Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [41]
“The only problem, Jo, is, I can’t afford eight singers,” he said.
Stafford laughed. “That’s OK, Tommy. Four quit to try and earn an honest living. There are only four of us now.”
The Pipers joined the band in December 1939, while Sinatra fulfilled his obligation to Harry James. And they were sitting on the stage in Milwaukee or Sheboygan or Minneapolis or Rockford when he appeared, straight out of the blue.
Had Stafford even heard him on the radio at that point?
“Never even heard of him,” she said. “But I sure knew this was something. Everybody up until then was sounding like Crosby, but this was a whole new sound.”
Was it ever. To get a sense of what Stafford heard that night, skip forward a few months and listen, side by side, to Bing’s version of a corny yet completely seductive number called “Trade Winds” and then Frank’s. The two recordings were made just four days apart—and Sinatra’s was first, on June 27, 1940, in New York City, with Dorsey and orchestra, including the still-unfired Bunny Berigan (like Beiderbecke, a fatally self-destructive lush) on trumpet, Joe Bushkin on piano, and Buddy Rich on drums. Crosby laid down his track the following Monday, July 1, in Los Angeles, with Dick McIntire and His Harmony Hawaiians.
Amazingly, both versions are equally strong. The thirty-seven-year-old Bing had been at the very top of his game for the better part of a decade, the biggest star in America and a vocal force of nature. On this number, as always, his matchlessly rich baritone was simultaneously romantic and (ever so slightly) ironic. Other men could try to sing like him—and many did try—but that voice, utterly of a piece with his elusive personality, was simply inimitable.
As was Sinatra’s.
As young as he was—not yet twenty-five—he carried the flyweight tropical number off with complete aplomb. Unlike Crosby’s version, which, as a superstar deserved, was an out-and-out vocal from beginning to end, Sinatra’s was a band singer’s dutiful turn, coming on the heels of Dorsey’s supersmooth trombone intro. His voice was nowhere near as deep and rich an instrument as it would become in the 1950s, and the Hoboken accent was still defiantly unreconstructed, the r’s dicey and the t’s a little adventure in themselves (“trade” became “chrade”).
Yet Frank was lilting, persuasive, and assured. He didn’t sound remotely like anyone else—and he knew it. Even that Hoboken accent was part of his arsenal. While Bing’s power was his cool warmth, Frank’s was his unabashed heat.
In fact, Bing’s days were numbered.
Not commercially. Buoyed by his movie career, his matchless radio presence, and his ever-rising record sales, Crosby’s stock was headed nowhere but up, and would continue to flourish for more than twenty years. But a new ballad singer had taken the field, and though America didn’t know it yet, its heart hung in the balance. Bing had specifically instructed his lyricist, the great Johnny Burke, never to put the words “I love you” into any of his numbers: It simply wasn’t a sentiment the star could carry off head-on. His humor—America loved him for his dry humor—would have been undercut by it. His wooing was more oblique. There was nothing oblique about Frank Sinatra.
“Frank really loved music, and I think he loved singing,” Jo Stafford said. “But Crosby, it was more like he did it for a living. He liked music well enough. But he was a much colder person than Frank. Frank was a warm Italian boy. Crosby was not a warm Irishman.”
So, suddenly, in the land of Crosby sound-alikes, in the year of Our Lord 1940, when Americans heard their president speak on the radio in godlike aristocratic