In the early 60s, right after we moved here, we always got our haircuts at the Westown Barber Shop. It was tucked in at the back of the plaza, right down from the Amber Inn. It was a traditional shop with about ten chairs and each barber had their name on a plaque above their station. My favorite was Russ Formica. He was a young, good-looking Italian guy who looked like one of the Four Seasons. Bob Gaudio, the producer of this album,  was the one he looked like. The Four Seasons were one of my favorite groups at the time (1964-65).

 

            Enough of the digression. I remember when this album came out. I recall it being hyped as a concept album and that it was produced by a rocker. Until I bought it, my recollection was that Lee Hazelwood was the producer. My confusion probably stems from the fact that Hazelwood wrote and produced most of Nancy Sinatra’s forgettable work.

 

            This was not a big-selling album and died pretty quickly without much notice or acclaim. Apparently a TV drama was planned based upon the storyline. Sinatra seems to have lost interest in it and it never happened. This album would have been as popular as the rest of his work at the time if it had a different title and cover. Had he called it “She Left Me” and had used the photo that appeared on “Cycles” two years before (the weary looking one), it would have been instantly recognizable to his middle-aged fans.

 

            The albums he released prior to this during the 60s usually contained his latest single release and several covers of popular songs. This album was different. It was all original music, nothing familiar with a point of reference for his older, less adventurous fans. At this point in his career, Sinatra had lost some favor with the public. His marriage to Mia Farrow had ended and the dynamic of the record-buying public was changing. The music is very similar to his folk-country hits of the time- “Cycles”, “Loves Been Good To Me”.

 

            Sinatra pioneered the idea of a concept album long before Frank Zappa, The Kinks, The Who, or Pink Floyd got credit for it. “Sings for Only The Lonely”, “In The Wee Small Hours”, “Moonlight Sinatra”, and “September of My Years” all had a unifying theme to the songs.

 

            In the album credits, Frankie Valli received special thanks. I imagine he was a friend of Sinatra’s who hooked him up with Gaudio. The lyricist Jake Holmes had co-written with Gaudio The Four Seasons’ album “Genuine Imitation Life Gazette” – a bizarre psychedelic artifact from 1968 from whence Ian Anderson stole the cover idea for “Thick As A Brick”. Holmes went on to write many nauseating commercial jingles.

 

 

The Tracks-

 

Watertown-

            The intro to the TV drama. It is the only song not sung in first person. Watertown is a pretty drab place with local characters, like Mayberry in New York. People who stay there are doomed to become local characters. The song is the pre-cursor to the final song- we see a man standing in the rain at the train station looking for a familiar face.

 

Goodbye-

            We never really know what the issues are in this broken relationship but we see how it ends. She decides to leave, she has the decency to meet him somewhere and tell him goodbye. They are different people- she is cheesecake, he is apple pie. Whatever ended their relationship, it had ended for her long ago. She left him and her children to “find herself”. Not uncommon, even in 1970. It happened to my brother a few years later.

 

For Awhile-

            Remember what is what like to get dumped by a girl? You go through five stages. 1- Hurt and dismay. 2- Self-blame- you will change anything to bring her back. 3- Anger. 4- Hatred. 5- Indifference- you don’t care anymore. Usually by the time you reach indifference, she shows up again

The  poor guy here never gets past stage one. It has been over a year and everyone else in town figures he is getting over her, but he hasn’t.

 

Michael & Peter-

            This song is heart-wrenching. I recall when my children were young, looking down at their angelic faces when they were sleeping. In their innocence, you could imagine who they truly were. He is looking at his children and seeing her. He can’t escape her- his kids, the house, her mother, she is never gone. He quickly changes the subject and talks of mundane things and people. Her mother helps with the kids. Obviously, she knew all along that her daughter was a flake. Maybe she was a flake too when she was younger.

            He mentions the gardener, the guy he will be in 30 years and the weather but still comes back to how she wouldn’t recognize the kids. Obviously she has not returned even once. “The air still has a country smell”- the boring life she has left behind. “That’s all the news I have to say, maybe soon word will come my way, tomorrow”. Maybe he is getting ready to move to stage 3.

 

I Would Be In Love (Anyway)-

            In hindsight you only remember the good stuff. Released as a single.

 

Elizabeth/ What A Funny Girl-

            She has a name.  She was “out of reach, out of touch”. Again he dreams of only the good stuff but a dream “has to end, when it’s real not pretend”.

 

What’s Now Is Now-

            The other single from the album. He’s still willing to forgive whatever she did to cause her to leave. I don’t find it noble for someone to forsake everything for love.  To thine ownself be true is preferable for me.

 

She Says-

            During the 70s if you heard any song with a children’s choir on it, you knew it was produced by Bob Ezrin (“School’s Out”  Alice Cooper, “Another Brick In The Wall” Pink Floyd). Ezrin had nothing to do with this song but maybe this is where he got the idea.

This song does not stand on its own, it is necessary part of the story but out of context, a head scratcher. It could have been fleshed out at the point of “the price is high”. Like his letters, she gives mundane info about her day that he wouldn’t care about. She says she’s lost some weight, I wonder how much he has lost.

The kids seem to have the right idea. Their reaction is “so she says” meaning they aren’t expecting anything from her, they don’t buy it like their father does. Obviously they have moved from resentment to indifference, unlike their father.

 

The Train-

            We are left with the scene introduced in the title song- a man standing in the rain at a train station. He has made all the changes she wanted but it ain’t the real thing- “we will look so much in love to people passing by”. Maybe he will finally get past the first stage and just get pissed at her and get on with his life.

An interesting interpretation of this whole album is not that she left him, but rather that she is dead and he has never accepted it. The letters in the drawer that were never sent and the fact that she  was never on the train seem to support that theory but there are too many others details unanswered that only make that an interesting , but not viable idea.

I can’t help see some influence from the Beach Boys “Pet Sounds” crop up in this album. That one was about loss of innocence, this one is about loss of love. The hollow sound that begins “Caroline No” (a drum stick hitting a pop bottle) is echoed in the percussion of “She Says”. At the end of “PS” we hear a train  passing by followed by barking dogs chasing it. Here a man is left alone after the train leaves.

 

Lady Day-

            This was not on the original album but was included on one of the cd releases as a bonus track. It was included on Sinatra’s next release “Sinatra & Company” part of which was recorded prior to Watertown and the rest cobbled together from assorted tracks in the can. After Sinatra & Co., he announced his retirement which only lasted a couple of years until “Old Blue Eyes Is Back” was released. Most of what he did after that album was embarrassing, the worst of it was the dreadful “Trilogy”.

            I can see why this track was left off the album, it doesn’t really fit in with the theme or his viewpoint. As an afterthought, it seems to give her version of it. There are two different versions of this song out there, the other is heavily orchestrated and sounds like the theme from The Godfather. It is on Youtube.

 

 

 

            I’ve really grown to like this album, if only because it was an album that I always was intrigued by. Listening to it on a cd, you get the whole story. When it was released as an album, you listened to one side or the other- neither side being stronger than the other. The lack of commercial success is due to the fact that it is pretty depressing, none of the songs are that great, and there were none of the cover songs that always popped up on Sinatra’s albums. We are spared the likes of Gentle On My Mind, Close To You, Mrs. Robinson, Sweet Caroline, etc. Having all the songs written by the same writers tend to make them all sound similar- almost a song cycle. His older fans, like my dad, weren’t interested in a pop-rock Sinatra album. Younger fans, like me, were more interested in real rock than one of our parent’s favorites. With age came greater appreciation of the man.

 

            I would still like to see someone create a one hour drama featuring these original recordings. I’m sure it would garbage like most of the TV entertainment produced today. It was a simpler, better time back then. Or maybe we just remember the good stuff.

 

 

Francis Albert Sinatra took some chances in a long career.    Some could argue that it was a bit too long, but none can dispute that it was an amazing career.   He leveraged a voice that was a pure and flawless thing, added the phrasing that came with experience, and to this day that voice stands alone.   

 

There are voices and then there are Voices.   Sinatra’s was incomparable.    The sheer number of imitators (or tribute artists) to this day that have tried to duplicate his phrasing, his tonality and of course, the attitude, speaks to that fact.   

 

Sinatra’s career was an evolution as a singer and as a man.  You cannot separate the man from the voice.   He had perfect pitch for most of his career and he was a perfectionist.   He could deliver the goods way before you could read his “life” in the delivery.   He grew up around his voice.  And as he grew up, he lost just a bit of the range and smoothness that he had as a younger singer, but not the pitch and not the phrasing.  The phrasing just got better.  It served him well.     

 

If you listen to his Columbia recordings and then the breakthrough Capitol recording of possibly the finest concept album ever made, “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning”, you can hear him evolve.  He delivered, depending on the material, a poignancy, a swagger, a grin, and always a truth that hadn’t been heard before, and in the succession of Capitol recordings that followed, what he did, made him a legend.  

 

These are the albums I grew up listening to in and around the Beatles, Chicago, James Taylor and the other music of my generation.   These are the albums that I would sit and listen to at 1:00 in the morning with a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other alone in my first apartment.   And in my second.   And so on.  

 

Sinatra did not take care of the “voice”.   He let it get ruined years ahead of its time by excess.  The last “pure” album he delivered was his first collaboration with Antonio Carlos Jobim in 1967.   What a gorgeous piece of work it was.   And he delivered it softly and flawlessly.

 

By 1969 when Watertown was released, he was straining and drifting.  His once perfect pitch was off in places and plain flat in others.   He held his phrase-ending notes too long as if hoping they would arrive right on target if he just didn’t let them go.   You can hear it in this album.  And you can hear it on every album that followed that 1967 Jobim classic album.  

 

And it is very uncomfortable.  

 

Watertown is a concept album about a small town divorcee.  Its only 37 minutes or so in length, and I read somewhere that it was supposed to be accompanied by a script and a TV story.     Maybe the context would have helped.  

 

It is hard to “not like” this album.   I wanted to desperately.   The problem with Watertown is not the arrangements, though they were unorthodox for him, much more “rock” than Sinatra’s typical orchestral support.   The problem is not the material necessarily, although frankly I thought it was pretty mediocre.  Sinatra has taken lackluster material and made it work (think “Strangers in the Night”)   The problem is that the album depended on him to overcome its flaws and deliver the story.   And he couldn’t pull it off.   The problem is the singer.  He failed to save the album.  

 

What Watertown really needed was the Sinatra of 15-20 years earlier.    It needed Sinatra when he had command of his powers.  By 1969, he was losing them, they were leaving him and that perfection was gone.   There are moments, but you hear way too many misses.   Where was the man that was supposed to deliver THIS music?   He wasn’t around much anymore.   Like Watertown, the town in the story, things had changed.   Something was missing, never to return. 

 

Those of us who continued to listen to him and to follow him, cut him a lot of slack over the years after 1973, after his return from a short lived 1971 retirement.    I think that he had to exit the stage for awhile, so we could adjust to the fact that we would not be getting “young blue eyes” back, but old blue eyes.    We didn’t mind so much by then.  We had some time to get used to the idea.   And maybe he needed time to get used to it too.  

 

But this was too painful.   He was still Frank then.  And we expected more of him.

Hi, its me, Erich.   My friend Dave Pela had an idea a month or so ago, that a few of us would start a “record club” and select an album that each of us in the “club” would buy, listen to and then review.   We would not share our thoughts until the due date for the review, and then we would send the reviews to one another!    I thought it might be fun to post them here, and might be entertaining for our listeners and readers to see.   (Both of them)    At any rate, the first album was selected by Dave, since it was his idea and he is the oldest.       He selected “Watertown” by Frank Sinatra, that was released in 1969.   We will post all three reviews on May 15th!   Stay tuned!