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Feature
Between a Rock and a Sinatra
IT ALWAYS SEEMED STRANGELY appropriate that Frank Sinatra died on the day of the Seinfeld finale— 10 years ago this past May. On a night when America was set to celebrate a sitcom’s elevation of irony to unforeseen cultural heights, it had lost its mythic pop singer, who knew something about irony, too, but who at his best stirred in his listeners a more earnest acknowledgment of longings, losses, and the good life.
On that night, I was more interested in seeing how Seinfeld would turn out than in remembering Sinatra. Like many of my generation (I was born in 1966), I viewed Sinatra as an icon from a musty and dusty age. His music seemed remote, too—the little of it I’d heard, almost all secondhand, in department stores or diners, or fading in and out of movie scenes.
I was still a rock and roll devotee, though my devotion was waning with each passing year. Rock, it seemed, didn’t age with the listener; it aged the listener. A decade later, I’ve finally caught on to Sinatra, though my appreciation likely will never be of the same character as that of his older fans. That’s because I’ll always be a child of the rock era; I can’t get the backbeat out of my head, though I now wish I could. Its absence looms over any music I try to embrace. It’s a testament to Sinatra’s power that he got through to the likes of me, but I wonder whether future generations will continue to find him as compelling.
Music critic Gary Giddins was certainly correct when he wrote that Sinatra “looms over the cultural life of the century,” but he was talking about the last one. “Every generation has to figure him out from scratch,” he writes—but that’s assuming they’ll think it’s worth the trouble. True, reissues of Sinatra’s recordings and multimedia projects, like those commemorating the 10th anniversary of his passing this year, sell well and generate lots of buzz, and usually prompt a quotation or two from a marketing type about how Sinatra is reaching new (that is, young) listeners. It’s difficult to tell with a heavily mythologized figure like Sinatra, though, just what product— the recordings, the image, the biography—is really being sold. Even if Sinatra’s music somehow finds a way to hover over the 21st century, his listeners won’t be hearing the same things.
The risk attached to his kind of singing was that it promised authenticity of emotion instead of its blithe dismissal or the empty technique of the virtuoso,” writes Pete Hamill in his brief book Why Sinatra Matters. “His singing demanded to be felt, not admired. It always revealed more than it concealed.” Yet to rock’s children, whose mother’s milk was the guitar chord of “You Really Got Me,” Sinatra sounded just like the virtuosos Hamill was slighting, his music devoid of the kick-starting violence of rock and roll. Sinatra was all polish and style, drained of emotion and risk, singing preposterously fuddy-duddy lyrics, backed by arrangements heavily scored with strings or by musicians who sounded like they were on work release from the embalmer’s. Rock buried the virtuoso’s technique in a fathomless grave, assuring that generations of listeners would hear something masterful and controlled as repressed and artificial. The curse of rock and roll on young listeners is not so much that it will corrupt their morals and characters, the dominant concern after Elvis arrived and for a good while afterward. With two parents, a kid can survive almost anything, even American popular culture. The real problem is that rock makes music synonymous with sensation, brute force, and emotional release—and renders the absence of such things suspect and seemingly dishonest. The availability of instant gratification in music, like in anything else, fundamentally alters our tastes. Music more complex than rock—a description that covers an enormous landscape—can sound merely confined, devoted to form at the expense of freedom.
And to a rock listener, freedom—as rock defines it, anyway—is the whole ballgame. A song like “Angel Eyes,” from Sinatra’s classic 1958 album Only the Lonely, is a good example of Hamill’s point about emotional authenticity, though it expresses emotion in a more muted fashion than the typical rocker’s lament. The song describes the kind of despair that rockers tend to convey with shouts, screams, or grunts of uncomprehending pain. Sinatra’s performance of “Angel Eyes,” on the other hand, traces a much subtler, quieter course of personal disintegration:
Pardon me but I got to run
The fact’s uncommonly clear
I got to find who’s now the number one
And why my angel eyes ain’t here
Excuse me while I disappear
Rock knows something about such estrangement, but its narrators almost always want the world to know about it, too. There are no shadows or corners of the room; the rock singer must always stand in the center, bathed in spotlight. In “Angel Eyes,” the world goes merrily on its way, and the singer’s anguish is private. The song plays out against the singer’s separation from those who are not in the emotional ditch he inhabits, and he tells them to “drink up all of you people/Order anything you see.” But he’s already gone.
MICHAEL GRAY, AUTHOR OF The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, describes Sinatra’s music as the kind that rock “was born to abolish.” He’s right. The control in every aspect of Sinatra’s work, from the vocal to the delicate interplay of orchestration, takes some getting used to if you grew up listening to “Like a Rolling Stone.” The title track of Only the Lonely, for example, is a kind of symphonic wonder. It opens in a distant flourish of piano that fades in until the singer’s voice emerges from it as if from a despairing haze, to set the album’s premise:
Each place I go only the lonely go…
The songs I know only the lonely know
The precision with which Sinatra delivers the song’s final lines—“…never let love go/For when it’s gone/you’ll know the loneliness/The heartbreak only the lonely know”—adds to the song’s emotional power as he enforces an intricate syllabic rhythm, breaking the lines like a poet. Contrary to rock’s central premise of spontaneous combustion, the song is more devastating because of Sinatra’s devotion to form.
This is not to say that the man wasn’t capable of hitting you over the head with emotion when the spirit seized him. On Sinatra’s 1965 album, September of My Years, released as he was turning 50, he seems to be laying bare the regrets and vulnerability he feels with the passage of time. The album is a song-cycle of exquisite expressions of melancholy and awareness of the receding calendar, without descending—too often, anyway—into bathos or self-pity. The album’s most famous track, “It Was a Very Good Year,” is an over-orchestrated and overbearing song that Sinatra nevertheless turns into a signature performance. More subtle is the album’s finale, “September Song,” in which Sinatra sings as a man whose time is passing—an idea the very antithesis of rock’s dream of an eternal present:
Oh, the days dwindle down to a precious few
September, November
And these few precious days I’ll spend with you
These precious days I’ll spend with you
But blues in the night was just one half of Sinatra’s canon. Younger listeners are more familiar with his swinging repertoire, including such classics as “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” “Summer Wind,” and “Fly Me to the Moon,” heard at wedding receptions and, for us New Yorkers, hearing the familiar strains of his “ New York , New York” at too many venues to count. Periodic spikes in popularity of ballroom dancing and the late 1990s swing revival helped keep these standards in heavier rotation than classics of melancholia like “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning” or “Willow Weep for Me.” Sinatra’s gifts are more readily accessible in such songs, not only because you can tap your feet, but because the music brings out his most famous persona—that of the devil-may-care, hard- living Rat Packer. In an era when image is much more than half the battle, this pose still seems relevant, even contemporary.
There’s something else, too, in these swinging songs: Sinatra sounds like an American man, or the way American men used to sound, anyway, back in the days when men wore suits and hats, before presidential candidates danced on ladies’ talk shows, before baseball players talked about psychotherapy and—well, you get the idea. In his famous 1966 Esquire piece, Gay Talese wrote that Sinatra was “the embodiment of the fully emancipated male, perhaps the only one in America.” Forty years on, that’s an enviable title indeed. Younger American men know that this older time existed, and though they mock it easily, their mockery is not always easy to distinguish from envy. Especially when they hear something like “Luck Be a Lady,” in which Sinatra sings, with joyfulness but also a hint of threat:
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Alice Moore| 12.31.08 @ 8:09AM
High quality music will always have adherents. With the advent of Beethoven and the Romantic Era in music; there probably was fear that Mozart, Haydn and Bach would be forgotten. Didn't happen.
Rock music had its virtuosos in Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix and lyricist teams such as Lennon/McCartney. Rock music has many parallels to the Romantic Era. There were the instrumental pyrotechnicists like Paganini and Liszt. Larger than life personalities in the persons of Wagner and Tchaikovsky were the norm. They even embraced the hare brained ideologies of their day. This observation is nothing new. My point being they didn't obliterate Bach and Mozart. Today's entertainers(most who are of lesser talent than the Romantics)won't bury Frank Sinatra or Bing Crosby.
Bob Scutari| 12.31.08 @ 12:35PM
When the dust settles and all that matters is the music, the mastery of Frank Sinatra will be alive and relevant to future generations. As long as there is a love of music and the pull of human emotion, Sinatra's music will be reborn every day.
No matter your age, generation or music orientation, just go outside today and you will hear the voice of Frank Sinatra . His genius is that he, unlike any other musical artist, continues to sing only to You!
sre| 12.31.08 @ 12:45PM
After reading about your father-in-law dancing to Sinatra's "Summer Wind" with his daughter at your reception, I read the lyrics.
My God, how did the man ever finish that dance?
Note to self: DO NOT play Summer Wind at my daughter's wedding if I don't want to make a fool of myself.
Sean C.| 12.31.08 @ 12:49PM
I also discovered Sinatra late -- although this was in the 90s -- and would concur with a lot of what Mr. Beston says here. Finally breaking through the standards of "authenticity" that I had held up as somehow superior in rocknroll type music, it was exhilarating to be able to discover not only Sinatra but the whole world of the great songwriters (Gershwins/Rodgers & Hart/Berlin/etc etc.) and the great singers and arrangers, jazz and popular. I basically abandoned listening to other forms music for a long time. Ultimately, though, I returned to rocknroll and other forms with more discerning and appreciative ears, I think.
The boxes are self-defeating when painted too thickly, but you do need an understanding of the different disciplines at work to fully appreciate a piece of music.
stmichrick| 12.31.08 @ 1:31PM
As alluded to here; it will be a long time before another entertainer is able to appeal on so many levels. To bobbysoxers, jazz afficianados, pop muzak fans, musicians of all stripes, film buffs and anyone who enjoyed watching someone who obviously lived the emotions he sings about.
His virtuosity will endure.
Pat Boyle| 12.31.08 @ 2:11PM
In these days of cultural relativity what I will now say is shocking - rock and roll (and rap) is degenerate.
In antropology you might study a set of pottery embelishments. Typically these markings will become more elaborate and exhibit greater sophistication over time. Then in many such sequences the decorations become simpler and more crude. This is technically called a degenerate sequence. A similar pattern can be seen in many cultural expressions. A culture exapands in sophistication. Some may stay at the peak over long periods of time but some others become degenerate. They lose their informational content. They sucumb to entropy. They fall from what are called a high cultural state to primitiveness.
Rock and Roll, and even more so Rap, is degenerate in this technical sense. At its height American pop songs had clever and even profound lyrics. They formerly used sophisticated musical devices and their singers could actually sing. None of those characteristics are true today.
Most modern singers can't sing in the sense that singing has been understood to exist in all human cultures for at least the last few centuries and probably since before Homo arose.
There are no openings in rap groups for an orchestrator. Rap just didn't abandon melody. It also abanoned rhythm. Sophisticated rhythms were soul of the great black musicians the "royals" - Count Bassie, Nat King Cole, Duke Ellington.
It isn't just a style change. Rap is crude in every dimension. It is degenerate.
Grampa Guy| 12.31.08 @ 2:47PM
An article even more comfortable the second time around.
And, let's not forget, the man could dance with Gene Kelly and act with Montgomery Clift, all the while looking like he was born to be there. God rest your noble soul, Francis Albert.
Steveo| 12.31.08 @ 3:25PM
As a guy who had an 8 track tape of Rossini overtures mixed in with the Led Zeppelin, I would like to think I have tried to appreciate the great ones. Sinatra, Crosby, Gene Kelly, etc are about romance as a beautiful thing, with its highs and lows. The sexuality seemed slight, an undertone. Rock always seemed inundated with sexuality, like a teenager overcome by their hormones. Hence, bands like Mother Love Bone, and albums with names like OU812. Geez!!
Everly Waverly| 12.31.08 @ 3:30PM
Sinatra is still relevant, at least to me, I can understand the lyrics. From Here to Eternity was a neat movie, except for the depressing parts. My favorite CD is "Sinatra At The Sands", great stuff, Count Basie is crisp and rich.
A few weeks ago on PBS California's Gold was an hour on Frank's Palm Springs compound. Wow, the guy lived the good life, and did anyone know he collected model trains. Model train collector, I had no idea, presents a different image of the man.
wrjonas| 12.31.08 @ 3:48PM
If anyone wants to see two guys having fun and do a little singing in front of the camera you gotta see Sinatra and Crosby doing "What a Swell Party" from High Society.
Mike| 12.31.08 @ 5:50PM
Wow...being born in 1966, too, it amazes me how this article reflects where I am in life, also.
I was in love with, nay wedded to, rock music for a long time. But something strange happened: rock didn't age well. Not at all.
Real music stands the test of time, which is primarily why classical music is still relevant, and Sinatra still an attraction.
Paul M. Mock| 12.31.08 @ 7:45PM
I was 13 in 1968 when I discovered Mr. S and his music. It was the height of the free-love, acid rock era. I eschewed that form of music and when I heard that voice and that HONESTY in his recordings I fell and feel hard. I was bullied and made fun of all through high school and college for loving Sinatra's music. I now have a rather extensive collection of all things Sinatra. Now at the age of 54, I am delightfully finding out that a whole new college age generation is doing just as I did. There are some young people out there with collections that rival mine...and I'm kinda jealous they are able to find it all as easily as they can now! Nah...not really. As long as Mr. S and his incredible body of work are passed along, he will be with us forever.
Gerard| 12.31.08 @ 8:55PM
There are some advantages to living in Philadelphia. Great museums, world class universities with only the requisite percentage of hard core lefty professors, a World Series winner of a baseball team, an NFL team that enjoyed vanquishing its archenemy by 38 points. And a city daffier about Sinatra than any other. My late father collected 45s of his hits before my birth. Most men can recite random lyrics from his songs. But most of all, there is Sid Mark. Who has dedicated more than 50 years of his life to the presentation and preservation of Frank Sinatra's musical body. He still regularly sells out advertising on his Friday evening and Sunday morning radio shows- blessedly, on the station that presents Rush, Sean and G. Beck. In fact, Frank Jr.- a worthy champion of his father's music in his own right- was a recent guest of one Sid Mark broadcast. In metro Philly, Frank Sr. remains a vital life force for many of us.
William Tucker| 12.31.08 @ 11:00PM
To me the real quality of Sinatra's voice was that it sounded so AVERAGE. They've discovered something in computer graphics - that when you take a lot of faces and average their qualities, the faces become more attractive. So it was with Sinatra. It wasn't that his voice was so distinctive but that it sounded just like everybody sounds to themselves when they sing in the shower. And that was what the persona that Sinatra cultivated as well. He was just the average guy, surprised by love, surprised by his lonliness, surprised to realize how much he loved that girl now that she is gone. It was music that everybody could identify with:
So I'm the guy who turned out a lover,
I'm not the guy who cared about fortune and such
Never cared much
Oh, look at me now!
Lorene| 1.1.09 @ 7:26AM
I was not a swooning Sinatra teenager, however, I was buying his 78's in the 40's. Most of my favorites are from his reprise era. He really came into his own at that time. I'm now transferring my record collection to CD's and hope I live long enough listening to Sinatra to transfer my CD's to a newer technology!
I literally hated the Mickey Mouse music of the 50's which went on to something worse to me, rock & roll. I still blame Elvis Presley for the downgrade in music and have never forgiven him.
stmichrick| 1.1.09 @ 11:24AM
Gerard;
FYI; the CDs that Sid Mark sent to his affiliated radio stations are great finds on eBay.
Rose | 1.1.09 @ 1:00PM
Frank Sinatra was a musician trained in belle cantro, few "singers" of today outside of the opera have any of that sort of training. His phrasing of the poetic set to music didn't 'just happen' he worked at it his whole life as did others of his generation. Gifted, trained and prepared they gave us all their all.
Gary| 1.1.09 @ 11:01PM
I was born in 1946 & loved any music as a child. I sing & play guitar as a hobby & as a child I sang Como, Martin, etc. but when rock & roll came around my genetic code locked in on Elvis, Buddy Holly, Fats, Jerry lee lewis, Sam Cook, & in the sixties rock left me with the advent of the Beatles. I listen to classical, new age, celtic, country, movies themes & some world music. I always respected Sinatra's talent but never could really get into his music. He was a great singer but his music never appealed to me. Elvis has always been the "man" for me because of his great voice & style. He could grind out rock & sing a ballad as no rocker can. I always felt his image & personna as covered in the press & media overshadowed his great musical talent. Without that immense talent he would not have endured. Having just a meager amount of musical talent I truly admire & respect the immense talents of Elvis & Sinatra. I think few appreciate the precious gift such talent is. I have just a smidgeon of it & I consider it a blessing just for my own enjoyment & therapy. The talent of Elvis & Sinatra is a joy to all who listen to their music.
Michael L. Hauschild| 1.2.09 @ 7:05AM
Mr. Beston, you sir contribute to the knowledge of music as Mr. Sinatra sang.
Howard| 1.2.09 @ 8:42AM
I was thirteen back in 1965 when The September of My Years album came out. My father who was 51 at the time loved it. I at the time like the Stones, Beatles, etc. thought Sinatra was cool and tough, but the music was not my favorite. Fast forward forty four years, and I am the old man. My father is deceased. And the words from that album resonate for me. My eighteen year old son is not quite in line with Sinatra, yet.
Bob Miller| 1.2.09 @ 1:53PM
The music of Dion DiMucci, from the 50's 'til now, wears very well, too. Every style (well, maybe not rap) has some exemplars who take it to a high level.
Brian| 1.2.09 @ 2:45PM
I just turned 44 and I bought a "best of" Sinatra album on iTunes.
What grabbed me is Sinatra's ability to paint a picture of a classy guy meeting a classy woman for a great time in a beautiful setting. You can almost smell the cologne, the perfume and the martinis.
Roy| 1.2.09 @ 4:38PM
"But it’s altogether different from the exuberance of youth, when it was you who knew better, and your poor old man who didn’t know diddley. "
I know what Mr. Beston means - but how is rock supposed to retain this feeling when not only people's parents, but increasingly, their grandparents grew up listening to it?
Kathleen| 1.3.09 @ 8:50PM
My kids are in their late teens and early 20's, and they will listen to Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Bobby Darrin and others of that era before they'd listen to Nickelback or REM. I didn't appreciate these men until I was in my 40's. My mother, who is in her 70's, was amazed when she got into my daughter's car with her and a Dean Martin CD came on. My kids would also rather listen to swing music and Gershwin rather than the claptrap that is considered music today. I still like my Beatles and my rock and roll, but Sinatra, Martin, et al, will live on in music history. Twenty years from now, I doubt many people will know who P Diddy, the Jonas Brothers or Amy Winehouse are. There isn't anyone on today's music scene that has lasting talent.
Robert| 1.4.09 @ 1:28AM
Nice Sinatra tribute, Paul, but I wouldn't worry about the silly, non-musical nonsense that you quoted from Michael Gray. In fact, I encourage you to listen to "Like A Rolling Stone" again and check out the wonderful wonderful guitar fills played by Michael Bloomfield. He knew a thing or two about "interplay" as well as the body of 20th century American music.
Sam| 1.4.09 @ 10:55AM
I was born in 1n N.J. in 1932 and grew up as Sinatra was first making a mark in music. I was 7 or so when I first remember hearing some singer (Sinatra) from a juke box transmitted over the P.A. at a pool in New Brunswick singing "All or Nothing at All" with Tommy Dorsey. As a 7 year old I was impressed with the theme of the song and in a way it became symbolic of Sinatra's career.
Bing Crosby was the top crooner back then and the media promoted competition between them as in programs "Battle of the Baritones" helped Sinatra achieve stardom tremendously. I preferred Crosby then and for some songs he is still untouchable. One of the images Sinatra had then was as a skinny kid with a drooping bow tie.
As time went on I greatly appreciated Buddy Clark, a voice that had the best of Crosby and a little Sinatra. His duets with female singers such as Doris Day were the best . I consider Sinatra's duet with Croby "Did You Ever" in High Society the best male duet ever made. Clark He died at the peak of his career in a private plane crash. If he lived on, he would've been a singing icon as Crosby and Sinatra are. I play cd's of that era and I listen to Buddy Clark five times as often as I listen to Sinatra. I concede that Sinatra was more multi-talented. From a tv drama of Sinatra's life produced by his younger daughter I have to conclude that Sinatra hated or was jealous of Buddy Clarke as a singer.
Whenever I go to "The Olive Garden " restaraunt , 80% of the songs played are Sinatra's and Dean Martin.
I had a chance to meet Sinatra once but turned it dow. A friend of mine who was a Vegas headliner at the time were in an Italian Restaurant outside of L.A. when the waiter came over and said,"Frank's in the backroom". My friend who was good friends with Sinatra stood up to go back and invited me to go along, but I said, "No". Sinatra was unpredictable, I was unknown to him and I did not know what his reaction would be to a stranger from Jersey. He could be insulting.
Sinatra was extremely multi-talented, but I preferred two or three others as singers and as a person, it was a mixed bag. He may have been the most talented entertainer of the 20th century, but he always said that he was a bar room singer.
I remember what George Burns said,(paraphrasing now)) " Sinatra, Crosby, Hope they were great but none could compare to Al Jolsen for holding a live audience"
There was another great singer of that era, Alan Dale, who would not cooperate with the mob and after aperformance was thrown through a plate glass window. His career went down because of a supposed affair that would be laughed off today.
Charlie| 1.4.09 @ 5:32PM
YES, there were other excellent singers, but NONE had the timing and phrasing of Sinatra.
CB
Katie| 1.5.09 @ 4:44PM
My 17 year old daughter and her boyfriend love Frank Sinatra. They discovered him on their own, parents and grandparents had nothing to do with it.
jack lindahl| 1.5.09 @ 7:53PM
Who are today's Sinatras (Nats, Ellas....for that matter)?
Treasures all, not to be replicated.
Great column.