100
Today we celebrate the 100th birthday of Francis Albert Sinatra.-
The man that would much later be known as the Chairman of the Board, thanks to New York City disc jockey William B. Williams, came into the world on December 12th, 1915-- beneath his fighting weight, tugged and ripped by forceps, an eardrum punctured, and not breathing, but his grandmother, an experienced midwife, exercised some quick thinking and positioned Hoboken, New Jersey’s youngest resident under a stream of cold running water. Seconds later, the Voice belted out his first note.
I get deeply possessive about my Frank Sinatra fandom. It comes from years and years of devotion, and also a run of melancholy. The number of people that can converse today about Axel Stordahl, Billy May, Gordon Jenkins, Sammy Cahn, Jimmy Van Heusen, or Don Costa are dying off faster than the first-generation qualifiers of the G.I. Bill. As a young man, I saw Frank in concert twice: first, at Hilton Coliseum in Ames, Iowa, in 1988, and then at The Mark in Moline, Illinois in 1994. (I was briefly trying for every state in the union.) Of the latter live performance, comedian Tom Dreesen, the opening act that night, tells this story.
CBS’s prime-time special last Sunday night honoring FS, while well-meaning, was a test of my patience. It was overly-broad in scope. All the clichés were incorporated, specifically the rough framing of his life into the four time-marking verses of “It Was a Very Good Year.” Daughter Nancy's performance was cut from the broadcast. “The Summit” of 1960’s Las Vegas was referred to over and over again, as it often is, as “the Rat Pack.” (So uncool.) And virtually no attention was paid to Frank’s music and film career prior to his 1953 comeback, which I appreciate in one way-- since the second part of his career was so artistically-prolific-- but ignoring the bobbysoxers, the Paramount Theater, and the Columbus Day Riot of 1944 is a little like broadcasting a tribute to the Beatles and skipping Ed Sullivan. That was the day Frank Sinatra created the Generation Gap. Ironically, he later obliterated it.
I’m a touch of a karaoke deity when it comes to Sinatra tunes, but I'm an amateur nevertheless. I shouldn’t be capable of performing Sinatra songs better than so many of the great stars of today, and yet I clearly am, if Sunday’s show is to be believed. Hillbillies Garth Brooks and Zac Brown each swing like a busted screen door, and Adam Levine behaved as if he was contractually-obligated to perform, even though he was given a shot at "I Get a Kick Out of You" in front of the most important concert audience of his career (pointedly, Quincy Jones and Tony Bennett). Perhaps he expected the audience to have its chairs turned away from him.
Harry Connick Jr., John Legend, and Usher were fine, but what these guys never attempt to latch on to is Sinatra's masculinity. By aiming for luxury over strength, male impersonators frequently wind up giving tribute, inadvertently, to the crooners like Dick Haymes and Perry Como, whose careers would be obscured by Sinatra. Frank should not be held up as the personification of a silky style of singing. He was the beginning of the end for it. The Chairman’s tough-guy persona often seemed like a pretense in his movies, but in his music, it translated as a raw truth being expressed by a grown man, albeit a manic depressive, albeit a functional one. Crosby was the smooth one. Sinatra ached.
On Sunday’s special, Alicia Keys gave us real longing, as well as one of the few new musical arrangements of the evening, sitting at the piano and crushing George and Ira Gershwin's “I’ve Got a Crush on You.” Keys told interviewers that she was introduced to Sinatra's music by her grandfather, and I often think it’s the women performers today that understand him best because they recognize the qualities of his strength and honesty from men that they have loved.
Seth MacFarlane, an animator by first vocation, knows the tune, literally and figuratively. He was one of the few vocal performers on the bill that would clearly list Sinatra as a top musical influence. He introduced a knowing segment recalling the way Sinatra would always credit the songwriters and arrangers during concert performances. (This is where your Stordahls, Mays, Jenkins, Kahns, Van Heusens, and Costas come in). The voice of Stewie Griffin blessed us first with a rendition of the sort-of-forgotten Capitol recording classic “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” then followed in the second hour with a stage performance of Sinatra’s greatest saloon song, “One For My Baby,” which MacFarlane croons lovingly, but struggles to “act.” Oh well, you knew he couldn’t act if you saw A Million Ways to Die in the West.
I’m sure some people rolled their eyes at MacFarlane’s presence because the TV shows he draws are so crass, and also they like their celebrities to stay in a box, but when you consider it, the multi-talented creator of Family Guy and executive producer of last year’s Cosmos mini-series on FOX might be the closest thing we have today to the brash Sinatra of yesterday’s Hollywood-- an industry unto his very own, balancing a life among the jacket-and-tie crowd with a profoundly-crude sense of humor. Bad boys in tuxedos still play. Sinatra was famously unsophisticated at times. I think that's what always made him fascinating. The FBI never abandoned its obsession with him, from a "morals" charge in 1938, through McCarthyism, the Cal-Neva Lodge, to the "Frankie and the Boys" photo snapped in 1976. He named his record label "Reprise," but pronounced it "re-prize" because it stood for him as a reprisal against his critics, and when his memory started to slip late in life, Don Rickles joked to friends that the singer suffered from Sicilian Alzheimer's Disease: "He only remembers the grudges."
A Sinatra TV special would really be more entertaining today if the time was filled by recorded video performances of the man himself. Much like the pair of Sinatra “Duet” albums released by Capitol during the 1990s, Sunday's event will be a pathway to the music for new, younger listeners, but within a week or so, we'll all be focused again on the original recordings.
I have one favorite anecdote to share on his birthday that’s not a well-known one. Tom Snyder told it from personal experience on his CBS late-night show the night Frank died in 1998-- and I have no media from which to recall it-- but Snyder was a long-time news reporter and anchor at KNBC in Los Angeles, and he was at Sinatra’s house in Bel-Air after Frank’s son was kidnapped in 1963. This crime happened only two weeks after President Kennedy's assassination. There was a pall over the scene naturally. The home’s entryway was filled with reporters, and one of the female journalists accidentally bumped into a shelf and knocked over a delicate item, shattering it on the floor. Imagine the scene: Sinatra, famously prickly to the press, and certainly at the darkest point in his life. Nevertheless, in the room's silence, he tells the woman not to worry about it, walks to the shelf, and nudges another breakable onto the floor.
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The Empire State Building will certainly be lit in blue this evening, and lights along the Vegas strip will be briefly dimmed, but the most important tribute to the man will be the countless, individual interludes of love and longing that will play out around the world on a typical Saturday night. People will be falling in love too easily, feeling as though there’s a wonderful fling to be flung, trying so not to give in. Men and women from all walks, their smiles so warm and their cheeks so soft, will make the conscious or unconscious decision that being loved by someone is no good unless they’re loved all the way... by only that one person beneath the moon or under the sun. Others will discover tonight that, for them, love is wasted on the young, and it's more comfortable the second time around. They’ll engage with their partners, alternately, in the lovely lovings, the hateful hates, and the conversations with the flying plates.
There will be losers in love also, in lonesome old towns, in the silence of lonely rooms, trying to think that love's not around, going out among us, fractured, in the wee small hours, attempting to get along without him or her very well, downhearted because they can't get started, with one they love that's in love with somebody else. They'll order one more Jack Daniels for that long, long road with no one in the place except the bartender and that solitary loser. Easy to remember, so hard to forget. Tough being alone on the shelf, worse to fall in love by yourself.
It's rare to find a jukebox in a saloon today, and those machines there are probably won't take nickels. But you can still get solace to fill the air from the leader of the losers ("Shake hands with the president of the club"), the mender of broken hearts, thanks to a miracle of today. When that moment of vulnerability strikes, Francis Albert's voice can be now be generated from nearly anybody's phone. The medium changes, but the voice is always with us... from here to eternity.
posted by CM @ 12:10 PM
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