![]() ![]() Artists who die young, in full possession of their gifts, are remembered mostly for dying. Scott Fitzgerald to the contrary, American life is swimming with second acts, the longest of them interminable. He was them with talent and the privilege it can buy. At least two generations of American men came to love him not just for his singing but for his having met middle age head on, with a combination of style and swagger they hoped might also do the trick for them. They shifted his appeal from women to men, giving him credibility as the guy on the next barstool, a singing Bogart, the recipient of an honorary degree from the School of Hard Knocks. Sinatra's dip in popularity, his romantic misadventures, his quick temper, and the rumors that began to surface about his mob connections-all the things that supposedly put his career in jeopardy-ultimately worked to his advantage. But also among his chart entries in these years were "Almost Like Being in Love," "What'll I Do?," "But Beautiful," "I've Got a Crush on You," and the haunted "I'm a Fool to Want You"-which, legend has it, Sinatra, still licking his wounds after being dumped, completed in one take before fleeing into the night. ![]() These were mostly covers of other singers' hits, including Nat King Cole's "Nature Boy" and the Weavers' "Goodnight, Irene," or novelty tunes, such as "One Finger Melody" and "Don't Cry, Joe (Let Her Go, Let Her Go, Let Her Go)," for which Sinatra didn't bother to conceal his contempt. But he put a whopping forty-three songs on the Top 40 between "Mam'selle" and the expiration of his Columbia contract, including nine in the Top 10. 1 single until "Learnin' the Blues," in 1955. His recording of "Mam'selle," a keepsake from the movie The Razor's Edge that reached the top of Billboard's chart in 1947, would be his last No. Sinatra wasn't really washed up he was just no longer a craze. Part of the Sinatra legend is that he was destined for oblivion until he switched labels, from Columbia to Capitol, in 1953. Despite quick fame as the best of the "boy" singers of the early 1940s, and also as the cutest in the eyes of that era's hysterical teenage girls, Sinatra didn't hit his stride as a singer or an actor until the early 1950s, when he was pushing forty and starting to lose his hair. Eventually he himself became the concept by 1964, when he recorded Frank Sinatra Sings Days of Wine and Roses, Moon River, and Other Academy Award Winners, the selling point wasn't that all the songs were Oscar winners but that Sinatra had deigned to sing them. The unifying theme of his classic albums was either that he was feeling dreamy and sad (as on In the Wee Small Hours and Only the Lonely) or that he was feeling too marvelous for words (as on Come Dance With Me and Songs for Swingin' Lovers). Unlike Ella Fitzgerald (whose albums for Verve in the late 1950s combined with Sinatra's for Capitol to define an adult market for pop standards at a time when teenagers were beginning to dominate the singles charts), Sinatra never recorded composer songbooks. Sinatra's innovation, on a series of albums initiated by Songs for Young Lovers, in 1953, was to make a concept out of mood. Many performers, including Sinatra, had released collections of songs that were related in some way as far back as the 1940s, before the long-playing album was even invented. During these years, with assistance from Riddle, Gordon Jenkins, and Billy May, among other arrangers, Sinatra originated what is generally called the concept album, though in his case I prefer to think of it as the LP of sensibility. Who wanted to hear anyone else do "Angel Eyes" or "I've Got You Under My Skin"? His interpretations were immediately accepted as definitive. ![]() He spent the next fifteen or so years taking songs off the market. What I most noticed was his hands-translucent, veined, and, to judge from his weak grip on the microphone, arthritic.Īlmost forty years before, on his first collaboration with the arranger Nelson Riddle, in 1953, when Sinatra sang of having the world on a string, he might as well have had it dangling. I wound up watching Sinatra on a color monitor suspended from a scoreboard, feeling no closer to him than if I were at home, watching him on video. Really, though, all I saw from my seat in the press box was a tuxedoed snowcap who looked a little bit like Casey Stengel and occasionally sounded like him too. When anyone asks did I see Sinatra, I answer yes I saw him in Philadelphia in November of 1991, on his "Diamond Jubilee" tour.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |