It’s Frank’s birthday.
Even one hundred and three years after his birth, most will get that it’s Mr. Sinatra to whom I refer.
He was one of the most famous men in the world for over fifty years. He was a movie star. He had the most beautiful women on the planet, one of whom he couldn’t stand losing. He once punched out a reporter. He could be generous to a fault. He was a proud liberal who brought down the Jim Crow laws in Vegas who became a Reaganite. He socialized with gangsters. He went broke and voiceless in mid-career but survived to build a business empire.
But let’s put aside Ava Gardner and the Rat Pack and the Jack Daniels and the films and focus on what Sinatra really was, first and foremost: a man who lived to sing. The greatest, most versatile, and most committed popular singer ever.
Sinatra was born in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1915. His father was a former prize fighter who rarely spoke. Sinatra took after his mother, Dolly, an aggressive, profane woman who was prominent in local Democratic politics. Sinatra the young adult was famous for being as thin as a pencil, but, improbably, he weighed 11 pounds at birth and was left permanently scarred from the forceps the doctor used to forcibly pull him into this world. Dolly had no other children, and she doted on Frank. He had so many clothes as a child that his playmates called him “Slacksie.”
Somewhere, somehow the teenaged Sinatra fell under the spell of the phenomenally popular crooner Bing Crosby. He left the distraction of high school after forty-seven days to work odd jobs and focus relentlessly on his dream of becoming a singing star. By the time he was seventeen he had all the required equipment: a folder full of arrangements, a portable p.a. system, a car to travel to gigs in, regular appearances on the radio, a surprisingly sophisticated singing voice, and the ability to attract female fans in large numbers despite a scrawny physique.
His rise was swift. Bandleader Harry James went to see Sinatra at the Rustic Cabin near the George Washington bridge, where Sinatra was working as a singing waiter, and signed him to a two-year contract. Sinatra made his first recordings with James, but sales were anemic and the band struggled financially. The ambitious singer jumped ship nine months later to join the much more popular outfit led by trombonist Tommy Dorsey.
In the two years that Sinatra fronted the Dorsey band, Sinatra recorded 80 sides—including his first hit (“Polka Dots and Moonbeams”) and improved dramatically as a singer. Before the advent of 78-rpm records, singers were theater singers—belters with voices that could reach the balconies. They often used megaphones. Bing Crosby was the first to understand that the recording microphone freed vocalists from bombast and gave them the opportunity sing naturally and intimately. Sinatra developed a strong voice as a professional, but he perfected the art of singing directly to the listener in the recording studio. For Sinatra it wasn’t just about crooning more quietly, it was about conveying emotion by focusing—often playfully—on the lyrics, singing impossibly long phrases with a single breath (a style inspired in part by Tommy Dorsey’s approach to the trombone), stretching or truncating certain words or vowels depending on the desired message, purposefully vocalizing ahead or behind of the beat to draw in the listener, and, overall, creating an illusion of overall casualness out of all this technique. The result, in the words of writer Will Friedwald, was “total credibility. No popular recording artist has ever been as totally believable so much of the time as Sinatra.”
In the early ‘40s, the band was the star. The singer was usually limited to a verse and a chorus in the middle of the arrangement. Sinatra worked on Dorsey, to whom he was contracted, to allow him to make some records as a solo artist, and in 1942 Sinatra recorded four sides for RCA Bluebird with music by Dorsey arranger Axel Stordahl. The supremely confident Sinatra, who was anxious to challenge his idol Bing Crosby, was thrilled with the results and decided that he had to go out on his own—something that no band singer had done successfully to that point. “He had a direction,” producer Mitch Miller noted years later. “He knew where he was going, come hell or high water.”
After some nasty negotiations, Dorsey finally let Sinatra out of his contract with the comment “I hope you fall on your ass.” Sinatra responded by taking Stordahl with him at five times his Dorsey salary.
Popular recorded music had always been aimed at the adult audience, but the vulnerability that Sinatra’s ultra-intimate, masculine recordings displayed was attracting a very new audience: teenaged girls. The newly solo artist scuffled for a time, but then got a big break: a four-week booking at New York’s Paramount theater in December of 1942 as an “extra added attraction” with Benny Goodman and his band. On opening night, when Goodman introduced Sinatra, a deafening roar went up—the audience was mostly bobby soxers. “What the hell was THAT?,” Goodman blurted out.
Sinatra killed every night that month, and before long there were lines of girls snaked around the block to get into the Paramount. Every song from him was greeted with enthusiastic hysteria. Every move from the 120-pound bow-tied singer was punctuated by screams and wailing. The press billed it “Sinatramania” or “Sinatrauma” and dubbed Frank “Swoonatra.” When Sinatra returned to the Paramount in 1944, only 250 people left after the first show, and 35,000 fans waiting outside nearly rioted.
Sinatra had single-handedly killed the big-band era. Singers were everything now.
Sinatra signed with Columbia, and seven of his first nine discs for them charted. During 1945 and 1946 he starred in four movies and released his first album, The Voice of Frank Sinatra, which quickly topped the charts. The vast majority of Sinatra’s Columbia sides were romantic ballads, but, in a harbinger of things to come, he recorded a swinging, up-tempo version of “Sweet Lorraine” with a dream assemblage of jazz stars: Charlie Shavers, Coleman Hawkins, Harry Carney, Buddy Rich, Lawrence Brown, Johnny Hodges, and Nat Cole. Sinatra was selling a million records a year.
Cue the fall.
Sinatra got flack for not serving in World War II (he was 4F due to a punctured eardrum)—some GIs didn’t appreciate him serenading their girlfriends when they were off fighting in Europe and the Pacific. Newspaper accounts of his Mafia connections began to surface. Critics started to pan his records, and Sinatra slipped out of the “best singer” polls. He made some really bad films, including the embarrassing “The Kissing Bandit.” His long-time press agent, who had carefully cultivated a public image of Sinatra as a devoted family man, died just as news broke of his affair with Ava Gardner. He suffered a throat hemorrhage just before an engagement at New York’s Copa and had to cancel. Sinatra came out of a divorce in such financial straits that he had to borrow money from Columbia to pay his back taxes and so diminished professionally that he was reduced to playing county fairs. The label dropped him in 1952.
And then came the resurrection. With a vengeance.
Sinatra signed with Capitol Records, a hip new label based in Los Angeles. He begged for the part of Maggio in the movie “From Here to Eternity” and miraculously grabbed the Oscar for best supporting actor. Most providentially, in April of 1953 Sinatra held a recording session with charts by Nelson Riddle, a moody genius of an arranger who had been scoring hit after hit for Nat King Cole. The result was punchy and ebullient hit “I’ve Got The World On A String.” Frank was back, all the way back, and this time there would be no stopping him.
Over half of the Sinatra albums recorded during Sinatra’s second career were arranged by Nelson Riddle, who proved to be the perfect partner in Sinatra’s reinvention of himself from the boyish romantric crooner into the ultimate middle-aged swingster on the hit albums Songs for Young Lovers, Swing Easy, Songs for Swingin’ Lovers, and A Swingin’ Affair.
Riddle was equally at home with ballads, where his unique ability to blend strings, woodwinds and bass trombones really shone. In 1955 he and Sinatra produced the concept album—a notion invented by Sinatra—In The Wee Small Hours, which many consider the greatest musical evocation of melancholy ever recorded. “I don't know what other singers feel when they articulate lyrics,” Sinatra once said, “but being an 18-karat manic-depressive and having lived a life of violent emotional contradictions, I have an over-acute capacity for sadness as well as elation.”
My own favorite Sinatra album is another ballad collection—1960’s Nice ‘N Easy, which was Sinatra’s last album for Capitol before launching his own label, Reprise. Outside of the title track, Nice ‘N Easy is the ultimate Sinatra tribute to the great American ballads, most of which he had already recorded in the 1940s. These versions, however, benefit from dramatic advances in recording technology, Nelson Riddle’s most luxurious and emotional arrangements, all the vocalizing wisdom that Sinatra had amassed over the past twenty years, and that unbelievable voice, which was now soulfully seasoned thanks to middle age, cigarettes and Jack Daniels. Nice ‘N Easy is the greatest make-out album of all time. (It’s staggering to ponder how many humans alive today were conceived to a Sinatra record. Johnny Carson once famously asked Sinatra, “When you’re in a romantic mood, whose records do you put on?” Sinatra, who was a huge and knowledgeable devotee of classical music, revealed that in those special moments he would put Ravel’s “Daphne and Chloe” on the spindle.)
Sinatra was a great singer because he loved to sing. He was famous for balking at doing more than one take as a movie actor, but he threw himself into every aspect of his recording projects. Weeks in advance he would decide upon a theme for the upcoming album and pick the tunes that best evoked it. He would work with Bill Miller, his pianist for over forty years, to nail down the tempos and the keys. Then there would be a meeting with Riddle or another hand-picked arranger to discuss and take notes on Frank’s ideas, typically followed by a week to write the charts. Sessions would be done with musicians, mostly jazz veterans from the big bands, that Sinatra personally selected. (The trumpeter Harry “Sweets” Edison, saxophonist Plas Johnson, and drummer Irv Cottler were among Sinatra’s go-to favorites.) Sinatra would record an album’s worth of tunes in four three-hour evening sessions (four completed songs out of each session was the norm) with the musicians sight reading the arrangements. Sinatra was in total control in the studio. He wasn’t afraid to make changes on the spot. He not only sang live with the band but performed before an audience of friends seated on folding chairs in the studio. Sinatra focused intensely from the first run through of each song; he wanted to nail it on the first couple of takes to keep things sounding fresh and to keep the musicians motivated.
The only film we have of Sinatra in the recording studio is one of him cutting “It Was A Very Good Year,” a smash hit for him in 1965. The tune is a folksong lifted from a Kingston Trio record, and Gordon Jenkin’s arrangement makes use of every cliché in the book, but the fifty-year-old Sinatra, standing in the middle of the orchestra, an audience behind him, his trademark fedora ostentatiously hung on a mic stand, does an undeniably brilliant job of applying his acting and singing skills to transform it into something like one of his famous saloon songs. He clearly enjoys the hell out of that four minutes and twelve seconds.
“Throughout my career, if I have done anything, I have paid attention to every note and every word I sing,” Sinatra claimed without overstatement. “If I respect the song, if I cannot project this to a listener, I fail.”
I got to see Sinatra twice. In the 1980s I took my parents (both huge Sinatra fans) to a Sinatra concert in the Tacoma Dome. Frank was in his seventies, and I had worked hard to keep my expectations as low as possible. But the old man was in damn good voice that night and he owned that stage. He and Bill Miller did their legendary boozy duet on “One For My Baby (And One More For The Road)” and just slayed the house. A decade later I caught him at show at the Centrum in Worcester, Massachusetts, and time had caught up with him—despite four huge teleprompters, he lost track the lyrics during the first song (a cover of “Bad Bad Leroy Brown,” of all the monstrosities). But the unembarrassed love the audience gave Frank that night was genuine and moving.
That was Frank Sinatra down there, for pete’s sake—a titan among bleating pygmies.
If you’re a fan of Frank Sinatra or would like to know more about him, I emphatically recommend Will Friedwald’s “The Song Is You,” a comprehensive, authoritative, and entertaining book that brilliantly recounts Sinatra’s musical career, recordings, and legacy.