaction”

This is Sinatra’s kind:

“The summer wind came blowin’ in from across the sea

It lingered there, to touch your hair and walk with me

All summer long we sang a song and then we strolled that golden sand

Two sweethearts and the summer wind

Like painted kites, those days and nights, they went flyin’ by

The world was new beneath a blue umbrella sky

Then softer than a piper man, one day it called to you

I lost you, I lost you to the summer wind

The autumn wind, and the winter winds, they have come and gone

And still the days, those lonely days, they go on and on

And guess who sighs his lullabies through nights that never end

My fickle friend, the summer wind”

Frequent performing, and too much Jack Daniel’s, and too many unfiltered Camel cigarettes took their toll before he acknowledged this and left the road, much too late. However, his reputation is preserved by the short-term memory loss of a nation that will forever hear the Sinatra of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.

Kaplan reports, according to “legend,” that Sinatra’s casket in a Palm Springs-area cemetery contains some Jack Daniel’s and Camels. If so, even in death, Sinatra did it his way.