Night Beat (74 page)

THE 1960S PROVED a variable time for Frank Sinatra. He enjoyed several Top 40 hits (including “It Was a Very Good Year,” “Strangers in the Night,” “Summer Wind,” “That’s Life,” and the vainglorious “My Way”) and made a steady stream of albums for his new label, Reprise (among the better ones:
I Remember Tommy, Sinatra and Basie, September of My Years,
and
Sinatra at the Sands
). But as time passed, Sinatra found himself and his musical tradition displaced by pop music’s shifting aesthetic. In the 1950s, Elvis Presley and the rise of rock & roll brought new styles, values, and vigor into the mainstream, and Sinatra decried this development, terming rock & roll a music of bad manners and low skill. “It is sung, played, and written for the most part by cretinous goons,” he said in 1957, “and by means of its almost imbecilic reiterations and sly, lewd—in fact, plain dirty—lyrics, it manages to be the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the earth.”

In the early 1960s, the music and songwriting of the Beatles and Bob Dylan caused even greater change, in effect killing off the Tin Pan Alley and Broadway traditions that had provided earlier pop singers like Sinatra with their repertoire. For a time, Sinatra seemed to be casting about for a new manner and a new purpose. In July 1966, at age fifty, Sinatra married actress Mia Farrow, age twenty-one. Their love was genuine and ardent, though some thought that the union was an attempt by Sinatra to regain a bit of his youthful vitality and relevance. After two years, Sinatra tired of the relationship. While Farrow was filming
Rosemary’s Baby,
Sinatra sent a lawyer to her set with divorce papers. Sinatra had not told her himself that he intended to end the marriage.

In June 1971, unhappy with his career and his personal life, Frank Sinatra withdrew from the entertainment business at age fifty-five. But the retirement didn’t last. In fact, he played concerts for political benefits during his layoff period. (By this time, Sinatra had switched his political affiliation. He was now a proponent of Republican California Governor Ronald Reagan as well as a supporter of the Richard Nixon-Spiro Agnew Administration. Some observers thought Sinatra’s political shift was a final revenge for his disappointing Kennedy experience.) In 1973, Sinatra returned to the pop world with
Ol’ Blue Eyes Is Back
and also returned to the touring life. In 1976, he entered his fourth marriage, to Barbara Marx, the former wife of Zeppo Marx. The marriage would last.

Sinatra continued to record and perform into the 1990s. Most of his late records showed him still looking for a fresh sound. Over the years, he made some passing concessions to the new pop forms; in 1966, he enjoyed a Top 10 hit with his roaring Ray Charles-style “That’s Life,” and he recorded affecting versions of Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender” and George Harrison’s “Something” for the 1980 album
Trilogy.
He also periodically covered songs by Paul Simon, John Denver, and Billy Joel. But by and large, the newer material he selected rarely suited his prime strengths, such as the way he could inhabit a song’s words, turning them into an urgent personal disclosure, or the way he could ride a lyric’s rhythm and melody with a spry, buoyant wit. One longed to hear what Sinatra might do with more fitting modern songs, like Sam Cooke’s “Mean Old World,” Mick Jagger and Keith Richards’ “The Spider and the Fly,” Van Morrison’s “Moondance,” Randy Newman’s “Lonely at the Top” and “Sail Away,” or Elvis Costello’s “Shipbuilding,” but we never got to find out. In concert, he continued to favor his old repertoire, and he also continued to sing it better than anybody.

Even so, Sinatra could still tap an occasional pop nerve. In 1980, he found a brash new anthem in “Theme from New York, New York”—a spirited song about tenacity that has been a favored item on barroom jukeboxes for the last eighteen years. And in 1993 and 1994, Sinatra enjoyed multiplatinum hits with
Duets
and
Duets II,
which paired Frank’s vocals with performances by Aretha Franklin, U2’s Bono, Barbra Streisand, Natalie Cole, Liza Minnelli, Tony Bennett, Patti Labelle, Linda Ronstadt, Chrissie Hynde, Willie Nelson, Neil Diamond, Jimmy Buffett, Gladys Knight, and Lena Horne, among others. For a brief time in 1993,
Duets
was second on
Billboard
’s charts—a notch below Snoop Doggy Dogg’s
Doggystyle.

Sinatra received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 1994 Grammy ceremony in New York. The honor represented an autumnal triumph and a valuable reconciliation of sorts. In the 1960s and 1970s, Sinatra had been anathema to many young pop fans, not just for exemplifying the classic prerock American Songbook tradition but also for seeming to embody a lifestyle of luxury and hubris. But in time that disregard faded and many listeners and musicians came to discover and appreciate, on their own terms, the depths and smarts in Sinatra’s artistry. Also, many modern music fans now understood that Sinatra’s spirit of bravado and impiety wasn’t all that far apart from the spirit of rebellion that characterized early rock & roll and much of the music that followed. In effect, Sinatra—with his defiance and his disrespect for phoniness—had been a counterculture unto himself for most of his career. Sixty years after he exploded the pop world, Frank Sinatra was once again a paradigm of hip discernment. U2’s Bono introduced the aging singer to the New York Grammy audience, and Sinatra was moved to tears by the standing ovation he received. But as he attempted to speak about his life, the orchestra abruptly cut him off when one of Sinatra’s employees feared he was rambling and looking confused.

A week later, at a concert in Richmond, Virginia, Sinatra collapsed and was taken off the stage in a wheelchair. He toured some more after that, but he was beginning to miss lyrics (even with the aid of TelePrompTers) and to overshoot his timing. At moments, he seemed lost on the same stages that had once been his lifelong familiar home. He gave a final concert at his 1995 Palm Springs Golf Tournament benefit; his last full song in public was “The Best Is Yet to Come.” In December of that year, he appeared as guest of honor at an eightieth birthday celebration event that featured performances by Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, Little Richard, Salt-n-Pepa, Tony Bennett, Vic Damone with Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, and others. At evening’s end, the tribute performers brought Sinatra onstage during “Theme from New York, New York” and somebody handed him a microphone. As the song came to its close, Sinatra pounced on the final phrase, “New York, New York,” sustaining and holding his tone with such a fierce sureness that his face turned red before he released the final note. Then, refusing any help, he made his way off the front of the stage, into the company of his wife and family, and he was gone from America’s eyes.

FRANK SINATRA LEFT BEHIND a vast body of tangible and enduring work—over two hundred albums, sixty movies, well over two hundred hours of live television, and at least an additional two hundred full concert appearances that have been preserved on film and video. But as remarkable and valuable as that legacy is, we will never again be able to sit in a theater and watch Frank Sinatra walk onto a stage, and it is Sinatra’s art as a live performer that, I suspect, is what will be missed the most.

I recall seeing him several times in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s at various West Coast venues—including the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles—and in Las Vegas. He would walk onstage in a brisk, matter-of-fact stride, wearing a crisp black tuxedo and a bright, cocksure expression. The audience would react with cheers and whistles and squeals—just as bobbysoxers had done decades earlier—and even if the acclaim came as no surprise, he always appeared thankful in that indomitable way of his. In each of these shows, Sinatra used the occasion of his opening song to trumpet his arrival as a triumph, often with a boastful or brassy song, like “Theme from New York, New York,” “Fly Me to the Moon (In Other Words),” or Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler’s “I’ve Got the World on a String”—the song he picked as his first Capitol single in the 1950s to proclaim his regeneration: “I’ve got a song that I sing/
I
can make the rain go/Anytime I move my finger. . . . ” In those moments, Sinatra relied entirely on his voice to depict whatever ambition and pride he might bring to a stage.

To be sure, Sinatra’s voice on those occasions was showing signs of wear. His range had lowered considerably, his tone had darkened, and his purity had turned rawer and rougher—and yet in some ways those flaws made his voice all the more affecting. In particular, in his delivery of ballads he sounded closer to the grain of heartache and desolation—a bit less proud, more wistful or abject than before. One night he offered a medley: a thoughtful mating of Harold Arlen and George Gershwin’s “The Gal That Got Away” and Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s “It Never Entered My Mind.” It showcased Sinatra at the full extent of his affecting interpretive power: prowling the shadowy fringes of the stage with cigarette in hand, letting the signs of age in his voice—the brandy-tone timbre, the grainy legato—infuse the lyric: “The night is bitter/The stars have lost their glitter/The winds grow colder/And suddenly you’re older/And all because of a gal who got away.” He sang the words in the manner of a broken, brooding man who knew he had lost his last glimpse of love’s saving whims and could only ruminate over all the tenderness that was now so painfully and finally out of reach. I remember thinking at the time that it didn’t matter that the portrait jarred with everything we presume about the real Sinatra—it just mattered that Sinatra had the sensibility to make us believe it
was
real. Looking back, I’m not so sure that we weren’t seeing the real Sinatra after all.

In his 1963
Playboy
interview, Sinatra said: “I’m for
anything
that gets you through the night, be it prayer, tranquilizers, or a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.” In 1997, Charlie Rose hosted a roundtable discussion by four men who had met or written about Sinatra and somebody mentioned how Sinatra often liked to stay up through the night, talking to friends, maybe nursing a drink, until dawn rose. Sinatra saw those mornings as a “victory,” said author Bill Zehme—as a way of beating the dark.

In truth, though, Sinatra’s greatest victories were achieved
in
the dark—the dark of studios and the dark of evenings in clubs, concert houses, and lounge bars. Night after night, for more than sixty years, Frank Sinatra stood onstage and sang songs about love and longing, about hope and despair, and each time he did so, he communicated the emotional truths of those songs to a mass of strangers as if that mass were a handful of understanding intimates. Chances are, he was not doing this merely for the money; long ago, Frank Sinatra became rich enough to live in any world he wanted to build for himself. Instead, maybe he did it simply because somehow singing those songs enriched him, helped him realize a depth and compassion that did not come quite so easily in the realities of his daily private life. Or perhaps singing simply became his most reliable companion—the best way of forestalling the darkness. Maybe it was his way of driving death back: As long as he performed on a stage, he was alive—and he could be the best man he knew how to be.

Frank Sinatra sang in and from the darkness. He sang about a profound loneliness that he knew well and that he spent his whole life trying to beat, in both wondrous and awful ways. Just as important, Sinatra sang to the loneliness inside others—and those who heard that voice sometimes found something of their own experience within its resonance and then—maybe—found some solace and courage as well. Sinatra’s voice entered our dreams, illuminated our pains and hopes, longer than any voice we have ever known before or may ever know again. That voice was the voice of our century, and now it sings no more, except in history.

Oh I do believe
If you don’t like things, you leave
For some place you never been before
LOU REED
“I FOUND A REASON”

publication credits

“Elvis Presley’s Leap for Freedom” appeared originally in part in the
Los Angeles Herald Examiner
in 1984 and 1985, and parts are new.

“Beatles Then, Beatles Now” appeared originally in the
Los Angeles Herald Examiner
in 1984, in
Rolling Stone
in 1990, and much of it is previously unpublished.

“Subterranean: Bob Dylan’s Passages” is assembled from pieces written for
Musical Notes
in 1976, for the
Los Angeles Herald Examiner
in the mid-1980s, from
Rolling Stone
in 1986 and 1991, and much of it is previously unpublished.

“The Rolling Stones’ Journey into Fear” is assembled from pieces that appeared in the
L.A. Weekly
in 1981, in the
Los Angeles Herald Examiner
in 1983 and 1984, and in
Rolling Stone
in 1987.

“The Legacy of Jim Morrison and the Doors” appeared in
Rolling Stone,
April 4, 1991.

“Lou Reed: Darkness and Love” is assembled from writings that appeared in
Rolling Stone
in 1979 and 1980, and from numerous
Los Angeles Herald Examiner
articles in the mid-1980s, plus some of it is newly written.

“Brothers: The Allman Brothers Band” appeared in
Rolling Stone
in shorter form, October 18, 1990.

“Keith Jarrett’s Keys to the Cosmos” ran in
Rolling Stone,
January 25, 1979.

“Life and Death in the U.K.: The Sex Pistols, Public Image Ltd., Joy Division, New Order, and the Jesus and Mary Chain” is from pieces published in
Rolling Stone
in 1980 and 1981, in the
Los Angeles Herald Examiner
in the mid-1980s, and parts of it are newly written.

“The Clash: Punk Beginnings, Punk Endings” is assembled from pieces that ran in
Rolling Stone
in 1979, and in the
L.A. Weekly
and
Musician
in 1982.

“Punk: Twenty Years After” is assembled from various mid-1980s
Los Angeles Herald Examiner
articles, a 1982
Musician
story, and from new writing as well.

“Van Halen: The Endless Party” appeared in
Rolling Stone,
September 4, 1980.

“Bruce Springsteen’s America” is from pieces that appeared in
Rolling Stone
in 1990 and 1995, in the
Los Angeles Herald Examiner
in the mid-1980s, and some of it is new as well.

“The Problem of Michael Jackson” is from various articles written for the
Los Angeles Herald Examiner
in the mid-1980s, for
Rolling Stone
in 1988, plus parts of it are new.

“Upstarts: Over and Under the Wall, and into the Territory’s Center” is from numerous mid-1980s
Los Angeles Herald Examiner
articles, from pieces published in
Rolling Stone
in 1987 and 1990, and parts are newly written.

“Clash of the Titans: Heavy Metal Enters the 1990s” appeared in shorter form in
Rolling Stone,
July 11, 1991.

“Randy Newman: Songs of the Promised Land” appeared in the
Los Angeles Herald Examiner,
January 23, 1983.

“Al Green: Sensuality in the Service of the Lord” is from the
Los Angeles Herald Examiner,
August 26, 1983.

“Jerry Lee Lewis: The Killer” appeared in the
Los Angeles Herald Examiner,
February 21, 1984.

“Miles Davis: The Lion in Winter” appeared in the
Los Angeles Herald Examiner,
August 26, 1983.

“Feargal Sharkey: Songs of Hearts and Thieves” is part of a longer article that appeared in the
Los Angeles Herald Examiner,
April 18, 1986.

“Marianne Faithfull: Trouble in Mind” is from a longer piece that ran in the
Los Angeles Herald Examiner,
April 25, 1986.

“Stan Ridgway’s Wrong People” is from a longer piece that ran in the
Los Angeles Herald Examiner,
July 11, 1986.

“Sinéad O’Connor’s Songs of Experience” appeared in shorter form in
Rolling Stone,
June 14, 1990.

“David Baerwald’s Songs of Secrets and Sins” ran at a slightly shorter length in
Rolling Stone,
September 6, 1990.

“Frank Sinatra: Singing in the Dark” is from
Rolling Stone,
January 24, 1991.

“Dark Shadows: Hank Williams, Nick Drake, Phil Ochs” is from articles that ran in the
Los Angeles Herald Examiner
in 1983 and 1986, and parts are new.

“Tim Hardin: Lost Along the Way” originally appeared in
New West,
February 1981.

“Dennis Wilson: The Lone Surfer” ran in the
Los Angeles Herald Examiner
on January 2, 1984.

“Marvin Gaye: Troubled Soul” is from 1984 and 1985 articles in the
Los Angeles Herald Examiner,
and parts of it are new.

“No Simple Highway: The Story of Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead” is from articles that appeared in
Rolling Stone
in 1987 and 1995, and much of it has never been published before.

“Tupac Shakur: Easy Target” appeared in
Rolling Stone,
October 31, 1996.

“Ella Fitzgerald: Grace Over Pain” appeared in
Rolling Stone,
August 8, 1996.

“Timothy Leary: The Death of the Most Dangerous Man” appeared in slightly shorter form in
Rolling Stone,
July 11, 1996.

“Kurt Cobain’s Road from Nowhere: Walking the Streets of Aberdeen” appeared at a somewhat shorter length in
Rolling Stone,
June 2, 1994.

“Allen Ginsberg: For the Fucking and the Dying” appeared in a slightly shorter version in
Rolling Stone,
May 29, 1997.