OLD SCHOOL: Death comes for the Chairman
eye SITE
eye WEEKLY January 4 1996
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OLD SCHOOL OLD SCHOOL
DEATH COMES FOR THE CHAIRMAN
by
LOU FORD
I'm writing this on Dec. 12, Frank Sinatra's 80th birthday; it's cold
but bright outside my window, just as bright as it must be in Palm
Springs. I could launch into a reverie about what "the Chairman" must
be feeling right now, the kind of thing you'll be able to read in
Esquire, waxing elegiac eight to the bar, but after immersing myself
in Sinatra for nearly a month now, I've come to a conclusion: I don't
care what Frank thinks -- not now, not ever.
I'm not trying to downplay the rewards of pondering Frank's career
(may I call you Frank?). Next to my left elbow I have arrayed: two
hardcover books from prestigious publishing houses; a box set of four
CDs; another of two; and three single discs, one of which is a
promotional sampler for an 18-disc set I've only ever heard of as
myth. It's been a very good month. I suppose all I'd need now is
Frank's skull on my right, in a glass vitrine. I know that sounds
morbid but it would only be a capstone to the overwhelming impression
I'm left by my research: completion, denouement, endgame. Frank isn't
dead yet, but he might as well be.
Will Friedwald's Sinatra! The Song Is You (Scribner's, $40 cloth) is
the kind of exhausting, dissective study of a career's kunstwerke
usually reserved for the likes of Stravinsky, Picasso or Faulkner. I
suppose, cultural relativism having levelled the playing field, that
Sinatra deserves to be considered in the same light. While rarely
lapsing into academic musicspeak, Friedwald's book is hardly light
reading. Eschewing biographical porn, Friedwald pores over the songs
with insight, session after session, discerning trends years before
they march in stride, agonizing over chronology in order to pinpoint
precisely when the Chairman left the sea, walked upright, swung mic
cable overhand: it's a sort of Origin of the Swinger.
In the beginning there was Harry James, collected complete on Harry
James & His Orchestra Featuring Frank Sinatra (Sony/Legacy). The year
is 1939 and Sinatra, at least according to testimony enhanced with the
advantage of time, was that much different from the rank and file of
big band boy singers. Even Friedwald is at a loss here since there's
little on the disc that shows either Sinatra or James in their later-
realized glory. Sinatra is clearly in thrall to Bing Crosby, not an
uncommon ailment at the time, and James and the band are polite, only
occasionally goosing the boy singer with bumptious riffs, as on the
covertly swinging "Stardust."
The evolution was subterranean at this point, more pronounced with
Tommy Dorsey and only emerging in clear relief when Sinatra arrived at
Columbia. The Best Of The Columbia Years 1943-1952 is a four-disc set
of highlights from Sony's 12-disc ｜er-box of two Yules past, no less
carefully assembled and annotated than that behemoth, and a bit more
accessible for those wishing to trace Frank's steps through his, to
me, most interesting period. Three tracks in and I can tell you why.
1944's "If You Are But A Dream," while neither a chart hit or among
the massive pantheon of codified Frank masterpieces, illustrates the
appeal this skinny, jug-eared crooner had for millions at the peak of
his first success.
Based on a theme by Rubinstein, this achingly slow ballad has Sinatra
musing distractedly through the joys of love, suddenly filling himself
with purpose on the chorus. "If our romance should break up," he
sings, gaining power and volume on the next line, "... I hope I never
wake up. If yooooou...." Here he tails off, the next line almost
whispered, hanging unresolved in a welter of minor chords, "are...
but... a dream."
With the aid of arranger Axel Stordahl, Sinatra brought pop singing
from the limited context of big band value-added attraction to
emotional centre stage. No one had ever sounded this vulnerable before
and, as is pointed out by Friedwald and others, no one ever sang
lyrics so profoundly in the first person.
For all intents and purposes, Sinatra never wrote a song in his
career, but it seems like nearly every song he sang is interpreted as
a personal statement, as pure a product of experience as any song by
Brel, Dylan or Lou Reed. In one song, Sinatra could articulate love,
fear, devastation and annihilation, and he did it over and over again.
His audience had the impression that they knew him, and it was that
impression of familiarity, that profound identification between singer
and listener, that made Sinatra both more real and less human.
Sinatra's life and career hit the skids in the early '50s, and his
signing to Capitol was considered an act of purest charity on the
company's part. Sinatra 80th: All The Best (Capitol/EMI) is a two-disc
collection of the biggest hits of his eight-year comeback. Strangely,
the 40 tracks are mainly up-tempo Nelson Riddle arrangements with
almost no representation from his "suicide" records: Only The Lonely,
In The Wee Small Hours, Where Are You? and No One Cares. Unremittingly
morose records that plumb the theme of romantic rejection and despair,
they would always remain cornerstones of his repertoire, but leavened
by the brash, brassy swingers he began unleashing on the world like
salvos as soon as he signed to Capitol. It was as if he was saying:
"Yeah, I've been down, but I don't want you people thinking I've ever
let it beat me longer than it took to get it on wax. Back to the bar!
Ring-a-ding-ding!"
Friedwald calls these "The Hat Years" and sketches the downside
philosophy with a rare bit of colloquial whimsy: "All human effort and
emotion amount to nothingness. There is no protection from the pain,
no safe place. We are all merely Lucky Strike Extras in the vast Hit
Parade of existence."
Now on top of the world, Frank starts his own record company, Reprise,
and the slow calcification of his style begins. The world had changed
and so had Frank. His voice grew steel at its core, and his swing had
sharp edges. It was a long way from "Nancy With The Laughing Face" to
"Somethin' Stupid." At the behest of Mitch Miller, Frank recorded some
real schlock for Columbia, and his Capitol years are marred only
rarely by stridency, but it was at Reprise that Frank would indulge
himself in lugubrious bombast.
The latest Frank megabox is The Complete Reprise Studio Recordings
(Warner), an 18-disc brass-trimmed case with a price tag of some $700
-- I hope it comes with a Lippizaner horse guard. This is the Frank
that most people probably know and love, so I can't criticize it with
much hope of a receptive ear, but it should be obvious to anyone who's
walked the long road of Frank's work that, as Frank wobbles a hammy,
Dean Martin-inspired "I'm having a few" on Johnny Mercer's "Drinking
Again," this is a man who has pulled back from the edge and now the
only risks he'll take will come from arrogance, not sincerity.
The Frank Sinatra Reader (Oxford, $34.95 cloth) is a collection of
writing on Sinatra the phenomenon more than Friedwald's total artist.
From period newspaper pieces to articles by names like Gay Talese and
Mikal Gilmore, the book has an overwhelmingly elegiac tone, as much
Sinatra's fault as a unison cry of his grieving, besotted fans. Frank
writes his epitaph over decades, but I doubt if it will ever be truer
than this passage by Murray Kempton, written in 1993: "He is free of
the illusions of anger and romance, free of tenderness and meanness.
He is no longer lonely because he has come to the place where he has
nothing to aspire to. The final sadness is that Frank Sinatra can
never fall in love again."
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