Listening To Old Voices

Frank Sinatra, Chairman of the Bored to my barely adolescent ears, was mangling The Beatles’ “Something” on a late-’60s TV special. “You stick around, Jack, and it may show,” Frank sang, and snapped his fingers in his swinging, ring-a-ding way, and I wanted to strangle him. It was blasphemous. Along with Herb Alpert, Ferrante and Teicher, Robert Goulet, and other insipidly unhip representatives of my parents’ record collection, Frank made strictly Old Fogey music, and he had desecrated one of the most beloved works of the sacred rock ’n’ roll canon. In those Generation Gap days, I wasn’t about to offer my grudging admiration. So let me do it now. I believe Frank Sinatra was an arrogant, overbearing blowhard who for years didn’t have a clue about the seismic musical changes that were taking place all around him. I believe that the Rat Pack were a bunch of lecherous lushes. And I believe that “My Way” is still the single biggest piece of self-congratulatory twaddle ever recorded. It’s OK, Sinatra family; please don’t send in the goon squad. I also believe Frank Sinatra is the greatest popular singer who ever lived. My transformation began many years later as an adult, predictably enough in the wee small hours of the morning. It was the heart of winter, cold and icy. My girlfriend had dumped me, and I couldn’t sleep. On a whim I had picked up Sinatra’s 1954 album In the Wee Small Hours from the library. It seemed as appropriate a time as any to rediscover a musical legend, so I cued up the first track and settled back to commiserate with another jilted lover. And I’ve never been the same. This wasn’t the brash, finger-snapping Sinatra of “Come Fly With Me” or “Fly Me to the Moon.” This was Sinatra as brooding torch singer, backed by Nelson Riddle’s superb string arrangements, and he had tapped into the deepest of late-night blues. On the title track, the altogether lovely “It Never Entered My Mind,” and the quietly devastating “When Your Lover Has Gone,” Sinatra’s singing took on a resigned, world-weary magnificence, battered and bruised and bathed in searing pain. The Old Fogey could sing, really sing. And I’ve been a huge fan ever since. It’s impossible to summarize a career so protean and prolific. The three great “Best of” boxed sets from Frank’s Columbia, Capitol, and Reprise years, respectively, span more than 30 years and barely scratch the surface. Together they encompass a massive 11 CDs and more than 250 tracks, and yet they still offer only a tantalizing sampling of the greatness of Sinatra’s music. Sinatra specialized in concept albums, tightly integrated song cycles that formed a cohesive whole, and that’s exactly what is missing in the compilations. But the alternative is to pick and choose from more than 100 officially released albums. It’s a daunting task.

For me, and for many others, Sinatra was at the peak of his interpretive powers during the Capitol Years, 1953-1959, and the 3-CD boxed set that chronicles the highlights from those years is as essential as American music gets. Frank’s voice had weathered and toughened by the mid-’50s, and he’d lost the boyish croon and Bobby Soxer appeal that typified many of his Columbia recordings from the ’40s and early ’50s. What he found, instead, was a masterful way of phrasing, a completely natural and original way of elongating key lyrical phrases that accentuated the beat. It also happened to swing like crazy. Sinatra wasn’t a jazz singer in the classic sense of that term, but he certainly brought a jazz-like sensibility to the songs he covered. And what songs they were. Frank was wrong in thinking that the creative wellspring had run dry with the advent of rock ’n’ roll, but he was right to champion the greatness of the Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths, and he recorded the definitive versions of the best songs from Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Rodgers and Hart, George Gershwin, and Harold Arlen. Sinatra’s standards are among the high points of American music, and nowhere are they on better display than the recordings he made for Capitol. I’m long over my Generation Gap prejudices. My household seems to live in more eclectic, less divisive musical times, and that’s a good thing. My children have no qualms about sandwiching a Sinatra song between Death Cab for Cutie and Van Morrison on compilation CDs, and I’m happy to note that three different musical generations can peacefully coexist. I’m not sure I would have liked Frank Sinatra, the man. But year after year, song after song, he sang like nobody else and better than anybody else. He left a staggering legacy: 60 years of recordings, most of them spent in the musical penthouse suite. He was, and is, the Chairman of the Board.