Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [208]
A great mythology has gathered around this song.1 The deliciously awful title alone has become a shorthand for the downfall of Sinatra’s career, a collapse that—according to myth—was all but engineered by the nefarious Miller. Sinatra himself liked to reinforce this impression. “I growled and barked on the record,” he told his daughter Nancy. “The only good business it did was with dogs.” Nor did Miller, an irascible and self-promoting character, do much to help his own reputation.
In fact, Mitch Miller was doing everything he could to jump-start Sinatra’s dying recording career in the spring of 1951: the goateed hit maker was up for trying anything—anything—that might work, and so, for that matter, was Frank Sinatra. A novelty number? Why not? It was a crapshoot, but plenty of them had succeeded: look at Frankie Laine’s “Mule Train”; look at Rosemary Clooney’s “Come On-a My House” (both produced by Miller).
Frank Sinatra loved recording great songs, but even more he loved recording hit records,2 and he desperately needed a hit that spring. Moreover, unlike, say, Clooney and Jo Stafford, both of whom were under constant contractual pressure by Miller and Columbia to record songs they didn’t like (and pay for the recording sessions),3 Sinatra had, through the good offices of Manie Sacks, grandfathered final approval over material into his contract with the label. In other words, Mitch Miller wasn’t foisting anything on Frank Sinatra. Miller brought “Mama Will Bark” to Sinatra, and Sinatra said yes.
However, Frank had been able to be considerably choosier just twelve months earlier. Returning from his disastrous visit to Ava in Spain, Frank had stepped off the plane at La Guardia to find his new producer brimming with excitement over two new songs he’d found. “Great stuff, Frank!” According to Sinatra archivist Ed O’Brien, Sinatra and Miller drove directly to the Columbia recording studio, where Miller had an orchestra waiting. Sinatra looked at the sheet music for the numbers, “The Roving Kind” and “My Heart Cries for You.” He gave the producer a look, but gamely enough ran through both songs with the musicians. The first was a bouncy, faux-folksy sea chantey (“She had a dark and roving eye-yyy, and her hair hung down in ring-a-lets”); the second, a swooner with a polka-esque chorus (“My heart cries for you, sighs for you, dies for you”). Hearing these atrocities actually set to music was all Sinatra needed. “Frank looks at Miller and says, ‘I’m not recording this fucking shit,’ ” O’Brien said. “He throws the sheet music on the floor and says, ‘You get yourself some other boy—I’m not doing this in a million years.’ And he walks out.
“Here we are, we’re all set up, we’ve got the music, we’ve got the musicians, the session is that night, we’re paying everybody—‘What the hell am I going to do?’ ” Miller told O’Brien. “So Miller jumps on the phone and calls Guy Mitchell.”
Guy Mitchell—born Albert George Cernik—was a twenty-three-year-old former child movie actor and radio singer recently signed to a Columbia recording contract by Miller (who came up with Cernik’s new name thusly: “You’re a nice guy, and my name is Mitchell—we’ll call you Guy Mitchell”). On the phone, according to O’Brien, Miller asked Mitchell, “ ‘Guy, would you like to come in and do a couple of quick songs for me?’ And Mitchell comes in and does the songs, and they both go right to the top of the charts. One was Number 1, the other made Number 2.”
By May 1951, Guy Mitchell was an important recording star, and no one knew this better than Frank. And so, when Miller—filled with certainty and energy, the main ingredients of persuasiveness—asked him to record “Mama Will Bark,” Sinatra said yes.
And on May 10, Frank and Mitch and Axel, along with a horn section, a rhythm ensemble including the reliable Johnny