| Swank: The Exit Music |
| by Jack Newcastle | |
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(Continued from Front Page) on his head, he would come to despise and revile the usurper to his throne? ‘Rock and roll smells phony and false,’ he would infamously say in 1957. ‘It is sung, played, and written for the most part by cretinous goons, and by means of its almost imbecilic reiteration - and sly, lewd, in plain fact, dirty lyrics - it manages to be the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the earth.’ Obviously, Frank was in the camp that rock and roll was going to destroy the American way of life, and though today’s music historians claim that he and the millions of Americans that wanted to eradicate rock and roll were victims of paranoia, Frank was, in the end, right. Rock and roll did eventually destroy the American way of life, that being the way of life Sinatra had always known it to be. Whether the victory rock and roll had over swing was to the good or bad is an entirely subjective matter. As already noted, Frank’s world swung, and though it may hump, thump, pound, gyrate, and twist, the one thing that rock and roll doesn’t do is swing, at least not in the syncopated, Count Basie, horns and vibraphone phrasing to which Sinatra was accustomed. Certainly, with Sinatra’s place in the music business and his socializing with black musicians, he had to have been exposed to rock and roll long before Alan Freed even started spinning those ‘race records’ in 1951, but without a demarcating term for it, he, along with other musicians, probably just though of it as another form of boogie-woogie. Did he, for example, believe rock and roll progenitors like Louis Jordan and Big Joe Turner were also cretinous goons? Doubtful, as early rock and roll did have some swing to it, but like most of the public (even today’s), he probably didn’t see any connection whatsoever between songs like Choo-Choo Ch’Boogie and Rock Around the Clock. Taking this into account, it must be presumed that Sinatra’s anathema wasn’t the pioneering sounds of rock and roll so much as it was the early white rock and roller, and that, of course, would primarily be Elvis. Reportedly, Sinatra would spend hours listening to Elvis records, dissecting them, wondering what the kids saw in this upstart and his music. But no matter how long he listened, he just didn’t get it, a fact made evident in his 1960 Timex special, Welcome Home Elvis. How Sinatra was persuaded, coaxed, cajoled, or coerced into hosting a show celebrating Elvis’ return from the army is to this day a mystery. It’s been suggested he did it out of love for daughter Nancy, at twenty years old an Elvis fan who co-hosted and performed a few numbers in the special, but if Sinatra held as much contempt for Elvis and rock and roll as he publicly stated, it’s hard to imagine his, or anyone’s, buckling just to make a child happy. Today, it would be like Tipper Gore hosting an NWA reunion. Yet, it could also be said that Sinatra, along with much of the adult population, had not only been inured to rock and roll - found that it didn’t immediately bring on the Armageddon as suggested a half-decade early – but saw that it had been tamed by the record industry. The years 1958 to 1963 belonged to the Fabians, the Frankie Avalons, the Pat Boone’s – manufactured teen idols strong on talent and looks but certainly short on fang, and by the time of Elvis’ discharge, that old juvenile delinquent rock and roll was long gone. Perhaps Sinatra simply thought it was time to dissolve the air of enmity between his world of swing and the one of rock, and for a few brief years, it did seem that the two worlds could happily coexist: the kids could take their transistor radios and repair to the sunny beaches of Fort Lauderdale and Malibu, the adults, to Las Vegas and The Sands. There’s actually not much of Elvis to be seen in the hour long program. After his entrance in uniform and a Joey Bishop quip about missing sideburns, Elvis disappears to let four-fifths of the Rat Pack (Dean missing) sing, dance, and kid around. Elvis reappears toward the end in a tuxedo (looking slightly uncomfortable in it) and after performing a few numbers with Scotty Moore and the boys, does his now legendary duet with Sinatra. That two men can be in the same business, to be masters of the same basic craft, and for both to be completely at sea as to what the other does for living is a minor testament to the accelerated pace of the twentieth century and a major one to the generation gap. Having decided to trade hits, Elvis takes on Witchcraft, and because of his lack of experience and his tackling of an unknown form, we can forgive both the resultant butchering and snapping of his fingers at the oddest of timings, but as for Sinatra, Love Me Tender is a ballad, not that incredibly different from anything he crooned when he was with Dorsey, and even if it’s argued that he just didn’t care - didn’t bother rehearsing - it seems nearly impossible that a professional with a quarter-century experience could muck it up as profoundly as he did. Did the part of Sinatra’s brain that interpreted straight-ahead four-four not work? Perhaps it really was as unfathomable to him as basic one-plus-one math is to an autistic who can instantly recite pi to the trillionth. So, we’re left to wonder if Sinatra’s contempt for rock was only a reaction borne from frustration. He didn’t get it, so he hated it. In a 1967 special, however, he seemed to have changed his mind. ‘Groovy,’ he says to Ella Fitzgerald about the new sound of psychedelia. ‘I love it. As a matter of fact, every generation has its own sound. In the 20s they had the Charleston. After that came swing…but the thing that strikes me, Ella, is that songs actually haven’t changed very much, you know, They sound different and the beat has changed, but the tunes basically say the same thing.’ But for as much as we'd like to believe him, his delivery is stilted, scripted, platitudinous, and so he comes across as a man hedging his bets; should the baby-boom hippie generation actually win the war, he’d have a videotaped document of allegiance. As the sixties wound down, the aging inhabitant’s of Sinatra’s antiquated, syncopated world were tired of fighting that war and had long retreated to the suburbs in record numbers. Swank, dying fast, knocked on their doors looking for help, but it was only met with the sound of the television being turned up. Within a few short years it was over. The Stork had closed, Madison Avenue was selling the cult of youth, and to put on a tie for anything other than work was beginning to be thought extravagant. Sinatra had one last comment to make on the decade, and it came on his album My Way. ‘I think he did it as a joke,’ says Jack Crosley, entertainer and swank era historian, ‘but he didn’t realize the joke was on him,' but whether it was a goof or a show of contempt, Sinatra’s cover of Paul Simon’s Mrs. Robinson remains a record of defeat. The irony of Sinatra’s version lies in the cumulative effect of lyric, sentiment, arrangement, delivery, and the timing of release. Even the subtext of Mike Nichols’ The Graduate, the film for which the original was appropriated (Nichols asked Simon to change the title from Mrs. Roosevelt to Mrs. Robinson), compounds the poignancy of Sinatra’s joke gone awry. Mrs. Robinson is the demandful, manipulative old guard preying on youth. Benjamin Braddock, paramour and title character, ultimately dismisses her, and by proxy everything her generation represents, in favor of daughter Elaine. Eventually, he becomes a crucifix wielding Von Helsing fending off a pack of middle-aged undead trying to tear him apart as he rescues the girl from both the wedding and a fate identical. The Graduate was one of the first films to take a serious swipe at bourgeois suburban America, to call into question the previously applauded results of post-war affluence, and Sinatra’s snide evocation of it only serves to reinforce Nichols’ point: the country was at a cultural crossroads where no one had direction and no one knew which road to take. At the end of the film, Braddock and Elaine are riding a somewhere-bound bus, their blank countenances revealing a probable just as blank future. ‘Where do we go from here?’ they seem to ask, just as Simon asks in the lyric of Mrs. Robinson, ‘Where has it all gone?’ By failing to understand the crux of Simon’s oft-analyzed lyric, Sinatra, too, compounds the despair of Mrs. Robinson by taking one of the few rock and roll songs that actually mourned his bygone era and turning it into a joke. It becomes a revolver in his hands, one thought to be a kid’s toy but discovered only too late to be very real and very deadly. Don Costa’s arrangement, the entire brass section sweeping in with a coda rather than an intro, exacerbates the mood as this is traveling music of the ‘Good night, folks, Drive safe’ variety. Sinatra comes in with his winking first line, a reference to the famed West 52nd Street Saloonkeeper And here’s to you Mrs. Robinson, Jilly loves you more than you will know. After leaving the rest of the verse intact, he takes to parody. The PTA, Mrs. Robinson, Won’t okay the way you do your thing. Ding. Ding. Ding. And you’ll get yours, Mrs. Robinson, Fooling with the young stuff like you do, Boo hoo hoo Woo woo woo And following the break he lapses into the nonsensical So how’s your bird, Mrs. Robinson, Dandy, Mrs. Robinson, you say, Hey Hey Hey Well, have you heard, Mrs. Robinson, Mine is fine as wine and I should know. Ho Ho Ho. The track takes to a long fade, Sinatra ending it with, ‘Keep those cards and letters coming in, Robin, baby.’ For well over a decade Sinatra had not only fought the encroaching forces of youth culture but tried to keep up the morale of his troops. Once he realized his efforts were futile, he took to mockery and potshots from safe distance. ‘If that’s the future,’ he seemed to say, ‘they can have it.’ Funny thing was, it turned out the adults wanted it, too: right around the corner from 1969 were leisure suits and a let it all hang out lifestyle. The Summer of Love might have been the death knell of Frank’s world of glitz and glamour, of night-clubs populated by tuxedoed men and gowned women, but his Mrs. Robinson is the family leaving the grave. It’s the moment when mourners move off to their cars and there’s the sudden realization that the departed’s not coming home with them. He has to go into the ground now, alone, and there’s nothing to be done about it. Inadvertently, Frank had been the one to fire up the back-hoe. Goodbye, Swank. It was nice knowing you. Adobe Flash Player not installed or older than 9.0.115! 
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