Culture Vultures: Under My Skin

...or rockers like Linda Ronstadt and Robert Palmer, desperate to appropriate a little retro chic...

...On Ella Fitzgerald's recording, the word passes unnoticed merely as a pretty "ow" sound...

...He died owing Capitol the last album of a three-album deal: the only 82-year-old pop singer with a recording contract...

...Without the rendition, there is no song," Jule Styne, Sinatra's onetime flatmate and long-time composer ("Time After Time," "Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out to Dry"), used to say...

...Ira loved Sinatra, but he didn't like his interpolations, especially 'I viewed the morning with much alarm.' Ira very much disliked that 'much.'" Hmm...

...Of course, that's exactly what the purists (Continued on page 82) The American Spectator • July 1998 49 Steyn/Sinatra (Continuedfrompage49) loathe about him...

...his Barrack-Room Ballads and a favorite of concert party baritones throughout the British Empire, comes out as surging big-town swing with Frank checking out the chicks east of Suez...

...From now on, we'll be on that long, long road without our greatest troubadour...

...77 audience likes it...

...Robinson...

...As for bedding and abusing women, all Frank's ex-wives stayed friends (and the living ones showed up at the funeral) and the casual affairs seemed fondly grateful to him, too...

...In 1984, he started singing "Mack the Knife" and made it one of the surest crowdpleasers of his last decade...

...This is a man who's left us "Angel Eyes" and "You Make Me Feel So Young" and "When Your Lover Has Gone...

...Frank's version goes: So how's your bird, Mrs...

...Five years later, he'd written a Broadway musical, retired from touring, given up on radio because he'd been told he didn't fit any of its "formats," and was peppering his conversation with references to other New York Jewish composers like Kern and Gershwin...

...Pop is fashion, yet Sinatra somehow managed to be at odds with whatever the prevailing fashion was...

...He looked at me as if I were nuts: "You can do anything in rock'n'roll," he said...

...On his desk, he had a Frank Loesser songbook...

...Robinson" to Paul Simon...

...Rock'n'roll was supposed to liberate pop music...

...Then when he sings 'lonely' in "Only the Lonely," it sounds such a lonely word...

...I once made the mistake of mentioning Sinatra's cover of "Mrs...

...In the rap era, Rich & Co...

...if you've spent six years defending Bill Clinton, the strains are bound to show...

...It's quite a different mood...

...Sammy, naturally, cited examples from his own lyrics: "When Sinatra sings, `Weather-wise, it's such a lovely day,' that slur on 'lovely' makes it sound the loveliest word ever...

...CULTURE VULTURES by Mark Steyn Under My Skin A s Sinatra himself wondered in another context: "What now, my love...

...Compared to the midlife crises of the rock generation, Sinatra's career trajectory is enviable...

...It's hat brims and Jack Daniel's—anything, it seems, to avoid acknowledging the unpalatable truth: that Sinatra built his house upon the bedrock of great songs sung better than they've ever been...

...And as long as Sinatra was out there, there was always the chance that the magic would alight on yet another song...

...I loved the way he was so relaxed with Rodgers and Hart that the middle section of "The Lady Is a Tramp"—"She loves the free, fresh wind in her hair" —would emerge as "She loves the free fine wild cool knocked out groovy koo-koo wind in her hair," or some variation thereof...

...I had some small personal contact with him, and he didn't seem like a "thug...

...Henry Louis Gates, Jr...

...I'll bet, in the finished show, all the musical excerpts are by those tremulous, overwrought New York cabaret singers who linger leeringly over every polysyllabic rhyme...

...I think Rich is indulging in what the psychologists call displacement...

...Kipling's "Road To Mandalay," written in 1892 for MARK STEYN is theater critic of the New Criterion and movie critic of the Spectator of London...

...With Sinatra, the good old days were always now, tonight: the essence of a great song is its versatility and, almost as if in rebuke to the tunnel vision of other singers, Frank was endlessly resourceful in finding new things to do with 'em...

...When Frank finally faced his final curtain, checked into the big casino, split the scene with the cat with the scythe, Time magazine headlined its cover story simply "Put Your Dreams Away" after his old closing theme: Put Your Dreams Away For another day...

...But I'm going to sing it the way George and Ira wrote it," he said...

...Sinatra is too naturalistic a singer to be comfortable with that: his solution—the interpolated "much"—seems perfectly acceptable...

...I once discussed the subject with New York cabaret darling Michael Feinstein...

...he was "a man who bedded and abused women by the score...

...Elton and Bowie and all the rest can only marvel...

...Across sixty years, Sinatra got to songs by writers as diverse as Rudyard Kipling and Sonny Bono...

...48 Ju y 1998 • The American Spectator ness recording that song...

...The weirdest thing about his death was all the rock star tributes...

...And, in return, Prof...

...Frank Sinatra had no busiAmerican popular song died with Frank Sinatra...

...In his own way, Sinatra kept these songs alive and kicking for a general audience...

...Time's headline distilled perfectly the sense of loss—for elderly grandmothers recalling bobbysoxer days at the Paramount...

...Sinatra's last words were "I'm losing...

...Maybe it's just that no one else is left: Bing and Ella, Sammy and Dean are all gone, so are Frank's writers—Jimmy Van Heusen, Sammy Cahn, Jule Styne — and his orchestrators—Don Costa, Nelson Riddle, Gordon Jenkins...

...But an awful lot of that is being credited to what Stephen Stills and Bono call his "attitude" and Jewel his "style" and Ted Nugent his "cool...

...I think you could make the case that, when Ira wrote up George's tune for"A Foggy Day," that line—"I viewed the morning with alarm" — is flawed...

...In the sixties, he started doing it as a swinger...

...Most singers think of Sinatra's recording and they want to do the same kind of macho interpretation...

...But here's the dirty little secret of rock'n'roll as it enters its fifth decade: whatever its merits as a spectator sport, for its practitioners it's...unsatisfying...

...But for the most part, middle-aged rockers, held in thrall to their juvenilia, would love to be Sinatra...

...Think about it: At 69, the guy is adding to his repertoire and the44 All Frank's ex-wives stayed his friends—and the living ones showed up at his funeral...

...of Harvard metaphorically does just that and insists that 2-Live Crew is working in the same tradition as Shakespeare...

...Nor was he keeping in touch with his contemporaries...

...Whatever Sinatra's message is, it eludes me," he sniffs...

...In the fifties, he had a beautiful ballad arrangement of "Where or When...

...Mine is fine as wine And I should know Ho ho ho ...which isn't exactly what Paul had in mind...

...But it's not a lament for the good old days...

...According to Frank Rich in the New York Times, Sinatra "not infrequently resembled a thug...

...And Feinstein obligingly machoed himself up to demonstrate Frank's finger-snappy, distinctly unfoggy style...

...These fellows are perfectly pleasant for a while, but they're the morticians of popular song...

...On the other hand, the last time I saw him, Simon wasn't listening to much of the new stuff either...

...instead it's imprisoned it in what Nancy Wilson—the Nancy Wilson who sings with Heart, that is, not the old jazz dame—calls "frenzied, thrillseeking, hormonedriven rock theater...

...Sonny's "Bang...

...He was a pop star once—in the forties, when the girls were squealing and swooning and wetting their knickers—but when that all turned sour, Frankie determined that, if he was ever popular again, it would be on his terms...

...written as bouncy-bouncy Seventies Hit Parade fodder for Cher, is transformed from a kiddies' jingle into a rueful meditation on life's illusions...

...Singing is, after all, an interpreter's art...

...He couldn't relate to the lyrics at all, so he changed them all...

...He was off to Britain, where he was intending to sing the Gershwins' "A Foggy Day (In London Town...

...It's hard to be optimistic: with Sinatra gone, the American songbook is in the shaky hands of operatic crossover artists like Jose Carreras and Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, guys without a consonant in their body...

...their younger champions seem determined to take some of the biggest hits of all time and reduce them to a minority interest...

...When he was asked how he'd like to be remembered, he always said that he hoped it would be for a certain approach to singing which he'd like to think would endure...

...Rich, though, isn't the only media commentator who takes the line that, while all the other celebrities harried by J. Edgar Hoover were undoubtedly the victims of an intrusive and obsessive federal agency out of control, the Sinatra investigation was uniquely justified...

...This isn't a rant against rock...

...That he survived with his legend enhanced is amazing...

...All right, to be honest, it is...

...Besides, "I Can't Get No Satisfaction" makes more sense as a plaint for seniors than as an anthem of rebellious youth...

...Admittedly, not all aging rockers are Frank fans...

...T hat Sinatra survived the last forty years is impressive...

...for wannabe hip Gen Xers in shot cuffs staring at grainy footage of Frank and Dino with the smokes and the tumblers and knowing that guys will never be allowed to have that good a time again...

...spend so much time bending over backwards to defend ugliness they seem to have lost their capacity to believe in beauty—the beauty of In the Wee Small Hours or Songs for Swingin' Lovers...

...I haven't heard it, but I gather Bob Dylan's last album was a big hit," he said at one point...

...A few years ago, at the end of a long TV interview with Simon, I suggested to him that he was bound, surely, to find rock music more and more limiting...

...It always comes back to the songs...

...Sinatra has no plans to tour at present...

...Who wants to be up on stage pushing 6o with nothing to say but "Well, she was just 17/You know what I mean...

...Yeah, okay, the Stones do —and good luck to them...

...In 1994, for the Duets II album, he made it a trio with Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme in a version that has Steve and Eydie vocalizing the instrumental figures so that the piece is reinvented as something halfway between ultra-Vegas and a contemporary take on Lambert, Hendricks and Ross's jazz stuff in the fifties As long as Frank was around, he kept the Great American Songbook current...

...Bang...

...I've never heard the Spice Girls," he mentioned en passant, "but I gather they're a young persons' phenomenon...

...But, without the guy who did the best renditions, what hope for the songs...

...or bloodless cabaret turns turning these songs into museum exhibits...

...When Eisenhower's America promoted cosy, picket-fence domesticity, Frank recast himself as a swingin' bachelor...

...A couple of days before he died, I was being interviewed by the BBC for a Rodgers and Hart special and every time I mentioned a Sinatra recording, you could almost hear the producers wince...

...The word "with" is given far too much weight: it's accented, it's a minim, it's a preposition yet, as written, it lasts forever...

...he was a friend of several friends of mine, and I'd be inclined to take their valuation...

...By contrast, 2-Live Crew has given us such timeless lyrics as: You said it yourself you like it like I do Put your lips on my d- -k And suck my ass---e, too...

...When the late Tupac Shakur, author of such gems as "I f----d your bitch, you fat motherfu-- er," met his end, the critics insisted that the gangsta stuff was just a front, that in private he was a real sweetie-pie, sensitive and good to his mother...

...In their precious, prissy over-reverent interpretations, you hear not the ring-a-ding-ding of Frank but the death knell of the mainstream repertoire...

...said Simon indignantly...

...In any case, the minute you start hailing his "attitude," you run up against someone for whom that's the chief obstacle...

...At 5o, a time when most celebrities are still pretending they're 28, Sinatra embraced premature old age and songs of wistful regret: "(When I was 17) It Was a Very Good Year...

...So instead Bob Dylan and Ted Nugent, Tom Waits and Stephen Stills, Bono and Usher and Jewel stepped up to salute a man with whom, on the face of it, they have nothing in common...

...Alas, not for just a day, but for always...

...No, Frank, we are...

...And even though he hadn't been on stage since his 8oth birthday, the official position up until the end, as articulated by his spokesperson Susan Reynolds, was only that "Mr...

...and, above all, for those of us who feel that with Sinatra's passing the golden age of popular song slipped a little further into the past and out of reach, the golden age of Rodgers and Hart, of Berlin and Porter, and also, while we're at it, of my compatriot Ruth Lowe, an obscure Toronto pianist who gave Frank not only "Put Your Dreams Away" but also his first number one, "I'll Never Smile Again...

...I'm with Jule on this one, though it doesn't seem to cut much ice with Feinstein...

...One wouldn't want to date the era too precisely...

...Sammy Cahn once told me that Sinatra's gift was that he could make any word sound like what it was, only more so...

...But the obsession with Sinatra's "flaws" is bizarre...

...You could find similar examples of heightened onomatopoeia throughout Sinatra's catalog: for an example of his ability to ride a rhythm section bouncing the words off into the stratosphere, look no further than "Wanna go and bounce the moon" in "You Make Me Feel So Young...