Frank Sinatra: Everything Happens to Me [Reprise, 1996]The Chairman on Reprise is a study in why artists shouldn't own record companies. My researches into a catalogue that runs to some 100 LPs have yet to uncover a single title that comes near the great Capitols, and the compilations are not to be trusted. So rather than spending $60 for the choppy 81-song box, try this 20-song oddity, supposedly programmed by Frank himself at age 79 and duplicating only seven box selections. It anoints more Don Costas than Nelson Riddles and is surprisingly scant on the Tin Pan Alley pantheon, the defining factor is tempo, almost always moderate or less, accentuating the autumnally ruminative mood of the songs and the old man who looked back on them so fondly. It ain't, to choose the Capitol remaster I've just glommed onto, Songs for Young Lovers/Swing Easy! But from the "suddenly you're a lot older" of the 1981 lead track, there's character here no callow 40-year-old would stoop to. A
>>131209250Sinatra's comeback on Capitol happened at the right moment. If he had come back in, say, 1957, after rock-and-roll was underway it would be too late. He revived just when the window for his generation of singers was still open yet.
>>131209250>My researches into a catalogue that runs to some 100 LPs have yet to uncover a single title that comes near the great CapitolsSinatra and Strings, September of My Years, A Man Alone and Watertown would like a word with your wife.
>>131209250granted, but the Sinatra family much prefers the Reprise stuff for reissues as they have more ownership of it
>>131209289think if he'd stayed at Columbia people would remember Dick Haymes more today lol
>>131209322Haymes left Decca in 52 at the same time Sinatra left CBS. The era of swooning romantic ballads was over and the era of housewife pop was in and Haymes couldn't adapt, and unlike Frank there was no career comeback ahead for him. Many of their peers like Como, Day, etc had no problem adapting to the new way of pop music.
Sinatra may have wound up on RCA had Manie Sachs been able to convince them to sign him. However as they had Como, Eddie Fisher, Tony Martin, Vaughn Monroe as well as Mario Lanza they didn't need another male pop vocalist.
>>131209322If that happens then he doesn't get paired up with Nelson Riddle, who was then arranging Nat King Cole's records at Capitol. This was before the era of artist-driven music and labels had a lot more top-down control of singers. The A&R guys would give singers material they thought "fit" them. Capitol was more liberal on artist freedom than Columbia, RCA, etc and they gave Sinatra the ability to put together his legendary concept LPs.
Tony Bennett may have benefited from the feud between Sinatra and Mitch Miller. While Miller still looked for hit singles by Tony he eased up when it came to Bennett's albums giving Tony more latitude. Miller did not want a repeat of what happened with Frank.
>>131209521Bennett had hits too and he was a teen idol in the early 50s with girls screaming for him. I mean, Jo Stafford was having hits with some awful songs which may be why they let her do what she wanted with her LPs. Sinatra trying to have hits with bullshit like "Chow Willy" and at the same time getting full creative control over his LPs was probably not going to work.
>>131209546hey now, Bennett and Rosemary Clooney hated some of the singles they were forced to record and ultimately did get to make concept albums closer to what they wanted to be doing. also idk about "Chow Willy", don't happen to know that song.
>>131209521Well then again Bennett didn't want to record "Cold Cold Heart." Would have been funny to see Sinatra tackle Hank Williams
Sinatra took himself far too seriously to record Mitchslop. If he stayed at CBS the result would be the same as his cover of "Downtown" where you can tell he's ready to stroke out from it. I don't think Bennett had that problem (not in the 50s anyway, Sings The Great Hits of Today) was another story). Maybe he didn't like Mitchslop and Clooney didn't like it, but the professional in them compelled them to make the best of it.
>>131209433he was on RCA during his big band days, he joined CBS when he went solo during the war
>>131209620Technically it's wrong to call MM the "boss man" at Cokelumbia. He was the head of the pop records division and answered to Cokelumbia president William Paley. Miller always claimed Sinatra had full freedom to record or reject any song he wanted. "The Beard" was in the right place at the right time to capitalize on the demand for meme housewife pop songs, but of course after rock-and-roll happened he lost it and his later years saw Cokelumbia's sales and chart relevance atrophy to almost nothing.
Capitol had been founded by Johnny Mercer with the idea of artistic freedom. It was there that Frank got to work with Riddle and Les Baxter which resurrected his career.
>>131209732idk anyone mentioned that Sinatra had to be practically pried away from his longtime relationship with Axel Stohrdahl. they cut a few sides at Capitol before he was convinced to work with Nelson Riddle instead. Stohrdahl could not have done those brassy uptempo songs that became Frank's hallmark at Capitol.
>>131209751idk what arrangers CBS could have given him to revitalize his sound. obviously the sound he'd developed with Stohrdahl had gotten stale and played out.
i feel if Frank stayed with Columbia any reissues would be direct-from-vinyl rips as the original tapes would look like they'd been used as a doggy chew toy by now and be almost unusable
>>131209802>i feel if Frank stayed with Columbia any reissues would be direct-from-vinyl rips as the original tapes would look like they'd been used as a doggy chew toy by now and be almost unusableidk man. they have original Bennett, Clooney, etc master tapes from the 50s that survived in good condition. i did hear that some later rock era stuff like the Byrds and Simon & Garfunkel tapes were pretty well destroyed though.
BTW, I'd also like to mention that red label Columbia 78s are godawful-sounding, probably the worst-sounding 78s of the electric recording era. This didn't improve until they switched to vinyl discs.
>>131209831that did happen with a lot of rock albums because they made so many reissues of them. the original stereo tapes for Blonde on Blonde were in such bad shape that they couldn't be used at all.
>>131209845these discs are not shellac, they're laminated cork likely due to wartime-induced shellac shortages and yes they sound like crap. Columbia's radio transcription discs did use shellac and sound much much better.
>>131209901Not even cork, it's more like some kind of brown paper stuff. their classical discs from this period sound decent, it's mostly the pop records that are affected.
>>13120984550s-era CBS records do generally have good audio quality, but I think Capitol's preference for emphasizing the mid-range was better for Sinatra's voice than CBS's pref for scooping the mid out and sounding more treble-y as well as abusing vocal reverb.
>>131209974I wouldn't say 50s era Columbia was entirely a hellscape of "Shrimp Boats" and "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)"s as they did have some top-tier recordings (though more often on the LPs than the singles). That said, I think Capitol's output from 52-57 easily buries Columbia's, at least the stuff I've heard, anyway. Now there were some classy Columbia discs like this one that rivals anything Capitol put out, so it wasn't like all of their releases were Mitchslop.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv5Hyh_vgIE
>>131210105>so it wasn't like all of their releases were MitchslopHe had to go on vacation or business trips sometime and there were probably other people producing while he was out of town. Bet $5 someone at Columbia that wasn't him produced that Eileen Rodgers record there. In fact we know Miller was out of town for the weekend when John Hammond signed Dylan.
>>131209558>also idk about "Chow Willy", don't happen to know that songDuet between Stafford and Frankie Laine, and about as bad as you'd expect a song with that title to be.
>>131210105granted, though i give Decca credit for offloading all their shitty material to the Coral label and saving the main one for more classy stuff
>>131209309in regards to the Capitol stuff, i feel there unfortunately isn't anyone left who'd still understand it from an engineering or presentation standpoint.
>>131209289It's like he came along at a dire time for trad pop and said "I'll show you how it's done you fucking amateurs".
>>131209250Critics should be forced to learn an instrument before they're allowed to criticize anyone or anything.
>>131209759>>131209845See here. George Siravo was one possibility and there are rumors that a few of the early Sinatra/Riddle recordings aren't really Riddle, but Siravo ghosting. In any case the 53-54 Sinatra Capitol records are not hugely removed stylistically from the 50-52 Columbia ones.
>>131210322yeah the reissues are bad, which is too bad considering the original vinyls have face-melting sound
>>131209663As anon said, John Hammond signed Bob Dylan, not Mitch Miller who happened to be away for the weekend. At that point they didn't have any actual rock acts except Paul Revere and the Raiders, and they got no promotion until 65, after Miller was fired. Otherwise CBS in the early 60s was mostly pushing aging warhorses like Doris Day and Kitty Kallen, as well as newer MOR mush singers like Andy Williams, Steve and Eydie, Johnny Mathis, and so forth. Barbra Streisand was their young rising star but she was a standards/showtune artist not a rock performer.
>>131210491Miller called R&R "musical baby food" in a 1958 interview with NME. Since he apparently believed "Shrimp Boats" and "Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania" were what classy, sophisticated adults listened to, any takes he had on matters of taste can be dismissed out of hand.
most of the older generation didn't like rock of course. a few had some fairly enlightened takes--Peggy Lee once said she enjoyed the rhythm of R&R but thought that until the Beatles it didn't have real lyrics or songwriting.
>>131210491the Raiders were signed to the label in 62. there was also Dion. prior to that, Carl Perkins and the Collins Kids were CBS acts, though signed with the country rather than the pop division. this was typical of the major labels at the time--Wanda Jackson was also signed to Capitol's country division, not their pop one and they had a similar problem with Dave Dexter not being too cool on rock.
imagine the number of women Sinatra fucked vs the amount cheiatgau did…
where did this thread even come from? is this some weird sect of frank sinatra superfans i've never run into on this board before?
Terry Melcher led the way for the rock renaissance at Columbia's LA studios which were more laid-back--people walked around barefoot and smoked weed unlike the formal suit-and-tie atmosphere at "The Church" (the NYC studio, so-called because it used to be an Albanian Orthodox church). None of their records were selling in the early 60s except the Mitch Miller Sing-a-Long LPs. So Clive Davis replaced him in 65 and quickly brought the label into the rock era, he himself attended the Monterey Pop Festival in love beads and flower-print clothing.Davis did also set the dangerous precedent of outbidding other labels to get talent, like the Yankees buying pitchers, and eventually he was fired after reportedly using the company account to pay for his son's bar mitzvah.
>>131209417would apply to some other people too like Margaret Whiting and Connie Haines. they had been big names in the 40s but couldn't adapt to the 50s.
>>131210601Mark Lindsay was also the best rock vocalist of the 60s bar none, with only Mitch Ryder for competition. It's too bad that he gets ignored because of not being British and most discussion of American rock vocalists of the period revolves around the harmony groups.
>>131210601Dexter gets a small measure of infamy for putting reverb on the early US release Beatles singles in place of their dry British sound, but again, he was a typical child of the big band era, about the same age as Sinatra, and thought R&R was bullshit and just a cheap fad that Capitol could milk some money out of.
>>131210601BTW, Dion split from his group because they wanted to move into balladslop and he didn't.
>>131210691Columbia had deep pockets as they had parent company CBS underwriting them and many independent labels like Capitol, Mercury, and Atlantic didn't have their bucks, so they could outbid them for top rock talent.
>>131209663Sinatra did bullshit a bit during the Smathers hearings in 58 when he claimed BMI songs were ruining music and that he himself was committed to and would only perform the "classy" ASCAP stuff although in fact he had recorded a number of BMI songs, some of them of his own choosing.
>>131210612Cuckgau fucked a bisexual feminist slut or two.
>>131210655Yeah I can't tell if it's one sperg talking to himself or if it's multiple people but the 50s music threads with lots of talk about record label business have been a regular thing for a couple of years at least. One of the more interesting parts of zombie/mu/
>>131210843Dave Dexter had become famous in the big band era as a young music journalist for promoting jazz in his home region of the Midwest, which was not then known for being much of a jazz market. But yes, he was deeply committed to that type of music and thought the Beatles were a stupid fad that would probably go away soon, so he didn't think too hard into putting reverb on their records for the US market.
I see the fifties music obsessed autist found the cuckgau threadsfucking cuckgau. I could fuck his wife so good that it'd make him cum. you're crazy if you don't think he'd give that an A
>>131212082lel
>>131212082>I see the fifties music obsessed autist found the cuckgau threads?
>>131213939There's a schizo who rants about an imaginary 50s music guy on /mu/. Pay it no mind.
>>131210920such an oddly specific thing to be the one actual discussion on this board that isn't shitposting simping or chartfaggotry.
my dad had Watertown when he was 15, when it came out. man some of those lyrics hit hard he said.
>>131214535a 15 yo in 1970 listening to Sinatra? that would be a major stretch.
>>131214579He was bullied hard for it, that was about the most uncool possible thing a teenager could do back then. Music was age-segregated to a far greater extent in the 70s than today.
>>131214535Could Tony Bennett have done Watertown? Big question.
>>131214666no, absolutely not. Bennett could not convey the emotional depth of that material.
>>131214666Watertown was unappreciated at the time and a poor seller, perhaps because it didn't sound like the brassy Nelson Riddle tunes his audience seemingly expected by then.
according to Nancy, "[Mitch Miller] tried to help my dad resurrect his career but it didn't work out."
>>131214051>an imaginary 50s music guyhe's the same Anon that's always ranting about Mitch miller
