Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [47]
Zeke Zarchy could see it from the trumpet section. “The audience wouldn’t let him off the stage,” he recalled. “This scrawny kid had such appeal. I had never seen a vocalist with a band go over like that. He had a certain quality. Jack Leonard was a good singer, but a band singer … I could sense [Sinatra] knew that also.”
Now, with the rocket booster of the Dorsey band behind him, Frank was going farther, faster—in fact, he was approaching escape velocity.
The rest of the band knew something was up, though they hadn’t a clue how far it would really go. John Huddleston of the Pied Pipers (then Jo Stafford’s husband) said, “He had something. He sure knew it. I could sense that he was going to do whatever he wanted.” And Zarchy further observed, “When I say he was standoffish, it’s not because he felt that he was better than anybody else. He knew that he was going to be a star because he wanted to be a star … And I didn’t blame him one bit and neither did anybody else because we saw what his appeal was.”
This last isn’t entirely true. The band’s first date after it returned from Chicago was at one of the biggest clubs in the East, Frank Dailey’s Meadowbrook, on Route 23 in Cedar Grove, New Jersey. “It was at the Meadowbrook,” Peter J. Levinson writes, “that Dorsey first gave Sinatra, rather than to Buddy Rich, featured billing. Buddy immediately expressed his anger to Tommy but to no avail. In retaliation, he speeded up the tempo on slow ballads behind Sinatra or played loudly behind him.”
Things would escalate from there. But Rich was fighting a losing battle—and he knew it, which riled him up even more. He felt gypped: he had signed on with Dorsey to propel jazz, and now the ballads (totally boring to keep time to), and the ballad singer, were taking over. And no matter how blazing a drummer’s solos, he sits at the back of the band; the singer stands in front. Literally and figuratively, Frank Sinatra was beginning to stand in front of everyone else.
Everyone.
Tommy Dorsey would have laughed in the face of anyone who told him that his boy singer, this pain-in-the-ass little guinea, was single-handedly bringing the primacy of the big band to an end and ushering in the age of the solo vocalist. The Dorsey empire was running smoothly, its ruler a superb businessman as well as a great bandleader. His band hit the ground running when it reached the Big Apple. Not only were they booked into the Paramount for four weeks in March and April, but they also began a blazing streak of New York recording sessions that would continue through August and result in almost forty of the eighty-three studio numbers that Sinatra eventually cut with Dorsey.
And Frank’s confidence grew with every tune. He began a practice he would continue to the end of his career. “I take a sheet with just the lyrics. No music,” he told the casino mogul Steve Wynn many years later. “At that point, I’m looking at a poem. I’m trying to understand the point of view of the person behind the words. I want to understand his emotions. Then I start speaking, not singing, the words so I can experiment and get the right inflections. When I get with the orchestra, I sing the words without a microphone first, so I can adjust the way I’ve been practicing to the arrangement. I’m looking to fit the emotion behind the song that I’ve come up with to the music. Then it all comes together. You sing the song. If the take is good, you’re done.”
The first number he recorded in New York was one that had been written by his old drinking buddy from the hungry years (just three years earlier), the brilliant former Remick and Company song plugger Jimmy Van Heusen. The number, co-written with the lyricist Eddie DeLange, was called “Shake Down the Stars.”
Sinatra had a gift for seeing talent and allying himself with it. Both Sammy Cahn and Van Heusen were coming into their own in 1940, Van Heusen in a spectacular