I always thought it was Dino.
Hal
Intentionally Left Bank
Halvard Johnson
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On Mar 22, 2007, at 8:53 AM, Roger Day wrote:
> I've seen documentaries about sinatra which said that during WW2 he
> was a New Dealer. Something seemed to happen after the war, maybe the
> fame. who knows.
>
> Who was supposed to be the singer who received the horse's head in
> Godfather? Was it based on Sinatra?
>
> Roger
>
> On 3/22/07, Kenneth Wolman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> Roger Day wrote:
>> > And yeah, Frankie was great in the 50s, but he seemed to spend the
>> > rest of his career grinding his work into cheddar. It's only
>> recently
>> > that I was able to listen to a re-pressing of a 50s recording
>> without
>> > letting the vegas bloat get in the way.
>>
>> Sinatra is one of the most difficult "cases" I know of. By all
>> reports
>> he was utterly hateful as a person: drunken, pugnacious,
>> womanizing, a
>> monumental snot with Mafia connections. And yet. And but. Even Joe
>> Profaci couldn't give him the gift in his throat and heart. He
>> was one
>> of the greatest song interpreters I ever heard. I'm not going to run
>> the I Know Classical Singing Jive by comparing him to Hermann Prey or
>> Fischer-Dieskau, but I will stick out my neck and say that he and
>> Tony
>> Bennett are at that level of achievement. Sinatra would probably
>> punch
>> someone who said he was a *sensitive* interpreter ("Waddaya,
>> calling me
>> a pansy, ya f--k???"), but there he was. I remember in 1965
>> sitting in
>> a coffee shop on upper Broadway listening to the jukebox recording of
>> Frank singing Ervin Drake's "It Was A Very Good Year." I got full-
>> body
>> chills. Nelson Riddle's arrangements surely helped set the mood, but
>> Sinatra found the soul of the music. I ran out and bought
>> *September of
>> My Years*, the album. It was filled with treasures, especially
>> "There
>> Used To Be A Ballpark," a painful evocation of memories if you felt
>> abandoned by the Dodgers and Giants, and were stuck with the 1965
>> edition of the Mets ("...the old team isn't playing and the new team
>> hardly tries"). If I remember this right, he also sang "Send in the
>> Clowns" and it was glorious.
>>
>> Toward the end he got into excessive self-parody of his own
>> style. The
>> voice was a ruin--booze, cigarettes, and age took their toll--and how
>> much finger-snapping can anyone stand in lieu of being able to sing?
>>
>> After he died Pete Hamill wrote a short book called *Why Sinatra
>> Matters*. My first though was "No, he doesn't" but by now I'm not
>> so sure.
>>
>> ken
>>
>> -----------------
>> Kenneth Wolman rainermaria.typepad.com
>> Old age and treachery will always overcome youth and skill.
>>
>
>
> --
> My Stuff: http://www.badstep.net/
> "Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious." Oscar Wilde
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