Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [34]
Frank Sinatra, who would record over thirteen hundred songs in his career, cut just ten sides in his six months with the Harry James band. The first time he went into the Brunswick studios at 550 Fifth Avenue—the date was July 13, 1939—was only the second time he had ever set foot in a recording studio. In all, Sinatra and James recorded three times in New York that summer (subsequent sessions would take place in Chicago in October and Los Angeles in November), on each occasion laying down two sides of a 78-rpm platter. The third session took place on Thursday, August 31, the day before the Nazis stormed through Poland—cool and cloudy in Manhattan; double-decker buses cruising up Fifth Avenue; big fans whirring in the studio. That day the Music Makers recorded one take of a soupy, utterly forgettable Frank Loesser ballad called “Here Comes the Night” (“Here comes the night, my cloak of blue/Here comes the night, with dreams of you”) and two takes of a new song by Arthur Altman and Jack Lawrence. The number was called “All or Nothing At All.”
It is impossible to listen to the song today and not think of all it would become: a huge hit, a trademark tune for Sinatra, a cliché so delicious that the animator Tex Avery would put singer and song in an MGM cartoon (in which a skunk dressed as Frankie croons it to a bunch of swooning bunnies).
It was not a great song. But it was a powerful song of the period, and an exceptional one: rather than just taking a chorus in the middle, as was customary with band vocalists of the era, Sinatra vocalized all the way through, to powerful and passionate effect. He was in great voice, his breath control was superb, and the twenty-three-year-old’s assurance, against the rock-solid background of James’s band, was extraordinary. There were minor gaffes: On both “half a love never appealed to me” and “if your heart never could yield to me,” his dentalization of the t in “to” is so extreme as to be laughable—that t could have walked straight off the graveyard shift at the Tietjen and Lang shipyards. And for a heart-stopping half second on the final, operatic high F (“all—or nothing at alllllll!”), Sinatra’s voice, at the height of passion, slips upward, a half note sharp.
And yet he had laid down a track for the ages, and on his seventh time out.1
Meanwhile, his boss simply couldn’t catch a break. Harry James’s management, the Music Corporation of America, didn’t know what to do with him. Bookings were scattershot. The band’s morale was sinking fast. Then, while the Music Makers played the Hotel Sherman, James finally got some good news: MCA had landed them a big gig at a big venue, the famed Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles, where Benny Goodman and his band had started the Swing Era overnight with a fabled performance in August 1935. There were smiles on the bandstand at last.
On October 4, 1939, the Palomar burned to the ground. (Charlie Barnet lost all his orchestrations, barely escaped with his life.) When Harry James’s band bus pulled out of Chicago ten days later, it must have felt a little like the Flying Dutchman.
Frank Sinatra wasn’t on the bus. Rather, he and his young wife had traveled west in his green Chrysler convertible. As the self-professed greatest vocalist in the business, Sinatra would have appreciated the symbolic value of separateness, not to mention the convenience of having his own wheels. Yet as an already established cocksman, with an already shaky commitment