Mother’s Day Music Break: Sinatra – All or Nothing at All

Something a little different for me for a Sunday… I’d like to open it by welcoming the lady herself, should she find her way here. Happy Mother’s Day (again), my iPadding and supposedly [N]-year-old Mom!

This playlist consists of twenty-one Sinatra recordings. I’ll explain my reasons for their selection and sequence later in this post. For now, let’s just set the music going, shall we?

Per usual with these RAMH mixes, the little audio-player thingamabob follows the playlist itself, below.

Here we go:

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I grew up knowing the name “Frank Sinatra.” Starting in the 1930s, he’d already fashioned from his voice and sensibility what could be considered multiple careers — as a nightclub singer, Big Band vocalist, and solo recording artist. Mom was crazy about him, and Dad, too, liked him (or at least his music). I don’t remember that they had many Sinatra recordings, at least early on, but they didn’t really need them: you could easily hear his music just by keeping your radio tuned to the right station.

Missing from all this familiarity with his name and his sound? Much awareness (at least in me, and maybe in my sisters and brother, too) of Sinatra’s life. I think I knew, vaguely, where Hoboken was (hey, I lived in New Jersey!), but I didn’t associate him with the city. Of course I saw him on TV every now and then, sometimes in the company of people like Dean Martin, and I’d noticed that they must know each other offstage — they laughed and cut up too easily for it to be faked. But I went for years and years before hearing the term “Rat Pack.”

I sure didn’t know that he’d been a lifelong in-your-face Democrat: one of those who’d strongly supported FDR throughout his Presidency, and then paid for it later with (false) accusations of Communist sympathies. I knew about Sammy Davis, Jr., whom I’d seen with Sinatra about as often as Dean Martin… but I had no idea how much support Sinatra offered to Negro/colored/Afro-American/black (choose your decade) causes in general. (His benefit-concert performance of “Ol’ Man River” — an unlikely matchup of singer and song, on the face of it — reportedly had Martin Luther King, Jr., weeping.)

I did have some sense of his sniffing disapproval of rock music. And I did know about his support, in later years, of Republican politicians like Nixon, Agnew, and Reagan, of his inflexibility on Vietnam; I did know of his moderately creepy affair with and marriage to Mia Farrow. That sort of knowledge, together with my ignorance of his real life in earlier decades, probably guaranteed that I’d come to think of him as an icon of unenlightened conservativism.

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Last weekend I watched the new four-hour, two-part HBO documentary about Sinatra’s life and career, Sinatra: All or Nothing at All. (First broadcast in early April, it’s still being shown in little back corners of the night — or, of course, at any time you want if you subscribe to their streaming service, HBOGo.)

I didn’t know what to expect from it. I’d heard of it only a few weeks before, when a guy I follow on Facebook reviewed it there. What he said did nothing to challenge my stereotyping of the doc’s subject. His comments went something like this (completely paraphrased):

If you’ve always doubted that Frank Sinatra was a brutal, right-wing thug, this documentary will shock you. He was all of that, and more.

Now that I’ve seen it myself, though: uh… no.

Look, I’ve certainly never been anything like famous, and not known anyone remotely as famous as Frank Sinatra. I’ve never even read a biography of the man, let alone lived anything like his life. I think the key to “getting” the documentary is multi-dimensional:

• Don’t go into it with your mind more or less made up. This was quite possibly where my Facebook friend — an unapologetically leftie Boomer — went awry.
• Recognize that the apparently recent interviews with and voiceovers by Sinatra’s children, among others, take place in a particular context: 2015 is the centennial of Sinatra’s birth. His family’s participation probably suggests their endorsement of much (if not all) of the program’s content.
• It covers Sinatra’s life only into the mid- and later 1970s.

On that last point, why stop there? After all, he was still performing — live and on TV — for another twenty years.

The answer to which question leads us full circle, to this RAMH playlist in fact.

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The HBO film takes its structure from the set list for Sinatra’s 1971 “farewell” concert. For that concert, he carefully selected eleven songs from his career to that date. He didn’t select his favorites, necessarily; he didn’t choose only his biggest hits; he didn’t attempt to match up the songs to his life, thematically or chronologically. Who actually knows why he chose them and arranged them in that order? (According to the documentary, he selected eleven songs which best “told his story” — which means both everything and not much at all, if you really think about it.)

Whatever his reasons for selecting those eleven songs, the documentary itself is structured in eleven sections, each titled for the corresponding song in the 1971 concert’s set list. I’ve used recordings of those eleven songs as the first half of this playlist.

Why use “regular” recordings, rather than the songs as recorded at the concert? Because to my knowledge no recording of that concert has ever been made available, or is likely to be. For starters, it was filmed only informally/unofficially, by various audience members. (The documentary includes numerous clips from these films.) And the recordings would be of only uncertain quality, anyway. The very first song, “All or Nothing at All,” was marred by an audibly ugly interruption: a stagehand accidentally kicked a plug from its outlet… the plug for the handheld microphone which Sinatra was using. (He was a pro about it, not even pausing, but one suspects the stagehand didn’t hold his job much longer.)

The second half? Just as a more or less random sampling of other songs I well remember emanating from the old hi-fi or stereo in the family living room.

(That second half isn’t perfect, of course — certainly not comprehensive. Performers with sixty years’ worth of hits don’t lend themselves to easy summation.)

It doesn’t hurt, finally, that you (whoever you are) can listen to this mix for the first time on a Saturday night. After all, Saturday nights — and Sunday afternoons — are one time of the week most reliably and sweetly bound up with my memories of Sinatra’s music, and (for me) life through the 1950s and ’60s.

Love you, Mom!