anyway we’re in FS’S dressing room (the manager’s suite) where the small talk is never small, im talking to Susan Reynolds, Franks p. a. and patron saint and Ali (my wife and mine). Paul McGuinness (U2’s manager) asks Frank about the pin on his lapel … ‘its the legion of honor … highest civilian award … given by the president …’ which one? enquires paul … ‘oh i dont know … some old guy … i think it was lincoln …’ cool … do you have to be american to get one? i think to myself … already feeling my legs go …
next up the award for best alternative album u2 are nominated for this … better get ready … whats the point … we’re never gonna win that … that belongs to the smashing pumpkins one of the few noisy bands to transcend the turgid old-fashioned format theyve chosen … you have to go downstairs … you might win … whats there to be embarrassed about … youve been no. 1 on alternative/college radio for 10 years now … its the most important thing to you … tell them … its your job to use your position … abuse it even … tell them … you’re not mainstream you’re slipstream … tell them … you’ll make it more fun … that you’ll try to be better than the last lot … tell them you’re mainstream but not of it and that you’ll do your best to fuck it up … TELL THEM YOU KNOW FRANK … tell the children … so i did.
the speechifying below wasn’t heard in the uk so loud is the word fuck over there but Frank heard it and Frank liked it … so here it is:
Frank never did like rock ’n’ roll. And he’s not crazy about guys wearing earrings either, but hey, he doesn’t hold it against me and anyway, the feeling’s not mutual.
rock ’n’ roll people love Frank Sinatra because Frank Sinatra has got what we want … swagger and ATTITUDE … HE’S BIG ON ATTITUDE … SERIOUS ATTITUDE … BAD ATTITUDE … Franks THE CHAIRMAN OF THE BAD.
rock ’n’ roll plays at being tough, but this guy’s … well, he’s the boss of bosses. The Man. The Big Bang of Pop. I’M NOT GONNA MESS WITH HIM; ARE YOU?
who is this guy that every swingin city in america wants to claim as their own?. this painter who lives in the desert, this first-rate first-take actor, this singer who makes other men poets, boxing clever with every word, talking like america … Fast … straight up … in headlines … comin’ thru with the big schtick, the aside, the quiet compliment … good cop/bad cop in the same breath.
you know his story because it’s your story … Frank walks like America, COCKSURE …
Its 1945 … the us cavalry are trying to get out of Europe, but they never really do. They are part of another kind of invasion, A.F.R. American Forces Radio, broadcasting a music that will curl the stiff upper lip of England and the rest of the world paving the way for Rock N’ Roll – with jazz, Duke Ellington, the big band, Tommy Dorsey, and right out in front, FRANK SINATRA … his voice tight as a fist, opening at the end of a bar not on the beat, over it … playing with it, splitting it … like a jazz man, like miles davis … turning on the right phrase in the right song, which is where he lives, where he lets go, and where he reveals himself … his songs are his home and he lets you in … but you know … to sing like that, you gotta have lost a couple o’ fights … to know tenderness and romance like that … you have to have had your heart broken.
people say Frank hasn’t talked to the press … they want to know how he is, whats on his mind … but y’know, Sinatra is out there more nights than most punk bands … selling his story through the songs, telling and articulate in the choice of those songs … private thoughts on a public address system … generous … this is the conundrum of frank sinatra left and right brain hardly talking, boxer and painter, actor and singer, lover and father … troubleshooter and troublemaker, bandman and loner, the champ who would rather show you his scars than his medals … he may be putty in barbaras hands but I’m not gonna mess with him are you?
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, ABE YOU READY TO WELCOME A MAN HEAVIER THAN THE EMPIRE STATE, MORE CONNECTED THAN THE TWIN TOWERS, AS RECOGNISABLE AS THE STATUE OF LIBERTY … and LIVING PROOF THAT GOD IS A CATHOLIC … will you welcome THE KING OF NEW YORK CITY … FRANCIS … ALBERT … SINATRA.
YOU WANT CLASSIC EARLY SEVENTIES ALBUMS, I got ’em. The entire Al Green back catalogue, Let’s Get It On, There’s No Place Like America Today, Grievous Angel, After the Goldrush, Blood on the Tracks . . . Unimpeachable classics, every one, and while others may have to bury their Cat Stevens and James Taylor albums away when fashionable friends come round to borrow a cup of balsamic vinegar, I have nothing to hide. Those pre-Ramones years were difficult to pick your way through, but I seem to have managed it quite brilliantly. If there was a smarter, more forward-thinking, more retrospectively modish young teenager around than me between 1971 and 1975, I have yet to meet him.
Sadly, however, I am that commonplace phenomenon, Reinvented Man. Most of the Al Green back catalogue I bought in the early Eighties, the Gram Parsons at university in the late seventies, the Curtis Mayfield from a car boot sale a few years ago, and so on. I didn’t buy any of them at the time of their release. I thought that soul music was for wide-boys, country was for old people, and Bob Dylan was for girls.
These are a few of the albums I bought back then: McCartney; Led Zeppelin II; a Humble Pie live double, the title of which escapes me; the Curved Air record which had painting on the vinyl; Anyway by Family; Deep Purple in Rock; Tubular Bells; a Van der Graaf Generator album, purchased after I read a review in Melody Maker, and if I ever meet the journalist who wrote the review he can either refund me my £2.19 or get biffed on the nose; Rory Gallagher; and Every Picture Tells a Story, by Rod Stewart.
Every Picture Tells a Story is the only one of those that I still possess. All of the others have disappeared, stolen or flogged (although the Van der Graaf Generator album was certainly not stolen, and I can’t imagine who would have bought it off me); some of them were flogged because I needed the money, others because they had absolutely no place in the ineffably cool collection I was in the process of assembling.
So how come Rod Stewart has survived? ‘Now there was someone who never let you down,’ a friend remarked sardonically when I owned up to my tragic affliction, and he has a point. Rod’s track record is not without its blemishes. There was Britt Ekland, for a start. And tartan. And ‘Ole Ola’, his 1978 Scotland World Cup Song (the chorus – and I may be misquoting, but not by much – went something like ‘Ole Ole, Ole Ola/We’re going to bring the World Cup back from over thar’). And ‘D’Ya Think I’m Sexy’. And the Faces live album Overture and Beginners, which the NME commemorated with its annual ‘Rod Stewart and the Faces Thanks-For-the-Live-Album-Lads-But-You-Really-Shouldn’t-Have-Bothered Award’. (The record ends with Stewart thanking the audience ‘for your time … and your money’, and you really have to hear the lascivious drawl in his voice to appreciate the full horror of the moment.) And the haircut. And his obsession with LA. And the champagne and straw boaters on album sleeves. And ‘Sailing’, which made a pretty decent football song but an interminable single. And several other blonde women who weren’t Britt Ekland but might as well have been. And the couplet from the song ‘Italian Girls’ (on Never a Dull Moment) that goes: ‘I was feeling kind of silly/When I stepped in some Caerphilly’. And the cover of the record Ooh La La, a pathetically cheap arrangement which allowed the purchaser to jiggle a tab and make a man’s eyes go up and down in a supposedly hilarious manner. And the record itself, arguably the worst collection of songs ever released by anybody. And the all-purpose session-musician sub-Stones rock’n’roll plod-raunch that can be found on any of his post-Faces work, ‘Hot Legs’ being the template. And the Faces live shows, which were