Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [121]
Astonishing as it may be to think about today, the idea of the standard—the great and lasting popular song, from the hands of one of the above-mentioned geniuses, or others such as Harold Arlen, Harry Warren, and Hoagy Carmichael—didn’t really exist at the end of World War II. There was just a lot of music out there: great songs, good songs, fair songs, and poor songs, among which not even a great artist like Sinatra could always be depended on to navigate reliably.
He got an early leg up from a man who would become a romantic rival (and probably because of this, a Sinatra hater till the end of his life): Artie Shaw. Early in his career, the mercurial, intellectually arrogant clarinetist and bandleader hit on a simple but brilliant notion. “As Shaw put it,” Will Friedwald writes, “the idea was to take the best possible songs and orchestrate them in the best possible way.” With this guideline in mind, Shaw resurrected great (but incredibly enough, lightly dust-coated) tunes such as Porter’s “Begin the Beguine,” Kern’s “All the Things You Are,” and Gershwin’s “The Man I Love” and made huge hit records of them.
Sinatra had ears, and he heard.
Also starting in the early 1940s, Sammy Cahn began scouting for him. “I take great pride in the fact that I introduced Frank to a lot of the great, great songs,” he told Friedwald. He would continue to do so throughout their long professional relationship. But Frank was a lightning-fast learner, and the two geniuses behind his first album, which was issued in March 1946 and consisted almost entirely of what would come to be called standards, were Sinatra himself and the warm businessman Manie Sacks.
As previously noted, Frank recorded prodigiously in 1945. He committed to disc “Where or When” and “All the Things You Are” and “If I Loved You,” and he also recorded “Mighty Lak’ a Rose” and “Lily Belle” and “My Shawl,” as well as a couple of dozen other mostly forgotten tunes. Yet in two sessions—one on July 30 in Hollywood, one on December 7 in New York—he recorded eight numbers, six of which were masterpieces of songwriting, and these eight songs became the four discs of Columbia Set C-112, The Voice of Frank Sinatra. It was not only Frank’s first album but also the first thematic album of popular music available to the American public.2
It was a time when Frank Sinatra’s singing could be heard profusely, on the radio or in live performance or on shellac 78-rpm discs; yet it was also a time when the very notion of a Frank Sinatra album—indeed, of a phonograph album period—was new and exotic. An album was what you put stamps or family photos or butterflies in. Yet now you could buy a wide, flat, heavy box with four records inside, with Sinatra’s curly-haired, red-bow-tied, grinning image on the 1940s-Moderne cover (dancing white, yellow, and black ellipses on a field of teal; a hint of Miró and Calder), selling for the not inconsiderable retail price of $2.50, the equivalent of $30 today. And the people bought it. By the tens of thousands. Canny businessman that he was, Sacks had paid attention to Frank’s masterly (and unprecedented) notion of a musical self-portrait. He had put a new and irresistible product in a new and irresistible package, raising the price but also raising the game. In a very real way, Frank and Manie, together, had reinvented Sinatra.
The bobby-soxers could keep swooning over their fifty-cent discs of “One Love” or “I Dream of You”; but here was a box of music for grown-ups. The theme was adult love: J. Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie’s “You Go to My Head”; George and Ira Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch over Me”; Strachey, Link, and Marvell’s “These Foolish Things”; Cole Porter’s “Why Shouldn’t I?”; Woods, Campbell, and