The Smiley Smile Message Board

Looking here and there at the blueboard, I came across a post referring to two things Brian said to radio interviewers earlier this month that seem to have escaped mention on this board. I thought about posting this at the Gen'l Music Sinatra thread but it seems on point over here.

On July 2 or thereabouts Brian was interviewed by an "air personality" known as Nadia Noir at JACK-FM in LA. The following exchange ensued, according to
http://jack.radio.com/2012/07/02/qa-brian-wilson-on-beach-boys-tour-next-album-possible-frank-sinatra-tribute/

"Would you ever do anything like your Gershwin album again?"
 
"Well, I might do Wilson sings Sinatra. I might."

"What would you cover on it?"

"“All The Way,” “Strangers in the Night” – I love all his songs."

Four days later, in an interview for KOOL-FM in Phoenix (http://kool.cbslocal.com/2012/07/06/brian-wilson-interview-no-sinatra-project-planned/ - includes audio) Brian was asked about the Sinatra idea by DJ Steve Goddard, and he answered: "No that is not in the works. I don’t think I’m going to do that.”

Since there has been no other mention of the notion, my guess, whether or not it has a basis in fact, is that on the road Bruce has been trying to talk up with Brian that idea he was going on about in a few interviews last year - that Brian do an album of his own classic songs, heavily orchestrated in the grand Sinatra/Tony Bennett/Nat King Cole tradition - and Brian, in turn, reconfigured this as an album of Sinatra songs and, off the top of his head, ran it past a charming lady interviewer, only to be startled by another DJ bringing it up a few days later.

But it does give one food for thought, maybe more so than his perennial plans for a good ole rock'n'roll record.  As totally unfashionable as Perry Como is, how would Brian feel about doing an album of his material, insofar as he mentions Perry in interviews far more often than Ol' Blue Eyes? Or, to name a singer he much admires who is somewhat less unfashionable, how about songs made popular by Rosemary Clooney?

 Or if we're sticking with Sinatra - how about an album of the Beach Boys performing Sinatra standards redone in arrangements by Brian Wilson (plus whoever he'd round up to work on it)?  Heck, I could see Dave laying down a nice line for an instrumental "All The Way" or "Nice And Easy."  Or Mike doing "Witchcraft" or "Learning The Blues."  Or Al getting into "Wee Small Hours" or "Gone With The Wind."  Or maybe Brian himself singing "Only The Lonely" or "One For My Baby."  Or if you wanna be less heavy about it - maybe Bruce duetting on "Mama Will Bark" with Ambha Love. Lotsa potential all round.

I think out of everybody you mentioned, only a Frank Sinatra album would have even the possibility of selling, or even getting green lighted by a record company. 


I'd love to hear it.  I like anything, though.



I'll just say it right up front.  Brian's old.  His time on earth, like all of ours, is finite.  With the few years that he has left recording music, do we really want him to spend some of that precious time doing a Frank Sinatra cover album? 

I'd love to hear it, and I'd especially love to hear it if that's what he wants to do.... but I'd much rather hear more new material. 

Well - Como was not a Capitol artist. And I don't think Rosemary Clooney ever was. But Sinatra - why, they'd be weeping tears of joy at Capitol if they got word of what Brian said to that lady DJ.  There's nothing that label likes more than finding ways to reach youngsters with disposable cash who at the moment are not able to recite "There's A Flaw In My Flue"'s lyrics on the spot.   Yep, the guys would find a ready response at that label for a BBs-meet-Frank album. But yeah...I'd most likely prefer a dozen or so new Brian Wilson compositions to a tribute album.

Sinatra is one of the all time greats, it's such as shame I feel that he is most associated with songs like "Strangers In The Night" or "My Way"  when he's so much more than that. I would say that no other artist had a longer running streak of excellent albums in a row than he did during the Capitol years in the 50's and early Reprise years in the 60's. Songs For Swingin' Lovers, Only The Lonely, In The Wee Small Hours, Come Fly With Me and No One Cares are albums I would rank among the greatest vocal records of the 20th century. Hell I ain't even old! :lol

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0ZQyLsBUxc
I've Got You Under My Skin (1956) - 2:14 for the best trobone solo ever!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ImGP33hcc4
- In The Wee Small Hours (1955)

But as to Brian recording an album of Sinatra material, hmm i'm not really sure that would work. :-\

Songs For Swingin' Lovers is a masterpiece, as are many of Sinatra's Capitol recordings from the 50's, especially with Riddle.

Sinatra aside - and it's coming up on Sunday morning when I get to hear Sid Mark playing Frank while driving in the car - there is seriously a radio host named 'Nadia Noir' on a station named 'JACK-FM'???

I wonder if the newsman at JACK-FM is named Mike Hunt...and of course Dick Rising with the weather at the top of every hour...

I don't understand what you mean by saying you think it's a shame that Frank is known for Strangers in the Night and My Way.  That's like saying it's a shame Brian's known for Good Vibrations and God Only Knows. 

Yeah, Frank was more than that, but those are two fine songs and fine performances that Frank chose to do, and was proud of.  He, after all, did it his way. 

My favorite Sinatra song will always be The Summer Wind.  I went to this Christmas party once time at a bar, we had the whole place rented out for this company I was working for at the moment, and the whole thing was surreal, everybody was older than me, I was pretty much alone with nothing to do or nobody to talk to... So I'm sitting there having a drink while all these old people do their thing, and they turned the music on.  It was just pumped up, everything was dark, and they played that song.  Everybody was ignoring it, but I was FEELING it.  It was so loud, you could just feel it, like you were in a club where Frank was actually performing that night or something.  It made such an impression on me it'll always be my favorite song of his. 

The Beach Boys have made some of the most iconic summer songs ever, but are there any songs that remind you of summer that aren’t by the Beach Boys?

“California Girls” and “Surfin’ USA”!

So there are no good summer songs that you didn’t write?

Not really.




 :-D :-D

I don't know about sales but to me the Rosemary Clooney catalog seems like a good fit.

I'd rather hear Brian doing such an album alone like with BWRG. But that above quote from you brought me to the question: how about Brian producing an album for California Saga ?

Do they have their own material? If not, it's just going to be another one of these:

(http://cdn.songonlyrics.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Wilson-Phillips-Dedicated-2012-Album-Tracklist.jpg)

He disliked both of those songs didn`t he?

I think Brian doing an album of Sinatra songs would be foolhardy in the extreme. There is no way that he could compete vocally now with Sinatra`s performances on the original recordings.

I didn't realize Frank didn't like either of those songs.  He sure sang them a lot if he didn't like them :)

In a lot of concerts caught on tape or film Sinatra pokes fun at Strangers. I think he just thought of it as album filler when he recorded it - it was the theme song to a now completely forgotten film, "A Man Could Get Killed," which wasn't much seen either when it came out - so he was surprised by its going to #1.  He seems to have had a better regard for My Way.  Even so, at the end of his career when he did it with Pavarotti for Duets II, he (or the album's producers, who were also Wilson Phillips's producers at the time) chose to leave it off and it ended up a bonus track on a live album which was his last release in his lifetime.

I didn't mean that they are bad songs I meant to say I think it's a shame that to many younger people he is known as the guy that sings My Way, Strangers and New York, New York when he has released so many other quality albums and singles, a little bit like how a lot of people ignore the Beach Boys post 1967 material.

The fact that he had to sing them so often in concert due to their popularity probably contributed to his dislike of them. I can`t remember the exact quote but I think he stated that `My Way ` was just a song from a failed pop star (Paul Anka).

I'd prefer Brian sing Brian Wilson, not Sinatra. But, of course, I'm sick in the head, so I'll buy whatever he puts out.

I just posted this in the thread for show 46. He's not going to do it

http://kool.cbslocal.com/2012/07/06/brian-wilson-interview-no-sinatra-project-planned/

Do Watertown and we're talkin.

A Wilsonized version of 'Blue Moon' could well be sublime, I hope there may be such a project one day just to hear that.

I'll just add that it's very possible he MIGHT do it.  Posting an interview of Brian saying he wont' do an album.... might be better evidence than posting an interview of him saying he WILL do an album, see the pre-reunion interviews for proof of that :)

It could be he doesn't want anybody to know. 

Brian offered Still I Dream Of It but Sinatra turned it down

Absolutely. Actually, Brian Wilson Sings Bob Gaudio could be great -- a few Watertown tracks, some stuff off Genuine Imitation Life Gazette, The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Any More...

(Though *obviously* what I really want is new Brian songs).

As much as I doubt it'd happen, Wilson sings ELO would rock!

Don't bring me down........Bruce.

If that were a dream project for a niche market of fans who think Watertown is a 5-star album, that would be fine.

Ultimately the way a singer takes on a character as Sinatra did so perfectly in the 1950's when he'd say "set 'em up, Joe..." is what made Sinatra one of the best interpreters of a lyric in the history of popular music. Sinatra had impeccable technique, he was a true musician among musicians, but also he had the sometimes unnatural ability to wear the clothes of the person telling the story in the lyrics, and become that person.

You can believe Sinatra as he tells of going into a bar and drinking away his problems to a faceless bartender named Joe who could be one or then thousand people he met in his life. And Frank did not write those lyrics, he's simply interpreting them just as an actor has to be believed in the role or it falls flat.

Watertown is good, it was an experiment that had to be done/tried, but did Frank's audience believe him as the lead character? he could have given the best performance of his career but the role and the location didn't exactly fit the actor playing in that role, for many fans.

Even though we know it won't happen, I think Brian trying to interpret some of those songs which Sinatra simply *owned* and sang as if he were telling his own story would come out sounding a bit contrived if Brian sang them. Sinatra had to become the lyric in order to deliver it that way, and that was what his fans would proscribe to his own personal life...the guy with the fedora, with the lit cigarette, coat slung over his shoulder, walking into a bar and wanting to get drunk to forget about whatever he needed to forget but couldn't.

Or Sinatra the definition of show-biz, classy-cool who walked with the same swing and swagger as the beats in his songs. It's image that is hard to separate. Watertown tried, Sinatra gave his all to put it across, but the debate is still how successful he was in transforming himself from Vegas Frank to small-town regular guy Frank.

And with Brian, I think the song choice for such a project would be crucial, so it wouldn't sound unintentionally funny hearing him sing "I'm drinking again..." or "it's up to you, New York..." or one of the other Sinatra lines.

See, that's where I disagree -- I think it's precisely *because* Sinatra's image is so different from that of the protagonist in Watertown that it works so well. I wrote a long blog post about Watertown at http://andrewhickey.info/2010/04/13/albums-you-should-own-watertown-frank-sinatra/ , so I'll just link that rather than repeat it all here, but Watertown may be one of the two or three greatest albums ever made, certainly among the most emotionally powerful.

I respect that, and in no way would I debate the album suggesting opinions are either wrong or right. But I can also say as someone who is equally a fan of Sinatra, I respectfully agree to disagree, on my opinions of Watertown.  :)

I think casting against type is what may best serve to keep an actor on his/her toes, in the context of them being artists within their chosen craft. However, when that actor's fans feel that something is too much of a stretch to be believed 100%, no matter how great the actor does that role, they won't be able to escape the typecasting imagery that created such a powerful image in those fans' minds. And some feel casting against type causes that actor to overplay the part rather than relaxing into it.

With Watertown, I'd never suggest Frank gave anything less than his all to that role, and the music was challenging and demanded more from the listeners than playing "New York New York" on a jukebox for kicks. But ultimately, my opinion only, I think the Watertown character was too far from Frank for many fans to invest the time necessary to get into the album and believe him in that role. Is that the fans' fault or was the project itself overreaching in its concept based on whose name was on the cover? Again, not that he didn't try, but it felt to me like Sinatra was trying to be that man rather than relaxing into his other characters which were closer to who he was and the people he was around in his own life. It's opposite the way I can get lost in certain of his 50's Capitol albums - you look at the cover and the guy you see in the artwork or the photo feels like the guy talking to you in the songs.

Frank Sinatra is (blinking marquee lights here...) *FRANK SINATRA!!!!*, that's the blessing and curse of becoming a pop culture icon in the upper stratosphere of celebrity so you become your own characters, in effect. I think Brian Wilson would have similar difficulties trying to sing as the characters Sinatra became in his songs because it's a world foreign to who he is as a person and as a persona to his fans. Again, not that he wouldn't use his musical skills to put it across, but it's something beyond that which made both Sinatra and Brian who they are. if you push that image too much, it treads on very thin ice.

The Beach Boys should totally do a standards album - if it's good enough for Paul McCartney, Harry Nilsson and Brian Wilson, well....

I don't know, the idea of groups from the era of the Beach Boys-Beatles tackling "The Great American Songbook" doesn't seem as appealing as hearing them take on songs that they used to perform as they were growing up loving what they heard on the radio. All those images of Mike and Brian hanging out, singing harmony to the radio - more of those songs! Brian did the Gershwin, McCartney did the ballad album (I'm sure in-law Barbara Walters got one of the first copies), etc. I always liked the idea of doing songs that were personal and meaningful to the band instead of the well-worn notion of having to record the standards that have been done many times before. Michael Feinstein is still around for that dose of obsessive authenticity, after all.  :)

I'll listen to anything they put out, seriously - it's just a case of what each fan might think would best suit the artist.

...it doesn't need to be done again. Especially since Brian already did it as you mentioned

Why not?

Then again, I am a stickler for those songs and to hear the band do them would be bliss for me.

If you wanna get practical, it took Brian 3 weeks to record the Gershwin record. We're not talking a massive undertaking....