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 Pop Music History (Carl Wilson, Beach Boys' Glue to Brother Brian’s Genius, Dies)

Feb. 6, 1998— Carl Wilson, the youngest of three brothers who formed the nucleus of the Beach Boys—and the one who kept the band together when his siblings spiraled into mental illness, substance abuse and family feuding—died at age 51 of lung cancer in Los Angeles.

As chief songwriter and studio mastermind, Brian Wilson has always been rightly seen as the group’s genius (as I myself acknowledged in a prior post on the making of the band's masterpiece, Pet Sounds).

But Carl made his own distinct creative contributions from the beginning—and, when Brian stopped touring in the mid-Sixties because of a nervous breakdown, and Dennis Wilson grew ever more wild and dangerous in pursuing women, alcohol and drugs, Carl took on a larger role in the studio and on the road, functioning as the group’s de facto leader.

None of this could have been easy. But Carl also had to maintain the Beach Boys’ sense of experimentation while keeping in the fold lead singer and cousin Mike Love, whose unwillingness to stray far from the band’s original surf sound and subject matter increasingly threatened to turn the group into a nostalgia act.

From the start, Brian knew that Carl, four and a half years younger, was open to new sounds, learning how to play guitar from imitating Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley chords and, in the mid-Sixties, learning the 12-string Rickenbacker as well.

As Brian’s mastery in the studio increased, his confidence in his kid brother’s harmonies grew, and he featured Carl more and more on lead vocals, including two of the Beach Boys’ seminal songs in their most musically innovative period, “God Only Knows” and “Good Vibrations.”

Still only 14 years old when the band’s first hit, “Surfin’,” climbed the charts in 1961, Carl would be all of 21 when Brian’s collapse during the Smiley Smile sessions thrust him into the role of studio leader, too.

The Beach Boys’ turmoil in this period was a microcosm of what the nation was also experiencing at this time: generational conflict (the Wilsons’ abusive father Murry sold publishing rights to their songs for what turned out to be a comparative pittance); flirtation with Eastern religions (Love visited the Indian ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi); drugs; violence (Dennis even briefly shared his home with Charles Manson); and Vietnam (Carl filed for conscientious objector status).

Yet the group was being written off as hopelessly square, as musical tastes turned sharply towards harder rock.

Carl was not without his own problems, particularly as he hit his 30s, including drugs, alcohol and a painful divorce. But he displayed a resilience that his older brothers lacked.

In the process, he not only overcome his own issues, but spent much time trying to release Brian from the clutches of his psychiatrist-Svengali, Dr. Eugene Landy, and served as an emotional anchor for his nieces and nephews when their fathers fell deeper into personal difficulties. (Dennis would die in a drowning accident in 1983.)

Brian’s waning presence in the band was much discussed—overwhelmingly to its detriment—in the post-Smiley Smile period. But in many ways that criticism was unfair. Much of the Beach Boys’ most interesting work—including mainstays of their live shows for nearly the next half-century—was recorded in this time, including “Darlin,’” “Sail on Sailor,” "Friends," and two particular favorites of mine featuring Carl on lead vocals, “Wild Honey” and “Long Promised Road.”

It might have been, though, that Carl’s most significant contribution during these years of critical and popular neglect was just to keep the band together as a touring unit. Though the band would never again have the sustained chart success it had experienced in the early to mid Sixties, audiences and critics would come around again to see them as seminal influences in popular music.

There were times, particularly in the early Eighties, when the internal strains of leading so many dysfunctional band members wore on Carl. 

In 1980, annoyed at the group’s lack of rehearsal time and its choice of material, he quit and released two solo albums. Their commercial failure, and the other band members’ vow to change, led him to rejoin two years later—though, for the next decade and a half, he increasingly yielded to Love on the Beach Boys’ musical direction.

The Beach Boys have continued to perform up to the present, but they have become increasingly riven into Love and anti-Love factions. Something irreplaceable died with Carl 25 years ago—an amazingly sweet, pure voice that reflected the singer’s gentle spirit and soul.

As friend and songwriting collaborator Robert White Johnson said after in an interview for The Vinyl Dialogues blog:

“I don’t think Carl ever got the accolades that he deserved for his musical contributions, instincts and abilities. If it hadn’t been for him, the Beach Boys would have died a long time ago. He kept it together, he kept it going. He was the heartbeat, he kept it real, vocally and artistically. He was a true inspiration to me, even with his regard to his humanity. It doesn’t take me much to get teary-eyed thinking about him. I was honored to be his friend.”

This Day in Pop Music History (Birth of Robert Palmer, English Avatar of Blue-Eyed Soul and Style)

Jan. 19, 1949— Robert Palmer, a British rocker whose suave style—embodied in notorious MTV videos of the 1980s—coexisted with eclectic musical tastes and a powerful, soulful delivery, was born in Batley, Yorkshire, England.

Until the end of the ‘80s, I did not have cable TV, not alone MTV. For the longest time, then, I didn’t know what the fuss was about over the video “Addicted to Love,” in which Palmer, decked out in a slick suit, was backed by guitar-strumming, vacant-gazed, miniskirted models—like a GQ fashion icon cavorting with rock ‘n’ roll fembots.

It’s hard to think that in the current MeToo environment, fashion photographer Terence Donovan could have shot such a video, and even in 1985 the tune was fodder for feminist protests over its obvious objectification of women. 

But Palmer dismissed the whole matter airily. For him, eight albums into a career with its share of up-and-downs, the controversy was probably worth it for creating a #1 hit, thrusting itself enough into the music community’s consciousness that the singer-songwriter finally won a Grammy for best male rock vocal performance.

The visual gyrations on this and his other songs in heavy MTV rotation at the time obscure the fact that no slinky, tightly dressed women were needed to accentuate the song’s inherent swagger and sexuality. If you don’t believe me, then check out this YouTube clip of Palmer performing the song live in 1997, with the Mighty Max Weinberg on drums and a pounding horn section.

His mid-1980s commercial success represented only one point in Palmer’s long creative journey. Amazingly, over the course of his all-too-short 54 years alive, he may have traversed even more musical than geographic distance. 

The Yorkshire native spent most of his childhood and youth on Malta, where his father served as a naval intelligence officer. 

The youngster’s interest in multiple musical genres began on that island, because the American Forces Network, an English–language radio service for U.S. troops stationed in Europe, broadcast soul, rhythm and blues, and jazz. 

When he returned to Yorkshire in his early teens, Palmer began playing in bands. 

"I joined a band because I didn't like school and there's nothing else I'd rather have done,” he later explained to The Face Magazine. In 1968, restless, he quit his graphic arts job to go to London and pursue music for good. 

While playing at one point or another the guitar, keyboards, bass and even drums, Palmer’s ultimate instrument was his voice. In the live footage I have seen of him, he is, simply, the front man, always impeccably dressed as he wields the microphone.

Although Palmer released his first LP, Sneakin' Sally Through the Alley, in 1974, I did not start to follow him in earnest until 1978, when he released the marvelously upbeat, Caribbean-flavored single “Every Kinda People.” 

His follow-up a year later, the LP Secrets, scored another hit with the driving “Bad Case of Loving You,” though I was more captivated with his cover of Todd Rundgren’s “Can We Still Be Friends?”

As a songwriter, Palmer returned continually to the theme of the tangled relations between men and women. That, along with his natty attire, encouraged many to view him as a Romeo for the video era. But he could get restless with his image, just as he could with all the places where he lived over the years. 

“I guess I think of myself as a romantic, but it’s a weighted word these days,” he said in an interview for “Cover Story: Robert Palmer,” on the USA Network. “I don’t like any dogma or formality.”

The singer was equally eager to slip loose from conventional musical categories. 

"I'm only interested in, I only like songs," he told an interviewer once. "There's no groups or singers that I like at all. I like songs by a lot of different people, but I'm certainly not a fan of anybody. I make up cassettes all the time -- to take on the road with me -- a song from this album, a song from that album. That's the way I listen to music; it's like one of those K Tel things, it's from all over. I listen to Fred Astaire, I listen to African folk music, I listen to Talking Heads."

One thing I love about YouTube: the way it brings to light dozens of songs you never knew existed by a favorite performer. 

In this regard, I would definitely have to mention Palmer’s cover of Marvin Gaye’s classic “Mercy, Mercy Me,” in a medley with "I Want You." (In an interview with Arsenio Hall immediately following that performance, he all too modestly noted, "I can't top Marvin's licks, only cop them.")

Unlike many contemporaries coming up in the early Seventies, Palmer resisted a hedonistic lifestyle. "I loved the music, but the excesses of rock 'n' roll never really appealed to me at all," he once told Los Angeles Times writer Dennis McLellan. "I couldn't see the point of getting up in front of a lot of people when you weren't in control of your wits."

But if drinking and recreational drugs were not for Palmer, he couldn’t resist an addiction of a different kind: to cigarettes. Smoking caused the heart attack that in 2003 struck him down at age 54, shocking and saddening thousands of fans like myself. 

As I write this, I imagine him at age 70, a silver-haired fox traversing eras and styles in his dapper suits and passion for any music that caught his fancy. 

His good friend Sting described his professional and personal appeal with economy but heart to People: "He was a fabulous singer. A gentleman. And underrated."

This Day in Pop Music History (Harry Nilsson, Golden Voice of ‘Without You,’ Dies)

Jan. 15, 1994— Harry Nilsson, a singer-songwriter of rare versatility and virtuosity, died at age 52 in his sleep at his Agoura Hills, Calif., home, two decades after his manic lifestyle ruined his voice, shortened his career and wrecked his health.

I first became aware of this musician’s work through watching TV as a child around 1970. An ABC animated “Movie of the Week” called The Point, narrated by Dustin Hoffman, featured stories and music created by Nilsson, with the musician singing his own songs. Moreover, the theme of the Bill Bixby sitcom The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, “Best Friend,” was an adaptation of a song from Nilsson’s Aerial Ballet LP, “Girlfriend.” 

A self-taught musician who learned piano chords from rock ‘n’ rollers who performed at L.A.’s Paramount Theater, where he worked as assistant manager, Nilsson was soon building a solid catalog of his own work (enough to eventually lead him to being recognized as one of Rolling Stone Magazine’s “100 Greatest Songwriters”), notably “I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City,” “Jump Into the Fire,” “Gotta Get Up,” “You’re Breakin’ My Heart,” and “One” (soon covered by Three Dog Night). 

Ironically, though, Nilsson achieved his greatest commercial success as an interpreter of other’s songs, especially with Fred Neal’s “Everybody’s Talkin’” (featured in the Oscar-winning Midnight Cowboy) and Badfinger’s “Without You.”

Even now, it is only dimly appreciated how innovative Nilsson could be. More than a decade before Carly Simon and Linda Ronstadt, entering their “legacy years” as performers, tried out the Great American Songbook, Nilsson was experimenting with this rich (and, by now, neglected) mine of music with A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night. Furthermore, he compensated for his stage anxiety by taping a forerunner of MTV with his tune “Coconuts.”

John Lennon may have helped make Nilsson’s career with an enthusiastic endorsement of his talent (“Nilsson for President!”), but also helped ruin it with shared drug-and-alcohol-fueled hijinx several years later. 

When the ex-Beatle and wife Yoko Ono had a trial separation in the mod-1970s, Lennon entered a period often referred to as his “lost weekend.” The phrase only began to capture the intense, incomprehensible benders on which Lennon took his friend Nilsson —misadventures that led another Nilsson friend, songwriter Jimmy Webb, to describe their “mutually destructive aerial ballet” in his memoir, The Cake and the Rain.

Even more insane than their night-owl antics (Lennon narrowly escaped charges of assaulting a female photographer) were their studio sessions for Nilsson’s Pussycats LP, produced by Lennon. 

At one point, Webb, alarmed to hear Nilsson croak out a greeting and to see him vomiting blood into Webb’s kitchen sink, asked what had happened to his vocal chords. The laughing response: “I left it on the microphone.” Nilsson’s magnificent singing voice was never the same again.

Nilsson’s career was shorter than it should have been, but he made the most of his short window of time. I love this quotation from songwriter and admirer Randy Newman on this talent: “He had a gift for melody. Which is a rare, inexplicable talent to have. People like McCartney have it, Schubert, Elton John has it. Harry had that gift."

This Day in Pop Music History (Birth of Phil Ramone, Go-To Producer)

Jan. 5, 1934—Phil Ramone, who cut a wide and influential swath among jazz, pop and rock ‘n’ roll musicians in the second half of the 20^th century by producing records by Ray Charles, Stan Getz, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, and especially Billy Joel, was born in South Africa.

In the last few days, I came across a lively Facebook discussion on the career of Ramone’s near-contemporary, Phil Spector. Although I disagreed with Spector’s many detractors on the quality of his records (though not about his insanity or lack of integrity), the comments did give me a frame of reference for assessing why a music figure who started out at almost the same time as the creator of the “Wall of Sound” could have turned out so differently.

Each producer initially got a toehold in the music industry through mastery of an instrument (Spector, the guitar; Ramone, more formally trained at the Juilliard School in New York on the piano and violin).

 

The two made their marks in the exact same year, 1958: Spector, as composer of “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” and Ramone as co-founder of A & R Recording with then- business partner Jack Arnold.

By the mid-Sixties, each had produced enormous hits for other artists: Spector, “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” for the Righteous Brothers; Ramone, “The Girl From Ipanema” for Stan Getz.

By 1967, however, with his withdrawal from his label Philles Records after the commercial failure of “River Deep, Mountain High,” Spector’s best days were behind him. Ramone, however, was only getting started. Among the records he would produce over the next four decades were:

* A Happening in Central Park, Barbra Streisand;

* Blood on the Tracks, Bob Dylan;

* Still Crazy After All These Years, Paul Simon;

* Celebrate Me Home, Kenny Loggins;

* Double Fantasy, John and Yoko Lennon; 

* Duets, Frank Sinatra; 

* The Broadway cast album for Stephen Sondheim’s Passion; and

* Genius Loves Company, Ray Charles.  

Take a look at that list again. It not only presents a staggering variety of artists and styles, but also represents many of these musicians at the height of their powers.

This may be the key difference between Spector and Ramone; while the former sought to impose his sound on each artist, the latter consistently tried to help his musicians find theirs. Often, that meant waiting patiently for a moment that made a song special.

Nowhere might this have been more vividly illustrated than in the case of Billy Joel, whom Ramone produced for nearly a decade—and, not coincidentally, in the period when the Piano Man finally broke through to a wider public. 

To start with, Spector might have wanted to import his loose collection of musicians, the Wrecking Crew, into the studio to perform most of the instruments. But Ramone readily bought into Joel’s notion that he sounded better with his own band of backup musicians.

Then, in their first collaboration together, The Stranger, Joel, trying to imagine a key instrument for the title tune, began to whistle. Ramone told him that this was the instrument he wanted, and the singer’s whistle was kept on the recorded song.

Lack of grandiosity especially distinguished Ramone from Spector. "I like to joke with people, ‘I’m the guy on the back cover,'” Spector once said. "It’s not like in the movies where it says, ‘Steven Spielberg presents Abe Lincoln.’ What I do is kind of invisible.” 

Finally: in 2009, when Spector was found guilty of second-degree murder for killing actress Lana Clarkson at his mansion, several musicians said they were not at all surprised, given Spector’s instability and use of firearms. When Ramone died in 2013, tributes came pouring forth across the entire spectrum of artists who had worked with him—or wished they could have.

(Photo of Phil Ramone was taken at the Songwriters Hall of Fame induction ceremony on June 18, 2009, by Ky1958.)