The Good Life (35 page)

WHSF, a rock radio station in Washington, D.C., invited me to perform at their Christmas festival, so I went down to D.C. with the trio. While we were backstage, we could hear the audience cheering, waiting for the show to begin. Danny stood in the wings along with a Columbia rep and everybody crossed their fingers and wished me luck.

I walked out in front of five thousand screaming kids and hit them with “Old Devil Moon,” a favorite opening number. By the time I got to the section where I hold the word “love” for something like thirty-two bars, I had them in my pocket. They were cheering, “Tony! Tony! Tony!” It was pandemonium, one of the most amazing things I’d ever experienced. A couple of days later I did a show on Long Island for the popular
rock radio station WDRE. I was on the bill with the groups the Cowboy Junkies, the Teenage Fan Club, and Squeeze, and as I was walking through the backstage area to my dressing room, they were all sitting down to dinner. When they saw me come through, they all stood up and started clapping. I couldn’t believe it! These weren’t just kids in the audience, these were rock musicians, and they were showing me their respect. That really got to me. A lot of the musicians asked me for my autograph, and I ended up sitting down and talking with them for a while before I went on stage. That night was really something else. My acceptance by the young people of today is such a change from what was happening to me in the 1960s. Back then, I was told that I had to change my music in order for the kids to accept me; today I’m encouraged to be myself and the kids will come to me. You can’t imagine how rewarding this is, and how much it affirms what I fought so long and hard for. People sometimes criticize the kids of today, calling them “slackers,” or “Generation-Xers,” but I don’t understand that way of thinking. Kids today are just like kids from any generation: intelligent, open-minded, and excited about life. They don’t want to be pigeon-holed when they listen to music, or anything else—they want to be free to experience everything, and choose for themselves, it was never the kids who asked me to change; it was those people who were interested in telling the kids what they were supposed to like. Well, young people have accepted me all over again, and I couldn’t be happier. I did a series of those Christmas shows all across the country and I got the same response wherever I played.

All this attention encouraged MTV to offer me another opportunity to appear on the network, this time to do
MTV Unplugged. Unplugged
was a series where rock superstars like Eric Clapton and Paul McCartney appeared in front of live audiences without electric instruments. We taped the show on
April 12, 1994. The trio and I really felt the energy in the room, that night. It galvanized us.

As a special surprise I invited a couple of my favorite contemporary performers to sing with me: k. d. lang on “Moon-glow” and Elvis Costello on “They Can’t Take That Away from Me.” I consider Elvis to be a very talented songwriter and a dynamic performer. I first worked with him back in 1983 when he and I were both guests on one of Count Basie’s final TV appearances, k. d. lang has a magnificent voice. She thrills me every time I hear her sing, and I really mean it when I describe her as being in the same class with Edith Piaf, Hank Williams, and Billie Holiday.

It was a triumphant evening for me in every respect. We released an album of the evening’s performance, and
Tony Bennett: MTV Unplugged
became the biggest-selling album of my entire career. It was also the second-most-watched episode in the entire history of
MTV Unplugged
, In fact, the president of MTV, Judy McGrath, told me recently that the Whitney Museum selected my show out of all of them to be included in their contemporary television and media collection. What a great honor.

In early January 1995, Danny and I were out having breakfast when Sylvia Weiner, my press agent extraordinaire for the last thirteen years, and Fran DeFeo, my publicist at Columbia, called me on my cell phone. They were so excited that I couldn’t understand what they were saying. The Grammy nominations had been announced and
Tony Bennett: MTV Unplugged
had been nominated for three Grammys, including the coveted “Album of the Year.”

So in February Danny and I were in our seats in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles at the Grammy Awards ceremony, waiting for the winner of the “Album of the Year” to be announced. We told each other before the ceremony
that if we didn’t win, wed still consider the night a success. I can’t describe how elated I felt when they opened the envelope and said, “and the winner is... Tony Bennett.” The audience jumped to their feet, and Danny and I gave each other a knowing look that made it clear that we were the only ones who truly knew how much this night meant. I was so proud that I invited Danny to join me on stage. To say it was a personal triumph would be an understatement: it was the culmination of everything I had been working toward for the last fifteen years, and it exemplified everything I had dreamed of accomplishing thirty years before that. It was Incredible. I was at the top of my game at the age of sixty-eight, and it was an honor to be recognized by my peers. What meant the most to me was that I had accomplished all of this without compromising my music. I felt like I had been to the moon and back. As a result, I have finally reached a point where I have total freedom, both economic and artistic, to do whatever I want to do.

But without getting on a soapbox, I want to say that I think that the Grammy victory stands as a positive example of what can be achieved by someone who sticks to his guns, who doesn’t give in to the naysayers. It’s a lesson that all acts should learn: they shouldn’t make the music fit the marketing but the other way around.

I wanted to follow up my salutes to Frank Sinatra and Fred Astaire with a tribute to the great female vocalists who have influenced me so much over the years. Instead of honoring just one great woman singer, I decided to pay tribute to all of them, and the result was
Here’s to the Ladies
, recorded and released in 1995, and again I won the Grammy for “Best Traditional Pop Album.”

In 1996 I got to make another long-time dream come true. I’d always thought it would be a great idea to do a show in
which the audience could call in and request their favorite songs and I’d sing them, live, right there on the spot. I’d been playing around with this idea for years and Danny hooked up with Paul Rappoport at Sony to test it out on radio. On Valentine’s Day 1993, I did a live-request radio broadcast to stations across the U.S. It was a huge success, and I did another live one on Mother’s Day the following year. It was so popular that we decided to bring the show to television. Danny and Paul pitched the show to the Arts & Entertainment Network (A & E) and they loved the concept. Live
By Request
debuted on A &E on Valentine’s Day 1996. To my delight, that show was nominated for and won an Emmy® Award. It worked so well that A&E decided to continue the format featuring other artists, and I’m proud to say we’re now entering our third year.

I decided to dedicate my next album to the greatest lady of them all, Billie Holiday. It was called
Bennett on Holiday
, and it was a kind of tribute album that had never been done before. People often focus on the negative aspects of Billie’s short and tragic life, on her sad songs. But I wanted to concentrate on the optimistic side of her legacy. Naturally I didn’t overlook her classic ballads like “Willow Weep for Me,” “Crazy She Calls Me,” and “Good Morning Heartache,” on which Jorge Calandrelli again supplied wonderful string arrangements. But I wanted to put the emphasis on her upbeat songs like “All of Me,” “Laughing at Life,” and “What a Little Moonlight Can Do.” I’ve traveled the world over, and I’ve found that musicians know Billie Holiday’s songs—from Australia to Malaysia, from Singapore to South America. She was truly the Goddess of Style, and she changed music forever.

Bobby Tucker, Billie’s pianist for a few years, was a great help in putting the album together. While we were picking the songs, he mentioned that Billie had once told him that
Irene Kitchings’s “Some Other Spring” was her all-time favorite song. When I heard that, I knew I had to include it on the record. The cover shows me standing in front of a large mural of Billie Holiday that I painted on a brick wall. She looks young and beautiful and full of hope, and that’s the way I’ll always remember her. I’m very proud of that album, which also won a Grammy and I hope that Billie is too.

I got to see Billie when she was playing with Duke Ellington at Basin Street East years earlier in New York. She approached me after the show and said, “Come on, lets go uptown and sing together.” I wanted to go, but the people I was with weren’t too keen on the idea and talked me out of it. If I knew then what I know now, what a night of singing that would have been.

One night after I’d made an appearance on the
Tonight Show
shortly after
Bennett on Holiday
was released, I got a call from the great silent movie star Gloria Swanson. She lived in Englewood too, although I’d never met her, and she had called out of the blue to tell me how much she enjoyed seeing me on the Carson show. She said, “Whatever you’re doing, just keep doing it like that, because you’ve never looked better.” And then she added, “By the way I was a very good friend of Billie Holiday, and once when we were talking she said, ‘Look out for this boy Tony Bennett, he’s really going somewhere.’ I’d never imagined that Gloria Swanson and Billie Holiday actually talked about me. What a lift that phone call gave me.

Another unexpected compliment came when Danny got a call from Madonna’s press agent in early December 1996, explaining that
Billboard
wanted to present Madonna with a Lifetime Achievement Award, but that the only way she would appear on the show was if her favorite singer, Tony Bennett, presented the award to her. I was really knocked out. I’ve always admired Madonna. I think she’s a great artist. The way
she continuously reinvents herself is amazing, and I was honored that she wanted me there with her when she got such a prestigious award.

I met Madonna in Los Angeles and we flew to Vegas together on her private plane. She was very sweet, but since it was the first time she’d been away from her newborn baby, Lourdes, she was really anxious, so we ended up talking about the baby for most of the flight.

In December 1996 President and Mrs. Clinton invited Danny and me to the White House for a Christmas holiday dinner. Earlier that year I’d had a hernia operation, and as we were pulling up to the White House gate, my hernia ruptured! I told the guard at the gate that I had an emergency, and he rushed me to the president’s private infirmary right there on the White House grounds. I was in the doctor’s office while the festivities were going on upstairs. While the doctor was examining me, the president suddenly appeared and asked me how I was doing. It was an awkward moment to say the least, but he was extremely gracious and quite concerned about my condition. I ended up being rushed from the White House to a nearby hospital, where the president’s surgeon performed emergency surgery I couldn’t have had a better doctor, and everything turned out fine.

Donald Trump heard about my condition and sent his plane to take me from the hospital to his mansion Mar-A Lago, in Palm Beach, where I recovered in luxury. I don’t think anything like that will ever happen to me again.

I recently signed a new contract with Columbia, one that gives me total control over my career. Proving that what goes
around comes around, Dee Anthony’s daughter Michele, Danny, and I work closely together. How could I have ever imagined that things would turn out this way? You just never know what’s going to happen. Michele grew up with Danny and Dae, and just like them she learned about the music business from the inside out. She’s had an amazing career. What a pleasure it is to work with someone you love. It’s strange to think that she and Danny used to play together; it always brings a smile to my face.

In my new partnership with Sony I essentially own all my masters from 1950 on, and Columbia can’t reissue anything without first getting my approval, I have total control over all my new albums—the recording as well as all the publicity None of this would mean anything to me if I weren’t singing the music I love. You could offer me all the money in the world and I still wouldn’t sing a crummy song I didn’t care about.