Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [170]
Sinatra didn’t like himself very much, and the world seemed to agree with him. In March, Down Beat wrote, of a group of sides Frank had done with the Phil Moore Four, a jazz quartet, “They don’t quite get the intimate between-you-and-me feel that was attempted and Frankie hits a few off-pitch ones to boot.” He wasn’t about to explain to Down Beat what kind of mood he was in these days. They could all go screw themselves.
At the end of May, he told Your Hit Parade to take a hike, issuing a statement decrying the material he had been forced to sing and the style in which he had been compelled to sing it. Yet Lucky Strike swallowed the insult and immediately went into negotiations with Frank’s people to create a new broadcast. The new show, unambiguously titled Light Up Time, would debut in September. One thing about that Sinatra: he certainly sold cigarettes.
But not records. His latest album, Frankly Sentimental, released in June, completely failed to chart: a bad first. And while Sinatra’s singles did far better than in the annus horribilis of 1948—they spent a total of fifty-nine weeks on the charts in 1949—not one record rose above number 6. Other singers, some of them on Columbia, were charting higher with the same songs Frank was recording. The big seller of 1949, on RCA Victor, was the soothing but insipid Perry Como song “A—You’re Adorable” (“M, N, O, P, I could go on all day/Q, R, S, T, alphabetically speaking, you’re OK”). It was perfect pabulum for the masses in a nervous year: in August, the Soviet Union would confirm Americans’ worst fears by testing its first A-bomb.
Frank was striving after an ideal impossible at that point in history: to succeed commercially and satisfy himself artistically. When he merely went for hits, he produced abominations like the pseudo-country “Sunflower” (whose melody would later reappear, unimproved, as “Hello, Dolly”). When he let himself go, as he did in the three up-tempo numbers he recorded in a remarkable July session orchestrated by George Siravo and the great Sy Oliver (“It All Depends on You,” “Bye Bye Baby,” and “Don’t Cry Joe”), the results were thrilling. Lacquer-disc safety copies of the Sunday-evening session (Sinatra always preferred recording at night—“The voice is better at night,” he was fond of saying), transcribed and analyzed by the Sinatra musicologist Charles L. Granata, have preserved Frank’s obsessive pursuit of artistic perfection in exquisite detail:
The recording date is July 10, 1949. As the evening session gets underway at Columbia’s cavernous 30th Street Studio, Sinatra, arranger Sy Oliver, and conductor Hugo Winterhalter are auditioning a second instrumental run-through of George Siravo’s arrangement of “It All Depends on You.” Tonight’s date will be jazz-flavored, the orchestra really a big “band”—no strings. Amid the chatter and bustle on the studio floor, the vocalist, listening intently to a passage by the brass section, feels that something is amiss …
“I’d like to hear the introduction, with the muted brass,” he instructs the conductor. The musicians comply, and the brief section is played for his approval. After hearing the passage, Sinatra carefully instructs both the musicians and the engineers: “I’d like to get that as tight as we can. Trombones: you may have to turn around and face the microphone or something. I’d like to hear the six of you, as a unit,” he says. The engineer brings down a microphone with two sides, to help capture the precise tonal quality that Sinatra desires. The section played through again, the singer continues. “Just once more, Hugo, and would you use less