This Day in Pop Music History (Sinatra Concept LP, ‘Only the Lonely,’ Offers Torch-Song Toppers)

Sept. 8, 1958—Once again collaborating with master arranger Nelson Riddle, Frank Sinatra reached something like a career commercial and critical peak with his latest in a series of song cycles he had helped popularize, the “concept album.”

Though baby boomers associate the concept album (a song collection united by theme and musical motifs) with such collections as The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Who’s Tommy, and the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, Sinatra got there first, sensing, with the extra minutes afforded by the arrival of the LP in 1948, that he could make such records far more ambitious—and requiring closer attention by the listener—than a mere collection of hits and filler material.

In a little more than a decade, he would create several such compilations: Songs For Young Lovers, Swing Easy, Moonlight Sinatra, and, as he turned fifty, September of My Years.

While several of these would be uptempo, it was his more melancholy LPs that called out his soulful, sensitive side. There are those who prefer In the Wee Small Hours as an example of this tendency.

But the one that came out 65 years ago today, Frank Sinatra Sings For Only The Lonely (often shortened to Only the Lonely, as I will do here), struck a special chord with the public, reaching #1 on the charts and being nominated for five Grammys in the first time those recording industry awards were presented. It also measured up to the singer’s demanding standard, as it would be one of the ones he would cite toward the end of his five-decade career as his favorite.

The Best Album Cover Grammy—the only one that, ironically, the album did win—should have been a dead giveaway that the finger-snappin’, swaggerin’ swinger who had been riding the pop charts had taken a back seat to the self-described “saloon singer” who craved the intimacy of a nightclub to communicate with audiences.

Artist Nick Volpe painted Sinatra, amid a gloomy dark background, as a Pagliacci-like sad clown, and the singer had much to be sorrowful about during the recording sessions: his last attempt at a regular TV series, The Frank Sinatra Show, was about to be canceled, and though his divorce from Ava Gardner was finalized the year before, she still represented for him The One Who Got Away.

Sinatra joked that the bleak tunes on Only the Lonely were “suicide songs,” but those familiar with the singer-actor knew and fretted over his mood swings (and he had, in fact, attempted suicide several times at low points in his relationship with Gardner, and once in the early 1950s when he thought he was washed up).

In Nelson Riddle, Sinatra found a musical partner whose temperament and musical orientation meshed perfectly with his own. Another New Jersey native who was an only child growing up, Riddle was also dealing with heartache during the Only the Lonely sessions, having recently endured the deaths of his mother and daughter.

Paired with Sinatra by Capitol Records to help forge a more mature sound from the one that one that made him a teen idol in the early 1950s, Riddle had triumphed beyond expectations with a series of bestselling LPs that took advantage of Sinatra’s changing voice textures, which were evolving, in the words of Pete Hamill’s Why Sinatra Matters, “from a violin to a viola to a cello, with a rich middle register and dark bottom tones."

In an interview cited in Terry Teachout’s July/August 2021 Commentary article, “The Man Who (Re)Made Sinatra,” Riddle described what he had tried to do in the studio with his most famous musical project:

“First, find the peak of the song and build the whole arrangement to that peak, pacing itself as [Sinatra] paces himself vocally. Second, when he’s moving, get the hell out of the way. When he’s doing nothing, move in fast and establish something…build about two-thirds of the way through, and then fade to a surprise ending.”

On movie sets, he was infamous for an unwillingness to rehearse or maintain interest beyond a few takes. But with lyrics, it was different. He positively burrowed into each note, each line, and when he was done he had created a kind of musical short story in each tune.

Part of Sinatra’s magic stemmed from his exquisite sense of which songs worked for him. As with his other LPs in this period, he turned to some of the greatest lyricists and composers who comprised the Great American Songbook, including Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer (“Blues in the Night”), Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen (the title track). Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart (“Spring Is Here” and “Where or When”), and Jule Styne (co-writer, with Cahn, of “Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out to Dry").

Three songs in particular fascinated me about this album. Carl Sigman and Robert Maxwell’s “Ebb Tide” would later be covered by the Righteous Brothers, but Sinatra and Riddle chose a different way to close out the tune than the rock duo and their producer Phil Spector, climaxing on the lyrics “I can tell, I, I can feel/You are love, you are real/Really mine in the rain/In the dark, in the sun” before receding with “Like the tide at its ebb/I'm at peace in the web/of your arms."

Arlen and Mercer’s “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)" had been written for the 1943 Fred Astaire movie musical The Sky’s the Limit, but Sinatra made it into an unsurpassed demonstration of his own powers of interpretation.

On movie sets, he was infamous for an unwillingness to rehearse or maintain interest beyond a few takes. But with lyrics for his albums, it was different. He positively burrowed into each note, each line, and when he was done he had created a kind of musical short story in each tune. You can see how he wove his magic in this YouTube clip.

Matt Dennis and Earl Brent’s “Angel Eyes” provided the ending to what Sinatra had billed as his “retirement concert” in 1971. It was surely a mistake, for someone who thrived so much on audience attention, to leave the stage while still only 55.  

But, had he followed through on his resolution, nobody would have ever been able to forget how he chose to go out. As seen in this YouTube video in the closing minutes of the June 13, 1971 show in Los Angeles, with smoke from his cigarette billowing and the spotlight on him dimming, he sang,

Pardon me, but I gotta run
Gotta find who's now number one
And why my angel eyes ain't here
Excuse me while I disappear.

If only he could have disappeared at this point! But he un-retired in short order. The success of his two late-career CDs, Duets and Duets II, was due more to the younger performers who blended their voices with his (unlike old days, not in the same studio) than to his own powers, which were on the wane at this point.

On February 23, 1995, in Japan, the 79-year-old Sinatra—confused and glassy-eyed, as remembered by drummer Gregg Field in this 2015 Vanity Fair article—performed in public for the final time, at a concert in Japan where he kept missing lyrics from nearby teleprompters.

The epitaph on “The Voice’s” tombstone came from one of his most ebullient songs: “The Best Is Yet to Come.” But the vulnerable spirit of his reported final words at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in L.A. in 1998 could have come as no surprise to close listeners of Only the Lonely: “I’m losing.”

This Day in Jazz History (Ella Fitzgerald Sets Standards Canon With First ‘Song Book’)

May 15, 1956—Two decades after starting a highly diverse career in which she moved from big-band jazz singer to popular music headliner in her own right, Ella Fitzgerald began to create a Valhalla for classic American songwriters in her first LP at the Verve record label: Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook.

Some years ago, I heard the musical term “standard” defined as “any song that Ella and Frank would sing.” An inexact definition, maybe, but it comes as close as any other I can think of.

To start with, the two singers launched Cole Porter into the songwriter firmament. Just before the composer-lyricist was about to enter a final lonely, agonizing physical decline nearly two decades after a devastating equestrian accident, he experienced a last burst of popularity as Sinatra (with some help from Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly) propelled the soundtrack for his musical High Society up the Billboard chart, and turned “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” into a major hit 20 years after it was introduced to the public.

But Ella got there first, with her 32-track double-album devoted to the Indiana native who came to personify international sophistication and cheeky wit.

It was not entirely coincidental that 1956 was the year when Fitzgerald and Sinatra made their landmark Porter recordings, as the two singers reached artistic maturity virtually simultaneously through the help of new musical mentors and new technology. 

Sinatra’s musical game-changer was arranger Nelson Riddle, who recorded “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” for their second collaboration, Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! Fitzgerald’s was jazz record producer and concert promoter Norman Granz, who had persuaded her to leave her two-decade musical home, Decca Records.

Though it had produced early hits such as her novelty song, “A-tisket, A-tasket,” the label, noted musical critic Dan Morgenstern, was “never quite sure how to present a singer of such versatility….From a positive angle, this made it impossible to typecast Ella; but on the other hand, it prevented her from developing a strong identity.”

Once Granz moved Fitzgerald to Verve (a label founded originally to record her), they embarked on an extraordinary eight-year skein of discs that paid tribute to the finest American lyricists and composers: Porter, Harold Arlen, Irving Berlin, Duke Ellington, George and Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Jerome Kern, and Johnny Mercer.

The recordings, which often brought new prominence to little-known gems, made even the honorees take notice. Ira Gershwin once declared, “I never knew how good our songs were until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them.” After hearing the collection devoted to Rodgers and Hart, Berlin requested—and was granted—inclusion in the series.

“Armstrong and Crosby and Astaire and Holiday and Sinatra each had an incalculable impact on the canon of modern song,” jazz critic Gary Giddins observed in Visions of Jazz: The First Century. “But Fitzgerald erected the pantheon.”

The still-new technology that benefited Sinatra and Fitzgerald was the long-playing record. Introduced in 1947, it had become, by the mid-1950s, the go-to musical format for audiophiles who appreciated its fidelity to recorded sound and to musicians who enjoyed the increased freedom provided by works of longer duration.

The qualities exhibited by Fitzgerald in her LPs—and especially those in the “Song Book” series—were perhaps best summarized by British critic Henry Pleasants in The Great American Popular Singers (1974):

“She has a lovely voice, one of the warmest and most radiant in its natural range that I have heard in a lifetime of listening to singers in every category. She has an impeccable and ultimately sophisticated rhythmic sense, and flawless intonation. Her harmonic sensibility is extraordinary. She is endlessly inventive.”

By the end of 1956, Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook had reached No. 18 on the list of Billboard Best Sellers for the whole year. When the Songbook series concluded with the Johnny Mercer disk in 1964, Fitzgerald was cajoled into trying artists and genres for which she had little affinity, such as The Beatles and country music.

But Fitzgerald, with a falsetto much-admired but seldom matched in popular song, had already created her legacy: virtually institutionalizing the jazz and popular songs created primarily for Broadway and Hollywood musicals from the Twenties to the Fifties. The scat-singer extraordinaire from earlier in her career had become, quite simply, The First Lady of Song.

Rubio vs. Christie: From Here to Calamity?

A few weeks ago, in a skit on the latest GOP Presidential primary debate, Saturday Night Live used cast members Bobby Moynihan and Pete Davidson as stand-ins for New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Florida Senator Marco Rubio. This weekend, we learned how wrong these two choices were. Unfortunately, the ideal actors were dead: Ernest Borgnine and Frank Sinatra.

Christie’s treatment of the pre-programmed Rubio recalled nothing so much as the (offscreen) flogging administered by Borgnine’s brutal stockade Sgt. Fatso Judson to Sinatra’s scrappy but undersized Angelo Maggio in the 1953 film classic From Here to Eternity. 

As Rubio repeated three (it felt like 10) times his contention that Barack Obama was trying to make America like other countries, Christie couldn’t help reveling, with a Fatso-like sadism, over “the memorized 25-second speech”—and supporters of his rival couldn’t help wincing at what they had just witnessed. 

Their agony was as palpable as the one shown by Montgomery Clift’s Robert E. Lee Prewitt as he listened to his dying Army buddy bewail the whupping he’d just received: “Yesterday it was bad. He hit me, he hit me, he hit me. I had to get out, Prew, I had to get out…”

The stockade, we learn from the adaptation of James Jones’ novel of American servicemen just before Pearl Harbor, is the roughest of places, a Darwinian pen that prisoner newbies enter at their own peril—sort of like this year’s GOP primary season. 

Rubio’s introduction to the next stage in the Presidential campaign via Christie starkly illuminated another such dark place.

Like Maggio, however, Rubio should have seen it coming. Fatso had warned the rebellious Maggio long before, “Guys like you end up in the stockade sooner or later. Some day you’ll walk in. I’ll be waiting. I’ll show you a couple of things.” 

Christie had served notice on Rubio, with his pre-debate verbal thrust at “the boy in the bubble,” to expect similarly rough treatment.

Even before that, Rubio and his handlers should have anticipated what could happen if he emerged, as he had started to do after the Iowa caucus, as the alternative to the odious Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. 

Channel-surfing last night, I came across Rachel Maddow pointing to a column by Erik Eisele on Rubio’s short but unfruitful encounter with the editorial board of the Conway Daily Sun, with one unbelievably prescient passage:

“We had roughly 20 minutes with him [Rubio] on Monday, and in that time he talked about ISIS, the economy, his political record and his background. But it was like watching a computer algorithm designed to cover talking points. He said a lot, but at the same time said nothing. It was like someone wound him up, pointed him towards the doors and pushed play. If there was a human side to the senator, a soul, it didn’t come across through.”

That piece appeared six weeks ago—more than enough time for his campaign manager and staff to prep the candidate about his propensity for canned responses. 

In fact, as Ezra Klein explained in a piece for Vox, strategists for other GOP candidates had already figured out that he was “a stump speech attached to a pretty face,” lacking experience or even substantial accomplishments.

Fatso acknowledged, with half admiration, that his latest prisoner was a “tough monkey.” Christie was a good deal more condescending. Rubio, he said, was a “nice guy,” but not equipped for the Presidency. 

Time in the Senate certainly hadn’t equipped the Floridian for his GOP rivals, all of whom swarmed over his stunned body on debate night to deliver pile-on blows.

Maggio bled to death in the dark, all too conscious of what had happened to him. Amazingly, though, in his first 48 hours after the brutal bout with Christie, Marco Roboto (I’m sorry, I mean Rubio) demonstrated to a worldwide audience that he had been left utterly punch-drunk.

That’s really the only way to view his initial flabbergasting contention that there was nothing wrong at all in what happened to him on Saturday night. 

“Actually, I would pay them to keep running that clip, because that’s what I believe — passionately,” Rubio told George Stephanopoulos on Sunday, adding, “We raised more money last night in the first hour of that debate than any other debate.”

Two days later, it was all a different story. By now, his campaign strategists had wrestled some sense into Rubio’s head. He told supporters that his lackluster fifth-place finish in the New Hampshire primary resulted from the fact that he “did not do well on Saturday night,” but that “it will never happen again.”

That’s what he says now. But as Fatso (I'm sorry, I mean Christie) told reporters after that takedown of his younger opponent: “You remember what Mike Tyson said, that great political philosopher?  Everybody’s got a plan until you get punched in the face.”

(The photo accompanying this post, showing Marco Rubio addressing the 2013 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland, was taken by Gage Skidmore.)

This Day in Theater History (‘Pal Joey’ Introduces the Musical Heel)

December 25, 1940— When it premiered at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, Pal Joey opened Broadway to more mature subject matter as the first American musical about an anti-hero. Without it, I would argue, you would never have the monstrous stage mother in Gypsy, the emcee in Cabaret, or the all-too-human leads in Stephen Sondheim’s landmark musicals like Follies.

When people think of names associated with Pal Joey, the ones that come to mind are its composer and lyricist, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. But the person often overlooked on the production team is the person who came up with the idea, the creator of the libretto and the original source on which it was based: John O’Hara.

In a way, that’s symbolic of what has happened to his place in American culture since his death 45 years ago: Once a bestselling novelist and short-story writer, he’s now hardly remembered in comparison with his good friends Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Some readers of this blog may know of a song from Pal Joey called “I Could Write a Book.” Well, O’Hara could—and did—write lots of them—novels, short stories, essay collections—and that’s not even counting plays, unproduced screenplays, or letters.

Pal Joey may have had the most unusual genesis of any of his works, as a series of about a dozen sketches in The New Yorker written in the form of letters to a friend from his “Pal Joey” Evans, a two-bit nightclub entertainer.

The sketches themselves were slight, but like Damon Runyon and Ring Lardner, O’Hara took a virtuosic delight in slang such as “take a powder” (get out), “making with the throat” (singing), “joint,” “crib,” and “angle.” Oh, yes—and the most delicious malapropisms until Archie Bunker came along, including my favorite, Joey’s account of his annoyance: “I lost my composer.”

When he was well along in this series, O’Hara wrote to Rodgers to see if he and partner Hart would want to adapt it into a musical. Rodgers recalled years later that he quickly said yes, because it would not only be different from anything they’d ever done but also different from anything anyone had ever done in a musical. Now, what did Rodgers mean?

Much of it stems from the slang word that Joey may use most frequently, and certainly, most enthusiastically: “mouse,” or young woman who’s caught his eye. Nowadays, we would call Vera Simpson, the rich, older society woman who pays for his clothes and his Chicago nightclub where he is emcee while making him her kept man, a “cougar.” These terms suggest predators and prey.

Virtually everybody in this animal kingdom uses everyone else, except for one sweet young woman, Linda, who still carries the torch for Joey. It’s a mark of the musical’s cynicism that Linda is as dumb as a rock.

Surprisingly, O’Hara’s interest in the musical faded after he first came up with the idea. George Abbott, a veteran director and script doctor, liked to have playwrights at out-of-town tryouts to make last-minute changes, but O’Hara went AWOL. So Abbott was left to make most of these changes, and he was also the one who helped create the plot: the affair between Joey and Vera. 

Pal Joey was not a great success in its first run, because of its risqué subject matter, its lack of a sympathetic lead or happy ending, and its premiere during a musicians’ strike that limited the radio exposure that songs in new musicals needed at that time. The critical quote that most succinctly summarized the state of opinion at that time came from Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times, who queried, "Although it is expertly done, can you draw sweet water from a foul well?"

Over time several songs, especially “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” and “I Could Write a Book,” became standards, and a cast album and revival in 1952 (which featured a young but already brassy Elaine Stritch) really thrust the show and its music into the popular consciousness. (Less successful were the 1957 film adaptation starring Frank Sinatra, and a 2008 “revisal”—i.e., a rewritten book—produced by the Roundabout Theater and starring Stockard Channing. See my review at the time of the latter here.)

The original 1940 production was also notable for launching young talents. Three of them ended up at MGM Studios: the actor Van Johnson; a chorus-line dancer who became a noted director-choreographer, Stanley Donen; and the show’s lead, who impressed just about everyone with his dancing: Gene Kelly (with a dancer in the image accompanying this post). (Kelly can also be found, in all-too-brief form, in this YouTube clip--taken from a patron who surreptitiously taped the show at the time.

This production, as well as its 1952 revival, which he also worked on, gave O’Hara a yen for the theater that he never really got over. One of the hardest-to-find O’Hara books is one that came out in 1964, Five Plays. They were unproduced, and they remain so, partly because he didn’t take well to director’s suggestions. But he was still working on another play at the time of his death in 1970.

As for the songwriting team that created it: “It was the most satisfying and mature work that I was associated with during all my years with Larry Hart,” recalled Rodgers in his autobiography. It would also be their last. The notoriously unreliable, alcoholic Hart was in no condition to work on the next project Rodgers had in mind, and its setting—rural life in the late 19^th century—was far removed from the contemporary urban milieu in which the lyricist excelled. Oklahoma launched a new partnership between Rodgers and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II that would be even more wildly successful than either of them--than anybody, really, certainly including the fictional Joey Evans--had ever known before.

Quote of the Day (George F. Will, on Sinatra, ‘The Greatest Singer of American Songs’)

“Frank Sinatra should be celebrated for his craftsmanship. Of geniuses, we have, it seems, a steady stream. Actual craftsmen are rarer and more useful because they are exemplary for anyone with a craft, be it surgery or carpentry. Sinatra was many things, some of them — libertine, bully, gangster groupie — regrettable. But he unquestionably was the greatest singer of American songs.”— George F. Will, “The Frank Sinatra We Remember,” The Washington Post, Dec. 9, 2015

Today is the 100^th birthday of Frank Sinatra, baby. Forget it at your own risk.

One who seems to have done so, at least according to a good number of true believers, is columnist George F. Will, who came in for considerable flack from aficionados who perceived a slight of the Chairman of the Board in that sentence about “regrettable” failings.

Let’s grant right now that Will could have made more of Sinatra’s fierce opposition, early in his career, to racism, at a point when such a stance could have posed grave risks for his career, or of the singer’s legendary generosity, manifested publicly and privately (he came to the aid of a number of entertainers experiencing severe financial difficulties, including Woody Herman, Duke Ellington and Lee J. Cobb).

But—there’s really no way to get around it—Sinatra was a bully, someone who could not only turn on people close to him for years, but also capitalize on friendships with Mafia figures to order beatings of people who rubbed him the wrong way, including comic Jackie Mason and author Dominick Dunne.

Every one of us who has ever suffered or fought off a bully can never forget it. And when professional muscle is enlisted to do the bullying—well, I don’t see how you can look the other way, do you?

So, let’s grant that, too. We are still left with the Wills assertion--that Ol' Blue Eyes was "the greatest singer of American songs"--which makes so many people defend Sinatra no matter what, while making others regard the singer as an infinitely fascinating mass of contradictions.

You can certainly count me among the latter group. As I searched for past posts of mine about Sinatra, I was surprised to discover that the number of times I’ve written about him has probably only been exceeded by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Bruce Springsteen and Steven Sondheim. Considering how I regarded him when I was a teenager in the '70s--a hopelessly square representative of everything the older generation stood for--that's quite a turnaround--and, of course, a tribute to his extraordinary talent.

For what it’s worth, below are links to my considerations of different aspects of his career and life:

*From Here to Eternity: The Godfather-propagated legend of how Sinatra landed his Oscar-winning, comeback role of Maggio—and what was the more likely, prosaic truth.

*Guys and Dolls: Why the singer hated, hated, hated that movie’s co-star, Marlon Brando.

*Carousel: Why Sinatra felt such an affinity with "Soliloquy," the epic centerpiece of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical—and why he walked away from the role of Billy Bigelow onscreen.

*Billie Holiday: How the example of “Lady Day” (whose 100^th birthday was also celebrated this year) proved crucial in Sinatra’s mid-career decision to refashion himself from youthful crooner to world-weary interpreter of song.

One last thing. You'll notice that to accompany this post, I haven't chosen one of his jaunty, "I've Got the World on a String"-style images, but one showing an infinitely more vulnerable side. This comes from another film for which he was Oscar-nominated, The Man With the Golden Arm, about a drug addict. 

The author of this post from the blog "More Stars Than in the Heavens" got it right in noting, "There’s real desperation in every second of his screentime here – the kind that, frankly, no actor can learn." It's the same type of desperation and pathos he mined in "saloon songs" such as "One More for My Baby (and One More for the Road)".