Where was the BEST place to spend Frank Sinatra's 100th Birthday?

[ChicaSkas 24,036]

 

Where Was The Best Place To Celebrate Frank Sinatra's 100th Birthday?

With his son, Frank Sinatra Jr., and his family, of course.

(Article and all photos  by (c) Katharine Styles-Burroughs aka ChicaSkas of GagaDaily, Propagaga, Populove, etc, etc, etc.)

No reproduction without permission

 

Read an eyewitness account of the celebration Frank Sinatra Jr. held for his father, and for us, 1,900 of his dad's big fans, packed into the Saban Theater in Los Angeles. It was held on December 12th, 2015 -- exactly 100 years to the day that Ol' Blue Eyes was born.

I had the opportunity (really lucky opportunity!) to get a ticket to this event, and to experience firsthand some of the magic of what it must have been like to see Frank Sinatra himself. 

What's way cool about this entire thing is that Frank Sinatra, Jr. sounds SO MUCH like his dad that it's almost eerie.

And extremely fun and cool all at once! 

Full Tracklist: 18 Songs, see below:

Spoiler

Sinatra Sings Sinatra -- Frank Sintra's 100th Birthday Celebration featuring Frank Sinatra Jr.
December 12th, 2015, Saban Theater, Beverly Hills, California, 90211  

COMPLETE TRACKLIST -- BOLD denotes a performance

1. Drumroll and Instrumental Introduction (Big Band)
2. Sinatra's Influences As Told by FSJ
3. All Or Nothing At All
4. Without A Song
5. Sinatra Legacy Enters Second Century
6. Nancy, With The Laughing Face
7. Sinatra - The Phenomenon and Cartoon
8. The Song Is You
9. The War Years
10. The House I Live In (That's America To Me)        
11. Night And Day
12. Hardships In Nine Weeks
13. One For My Baby (And One More For The Road)
14. The Comeback
15. I've Got The World On A String
16. Sinatra's New Era and Nelson Riddle
17. I've Got You Under My Skin
18. Intermission Music
19. High Hopes (The Ant And The Rubber Tree Plant)
20. Come Fly With Me 
21. The Mid Life Crisis
22. Luck Be  A Lady
23. Lonesome For His Youth    
24. The Best Is Yet To Come
25. The Elder Statesman of Entertainment
26. It Was A Very Good Year
27. Fly Me To The Moon
28. Musicians And Family Chat
29. Summer Wind
30. The Dark Side
31. Demons Instrumental Interlude
32. My Way
33. New York, New York
34. Put Your Dreams Away Epilogue
35. He Did It His Way -- Instrumental Outro

 

Frank Sinatra, Jr. was the consummate entertainer. 

Which doesn't surprise me that much, as he'd have had the best teacher on class and entertainment --- his dad!

Here's what he told us:

 

 

"Every night when we do this show, I've been making a kind of a brief introduction to our audiences, this show, of course, is dedicated to the music of a guy named Frank Sinatra.

We figure that if you are here it's because you like that music, and you like Sinatra. The music... is a given, and I think you are gonna hear exactly what you expected to hear when you walked in. The stories are there, of course, they've been overtold, retold, double-told, triple-told, but now , the direction we are going in is for you to learn something about the man. 

That's what our show is all about.

 If you will consider me, tonight... nothing more than a kind of musical biographer. From time to time we will be showing you still pictures, moving pictures, and I will be imposing on you to ask you, if you will, to read reproductions on our screen of actual newsprint, that came up at different periods of time during his life , this to [help] tell the story.

But now we come to... this night.

And forgive me for being just a little bit selfish, this is an important night to me, I'm pleased to tell you there are several members of my family in the audience this evening... [and] I have not had the opportunity to discuss their impressions of what this night means.... I hope that you will remember this of all nights, here, the Sinatra story enters it's second century, beginning today."

The audience cheers and claps, and goes crazy at the sentimental impact of this thought -- we are here with the man's son as we enter the next century of Frank Sinatra's legacy, and even though he's no longer around to tell us about his own life -- his son Frank Jr is about to tell us all about it from firsthand recollection. Really, none of the celebrations being held in New York, or Las Vegas, or Chicago -- none of them could boast the Sinatra family having attended. We were all lucky to be where we were tonight!

He continued:

"That's enough obituary prose here, so with that, let's just get right back into the show, and pick up where we left off ...
It is now 1944, and a very young Frank Sinatra, shortly before that time, had the best thing he said ever happen to him: He had his first child, [a] beautiful little girl, [Nancy]. He wanted a song on her behalf...

 
His friend, Jimmy Van Heusen, an Academy Award [winning] songwriter, joined him in a place called Bitford, in England, in 1944. A young Sinatra was wearing a funny colored khaki suit, with 600 and some thousand other young Americans, [and] the invasion of Europe was weeks away. Van Heusen played this melody, and Sinatra liked it. And Van Heusen said, "I'll get Johnny Burke started on the lyric."  A young comic in the group, a man named Phil Silvers, spoke up. He said, "You know what, I'll write a better lyric to that melody in ten minutes than Johnny Burke could write in a month." They all laughed. And Van Heusen looked at his friend, Frank Sinatra, and he said, "You got a bet."

And Phil Silvers got out a pen and paper, and started writing out some poetry. That was decades and decades ago. The song became a standard... 

Frank Jr. incorporated a few modern lyrics in the retelling of his sister's namesake song!

 

 

"Keep Julia Roberts, and Cameron Diaz
They don't compare to how fine she is."

This of course caused the audience to crack up.

Frank Jr. continued telling us stories:

"Mark Twain once said, 'No occurrence in our lives can be called a phenomenon, until it has been made the object of satire.' 

By 1944, America had been at war for 3 years, and with the women providing all the supply and the equipment for the war effort, there was much opportunity for satire. And the young Sinatra, with his voice, appearance, and mannerisms, was at that time, a phenomenon.

A Looney Tunes cartoon begins, showing hens working in a factory, doing their best to put out eggs for the war effort. But they are interrupted by a crooning sound, a charming rooster who looks and sounds a whole lot like Frank Sinatra!  The audience laughs in recognition, as the cartoon fades... FSJ goes on.

 

 

 

"The War brought many changes to the American way of life. Not the least of which was a rise of local intolerance. Many times during the years between 1942 and 1947, young Frankie had been asked to speak all over the country to youth groups and high school students about this very kind of injustice.

These appearances made him very few friends, especially among certain officials of the Federal Government, who were watching him... with great interest. But by the war's end, RKO Pictures in Hollywood believed the issue of racial discrimination to be so serious, they decided to create a short subject about it for movie theaters. They called on Sinatra to tell the story. Not only because he was a rising star, but also because as a boy, in his neighborhood, he had been a constant victim of ethnic bullying. 

Frank Jr. plays an iconic film, called, "The House I Live In" on a huge drop down screen. It teaches and promotes tolerance to all races and people. This film, though only ten minutes long, would go on to receive Presidential honors for it's message of truth and idealism.

Check it out here: 

Here's how Frank Jr. laid it down:

 

 

 

Frank Jr performs for us another one of Frank Sr's most iconic hits, "Night And Day":

 

 

 

Frank SInatra, Jr. returns to teaching the audience about his father's experiences:

There's a saying in show business... 'When your face is before everyone's eyes, and your name is on everyone's lips; when you've become one of the biggest stars going, and you're on top of the world, there's no place to go but down.'
Some of the oldtimers say this is inevitable. 

-- Newspaper headlines of increasingly bad news scroll by -- 

Well it was, for young Frankie. 

-- More newspapers, increasingly tough to read, scroll past on the screen -- 

 "And all of these things occurred within a period of nine weeks...

Then there is another saying, when your entire world has collapsed, and your life has hit bottom... there's nowhere to go but up.  

On April 30th, 1953, quietly and inauspiciously, the comeback began. He was to become one of the classic figures in the industry and Hollywood."

 

"We are now in the 1950's with the "hat and the loosened tie Sinatra" that became so famous. There are changes coming, rock and roll had already begun, and not only was the music changing but the recording industry itself was now beginning to change. The technologic side was beginning to alter.  First came the long playing record album, which was ten inches in diameter, and almost immediately thereafter, the companies that made record changers -- how long has it been since you've heard THAT expression -- then they said, we can make a record player that will play a twelve inch album! Well, everyone was delighted, the record companies could sell more music, two extra songs per side. The publishers were picking up more royalties, every record album in production had to be set up for that new format, including one album that was in production with Frank Sinatra, and his friend, Nelson Riddle.

They had recorded [it in] four nights, -- this is true -- they had finished on Thursday what they thought would be their new album.
[At] one o' clock in the morning the phone rings, and Sinatra answers the phone. They say to him, "We need four more songs for your new album, and the studio is booked for eight o' clock tonight. You have nineteen hours."

And he said, "Can I give myself some leeway, we have no songs selected, we have no orchestrations written!" and they said with that corporate indifference, "Well, you've got till 8 o'clock tonight." 

Sinatra calls his friend Nelson Riddle, gets him out of bed at one in the morning, and Nelson Riddle starts writing.  He gets out the scorepage, "let's do this song, this song, this song..." By sunup, Nelson has finished two full orchestrations, each for this many musicians, by the way...

(there are approximately 20 musicians onstage behind Frank Sinatra Jr., that's a LOT of paper sheet music)

Wonderful.... Now he stops for his umpteenth cup of coffee, he does the third orchestration by lunch, and he's dragging now. He begins the final orchestration, and he doesn't finish. Now it's time to go to the recording studio...

Mrs. Riddle gets the family station wagon out of the garage, and here, in the rear of the car, with a leaf from the dining room table across his knees as a desk, is Nelson Riddle, with a flashlight! And he's writing away as fast as he can. They get to the studio, the copy is grabbed, the scorepages... [and] they record the first three songs. They pass out the parts to the orchestra for the fourth song... the ink is WET on the parts... and Nelson... was a very quiet, shy man...

I used to tell people, "Nelson Riddle could stand next to a volcano, and the volcano could erupt, and Nelson would go, "Oh... well, how 'bout that...?" It was his personality. 

He passes out the fourth arrangement, and he said, " I didn't have, uh, time to kind of write much, I just threw notes on the page as scribbles."

Well, his friend Frank Sinatra had long since learned to trust Nelson Riddle, and he turned to the orchestra and he said, "Alright, let's play some of Nelson's scribbles!"

This is what the scribbles sounded like:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Frank Jr. tells us next about Sinatra's "Midlife Crisis."

"Midlife Crisis. That's when you are still young enough to do, but old enough to know better.

In his mid-forties, Sinatra gave all his attention the the former and completely ignored the latter. 
Especially when it came to having fun. He and a few of his closest friends became infamous in that endeavor -- music, shows, nightlife, and, even women, were on the menu for the guys that became known as the Rat Pack."

 

This next song is quite possibly one of the most iconic from the Rat Pack era: Luck Be A Lady Tonight.

(Gaga and Tony NEED to sing this at some point in the extremely close future!) 

 

 

 

Sinatra, Looking Back...

 

"As he reached his mid fifties, more and more he was regarded as the elder statesman of entertainment. Moreover, as it had been with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman, Presidents Reagan, Nixon, Carter, and Bush -- appointed him to represent America in many different ways -- but there was something else.

Year after year there were always new songs, new record albums, piles of shooting scripts and movie preparations that kept him in a constant anticipation of about what was coming next. But now, for the first time, he discovered the warming embraces of looking back, remembering the distances and times he had travelled." 

 

 

 

A film reel rolls with scenes of Sinatra's most iconic films and public appearances, photos with Presidents, with his kids, and just clowning around. All the while in the background, his son, Frank Jr., sings a note perfect rendition of his father's song, "It Was A Very Good Year", lovingly chronicling these memories we all share of his dad.

"I mentioned earlier, ladies and gentlemen, [that] a couple of my family members are here tonight. I have the lovely lady who made yours truly here a GREAT uncle... That'll give you an idea what age is... I want to have you meet my niece A.J. [And] ladies and gentlemen, a lady you have seen many many times in this show tonight, and she is one of the best ladies around, she is a terrific star in this business here, my sister Nancy!"

 

Nancy stands up and waves to the audience.

"She's havin' her boots retreaded!", he cracks.

(As many of you recall, one of Nancy's biggest hits was "These Boots Are Made For Walking".)

Then he leads us back into the story:

"How magnificent, ladies and gentlemen, it was... it was really such a wonderful time to behold in his life. Talk about the Midas touch. His movies were blockbusters. His records were platinum. His TV specials got high ratings. Everything was just wonderful..
But you may remember, many years ago in that great fantasy picture, which was called 'Star Wars' ... The Jedi master Obi Wan Kenobi warned [and] cautioned the young Luke Skywalker about something he called 'The Dark Side'.

 
Sinatra had his Dark Side.

Everything was so wonderful. And yet, as it is to every one of our lives, there was something else to contend with.
I would be remiss in telling our story if I didn't have you meet some of his personal legion of demons..."

Screens scroll by detailing the hardships poor Frank Sr. had faced, all the while a slow steady rumble of drums and increasing violins highlight the poignancy --he was dogged by the media, by the FBI who thought he was a communist, and he lost his mother to a plane crash, when she was on her way to visit him. 

"No one thought there could ever be a triumphant ending."

 The music builds to a crescendo, and then stops. Frank Jr. pauses, and launches into his father's signature song: "My Way."

The audience claps vigorously, clearly thrilled. Sinatra had made his own triumphant ending, in a way... 

Frank Jr. then leads us into a rousing rendition of "New York, New York", and closes with a soft epilogue, listen below:

 

 

"You may recall, our program tonight began with this simple little waltz, written way back during the war years, in 1942.
It became Frank Sinatra's theme song for the next six decades. It told you, what a strange story in so many ways. Dare we risk an epilogue or conclusion -- if we do, it's only this:

All my life, I've been asked, 'What was his communication to the audience? How did he talk to people in his singing?' 

And the answer is this:

He was the most human, he had the greatest accomplishments, the greatest highs, and the most dismal failures of anyone I ever knew.

That was his communication. He left us with one thought...

(The instrumental from "My Way" builds into a crescendo)

"Yes, I did it my way..."

 

 

 

All in all , this was a great show to learn about one of the biggest stars in popular culture who influenced Tony Bennett, who is now influencing our Gaga. I will be writing another piece on the impact of the Sinatra - Bennett - Germanotta Italian connection soon -- with excerpts from the new Sinatra 100 hardcover book, for which Tony has written a prologue.  

 

Enjoy the music, and I hope you all now have a deeper understanding of 'Ol Blue Eyes... through the voice of his son.

Until next time,

-- Chica

(c) all rights reserved to the Sinatra family for Audio

No part of this article is to be reprinted without permission. Permission can be obtained at chicaskas at hotmail dot com.

 

[Gallus 1,525]

Legend

[Pandacadabra 9,180]

Thanks for this, I recently started to listen to his discography and he is amazing.