Frank Sinatra: S/D

Didn't Johnny Mercer write the songs for that L'il Abner musical?

That's what Wiki says.

Happy belated 100th Frank.

that equire profile that's been going around is amazing

hadn't really registered with me how much his output diminished after Watertown. Can only speculate what would have happened if he'd stuck around long enough for Rick Rubin to get his hands on him lol.

I'm listening to some of his mid- to late-60s albums and man this stuff gets pretty dire, even with the occasional big hit/"signature song" popping up. It's crazy how rapidly he became totally irrelevant, and you can't really blame him for not giving as much of a fuck. What was he supposed to do, make a rock opera? Retreat to small jazz combo recordings? He had nowhere to go.

Been a while, but I liked the ones w Jobim and Ellington. Main thing: he came back strong on the radio, King of Dad Pop, while upstart Elvis was in eclipse. Adult Pop was the way Sinatra, Bennett etc. had been marketed in the 50s, talkin' back to that greasy kid stuff. Even prestigious albums, as albums first became a big deal (not in kid music, o course). Then he became a compulsive self-parody with that Rat Pack shit ('bout ruined his movie career/cred), but for a while there in the 60s, pretty good, and even when not good, still pretty big (on the radio). Uniquely so, for a guy of his generation, in that time segment (might've sucked again by late 60s though, don't remember).

yeah everyone loves the Jobim one afaict, I was just listening to That's Life! (ugh what is with the organ and the female backup chorus?!) and Strangers in the Night. Both generated big hits that must've felt like combative throwbacks at the time.

The movie version of Pal Joey is fine anytime Frank is singing, or Rita Hayworth is moving or singing. Kim Novak ventilating "My Funny Valentine," not so much.

Also there's a cute dog doing shtick throughout, to keep your mind off all the transactions in human flesh going on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0Uw5dDEa7U

(was surprised at the amount of San Francisco location shooting, very early for that kinda stuff unless something Serious like a Kazan film)

(also i should note that neither of the female stars did her character's singing)

this one got a lot of publicity and actually went gold:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51KwTJmY-nL._SX300_.jpg

i felt the Gibney doc kinda skimps over his gangster affiliations

this John Lahr essay (year unknown) is a wowser

The result Riddle achieved in “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” was, he said, “a sort of a cornerstone recording for both him and me.” The arrangement starts with a comfortable, loping rhythm that Riddle called “the heartbeat rhythm” (“Sinatra’s tempo is the tempo of the heartbeat,” he said) and then sets up a marvellous instrumental tension around Sinatra’s voice. Riddle always found little licks—certain spicy, nearly out-of-key notes—that would tease the key, and added the glue of “sustaining strings” almost subliminally to the rhythm and woodwind sections. At the instrumental breaks in the songs, Riddle gave solo voices to oboes, muted trumpets, piccolos, bassoons; in “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” it was to Milt Bernhart’s trombone, which whipped up the excitement until Sinatra joined the song again and brought it back to the heartbeat rhythm where it had begun. Sinatra had wanted an extended crescendo; Riddle provided one that was longer than had ever been heard in an organized arrangement....

After the humiliations of his decline, nothing so moved Sinatra as the spectacle of himself as a powerhouse: big talent, big guys around him, big bucks behind him, big connections to the mainstream and to underworld power. “He used his success in film, in singing, and in business to pump up the persona of untouchable,” Tony Curtis says. “Notice I don’t bring up the Mafia. He in himself was his own godfather. He ran his own family and his friends like that. Untouchable.”...

Sinatra stood before an audience as a person who had caroused with killers and kings. He’d been married to the most beautiful woman in the world. He had won and lost and now won again. All this made him more interesting as a performer than anything he sang. Sinatra’s best songs of the period—“All the Way,” “Call Me Irresponsible,” and especially “Come Fly with Me”—were written by Sammy Cahn, who had roomed with Sinatra, travelled with Sinatra, and lived a lot of Sinatra’s story with him. The material was Sinatra. “Sammy’s words fit my mouth the best,” he told the producer George Slaughter.
But lyrics, like everything else, could suffer from Sinatra’s egotism. “Ira Gershwin hated that Sinatra took ‘A Foggy Day’ and sang ‘I viewed the morning with much alarm,’” the singer Michael Feinstein, who was for a long time Gershwin’s assistant, says. “The lyric is ‘I viewed the morning with alarm.’ It drove Gershwin crazy, because he felt the word ‘much’ weakened what he originally wrote.” Leonora Hornblow tells of an evening at actor Clifton Webb’s when Cole Porter was present: “Frank fiddled with the lyrics. I think it was ‘I Get a Kick Out of You’—you know, ‘You give me a boot.’ Cole got up and walked out. Cole had perfect manners. For him to do that while somebody was singing was like stripping his clothes off.” Sinatra revered Porter (he leased Porter’s apartment at the WaldorfTowers), but he also thought Porter “a snob,” whereas Cahn wrote lyrics that had Sinatra’s common touch....

At Caesar’s Palace, sometime in the early eighties, Shirley MacLaine caught Sinatra’s show. “I don’t know what was bugging him,” she told me, describing the evening’s first set. “The magic wasn’t there. He marked it. He couldn’t wait to get out.” Afterward, at dinner, Sinatra asked what she thought, and she gave him her version of a pep talk. “Frank, you really ought to remember how you got so many of us through a Second World War, and a New Deal, and gave us an education in music,” she said. “Please don’t just mark it, because it disrespects everything you meant to the whole country. You might seem to some like a ruin but to most of us that ruin is a monument.” MacLaine adds, “His eyes just…It was like nobody had said that to him in a long time.”

http://johnlahr.com/frank-sinatra/

ooh!

woah.. good stuff.

formatting putting me off making it through the whole thing but pretty much every paragraph has a great bit in it

I highly recommend the biography "The Chairman" by James Kaplan. It's 900 pages, and begins at From Here To Eternity but boy is it entertaining. Basically, Frank was a mean drunk who drank a lot. And the older he got, the meaner he got.

He also kicked out a car radio when he heard Light My Fire on 3 consecutive stations.

That Lahr piece is fantastic. Is the Kaplan book the two-part one?

I've always viewed the Rat Pack's rage/bitterness at the ascendancy of rock with a mixture of pity and "Now you guys know how Rudy Vallee felt, huh?"

Nancy Sinatra made it clear two weeks ago that she believed her father Frank Sinatra would not have supported Donald Trump, or performed at his inauguration.

Now a fan has asked her how she feels about the prospect of 'My Way' being sung at the event, after reports that the famous song would be performed for Trump's first dance with his wife Melania as US President.

"Just remember the first line of the song," she responded....

Sinatra himself came to hate the song despite popularising it in 1969, according to his daughter Tina, who said he "always thought that song was self-serving and self-indulgent".

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/nancy-sinatra-responds-donald-trump-my-way-sang-us-presidential-inauguration-having-frank-sinatra-my-a7534701.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuIcRiHlHoY

Absolutely insane story. Sinatra was a mean drunk to put it mildly (according to the huge James Kaplan biography from last year) and this story certainly backs that up.

Destroy Somethin Stupid without mercy.

I like Something' Stupid a bit more than you while also forever being frustrated and perplexed by Nancy being so low in the mix. I think of tunes like this as "Italian Restaurant Music."

And here's my top 25.

unusually shot on location

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSawinsjVKs

and later in the same film... the bonhomie between Durante and Frank really makes this number fun

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLF8rkiV0Ts

I couldn't put down the first volume of Kaplan's bio over the holidays, highly recommended

ends with Frank wandering the streets of Beverly Hills, alone, at night, clutching his newly-won Oscar for "From Here to Eternity"

is the degree of mob connex more or less than u expected?

well I knew about the two most famous incidents (getting out of his contract with Dorsey and his conspicuous trip to Havana) and he sticks to what can be corroborated/documented on those points. The transcript of Frank's closed-door Senate testimony on the latter incident is quoted extensively. With the former he takes some pains to point out how the parallels in the Godfather are mostly fictional - someone may have threatened Dorsey with a gun, for ex, but nobody put a dead horse in his bed.

Otherwise he makes it clear that the mob was just part of the milieu he both grew up in as a kid and worked in as an adult, and that he wasn't particularly unusual in this regard. Guys like Bugsy Siegel and Willie Moore were just *around*, so some degree of involvement (and fascination with them) was inevitable.

his mob-financed stake in the Sands is also covered

I'd never really listened to his pre-Nelson Riddle, Alex Stordahl-arranged stuff. Sheesh those strings really are soporific.

volume 2 (the Chairman) goes deep into the mafia stuff - kinda unavoidable given the Sinatra/Kennedy/Giancana nexus

I wonder who will make the biopic now Marty has given it the elbow

https://news.avclub.com/martin-scorsese-says-he-s-giving-up-on-his-frank-sinatr-1798255980/amp

Ken Roberts:

"The hat check girl, Fran, came in, and said 'Someone just shot Bobby Kennedy', and Sinatra made the comment, 'I hope they shot him in the fuckin' head.'

A couple minutes later, she came back and said 'Yes, he was shot in the head.' Sinatra turned white and became so frightened and panicked... he thought that, while he was singing, someone might shoot him"

this book is fucking insane

important new developments:

There's a QAnon follower who angrily speculates that Pope Francis is secretly Frank Sinatra, who in reality died in 1998.

Sinatra going from a world-famous boozing philanderer to the celibate head of the Catholic Church would be quite a dramatic lifestyle change. pic.twitter.com/0udwW7o2H9

— Travis View (@travis_view) January 30, 2020

the end of this reminded me very much of the last chapters of the James Brown bio "The One". Not in the particulars (Frank didn't go on any PCP-fueled cross-country car chases), more in the dynamic of being emotionally isolated (and stunted) triumphal figures with nowhere to go but down. After being on top of the world he basically just regretfully slides into creative stagnation and a sort of blank, resentful resignation: no real friends or family, nothing to do, embalmed in his own legend. Did he think it was all worth it, at the end? who knows

also yes obviously Frank is the world's first 105-year old American pope

Frank didn't go on any PCP-fueled cross-country car chases

Cannonball Run II, yo.

https://pics.imcdb.org/12851/snap480.5.jpg

"Gas, grass, or ass, baby..."

https://pics.imcdb.org/12851/snap480.5.jpg

lol fair point

Brian Wilson talking about writing "Still I Dream of It" for Frank, how awesome "Only the Lonely" is etc

https://youtu.be/YZAwYF2tLbU?t=462

(thx to Tyler for the link!)

this is so great!

Apparently Capitol Recording Studios (where Frank recorded many of his greatest records, including Only the Lonely) has closed for good - the entire staff was laid off. Would be a shame if they gut it (which I guess will probably happen) - the famous echo chamber alone is irreplaceable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hDFSbsqn5U

Really? That is ... not good. Where did you hear that?

Here's what a freelance cutting engineer in L.A. posted last night:

"Stephen Marsh just told me that Capitol Tower Studios is closed and staff has been let go, Ron McMaster confirmed all mastering engineers, Perry and Dave in Restoration and even Paula Salvatore (!!!)"

McMaster is their longtime mastering engineer - he was supposed to retire like a decade ago, but he wound up staying due to the vinyl boom. (Very few people left have his experience in cutting vinyl.) He finally called it a day in 2018.

Salvatore may be familiar to anyone who's seen Dave Grohl's Sound City documentary - she used to run that studio before Capitol.

Ugh.