BETWEEN A ROCK AND SINATRA: Catching on to the Chairman of the Board's greatness after a lifetime of rock and roll

...It is sung, played and written for the most part by cretinous goons and by means of its almost imbecilic reitera­tion, and sly, lewd, in plain fact, dirty lyrics…it man­ages to be the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the earth...

...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...

...But it’s certainly true that Sinatra’s great ballad albums, song after song about the pain of lost love, depict a raw vul­nerability, at times even what sounds like helpless­ness, that is far riskier than what most male pop 26 THe aMeRIcan sPecTaToR ocTobeR 2008 singers would hazard today—even as, paradoxically, touchy-feely men are so much more in vogue than they were in the 1950s...

...In an era when image is much more than half the battle, this pose still seems relevant, even contemporary...

...And to be fair to rock, it’s not just a backbeat that Sinatra’s music lacks...

...Near the end of his life he consented to the novelty album Duets, featuring the likes of Bono, Anita Baker, and others who sang along to his pre-recorded renditions...

...A nD yet, to twist the worDs of Andrew Marvell: at my back I always hear rock’s wicked guitars thundering near...

...To refuse to go mad, to just tip Joe and then walk home alone, seems somehow inauthentic in this rock world...

...I’ve winced at my share of Sinatra lyrics...

...Speaking in 1957, he made himself infa­mous among the younger crowd by declaring that “Rock ’n’ roll smells phony and false...

...He’s right...

...Only the singer’s skill compensates—that is, assuming the listener consid­ers such singing compelling in the first place...

...In his music, at least, Sinatra never did go mad, never relinquished control...

...While he was releasing September of My Years, Dylan listeners were hearing this: Now Ophelia, she’s ’neath the window For her I feel so afraid On her twenty-second birthday She already is an old maid To her, death is quite romantic She wears an iron vest Her profession’s her religion Her sin is her lifelessness That makes for a steep linguistic contrast with Sinatra’s instruction that, say, love and marriage go together like the horse and carriage...

...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 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...

...Michael Gray, author of The Bob Dylan Encyclo­pedia, describes Sinatra’s music as the kind that rock “was born to abolish...

...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...

...Speaking in 1957, he made himself infamous among the younger crowd by declaring that “Rock ’n’ roll smells phony and false...

...This is not to say that the man wasn’t capable of hitting you over the head with emotion when the spirit seized him...

...Forty years on, that’s an enviable title indeed...

...And we’re all invited to witness the conflagration, still guided by the predominant aesthetic of the last half-century, as set down by Jack Kerouac: “The only people for me are the mad ones…” If you’re not one of them, you’re not really in the game...

...When a typical wimp singer of today like, say, R.E.M.’s wormlike Michael Stipe, goes groveling in song, nobody is surprised...

...That mastery, so evident to older lis­teners, can still sneak up on Sinatra’s lost genera­tions...

...Maybe...

...It happened the night of my own wedding reception, when, watching my bride dance with her father to “Summer Wind,” it occurred to me that Frank Sinatra was undefeated, stronger than rock...

...The title track of Only the Lonely, for example, is a kind of symphon­ic wonder...

...Especially when they hear something like “Luck Be a Lady,” in which Sinatra sings, with joyfulness but also a hint of threat: Let’s keep this party polite Never get out of my sight Stick with me baby, I’m the guy that you came in with They might be reminded of how constricted they are in their dealings with the fairer sex, even as, it seems, all the barriers have come down...

...His singing demanded to be felt, not admired...

...Yet here he is telling us: I thought I found the gal I could trust What a bust This is how the story ends: She’s gonna turn me down and say, “Why can’t we be just friends...

...Listening to Sinatra now, having come to him so late, feels something like being one of those early middle-aged characters in his great 1950s ballads, who suddenly wakes to discover that the answers he thought he had weren’t answers at all...

...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...

...And there are those vintage lines at the end that mark off Sinatra’s era from the coming rock age: “This torch that I found/It’s gotta be drowned/Or it soon might explode...

...Music more complex than rock—a description that covers an enormous landscape—can sound merely con­fined, devoted to form at the expense of freedom...

...ocTobeR 2008 THe aMeRIcan sPecTaToR 27...

...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...

...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 kick­starting violence of rock and roll...

...If he doesn’t, then he is left with a dead singer singing dead words...

...It’s words that sound like they ocTobeR 2008 THe aMeRIcan sPecTaToR 25 could be spoken by characters in today’s movies and songs...

...I read a few obituaries and then headed over to YouTube, where I saw an astounding video of Diddley performing “Road Runner”—barely a min­ute and a half of intoxicating, percussive rhythm...

...And to a rock listener, freedom—as rock defines it, anyway—is the whole ballgame...

...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...

...Part of Sinatra’s old-style manliness was also about sophistication and knowingness, of course...

...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...

...However crude or simplistic many rock lyrics were, and however self-conscious and pretentious they have become (especially in comparison with Sinatra expressed his own views about rock early on...

...That’s because I’ll always be a child of the rock era...

...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...

...Regardless of the tiresome debates about the literary value of rock song lyrics—which invariably become a debate, really, about the literary value of Bob Dylan song lyrics, the only ones worth arguing about—there’s no point denying that Sinatra’s remoteness from a younger audience has to do not just with how he sings, but what he sings...

...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...

...by Paul beston Sinatra 22 THe aMeRIcan sPecTaToR ocTobeR 2008 I t always seemeD strangely appropriate that Frank Sinatra died on the day of the Seinfeld finale— ago this past May...

...Yet even when they paid him tribute, the rockers could never let go of their self-regard...

...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...

...He hangs out with gangsters, for crying out loud...

...Hamill writes that Sinatra “perfected the role of the Tender Tough Guy and passed it on to several generations of Americans…[He] created a new model for American masculinity...

...Sinatra expressed his own views about rock early on...

...I was still a rock and roll devotee, though my devotion was waning with each passing year...

...Rather than acknowledging that Sinatra’s greatness embodied something separate from and mostly incompatible with rock, Bono instead argued that his virtues were really rock’s virtues...

...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...

...On a night when losses, and the good life...

...At a televised 80th birthday tribute in 1995, Bruce Springsteen praised Sinatra’s music for evoking a “nasty sense of freedom,” whatever that meant (it sounded like an outtake from “Born to Run...

...T he 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...

...The album, which became a top-seller, was an ingenious bit of marketing, if not music, and it also made clear that the old musical divisions were break­ing down...

...The song describes the kind of despair that rockers tend to convey with shouts, screams, or grunts of uncomprehending pain...

...Among many other things, his work dramatized the great discipline it takes to resist the temptations that loss offers for let­ting everything go...

...Sinatra, Bono seemed to imply, was really a rocker...

...The album’s most famous track, The fact’s uncommonly clear I got to find who’s now the number one rchestrated and overbearing song that And why my angel eyes ain’t here inatra nevertheless turns into a signature Excuse me while I disappear ment, but its narrators almost always want the world esis of rock’s dream of an eternal present: 24 THe aMeRIcan sPecTaToR ocTobeR 2008 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 B ut blues in the night was just one half of Sinatra’s canon...

...It was almost enough to make me forget why I’d turned away from rock in the first place...

...Rock, it seemed, didn’t age with the listener...

...Contrary to rock’s cen­tral premise of spontaneous combustion, the song is more devastating because of Sinatra’s devotion to form...

...In “Angel Eyes,” the world goes merrily on its way, and the singer’s anguish is private...

...The avail­ability of instant gratification in music, like in any­thing else, fundamentally alters our tastes...

...The whole tough/tender circle is squared in “One for My Baby,” a classic Sinatra performance...

...To rock’s children, Sinatra was all polish and style, drained of emotion and risk...

...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...

...On that night, I was more interested in seeing how Seinfeld would turn out than in remembering Sinatra...

...But the Sinatra tough-guy persona was much more compli­cated than the facile public image of a pre-rock and roll bad boy...

...the rock singer must always stand in the center, bathed in spotlight...

...Catching on to the Between a Chairman of the Board’s greatness after a lifetime Rock and of rock and roll...

...The real problem is that rock makes music synonymous with sensation, brute force, and emotional release—and renders the absence of such ocTobeR 2008 THe aMeRIcan sPecTaToR 23 things suspect and seemingly dishonest...

...There are no shadows or cor­ners of the room...

...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...

...Even if Sinatra’s music somehow finds a way to hover over the 21st century, his listeners won’t be hearing the same things...

...Paul bestonis associate editor of City Journal...

...Or perhaps it’s more like the musical equivalent of realizing that your father was right all along...

...his up-tempo music (always played by the top hands in the business) exudes a class and refinement that rock, devoted to spirit over craft and rooted despite its best efforts in the adolescent, simply does not pos­sess...

...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...

...It always revealed more than it concealed...

...This past summer, the wires carried news of the death of Bo Diddley, one of rock’s pioneering instrumentalists and bandleaders, who created a syncopated guitar style that is routinely copped, in song after song, right up to the present day...

...I can’t get the back­beat out of my head, though I now wish I could...

...Here the two personas come together: the hard­living guy, alone in the bar after hours, still knock­ing back the booze, but left alone with the bartender to lament the “end of a brief episode...

...More subtle is the album’s finale, September Song,” in which Sinatra sings as a Rock knows something about such estrange-man whose time is passing—an idea the very antith­ It Was a Very Good Year,” is an overescending—toooften,anyway—intobathos Pardon me but I got to run r self-pity...

...he’s no tofu-eater...

...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...

...That’s a long way from the rock vision of following impulse where it leads...

...That’s what makes Sinatra’s lost-love music so compelling...

...it aged the listener...

...it’s difficult to believe that there is a single model, any­more, for American masculinity...

...those of the Gershwins or Cole Porter), it’s also true that rock’s informal, profane, hipster vocabulary was the language of at least the last third of the cen­tury...

...The album is a song-cycle of exquisite expressions of melancholy and awareness of the receding calendar, without erformance...

...With two parents, a kid can survive almost anything, even American popular culture...

...Hearses can ride in carriages, too, and to younger ears, accus­tomed by now to all manner of wordplay in rock songs, such lines sound stale and dead...

...It doesn’t get more patronizing than that...

...Like many of my generation (I was born in 1966), I viewed Sinatra as an icon from a musty and dusty age...

...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...

...Its absence looms over any music I try to embrace...

...His views of their work aside, aging pop royalty had come to crave the Sinatra affiliation, a professional way of marrying up...

...Sinatra’s performance of “Angel Eyes,” on the other hand, traces a much subtler, quieter course of personal disintegration: to know about it, too...

...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...

...he risks nothing by exposing himself...

...Angst is all that he has to sell...

...In an embarrassing tribute at the Grammys a year earlier, Bono celebrat­ed Sinatra for setting an example that rock stars wanted to emulate: that is, he had “bad attitude” and snarl and edge, he was a tough guy, and he was not to be “messed with...

...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...

...I’m not sure Sinatra ever quite convinces us that he is as happy as the music and words of these songs instruct him to be—more often than not, the joy seems fleeting, as in “Summer Wind”—but the sense of five-carat style and once again, mastery, come through...

...The rock instinct is just the opposite: the torch should be lubricated for maximum flamma­bility, the better to express in a howl that will be regarded, on sheer force alone, as art...

...But he’s already gone...

...He never renounced this judgment, though in time he covered some pop-oriented material, including George Harrison’s “Something,” which he remarkably called one of the greatest love songs ever written...

...Every generation has to figure him out from scratch,” he writes—but that’s assuming they’ll think it’s worth the trouble...

...T he rockers can’t necessarily be blamed for trafficking in Sinatra caricatures that had, after all, been around for decades...

...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...

...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...

...After the initial sheepishness, a certain satisfaction, even liberation, results, and Sinatra’s music becomes a great undis­covered thing about middle age, a strong and unex­pected bulwark to hold up against the advancing years, its pedigree matchless, its worth already proven...