Wednesday 31 August 2011

Sinatra and the art of losing


















"What is this thing called love? Just who can solve its mystery, and why should it make a fool of me?  ('What is this thing called love?')

The words belong to Cole Porter, but, for me, the song is forever and indelibly Sinatra's. It's featured on the 1955 album In The Wee Small Hours. Sixteen songs that speak of loneliness, longing and loss. Many of them had been recorded before by other singers. But these were definitive versions. Frank wasn't just a singer of standards. He set them.

Somebody once asked me recently, "Is it true that he never wrote a song?"; as if that somehow invalidated his art. It's a question I will answer later in this essay, but I would argue it's a question  that could only be asked in the age of the singer-songwriter. We should remember that Sinatra came from a different age. To me there seems an undeniable logic in the creative 'division of labour' that characterised that 'golden age'. Why not have the most suitable individuals responsible for the constituent parts of a song: the melody, the lyric, the arrangement, the performance etc ? The best songwriters do not necessarily the best singers as a cursory listen to the work of Bob Dylan proves. Ironically Dylan himself described Sinatra as 'one of the few singers who sang without a mask' (Mojo #56). It's a sincere tribute, clearly intended to diffuse any performer vs singer-songwriter debate, but for me, 'the mask' is essential to Sinatra's art. His creativity lies not in the writing of the song but in the interpreting of it. The songs are a canvas upon which to paint, a stage upon which to perform.

Roger Gilbert, in an enlightening essay, identifies two 'roles' Sinatra returned to most frequently in his musical repertoire , 'the swinger' and 'the loser', and places those roles within the context of troubled masculinity in the 1950s.  Sinatra alternates between these two roles in his recordings for Capitol records in the 1950s (unquestionably his artistic peak) in a quite deliberate fashion. For all his swagger he was willing to bare his soul. As a performer playing to an audience he understood the importance of contrast, of light and shade. Lifting them up and bringing them down. "The roaring traffic's boom, to the silence of my lonely room", as he puts it in a signature song. 'Night and day' indeed.

The 'loser' persona is best displayed on a trilogy of thematically linked 'song suites': In The Wee Small Hours  (1958), Where Are You? (1957) and Only the Lonely (1958). Intimate, intense albums of breathtaking beauty, and arguably amongst the greatest recordings of the twentieth century.



In The Wee Small Hours (1955)

There is a sense in which pop music came of age with this 1955 release. Sinatra and his arrangers (in this case Nelson Riddle) were among the first to realise the potential of the 'long playing' format. This would be no mere collection of unrelated singles, as albums had previously been. Through careful song selection they were able to covey a consistent mood, and tell a story of sorts.


The central narrative of In The Wee Small Hours is of 'the loser' alone in his room, brooding over his departed lover. The overall mood is one of longing; as the hours pass he slowly drifts into a dream-like state. In those dreams he is plagued by images of his loved one... ('I see your face before me')



Later, during 'I'll Be Around', 'the loser' deceives himself into believing in the possibility of a reconciliation, lapsing once more into a dream reverie in 'Deep in a dream'. As his cigarette burns down he wakes to confront a lonely reality...




















Where Are You? (1957)
Where are you? was the first Sinatra album to be recorded in stereo, and the sound quality is a considerable improvement on the 1955 album. It was also the first Sinatra album to feature arranger Gordon Jenkins , whose lush arrangements inspire a terrific performance from the singer. Witness the way in which Sinatra climbs into the high note at the beginning of the second verse of the title track on the line "...where's my heart?..."  In later years, on lesser albums, he would hide behind the orchestra, riding on the conductor's coat tails. Here he soars, taking the strings, and the listener with him.

If the abiding image of the previous album is of 'the loser' alone in his room, "uneasy in my easy chair" as he puts it in 'It Never Entered My Mind', here he takes a tentative step into the outside world. Searching for his lover, "away from the city that hurts and mocks",  he covers the waterfront, watching the sea ('I Cover the Waterfront').  In Billie Holiday's earlier recording of the song the prevailing mood is hopeful, the setting romantic - searching for her love she is "covered by a starlit sky  above". Here a subtle change in the lyric to 'starless sky' gives the song an altogether darker hue.

The search continues in 'Where is the one?' before the loser appears at last resigned in 'There's No You'. The full realisation of this comes during what is undoubtedly the centrepiece of the album, 'Lonely Town'.  Wandering the streets in search of his lover "a million faces pass before (his) eyes", but he is still alone. Vocally it is a tour-de-force, Sinatra squeezes every inch of drama out of the song's dynamics, and every hint of pathos from the final lyric, "unless there's love, the world is an empty place... and every town a lonely town." 

Roger Gilbert's essay, 'The Swinger and the Loser', considers Sinatra's 50s recordings, and the projections of masculinity therein, in the light of broader cultural tendencies of the period: Method acting, the Beat poets, Action painting and Hard bop jazz.   The first of these strikes a particular chord with me. Lest we forget, Sinatra was a gifted actor. His best cinematic roles in  From Here To Eternity, The Man With The Golden Arm and Suddenly allow him to simultaneously demonstrate both the swinger and the loser personae from his musical repertoire. As Gilbert puts it,  these overtly masculine roles display the startling capacity for showing pain that lies at the heart of the Sinatra's singing, despite his macho, finger-snapping swagger. The film writer, David Thomson, also notes this interrelationship between singing and acting, describing Sinatra as having a pervasive influence on American acting. "Sinatra is a noir sound, like saxophones, foghorns, gunfire and the quiet weeping of women in the background."  (Sorry, I just had to shoehorn that quote in somewhere...)

Whether Sinatra was a method actor is a moot point - he certainly demonstrates some of the traits of method acting within his song roles. 'I'm A Fool To Want You' from Where Are You? is a case in point. Sinatra first recorded the song in 1951 at the beginning of his tempestuous relationship with the love of his life, Ava Gardner. Returning to the song on Where Are You? in 1957, the year of their divorce, Sinatra draws on his own heartbreak to lend absolute conviction to the performance. Legend has it that Sinatra ran from studio after recording the song with tears cascading down his cheeks. The extent to which Sinatra 'got inside' this particular song is evidenced by the co-writing credit the song's original authors afforded him (the only instance of this in his vast back catalogue, I believe).



 
If, in In The Wee Small Hours, we see Sinatra, the artist, painting in rich autumnal shades, then Where Are You? draws on the deep blues in his pallet. If the final album in this trilogy, Only the Lonely, is to be characterised by a colour then it can only be pitch black.  Having followed the loser through longing, and then loneliness, we now join him in despair.

 Only the Lonely (1958)
The cover features the singer in full clown make-up, with the suggestion of a tear lining his cheek. This is not simply Sinatra portraying 'the fool' undone by love. This is Sinatra, the performer, whose ostensible role is to 'entertain' us, admitting to a secret pain. It brings to my mind a joke from Alan Moore's Watchmen novel. A man visits a doctor's surgery complaining of feeling all alone in an ever-threatening world. The doctor finds nothing wrong with the man but suggests a visit to circus, as the great clown Pagliacci will surely lift his spirits. The man breaks down in tears. "But doctor, I am Pagliacci..."
 


A dramatic, sweeping piano ushers in the opening, title track. A deceptively gentle opening verse follows. But something is wrong... The voice, on the previous 'loser' albums still recognisable as the croon that wowed the bobbysoxers in the forties, has changed... Deeper, positively mournful, and pushed to the very front of the mix it has a ghostly, disembodied quality, as if weighed down by the sorrow of a thousand lifetimes. These may have been Songs for Only the Lonely, as the full title promises, but they are certainly not for the faint of heart. Indeed, the album ought to carry some sort of warning sticker as 'easy' listening seems a woefully misleading description.

In 'Lonely Town', on Where are You?, the loser has internalised his pain to such a degree as to be oblivious to all passers by. In Only the Lonely he now sees that pain externalised and reflected in the outside world. As John Collis notes, the preponderance of elemental imagery  in the song titles seems to mirror his heightened emotional state: Willlows weep for him ('Willow Weep For Me'), 'Spring Is Here' (but joylessly) and his love has 'Gone With The Wind'.  

Retreating from these delusions he seeks sanctuary indoors, finding a new companion in the warm, welcoming arms of alcohol. The scene is a deserted barroom. The loser is slouched on a stool, pouring his heart out to the bartender. To the accompaniment of a soft, shuffling, honky tonk piano he begins...

"It's quarter to three, there's no one in the place, except you and me. So set 'em up Joe,  I've got a little story I think you should know..."

 
The song is, of course, 'One For My Baby'. It, and its companion piece on the album ,'Angel Eyes', represent two of Sinatra's most celebrated performances, and are the two key songs in his portrayal of 'the loser'. Right up until the end of his career he included one or both of these songs in his live act, adopting the 'saloon singer' persona, as he called it, creating scenes of complete intimacy within packed concert halls, turning Madison Square Garden into a backstreet speakeasy for three beautiful minutes.
                                                                     
'Angel Eyes', with its sparse Nelson Riddle arrangement, and slow rhythmic pulse, resounding like the drunk's slowed heartbeat, provides perhaps the album's most dramatic moment. It's no coincidence that  Sinatra chose this song, not the recently recorded 'My Way', to close the 'farewell ' concert that began his 'retirement' in 1971. With a typical sense of theatre, the lights dimmed as Sinatra delivered the breathtaking final line, "excuse me, while I disappear...." And he was gone.



Joe's calling last orders for me too.

Dim the lights.

Raise the curtain.

Bring on the clown.










Sinatra & The Art of Losing:

Recommended albums


In The Wee Small Hours (1955)
Close to You (1956)
Where Are You? (1957)
Only The Lonely (1958)
No One Cares (1959)
Point of No Return (1962)
All Alone (1962)
The September of My Years (1965)
A Man Alone (1967)
She Shot Me Down (1982)


Recommended reading

John Collis 'The Complete Guide to the Music of Frank Sinatra' (Omnibus 1998)
Will Friedwald  'Sinatra! The Song Is You' (Scribner Press 1995)
Roger Gilbert 'The Swinger and the Loser: Sinatra, Masculinity, and Fifties Culture'
(from 'Frank Sinatra and Popular Culture'  (ed) Leonard Mustazza, Praeger Press 1998)