The Meaning of Recognition (15 page)

But the great role model of my first bathroom period was Frank Sinatra. He, too, sang from the standard repertoire, but by selection and presentation he dragged it towards the forbidden. One of
my fellow study-circle leaders in the Kogarah Presbyterian Church Fellowship was a secret collector of Sinatra records. He possessed the first copy of
Songs for Swinging Lovers
I ever
heard. I helped him to wear it out. I also helped to wear out several seats at the local Odeon, where I watched
The Tender Trap
over and over. Only much later in life did I realize what
Sinatra was doing from the technical angle. The standard item of praise is ‘breath control’ but every professional singer has a certain amount of that. What Sinatra really had was
enunciation control. In that department he went beyond Crosby, who even when feigning heavy-lidded gloom was always reassuringly joyful, as if the very act of singing was a guarantee of buoyancy.
Sinatra could get the tone of bitter speech into singing words. Almost to its outer limit, he increased the range of naturalistic enunciation, making a song into a spoken statement. (If his voice
had been as pretty as his epigone Vic Damone’s, he would have found that a lot harder.) The only realistic element he did not include was inarticulacy.

Though they have never come up with anything quite so slovenly as Estuarine English, even the Americans occasionally swallow their final consonants when speaking. Uniquely among the crooners,
Dean Martin adapted the suppression of terminal consonants to his singing style. In London at the moment, an Italian restaurant called Da Paolo in Charlotte Place plays Dean Martin tracks one after
the other as background music to the evening meal. For those of us who grew up marvelling at Dino’s ability to exhale a satiated moan along with the fumes of the third cocktail, here is vivid
evidence that our memories are exact: he really did keep missing out on the final ‘s’ as if the olive had got into his mouth along with the gin, and he really did bring English into
line with Japanese by eliminating the difference between the singular and the plural. Sometimes the consonant before the ‘s’ vanished along with it: ‘Make my dree come
true.’ At other points, if you put the ‘s’ back on one word as the sense seemed to demand, it turned out that the rhyme word up ahead of it needed an ‘s’ too.
(‘Thrill me with your charm/ Take me in your arm’.) In his own words, it was a magic technee. (‘When we kiss I grow wee.’) Admittedly most of the songs victimized by Dino
were already victims. Far from being refined examples of the upmarket repertoire, they were Italian hits translated into an English so indifferent that it was asking to be assaulted. But his
calculated maltreatment of received elocution was more creative than I was ready to admit at the time. Only today am I ready to see the sophistication of his approach. Sleepy but unsleeping, he was
transmitting the sweetly painful post-coital admission that desire could never be satisfied, but only, temporarily, allayed. Admissions like that weren’t very common around the Kogarah
Presbyterian Church Fellowship. No wonder I didn’t get it. Sinatra was more than enough for me.

Every inflection Sinatra sang came from the spoken language. By no paradox, he did the same for screen dialogue. His sense of the music inherent in speech – not the music that can be
imposed on it, but the music already in it – made him a revolutionary screen actor. Alas, he was too impatient to become the screen giant he might have been. (In the recording studio he would
volunteer for another take: in the film studio never.) Crosby in his screen heyday was number one box office star in the world five years running. Sinatra would have thought that was a stretch in
prison. It was one of the differences between them, and you could see all the differences in
High Society
, one of the great cinematic experiences of my first youth. For
High
Society
I moved into the cinema and stayed there, as if constant attendance would get me an audience with Grace Kelly.

In
High Society
, Bing, old enough to be her grandfather, and Sinatra, merely old enough to be her father, vie for Grace Kelly’s blessing. Frank got close, but the matter was
settled in Bing’s favour after he and the spun-gold goddess sang ‘True Love’ together. A song so undemanding that even I could sing it, ‘True Love’ was constructed by
Cole Porter especially for the movie after it was noticed that Kelly could not manage three notes in a row unless two of them were the same and the third not very different. For the standard
romantic ballad, ‘True Love’ was a symbolic indulgence so overwhelming that it invited rebellion, like the rumours about Marie-Antoinette’s necklace. Sinatra had been doing his
best for years to divert the traditional repertoire in the direction of actual sexual passion, rather than well-behaved self-control. Bing stood for adulthood, with all its renunciations. Sinatra
stood for adultery. He could sing ‘One For My Baby’ with a whole heart. When, in ‘Love and Marriage’, he sang that they went together like a horse and carriage, you could
tell he thought that the sentiment was a natural product of the horse. Bing, always a great one for the ladies until his second marriage settled him down (I prefer to leave out his off-screen
success with Grace Kelly: the matter is still too painful), would probably have agreed with Sinatra on the subject but would never have let himself be caught uttering a non-conformist nuance.
Sinatra’s problem was that nuances were as far as he could go. In the world of the well-made song, illicit love, no matter how delicious, was a crime, and the compulsion to sing about it was
the punishment. The standard song catalogue was a thousand modulations on the theme of anguish. Rock and roll was the shout of guiltless joy.

Rock and roll took over the hit parade, which would eventually cease to be a show-case for the well-made song, although the period of overlap lasted longer than we tend to remember. Elvis
Presley and Sammy Davis Jr were sometimes up there one after the other, Elvis instructing us that we were nothing but a hound dog and Sammy driving the last nails into the coffin of some helpless
big ballad chosen to prove that he bought his shirts and shoes in the same store as his friend Frank. But on the whole, and irreversibly, the popular music of the hit parade turned into something
only the young could love. The popular music that could still be enjoyed by older people took up a shadow existence, with the album charts as the nearest approach to the glare of daylight. Broadway
shows and film soundtracks continued to be written, however, and although Elvis Presley’s album sales soon rivalled the astronomical figures Judy Garland had attained before youth usurped the
business, so did the album sales of Barbra Streisand. The rock numbers and the well-made song could co-exist. Some of the rock numbers, indeed, were themselves well made, and not just as calculated
throwbacks to the old music industry traditions but as spontaneous products of its tenaciously surviving vestiges. (The Leiber-Stoller numbers in the Elvis opus
Jailhouse Rock
were put
together with a precision that would have been approved of by George and Ira Gershwin.) What really hurt the tradition of the well-made standard was the rise of the singer-songwriter: the very
aspect of the sixties popular music revolution that we were supposed to be most happy about. No more mass production! Personal inspiration at last! But it turned out that some of the mass
production had been pretty good, and that a lot of the personal inspiration was dire.

If criticism could be divorced from economics, the breakthrough of the singer-songwriters would look like the triumph of expression over music business logic. Actually, music business logic was
the first thing the breakthrough expressed. The Beatles, apart from proving that Britain was a good offshore base from which to revitalize the American song, also proved that a singing act of any
size would make more money if it wrote its own stuff. The act would get paid twice: once for performing, and again for what it wrote. It was an irresistible dynamic that spelled lingering death for
the independent professional songwriter who wrote for all comers. This would be the age of gifted amateurs who wrote mainly for themselves. If someone else later recorded their songs they would be
paid a third time, but the fact that they had already been paid twice was what drew new recruits to the ranks. Gifted amateurs proliferated.

Inevitably some of them were less gifted than others. The first thing to say about the rise of the singer-songwriters was that, in depth if not in breadth, it paid off artistically, even by the
parameters of the tradition it superseded. Bob Dylan didn’t further that tradition and didn’t mean to, but there were many who did. The best songs that came out of California –
John Sebastian, the Mamas and the Papas, and The Lovin’ Spoonful were only some of the active names – weren’t like Broadway show tunes, but they were neatly constructed and full
of a new kind of life. Later on, the Eagles showed that millions could be made out of a group sound that didn’t necessarily sound like a song: but the words, when you could figure them out,
were often wittier than they needed to be (‘Everybody wants to touch somebody / If it takes all night’). When we talk about a rock classic, we usually mean that it goes on yielding
satisfaction beyond the initial impact it must always have. Randy Newman turned out to be a master songwriter, although you had to listen hard. His elliptical mumble set Enigma standards of
encryption. But Newman’s rhymes were solid, pure and cunning, even if, when he enunciated them, he compounded Dean Martin’s missing consonants by turning most of the vowels into a
common groan. Newman was an extreme version of the singer-songwriter who wrote classic songs but delivered them with such a personal stamp that they were hard to borrow. Alan Price took a few of
them over and got away with it. But when Joan Baez did a cover version of the Band’s wonderful anthem ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’, it didn’t sound wonderful. It
sounded ludicrous, even though Baez’s voice was as pretty as ever. Expressing themselves as nobody had ever done since the first days of the blues, the singer-songwriters had achieved a unity
of material and delivery that paradoxically yielded scattered results when it came to building up a new catalogue of standards. It was a literature, but it wasn’t a repertoire.

The country musicians did best: the average country song could be covered by the average country singer, because they were all wearing the same boots and hats, even the women. (
Shania Twain
sings Merle Haggard
is an unlikely album title, but not impossible.) But the average singer-songwriter, for whom individuality was everything, ran a double danger through self-enthralment.
Even if the song was any good, it would have small chance of independent life. And the chances were very good that it would be bad.

Popular music has never run out of music. But it has, pretty well, run out of words, and lately there is a widely recognized awareness that the business of writing considerable songs might be a
bit more complicated than just bunging down a few thoughts. At the moment, Ravi Shankar’s daughter Norah Jones is selling albums by the million. Her voice is as lovely as her face. It would
be too much to say that she can write melodies to match, but they are never less than pleasant. Her lyrics, however, rarely rise to the level of drivel, which is at least clear. On her new album
Come Away With Me
she sensibly puts in some songs by other people. On Robbie Williams’ new album
Swing When You’re Winning
all the songs are by other people, most of
them long dead. So is the album’s acknowledged hero, Frank Sinatra. Robbie wants to be Frank. It is a laudable aim, but he has a long way to go. On one track, by electronic trickery, he
actually sings a duet with his idol, thus cruelly revealing what he can’t do: give the words their value. I should hasten to say that Norah and Robbie have both been doing something right.
They make money by the shed-load, whereas I and my collaborator Pete Atkin are in no danger of corruption through affluence. But tonight, when we play the first date of our new song-show tour, we
will have our eye on something that must be more satisfactory than cash, or we would have given up years ago. Not that having a budget wouldn’t be nice. (When I say that his new album,
Winter Spring
, is available through his website at www.peteatkin.com, I am mounting our entire advertising campaign in one parenthesis.) For
me, however, the writer of the words, what comes first is the return to the source. Listening to the hit parade when I was a kid was how I started to be a writer. In amongst the cheap artifice
there was expensive artifice; in amongst that there was art; and ever since I have always liked the idea of finding sapphires in the mud. Anyone can find them in Tiffany’s.

Postscript

This piece was something of a departure for the
TLS
, but there were no protests, and there were several letters of support from impeccably qualified literary people who
were glad to see the tradition of the showbiz song lyric receiving its due honour. One such correspondent was disappointed that I singled out Bix Beiderbecke, rather than Louis Armstrong, as the
young Bing’s jazz alter ego. I did it because it was true. Bing’s duet with Satchmo in
High Society
might have been the great and lasting sign that the racial barrier in
popular culture was broken for ever, but before the war, though the two men did occasionally appear together, it was always a novelty act. In the music business, de facto segregation continued far
into the age of rock and roll, even on radio. Pat Boone’s cover version of ‘Tutti Frutti’ got more airplay than Little Richard’s original because Boone
sounded
white. Jim Crow was that hard to beat. One of the measures of the iconic status reached by the American entertainers is that we retroactively credit them with powers of influence. But they
possessed the influence only on the understanding that it was seldom exercised. Humphrey Bogart was unusual in marching against McCarthyism even once, whereupon he was persuasively informed that
his charisma had no existence apart from his career. After that, he campaigned for Adlai Stevenson – a radical enough allegiance for the time – but he did no more marching. Bing, still
selling orange juice far into his old age, never forgot that he was only a performer, and lucky to be one.