The Chairman at 100

Frank Sinatra was now involved with many things involving many people

-- his own film company, his record company, his private airline, his missile-parts firm, his real-estate holdings across the nation, his personal staff of seventy-five -- which are only a portion of the power he is and has come to represent. He seemed now to be also the embodiment of the fully emancipated male, perhaps the only one in America, the man who can do anything he wants, anything, can do it because he has money, the energy, and no apparent guilt. In an age when the very young seem to be taking over, protesting and picketing and demanding change, Frank Sinatra survives as a national phenomenon, one of the few prewar products to withstand the test of time. He is the champ who made the big comeback, the man who had everything, lost it, then got it back, letting nothing stand in his way, doing what few men can do: he uprooted his life, left his family, broke with everything that was familiar, learning in the process that one way to hold a woman is not to hold her. Now he has the affection of Nancy and Ava and Mia, the fine female produce of three generations, and still has the adoration of his children, the freedom of a bachelor, he does not feel old, he makes old men feel young, makes them think that if Frank Sinatra can do it, it can be done; not that they could do it, but it is still nice for other men to know, at fifty, that it can be done. Frank Sinatra Has a Cold - Gay Talese

Sinatra’s way

Pop music is particularly prone to the style: the writer Greil Marcus is its high priest, lionising Elvis Presley or Bob Dylan as outsiders who changed everything. In an echo of the 19th-century historian Thomas Carlyle (“The history of the world is but the biography of great men”), they are held up as the unconventional “founding fathers” of postwar America, remaking the world anew through force of individuality.

Sinatra wasn’t averse to casting himself in the same light, as with his brassy anthems of self-fulfilment, “That’s Life” and “Theme from New York, New York”. “My Way”, released in 1969, is the prime example, sung by Sinatra with the gusto of a bull in a china shop. But Sinatra actually disliked the song, written for him by the singer Paul Anka. It “really had nothing to do with my life whatsoever”, he complained. “I know it’s a very big hit — and I love having big hits — but every time I get up to sing that song I grit my teeth . . . ”

The style he honed was the product of science as well as art. Sinatra’s favourite microphone, the Neumann U47, came on the market in 1949; its sound quality remains almost unmatched today. Advances in vinyl production, studio equipment and high-fidelity stereo systems lay behind his recordings in the 1950s, allowing him to murmur sweet nothings from the turntable in the nation’s living rooms. When he sang “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”, the real meaning lay the other way round. It was his voice charming the ears of millions, getting under their skin, a physiological seduction brought about by recording technology.

I've been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn and a king
I've been up and down and over and out and I know one thing
Each time I find myself layin' flat on my face
I just pick myself up and get back in the race

That's life (that's life), that's life and I can't deny it
Many times I thought of cuttin' out but my heart won't buy it
But if there's nothin' shakin' come this here July
I'm gonna roll myself up in a big ball a-and die

Posted by gerardvanderleun at December 12, 2015 9:21 AM