Goodnight Ladies

LOU REED

from the 1972 RCA LP Transformer 

Words for the Music 028: THE TRASH CAN SINATRAS

 

THE TRASH CAN SINATRAS

OBSCURITY KNOCKS

THE TRASH CAN SINATRAS

    from the 1990 Go! Discs LP

Cake

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

OBSCURITY KNOCKS 

 

 

 

Always at the foot of the photographs

That's me there

Snug as a bug in a mugshot pose

A foul-mouthed rogue

Owner of this corner and not much more

Still these days 

I'm better placed to get my just rewards

I'll pound out a tune and very soon

I'll have too much to say

And a dead stupid name 

 

And though I ought to be learning

I feel like a veteran

Of oh I like your poetry but I hate your poems

Calendars crumble

I'm knee deep in numbers

I've turned twenty-one

I've twist, I'm bust, I'm wrong again

 

Rubbing shoulders with the sheets till two

Looking at my watch

And I'm half-past caring

In the lap of luxury it comes to mind

Is this headboard hard?

Am I a lap behind?

But to face doom in a sock-stenched room

All by myself

Is the kind of fate I never contemplate

Lots of people would cry

Though none spring to mind

 

And though I ought to be learning

I feel like a veteran

Of oh I like your poetry but I hate your poems

Calendars crumble

I'm knee deep in numbers

I've turned twenty-one

I've twist, I'm bust, I'm wrong again

 

Know what it's like

To sigh at the sight

Of the first quarter of life?

Ever stopped to think

And found that nothing was there?

 

They laugh to see such fun

I'm playing blind man's bluff 

All by myself 

(All by myself)

And they're chanting a line

From a nursery rhyme

Sing ba-ba bleary eyes 

have you any idea?

 

Years of learning I must be a veteran

Of oh I like your poetry but I hate your poems

And the calendar's cluttered

With days that are numbered

I've turned twenty-one

I've twist, I'm bust, I'm wrong again

Ought to be learning

Twist, I'm bust, I'm wrong again

Feel like a veteran

Twist, I'm bust, I'm wrong again

Calendar's cluttered

With days that are numbered

And I know what it's like

To sigh at the sight

Of the first quarter of life

And I know what it's like

 

 

 

 

Words and music

JOHN DOUGLAS, STEPHEN DOUGLAS, 

PAUL LIVINGSTON, GEORGE McDAID  

and  

FRANCIS READER

 

 

 

© 1990 Go! Discs UK

 

 

 

 

 

What do we expect of a so-called 'classic' popular song?  A simple but evocative title?  A catchy, easily reproducible melody?  Lyrics that reference and/or illuminate some aspect of our own life experience in unique and unexpected ways, using language mercifully devoid of the clichés that make so much of what is deemed to be 'contemporary pop' so instantly forgettable if not mindlessly awful?   

 

Obscurity Knocks, released by Scottish band The Trash Can Sinatras in 1990, ticked all of these boxes, perhaps explaining why it remains the favourite song of many people who came of age in the heady days of Britpop, an audience that can recall a time when genuine originality was prized and popularity was more than a matter of conforming to the right set of algorithims.

 

The most striking elements of Obscurity Knocks are its title and lyrics, which are at once clever, knowing, innocent and, most crucially of all, surprising.  Little of the imagery is borrowed and what is borrowed — eg. 'Snug as a bug' — is juxtaposed with imagery that is deliberately, often gloriously disarming.  The rhymes are also unusually structured, stressing sounds — for example, the 'ug' sound repeated three times in the third line of the first verse — that are generally avoided by lyricists because they are short and staccato rather than long and round.  (Think of words like 'love,' 'glove,' 'dove' and 'above' and how many times these have appeared in popular songs since popular songs were invented.)  This is capped off by a soaring chorus and not one but two — yes, two! — middle-eight sections, boldly repeated one after the other before the extended final chorus.  

 

Nary a cliché in sight.  And when you add an irresistibly jangly guitar riff and a vocal that makes no apology for its use of Scottish English rather than standard British or North American English (the most overused form of the language on the planet and particularly so in the field of popular music) you have all the ingredients necessary to create a three and a half minute masterpiece.  Of course, this was no guarantee of commercial success in 1990 just as it remains no guarantee of success today.  Obscurity Knocks became a cult favourite rather than a chart favourite, with its accompanying three track EP rising to #86 in the UK and remaining there for a month while it rose to #12 on the Billboard alternative chart, no doubt aided by some consistent exposure on what used to be the vitally important sales tool known as US college radio.  

 

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to visit the website of Scottish band THE TRASH CAN SINATRAS:

 

 

 

https://trashcansinatras.com/

 

 

 

 

 

 

You might also enjoy:

 

 

Words for the Music 025: ROBYN HITCHCOCK

 

 

Words for the Music 022: PHIL JUDD

 

 

Words for the Music 011: KIRSTY MacCOLL

 

 

Words for the Music 027: DORY PREVIN

 

 

 

DORY PREVIN

 22 October 1925 – 14 February 2012

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 CHILDREN OF COINCIDENCE

DORY PREVIN

from the 1976 Warner Records LP

We're Children of Coincidence

and Harpo Marx

 

 

 

 

 

CHILDREN OF COINCIDENCE

 

 

If I hadn't made a left-hand turn

If you hadn't made a right

If I'd waited just a moment more

If you'd missed the light

If that car had never blown its horn

If that friend had stopped to talk

We'd have never met at all

If I didn't take that walk

I'd have gotten there too early

You'd have gotten there too late

We are childen of coincidence

Coincidence and fate

Crossed connections

Lost connections

Empty corners

Crowded intersections

Accidents

And incidents

We're children of coincidence 

And chance

If he hadn't stopped to pick it up

If she hadn't dropped her book

When she took it if she'd noticed him

How come we never look

If she hadn't been so very white

If he hadn't been so black

Would she smile and say hello to him

Would he have turned his back

If she cancelled her appointment

Would he break his other date

We are children of coincidence

Coincidence and fate

 

 

Crossed connections

Lost connections

Empty corners

Crowded intersections

Accidents

And incidents

We're children of coincidence 

And chance

 

 

If the planets were in perfect place

If your sign was on the rise

If my stars were in complete accord

But the sun was in your eyes

You'd have only seen my shadow

As I passed you on the street

And it might have been a hundred years

Before our souls would meet

And we would still be strangers 

Too early and too late

We are children of coincidence

Coincidence and fate

 

 

Crossed connections

Lost connections

Empty corners

Crowded intersections

Accidents

And incidents

We're children of coincidence 

And fate

 

 

 

 

Words and music by

DORY PREVIN

 

© 1976 Warner Records/Rhino Music

 

 

 

 

 

Dory Previn, who was born Dorothy Langan on 22 October 1925, began her career as a cabaret performer and lyricist, initially working most frequently with pianist and composer André Previn, the man who became her second husband in 1959.  

 

The couple wrote a number of well-received songs together while working under contract at MGM studios, garnering their first Academy Award nomination for The Faraway Part of Town that was performed by Judy Garland in the 1960 film Pepé and a second nomination for their 1962 song Second Chance which featured in Two For The See-Saw, a popular film starring Robert Mitchum and Shirley Maclaine.  

 

The next six years saw the couple compose many more cinema-related songs together including You're Gonna Hear From Me (recorded by Frank Sinatra among others) and five witty, tongue-in-cheek titles for the 1967 adaptation of Jacqueline Susann's scandalous 1966 bestseller Valley of the Dolls.  This is all the more impressive given that Dory Previn suffered a psychiatric breakdown in 1965 that saw her briefly hospitalized to undergo treatment for severe depression.

 

Previn's transition from witty Broadway-style lyricist to 1970s singer/songwriter was triggered by the second breakdown she experienced after learning that her husband, who had gone to the UK to work as the conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, was having an affair with actor Mia Farrow and had fathered a child by her.  Previn's breakdown began on the aircraft she had boarded, despite her lifelong fear of flying, to take her to the English capital where she hoped to somehow salvage her doomed marriage.  

 

Writing, specifically about herself and her emotions, became a key component of her therapy and led to the creation of the songs that would appear on her critically acclaimed 1970 LP On My Way To Where.  (This was her second album, preceded by a jazz-based recording of original material titled The Leprechauns Are Upon Me that she released under the name 'Dory Langdon' in 1958.)  The album, which featured her accompanying herself on guitar along with other musicians, included the song Beware of Young Girls, a thinly veiled attack on Mia Farrow who married her former husband that same year, an event which saw Previn re-hospitalized to undergo another course of electro-convulsive therapy.  

 

The LP also featured the chilling cut With My Daddy in the Attic that spoke indirectly of Previn's difficult and possibly incestuous relationship with her father, an Irish-American World War One veteran who had been gassed in the trenches and was prone to episodes of extreme paranoia that, at their worst, saw him become violent toward his wife and children and, at one point, keep them literally imprisoned inside the family home for several months.  Despite this and his destructive habit of alternately overindulging and ignoring her, Previn's father was supportive of her decision to become a performer after she displayed genuine talent as both a singer and a dancer in her youth.

On My Way To Where was followed by six more LPs of original singer-songwriter material including Mythical Kings and Iguanas (1971), Reflections In A Mud Puddle (1971), the concept album Mary C Brown and the Hollywood Sign (1972), the self-titled Dory Previn (1974) and what was to be her next to last solo effort We're Children of Coincidence and Harpo Marx (1976).  She also found time to write two autobiographies, a television screenplay, a song for the controversial 1973 film Last Tango in Paris in addition to releasing the double LP Live At Carnegie Hall that went on to become her most enduringly popular recording.  

 

All of Previn's music features startlingly honest and strikingly original lyrics, many of which are as good as any of those penned by her 1970s singer-songwriter contemporaries, and clever arrangements that make the best use of her limited vocal range.  She was never afraid to tackle taboo topics like incest, artistic failure and the bogus spiritualist movement of the 1970s, often disarming listeners with her combination of high intelligence and what, on occasion, could be dark and even macabre humor.

 

Previn spent the 1980s focusing on stage work, often appearing under the name Dory Previn Shannon, and writing short stories and a novel titled Word-Play With An Invisible Relative.  All this work did not prevent her from co-writing the theme song for the 1980s sitcom Two Of A Kind for which she and her songwriter partner Jim Pasquale received an Emmy award in 1984.  That same year she married actor and artist Joby Baker, going on to collaborate with him on an illustrated edition of her 1970s song lyrics that appeared in 1995 as The Dory Previn Songbook.  

 

Two years later Previn revived her professional partnership with her former husband André Previn, collaborating with him on The Magic Number, a piece he composed for orchestra and solo soprano.  She allegedly contacted Woody Allen after the comedian was accused of sexually molesting his adopted daughter Dylan in 1992, suggesting that Mia Farrow had based the story of what had been done to Dylan inside the Farrow home on the lyrics of her song With My Daddy In The Attic.  Nor is it without significance that, like the decidedly menacing father figure in the song, Allen also plays the clarinet.

 

Despite suffering a series of minor strokes which affected her eyesight, Previn continued to work and managed to release a final LP — another conceptual work about the environment and the threat of nuclear war titled Planet Blue — in 2002, a decade before her death at the age of eighty-six on 14 February 2012.  

 

 

 

Use the link below to listen to more great music by lyricist, composer and cabaret/stage performer DORY PREVIN: 

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=dory+previn

 

 

 

 

Special thanks to everyone who takes the time to upload music to YouTube.  Your efforts are appreciated by music lovers everywhere.

 

 

 

 

 

Use this link to read a long post by JUSTIN LEVINE about the connections between DORY PREVIN and the more lurid aspects of the ALLEN/FARROW scandal:

https://levine2001.medium.com/the-woody-allen-controversy-reader-did-dory-previns-song-lyrics-influence-mia-farrow-in-accusing-6cb1f83038fe

 

 

 

 

 

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Words for the Music 006: DAVE FRISHBERG

 

 

Words for the Music 008: LORENZ HART

 

 

Words for the Music 021: BOBBIE GENTRY 

 

Some Books About… FRANK SINATRA

FRANCIS ALBERT SINATRA
12 December 1915 – 14 May 1998

 

While he did not serve as a catalyst for major cultural shifts in the same way that his predecessors Louis Armstrong and Bing Crosby or his successors Elvis Presley and The Beatles did, there's no denying that Frank Sinatra was and remains, more than two decades after his death, an important cultural figure whose musical influence continues to be surprisingly pervasive. The fourteen LPs he recorded for the Capitol label between 1954 and 1961, featuring his flawless interpretations of material drawn from The Great American Songbook, are still considered to be some of the greatest vocal performances ever recorded by any Western recording artist — performances unequivocally adored by modern audiences who continue to revere them for their nuanced sensitivity, infectious sense of swing and sheer unadulterated beauty.

Sinatra would go on, after leaving Capitol to start and oversee his own Reprise label (a version of which remains in business today), to enjoy a career that would last another thirty years — a significant achievement in itself, given the fickleness of the music-buying public and of an entertainment industry unapologetically obsessed with youth and novelty. It was inevitable that Sinatra's longevity as a performer, combined with his sometimes combative personality and status as one of the world's most controversial celebrities, would make him the subject of a slew of biographies, tributes and exposés of the grimy, scandal-driven variety. In fact, it's difficult to think of another popular male recording artist, with the exceptions of Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson, whose life and career have spawned as much accompanying biographical literature of wildly varying style, length and quality. What follows is a small sampling of what's out there and what, in my view, is worth investigating for the light it sheds on the character and career of this supremely gifted if sometimes contradictory performer.

 

 

I FALL IN LOVE TOO EASILY
FRANK SINATRA
Columbia Records mx. CO33931-1
Recorded 1 December 1944 

featured in the 1945 MGM film 

Anchors Aweigh

 

Michael Joseph Ltd first UK edition, 1962

 

 

 

Sinatra (1962) by ROBIN DOUGLAS-HOME

 

Attempts to analyze Sinatra's appeal began almost as soon as his career itself was properly launched with his 1940 RCA recording — as featured vocalist of the immensely popular Tommy Dorsey Orchestra — of the endearing romantic standard Polka Dots and Moonbeams. While the track was not his first commercial release — that was From The Bottom Of My Heart, which he recorded for the Columbia label as a member of the Harry James Orchestra in March of the previous year — it was his first notable hit, ushering in the early 'Sinatramania' phase of his career which saw him become the idol of millions of swooning teenage girls and the focus of a near riot at New York's Paramount Theater when, having gone solo by this time, he appeared there on 30 December 1942 as an 'extra added attraction' at a concert featuring the Benny Goodman Orchestra. 'The Voice,' as he was affectionately known, clearly had something special to offer and audiences, female and male alike, clamoured to know what made him tick.

 

Robin Douglas-Home, Scottish-born journalist, novelist and jazz pianist son of aristocrat parents (as well as being the nephew of British Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home), shared the curiosity of these early Sinatra fanatics. Becoming fascinated by the singer after purchasing a copy of his classic 1956 LP Songs For Swinging Lovers and playing it virtually non-stop for months, Douglas-Home quickly found himself frustrated by the lack of serious efforts to contextualize Sinatra's artistry.  'From 1956 onwards,' he explains, 'I bought every Sinatra record available, and absorbed every note he recorded, in an attempt to analyse the man's unique power of communication. I read all the so-called profiles on him in British and American publications, but my search for an explanation of his particular talent was invariably fruitless; every writer seemed far more concerned with what girl he was dating at the moment than with an analysis of his professional approach, his artistic ability, or his unique lyric interpretation.'

 

Determined to change this, Douglas-Home contacted the singer's agent, seeking permission to write an in-depth profile of him, only to receive a polite rejection letter for his trouble — a situation that persisted until June 1960 when he found himself invited to a dinner also attended by two of Sinatra's closest friends, Hollywood restaurateur Michael Romanoff and his wife Gloria. The Romanoffs promised to mention the profile idea to Sinatra and subsequently did so, but no invitation to interview him was forthcoming until the following year when an article Douglas-Home had written in praise of Nelson Riddle, generally regarded as being the singer's most gifted arranger, was published in Queen magazine. The Romanoffs gave Sinatra a copy of the article and six weeks later Douglas-Home was summoned to Claridges Hotel in London to meet him. This short but illuminating book was the product of that initial meeting.

 

What differentiates this study of Sinatra from later, more exhaustive studies of his life and career is the fact that it captures him at the crucial point between his departure from Capitol Records and the shift to his own Reprise label. (It's also quite pithy, running to a mere 64 pages, many of which are devoted to glossy black and white photographs.) Sinatra is portrayed, not as the cantankerous, reporter punching thug he was so frequently portrayed as by the muckraking popular press, but as an articulate, intelligent artist whose self-imposed quest for musical perfection never robbed him of his sense of humor in or out of the recording studio. He was also surprisingly candid with Douglas-Home about his childhood at a time when top drawer celebrities were not in the habit of doing this. 'Undoubtedly psychiatrists would say that his great need for affection from others and his deep urge to give affection to others could spring from an emotional starvation or lack of affection as a child,' Douglas-Home speculates at one point. 'He talked occasionally of gang escapades with his High School friends and his work after graduation as copy-boy on a local newspaper. But he plainly preferred to recall even his adolescence within a musical framework.'

 

While it is this focus on Sinatra the musician that makes the book relevant and still worth reading, it also contains many pertinent comments about Sinatra's parallel careers as film star and philanthropist plus a detailed examination of a November 1961 nightclub performance at The Sands Hotel in Las Vegas — the onset of the legendary (or grossly overrated, depending on whom you choose to believe) 'Rat Pack/Clan' era that saw him, fellow vocalists Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr, comedian Joey Bishop and actor Peter Lawford (brother-in-law of John F Kennedy) inflict their love of ad-libbing and booze inspired high-jinks on an equally well-lubricated and, for the most part, thoroughly delighted middle-aged audience.

 

Again, it's the immediacy of Douglas-Home's impressions of the era which makes them so compelling. Nobody suspected in 1962 that Sinatra would remain at the top of his profession for another three decades, transforming himself into the bonafide entertainment legend known as 'The Chairman of the Board' in the process. That said, the occasionally overwhelmed Scotsman does a fine job of dissecting Sinatra's unique and often contradictory appeal. 'He has,' he states at the end of the book, 'by the peculiarly potent chemistry of his nature and image, become the living symbol of an ideal that millions subconsciously would like to emulate, but consciously realise that it would never work out in practice… The paradoxes in his make-up are all part of it — the swashbuckling toughness together with the poignant tenderness, the idolised hero yet simultaneously the small boy underdog, the family man yet the emanicipated charmer of the world.' Many other books would go on to be written about the phenomenon that was Frank Sinatra, but few if any were so immediate or so prescient in their analysis of what would become his lifelong popularity.

Sinatra is currently out of print. 

 

ROBIN DOUGLAS-HOME (1932–1968) was also the author of three novels including Hot For Certainties published in 1966.

 

 

Scribner first US edition, 1995

 

 

 

Sinatra! The Song Is You: A Singer's Art (1995) by WILL FRIEDWALD

 

In a sense, this rivetting piece of musical scholarship could be said to pick up from where Robin Douglas-Home's extended magazine article left off. Already the author of a well regarded study of jazz singing titled, fittingly enough, Jazz Singing: America's Great Voices from Bessie Smith to Bebop and Beyond (1990), Will Friedwald was able to bring the skills that made that earlier book so valuable — enthusiasm, erudition, attention to detail and a penchant for making controversial statements that challenged the preconceptions of readers and critics alike — to bear on the entire recorded output of one of the twentieth century's top selling recording artists. Published in the singer's eightieth year, it investigates 'the way he used his voice to invigorate American popular music with innovative phrasing and a mastery of range and emotion.' It is, in my view, the best book written about Sinatra the musician and what made him a consummate interpreter of songs which, in many cases, came to define the first half of the twentieth century.

 

Friedwald wisely chooses not to restrict his focus to Sinatra himself, emphasizing the vital contributions made to his success by his former bandleading bosses Harry James and Tommy Dorsey and, even more crucially, by his many talented arrangers including (but not limited to) Axel Stordahl, the aforementioned Nelson Riddle, Billy May, Gordon Jenkins, Johnny Mandel, Neal Hefti and Billy Costa. It was Costa's unenviable task to help Sinatra re-invent himself as a performer of contemporary pop material as the market for traditional standards of the Tin Pan Alley variety began to shrink following the emergence of The Beatles and their domination of the charts throughout the 1960s — a period that saw Sinatra tackle, and not always successfully, songs originally recorded by Simon and Garfunkel, Joni Mitchell, The Beatles themselves and, as the 1970s arrived, artists like Neil Diamond and Joe Raposo whose It's Not Easy Being Green, released in 1973, had originally been recorded by Jim Henson in the guise of his Muppet alter-ego Kermit the Frog.

 

Friedwald is particularly enlightening on the subject of Sinatra's groundbreaking 1950s Capitol work — it is probably more accurate to define it as a collaboration — with Nelson Riddle. 'Sinatra and Riddle remained essential to each other,' he notes, 'because each man pushed the other to heights neither could achieve individually. It remained for Riddle to develop both the ballad side and the swinging side of Sinatra, or rather to extend the legacies of Axel Stordahl and George Siravo (and before him, Sy Oliver)… Anyone with half an ear can hear what Riddle did for Sinatra, but it takes a little more digging to ascertain what Sinatra did for Riddle — apart from making him a national name by letting him ride on the coattails of one of the most phenomenal comebacks in showbiz history.' These are shrewd and thought-provoking observations, delivered by a critic whose passion for his subject is clear in every word he writes, even when his tone borders on the vituperative because the music he's describing is less than artistically satisfying as was the case with much of the frequently forgettable material Sinatra recorded prior to his short-lived retirement from the entertainment business in 1970.

 

But the most astute review of Sinatra! The Song Is You comes from one of its contributors, the session guitarist Al Viola who worked closely with the singer for a quarter of a century. 'I've never heard of a book like that,' he confided to Friedwald after being interviewed by him, 'a book on Frank where they talked to guys like me. The people that were really there with him, sweating it out. That's the one book on Frank that hasn't been written. And I think that's the soul of his music.' It is and this fine study does much to affirm the truth of that statement.

 

Sinatra! The Song Is You was last reissued, with a new introduction by vocalist TONY BENNETT, in May 2018 by the Chicago Review Press. 

 

 

 

Little, Brown & Company first US edition, 1998

 

 

 

Why Sinatra Matters (1998) by PETE HAMILL

 

This celebration of Sinatra's life and art — again, quite short by biographical standards — appeared shortly after the singer's death in May 1998 when many of his fans, including its author the North American novelist and journalist Pete Hamill, were mourning not only his long expected passing but the passing of the epoch he embodied and his status as the defining male celebrity of their generation. For many males of Hamill's vintage, including my own father in Australia, Sinatra was the touchstone during their adolescence and early manhood — a trendsetting n'er-do-well whose distinctive personal style they avidly sought to emulate and a performer whose music seemed to have been tailormade to serve as the soundtrack to their exciting new post-war lives. As Sinatra's fame grew during the latter half of the 1950s, so did the reverence these young fans felt for him and his music, particularly for the Capitol material which, as should be obvious by now, represents the pinnacle of his career as a recording artist.

 

Hamill was uniquely qualified to write about this phenomenon because he knew Sinatra personally and was fortunate enough to have interviewed and occasionally socialized with him over a period of several years. Despite this level of access, he baulks at describing himself and the singer as friends. 'To be sure,' he says, 'we were not friends in any conventional way; I did not visit his home and he did not visit mine… But I liked him enormously… He was wonderful with children, including my two daughters. He was funny. He was vulnerable. I never saw the snarling bully of the legend. That Frank Sinatra certainly existed; on the day that his death made all those front pages, there were too many people who remembered only his cruelties… Like all great artists, Frank Sinatra contained secret places, abiding personal mysteries, endless contradictions.'

 

Hamill writes very movingly about his subject's life, beginning with his childhood as a second generation Italian-American in the New Jersey town of Hoboken, just across the river from the city of New York that he would one day come to epitomize in the eyes, minds and hearts of so many of his fans. Hamill is at his best, however, when he relates the facts of Sinatra's life to his music, a task to which he brings a keen eye for detail and a great deal of insight. 'As an artist,' he observes, 'Sinatra had only one basic subject: loneliness. His ballads are all strategies for dealing with loneliness; his up-tempo performances are expressions of release from that loneliness. The former are almost all fueled by abandonment, odes to the girl who got away. The up-tempo tunes embrace the girl who has just arrived. Across his long career, Sinatra did many variations on this basic theme, but he got into real trouble only when he strayed from that essentially urban feeling of being the lone man in the crowded city.' Hamill goes on to link this characteristic theme to the circumstances of Sinatra's upbringing as an only child in a neigborhood and a culture in which large families were considered the norm and any deviation from that norm was viewed with disdain if not with outright suspicion. It is a minor point perhaps, but a significant one that seems to cut to the core of what Sinatra would ultimately go on to achieve as a performer. It was the singer's uncanny ability to affect and to a certain extent define the emotional lives of his audience that Hamill's book celebrates and it's written with skill, taste and, above all, compassion.

Why Sinatra Matters was last reissued, with a new introduction by PETE HAMILL, by Little, Brown & Company in January 2016.

Sadly, North American journalist, novelist, essayist and editor PETE HAMILL died of heart and kidney disease on 5 August 2020 at the age of eighty-five. 

 

Little, Brown & Company first US edition, 1986

 

 

 

Frank Sinatra: A Celebration (1985) by DEREK JEWELL

 

Derek Jewell (1927–1985) was a British novelist, broadcaster and critic who wrote a weekly music column for the London Sunday Times for nearly a quarter of a century. A longtime Sinatra fan, beginning with the singer's rise to prominence in the 1940s when he was affectionately known as 'The Voice' to audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, Jewell was ideally placed to produce what remains a very readable pictorial biography, generously illustrated with dozens of black and white photographs, that deals intelligently and dispassionately with the many controversies that, at times, seemed to plague its subject's life if not define it — his four marriages, his alleged links with the Mafia, his ego-fueled run-ins with various members of the press and, on more than one occasion, his fellow celebrities.

 

While Frank Sinatra: A Celebration is probably not a must-own book for anyone but the most dedicated of Sinatraphiles, it does include a full filmography prepared by Jewell's colleague George Perry, listing all 57 of the singer's appearances on film between 1941 — when he appeared backed by the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra in a now forgotten Paramount production titled Las Vegas Nights — and 1980 when he starred as Detective Edward Delaney in the poorly received police thriller The First Deadly Sin alongside Faye Dunaway, David Dukes and Brenda Vacarro. The accompanying essay, again generously illustrated in black and white with many film stills and publicity shots, is well worth reading, particularly for those who may be less familiar with the singer's film work than they are with his music.

 

Sinatra was a major presence on the world's movie screens throughout the 1950s and much of the 1960s, having proved his cinematic worth by winning the 1953 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Angelo Maggio in the Columbia Pictures adaptation of James Jones's bestselling 1951 novel From Here To Eternity. After co-starring as a shy, love-starved sailor in the MGM musicals Anchors Aweigh (1945) and On The Town (1949) and less successfully in a number of other, less prestigious films in which he was variously cast (or miscast) as an aspiring playwright, a returned GI, a Catholic priest and a neuraesthenic college graduate determined to prove his mettle in the Old West, the role of Maggio proved to be the turning point in what, following his highly publicized divorce from his childhood sweetheart Nancy Barbato and re-marriage to actor Ava Gardner, had become a stalled career which had seen him dropped by Columbia Records and its subsidiary television network and also by his agent who claimed he was owed $40,000 in unpaid commissions. Sinatra's performance as Maggio, a role he worked extremely hard to get and agreed to play for the paltry fee of $8000, re-established him as a major star and led to him being re-signed as a recording artist by Capitol Records. It also bolstered his credentials as an actor, seeing him star in at least nine more films –– including the acknowledged classics The Man With The Golden Arm (1955), The Joker Is Wild (1957), Pal Joey (1957) and the controversial political thriller The Manchurian Candidate (1962) — that remain well worth viewing today. Perry also discusses some of the film projects, such as Carousel (1956) in which he was replaced by Gordon MacRae after arguing with the studio over its decision to film every scene twice to accomodate a new projection system, that may have challenged him more as an actor than much of his subsequent cinematic output managed to do.

Frank Sinatra: A Celebration is currently out of print.

Oxford University Press first US edition, 1995

 

 

 

The Frank Sinatra Reader (1995) by STEVEN PETKOV and LEONARD MUSTAZZA (editors)

 

This is a different kind of Sinatra biography in that, technically speaking, it's not really a biography at all. Rather, it's a chronologically arranged collection of essays, interviews and journalistic pieces covering all phases of the singer's career from the emergence of 'Sinatramania' in the early 1940s up to the gala 1995 tribute concert held at Carnegie Hall in New York City to mark his eightieth birthday. Its contributors include the aforementioned Sinatraphiles Will Friedwald, Pete Hamill and Derek Jewell and they're joined by some of North America's most perceptive jazz and pop critics including Leonard Feather, Robert Palmer, Ralph J Gleason, Johnathon Schwartz, Gene Lees and Whitney Balliet, all of whom have fascinating things to say about the Sinatra phenomenon.

 

Good as these writers are, my favourite piece is a 1974 essay by Martha Weinman Lear titled The Bobby Sox Have Wilted, but the Memory Remains Fresh in which she recalls the time when she, along with all her friends, was a swooning teenage fan. 'Ah, Frankie everlovin',' it begins, 'here we are at the Garden dancing cheek to cheek and the lights are low and it's oh so sweet. We haven't been this close since the old days when I played hookey from school to come see you in the RKO-Boston. You remember me, don't you? I was the one in the bobby sox.' The piece is affectionate and amusing and also a semi-serious attempt to explain the benign form of mass hysteria that gripped so many young female Sinatra fans when he was, for them, not only their beloved 'Voice' but the epitome of romantic sophistication with his boyish charm and superb portamento phrasing, spinning soft romantic dreams for a generation of young women trying to grow up amid the turmoil and uncertainty of World War Two. But Ms Weinman Lear is less dewy eyed when it comes to describing post-Reprise, mid-career Sinatra: 'A few years later, it started getting… seamy. Tacky. With the henchmen and the talk of mob connections, the mean-mouthed confrontations with the press, the public degrading of women, the spectacle of baggy-eyed, boozed-up, middle-aged men trying to make it New Year's Eve forever: We're gonna have fun if it kills us. The Kennedy White House, into whose Camelot he had drifted for a time, dropped him. The Clan faded, maybe of age. His third marriage, to nymphet Mia Farrow, broke up. A lifelong Democrat, he got chummy with Reagan and then, good grief, with Agnew.' But, unsurprisingly, the writer's abiding love of the music overrides even these regrettable associations. 'The blue eyes still burn,' the piece concludes, 'the cuffs are still incomparably shot, the style, the style, is still all there, and what's left of the voice still gets to me like no other voice, and it always will.'

 

The Frank Sinatra Reader is one of the more interesting books published about its subject, offering a mosaic of perspectives on his life and career along with a full discography of his Capitol and post-Capitol recordings (the earlier Columbia and Victor years are ignored for some reason), a complete filmography (which, unlike the George Perry filmography mentioned above, includes what was to be his final film appearance, a cameo in Cannonball Run II released in 1984), a selected bibliography and engaging linking material penned by its non-specialist editors. The book is a labor of love and reads like one, demonstrating yet again why Sinatra remains a captivating yet enigmatic performer whose appeal has never truly faded and probably never will.

The Frank Sinatra Reader is currently out of print.  

 

 

FRANK SINATRA 

c 1960

 

 

Use the link below to visit the family operated website of North American vocalist, actor, entertainer, entrepreneur and philanthropist FRANK SINATRA:

 

 

http://www.sinatra.com/

 

 

 

Special thanks to everyone who takes the time to upload music to YouTube.  Your efforts are appreciated by music lovers everywhere.

 

 

 

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J is for Jazz 014: BING CROSBY

 

 
 

Words for the Music 016: BILLIE HOLIDAY

 

 
 

Some Books About… ELVIS PRESLEY

 

 

 

 

Originally published in the 2021 eBook collection  

Words Fail Me: Selected Nonfiction

 

 § 

La Chanson est la vie 004: CHARLES AZNAVOUR

 

CHARLES AZNAVOUR

22 May 1924 – 1 October 2018

 

 

 

COMME ILS DISENT

CHARLES AZNAVOUR

from the 1972 Barclay LP  

Idiote je t'aime

 

 

 

 

 

COMME ILS DISENT

[AS THEY SAY]

 

 

I live only with mother

In a very old apartment

On Rue Sarasate

To keep me company

I have a tortoise, two canaries

And a cat 

To allow mother to rest

I often do the shopping

And the cooking

I tidy, I wash dishes, I wipe up

On occasion I also sew

With the machine 

Work doesn't frighten me

I'm half-decorator

Half-stylist

But my true calling

Reveals itself at night

Where I perform as a transvestite

I'm an artist

I have a very special number

Which I finish completely nude

Following the strip-tease

And in the room I see that

The men don't believe their eyes

I'm a man

As they say

 

Around three in the morning

My friends and I of both sexes

Go to eat

In some bar-tabac 

And there, with joyful hearts

And without complexity

We unpack the truth

About the people who get up our noses

We stone them to death

But we do it with humour

Wrapped in puns

Damply acidic

We meet retards

Who to impress their table

Walk and wave

Aping what they believe us to be

And the poor fools covering themselves

With ridicule

Gesticulating and speaking loudly

Playing the diva, the stupid show-offs

For me their jibes, their jeers

Leave me cold since it's true

I'm a man

As they say 

 

At the hour when a new day is born

I return home to reclaim

My consolation prize 

Of solitude

I take off my eyebrows and my hair

From weariness 

Like a poor unfortunate clown

I go to bed but I don't sleep

I think of my love affairs without joy

So laughable

Of the handsome boy like a god

Who without doing anything

Sets fire to my memory

My mouth will never dare

To share my sweet secret

My tender drama

Because the object of my torments

Spends most of his time

In the beds of women

Nobody truthfully has the right

To blame or judge me

And I specify

That nature is wholly responsible if

I am a man

As they say

 

 

 

Words & Music by  

CHARLES AZNAVOUR

© 1972 Barclay Records France

 

 

Translated (very loosely) by  

 BR

 

 

 

See below for original French text

 

 

Charles Aznavour, who was born Shahnour Vaghinag Aznavourian to Armenian parents in Paris on 22 May 1924, was at the height of his international fame when his twenty-third album Idiote je t'aime [Idiot, I love you] was released in July 1972.  After entering showbusiness at the age of nine — the same year he heard Maurice Chevalier's recording of Donnez moi la main Mamz'elle et ne dites rien [Give Me Your Hand Miss and Say Nothing], the song he claimed inspired him to pursue a career as a chansonnier — and achieving some early success in Québec as a member of a duo featuring himself and actor Pierre Roche, Aznavour had by then become a bestselling recording artist who had appeared in more than thirty feature films, some of which he co-wrote and provided the soundtracks for.  He was arguably the most famous Frenchman in the world (despite the fact that his heritage was one hundred per cent Armenian) and a top concert attraction in France and many other countries including the UK and North America thanks to a string of successful hit singles (sung in a variety of languages) that included the evocatively romantic She and the achingly wistful Yesterday When I Was Young.

Aznavour's fame is partly what makes his decision to write and record a song like Comme ils disent [As They Say] so noteworthy.  The early 1970s was not a time when the subjects of homosexuality or the lives of drag queens were openly spoken of, if they were spoken of at all, with anything resembling understanding or acceptance.  

 

Comme ils disent was a bold statement for a popular mainstream performer to make at the time, particularly when the performer in question was neither gay nor a drag queen himself.  Nor was the reaction of Aznavour's gay friends to the song quite what he'd anticipated.  As he stated in a 2011 newspaper interview, they initially greeted the song with baffled silence when he performed it for them.  "Ça a jeté un froid," he remembered.  "Puis on m'a demandé qui allait chanter ça. J'ai répondu : « moi ». Nouveau silence. Puis quelqu'un s'est inquiété de savoir si je ferais une annonce. Vous m'imaginez annonçant sur scène que je vais me mettre à la place d'un homosexuel, alors que je ne le suis pas ? Il n'était pas question de reculer."  [It threw out a chill…  Then they asked me who was going to sing it.  I answered, 'Me.'  New silence.  Then someone became anxious to know if I would make an announcement.  Can you imagine me announcing on-stage that I'm going to put myself in the place of a homosexual, when I am not that?  There was no question of going back.']

 

The song obviously conveyed a message that a lot of people, LGBTQIA+ and otherwise, were eager to hear.  Subsequently released as a single, Comme ils disent went on to sell a respectable 150,000 copies and become a mainstay of Aznavour's stage act for decades to come.  Nor is it difficult to understand why it struck such an enduring chord with his audience.  It's a deeply moving song, one very much in keeping with the chanson tradition that insists on drawing its subject matter from the circumstances, promising or crushing, of everyday life.  The narrator is portrayed as a forlorn human being and an artist, not as a freak to be vilified and ostracized by an ignorant and prejudiced society.  That was a powerful message in 1972 and remains just as powerful half a century later, a reminder that to be an LGBTQIA+ person is neither a consciously made 'lifestyle choice' nor a 'sin' as so many fundamentalists of all faiths prefer to believe for reasons that remain, to me, as ludicrous as they are indefensible.  

 

 

 

Use the link below to visit the website (in English) of Armenian-French singer/songwriter, actor, diplomat and philanthropist CHARLES AZNAVOUR:

 

https://en.aznavourfoundation.org/

 

 

 

 

 

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La Chanson est la vie 001: CLAUDE NOUGARO

 

 

La Chanson est la vie 003: BARBARA

 

 

Une vie intense REMEMBERING JACQUES BREL

 

 

 

 

 

COMME ILS DISENT

 

J’habite seul avec maman
Dans un très vieil appartement
Rue Sarasate
J’ai pour me tenir compagnie
Une tortue, deux canaris
Et une chatte
Pour laisser maman reposer
Très souvent je fais le marché
Et la cuisine
Je range, je lave, j’essuie
À l’occasion je pique aussi
À la machine
Le travail ne me fait pas peur
Je suis un peu décorateur
Un peu styliste
Mais mon vrai métier, c’est la nuit
Où je l’exerce, travesti
Je suis artiste
J’ai un numéro très spécial
Qui finit en nu intégral
Après strip-tease
Et dans la salle je vois que
Les mâles n’en croient pas leurs yeux
Je suis un homme oh !
Comme ils disent

 

Vers les trois heures du matin
On va manger entre copains
De tous les sexes
Dans un quelconque bar-tabac
Et là, on s’en donne à cœur joie
Et sans complexe
On déballe des vérités
Sur des gens qu’on a dans le nez
On les lapide
Mais on le fait avec humour
Enrobés dans des calembours
Mouillés d’acide
On rencontre des attardés
Qui pour épater leur tablée
Marchent et ondulent
Singeant ce qu’ils croient être nous
Et se couvrent, les pauvres fous
De ridicule
Ça gesticule et parle fort
Ça joue les divas, les ténors
De la bêtise
Moi les lazzis, les quolibets
Me laissent froid puisque c’est vrai
Je suis un homme oh !
Comme ils disent

 

À l’heure où naît un jour nouveau
Je rentre retrouver mon lot
De solitude
J’ôte mes cils et mes cheveux
Comme un pauvre clown malheureux
De lassitude
Je me couche mais ne dors pas
Je pense à mes amours sans joie
Si dérisoires
À ce garçon beau comme un dieu
Qui sans rien faire a mis le feu
À ma mémoire
Ma bouche n’osera jamais
Lui avouer mon doux secret
Mon tendre drame
Car l’objet de tous mes tourments
Passe le plus clair de son temps
Au lit des femmes
Nul n’a le droit en vérité
De me blâmer, de me juger
Et je précise
Que c’est bien la nature qui
Est seule responsable si
Je suis un homme oh !
Comme ils disent 

 

 

 

 

Paroles et musique par 

CHARLES AZNAVOUR

© 1972 Barclay Records France