Albums You Should Own: Watertown, Frank Sinatra
If ever I’m asked why I think hipsters are wankers, Watertown is exhibit one.
Watertown is an album whose good qualities are absolutely self-evident. Anyone with ears – and I do mean anyone – would have to admit this is a very good album. In terms of thematic unity, quality, and feel, this site easily with the first four Scott Walker solo albums, Pet Sounds, Astral Weeks and the first couple of Leonard Cohen albums. While it was never a hit, it’s not like Sinatra is a horribly obscure artist, and so by rights this should, at the very least, be one of those albums that get ‘rediscovered’ by that weird coalition of hipsters and Mojo-reading dadrock lovers that brought Nick Drake, Big Star and Pacific Ocean Blue out of obscurity.
But the difference is that all the music I’ve mentioned above is essentially juvenile, and therefore ‘cool’. The concerns of, say, Pet Sounds, magnificent as it is, are those of a teenager – does she really love me? How can I balance what I want with what my parents say? Do I really love her? And teenage angst is cool and romantic.
Even Sinatra’s own earlier work – say Sings For Only The Lonely, no matter how downbeat, are the loneliness of a rinky-dink, shooby-dooby-doo swell kinda guy man about town, sat depressed in a New York bar at midnight with his suit disheveled and his tie hanging loose telling the barman about the one who got away.So they’re OK.
They’re safe.
Watertown on the other hand is different. It’s a concept album, like many of Sinatra’s early albums, but this is a specially-composed song cycle, and it’s told from the point of view of a middle-aged divorcé trying to bring up his two kids as a single parent in a small town, reflecting on his wife’s adultery, constantly reliving the last moments of his marriage, and trying to find a way to make it not have happened.
Where’s the fun in that?!
Actually, before I continue, I’m going to put in a Spoiler warning, because this album does have a plot, and a twist in the tale, and all those kind of things, and it really is best experienced without knowing much more about it. If you haven’t heard the album before, and you have any respect for my opinions whatsoever, go and buy it. The CD is out of print and is apparently selling for sixty quid on Amazon UK (but I’m not selling mine), but Amazon US has it for sale as MP3s for $9.99 (you could save nine cents if you wanted by not bothering with inessential CD bonus track Lady Day). Go and buy it, and listen to it, now.
Then do like I just had to, having listened to that album once already while writing this, and have a little cry on the shoulder of your spouse or closest approximation thereto.
Finished? Eyes dry? Then I’m going to start talking through this track by track. I’ll be talking mostly about the lyrics, but the music (by Bob Gaudio, produced and arranged by Gaudio and Charles Calello) is absolutely astonishing. Gaudio was the principal composer for the Four Seasons, and you can definitely imagine that other Italian-American Frankie singing these melodies, but he keeps carefully within Sinatra’s notoriously limited range, allowing Sinatra to do what he did best, just act the role in that gorgeous voice.
In fact, the album Watertown resembles most in this respect is Macarthur Park, Jimmy Webb’s suite of songs for the similarly-limited Richard Harris – but of course Harris didn’t have Sinatra’s voice, or his musical sensibilities, and while Webb’s songs were great, they were nothing compared to these. And Sinatra here has the advantage that every track here is sung from the point of view of the same character – it’s one half-hour monologue, not a series of sketches.
Gaudio and Calello also do a marvellous job of orchestrating the album as a whole, with leitmotifs recurring throughout – the high, slightly out of tune piano chords, the drums emulating the rhythm of the train – giving the whole album a unified theme like no other album in popular music outside possibly Smile.
The lyrics, meanwhile, were by Jake Holmes – a very strange figure from whom Led Zeppelin stole Dazed And Confused, and who later wrote the Be Who You Can Be In The Army jingle, but who had just finished collaborating with Gaudio on another astonishing album, the Four Seasons’ Genuine Imitation Life Gazette, which I wrote about here. Astonishingly, Holmes was only thirty – younger than me – when he wrote these astonishingly mature lyrics.
The album itself was (like that other great narrative concept album Arthur by The Kinks) originally intended to have a TV special attached to it which never materialised, and the opening track, Watertown, is clearly the music for the opening credits. Starting hesitantly, with a slightly out-of-time bass, we get a portrait of a small town from a distance, slowly zooming in (and it’s so cinematic I can see precisely the shots in my head, and I’m not a visual person) on one man standing alone in a train station.
The only song on the album not sung from the perspective of our narrator, this is the establishing shot before the main story starts, but even here, the narrator’s voice breaks in, and is singing to someone – “It’s gonna be a lonely place/without the look of your familiar face”, and immediately after we get hints that maybe the narrator isn’t to be trusted (“But who can say it’s not that way?”) before woodwinds, bass and arpeggiated guitar take us out over a train sound that is, in context, much sadder than the one at the end of Caroline, No.
Goodbye (She Quietly Says) is a wonderfully sparse, distanced description of a relationship breaking up (“Just two always-strangers avoid each other’s eyes/One still make-believing, one still telling lies/She tells me that I’m not to blame but when I ask the reason why/She reaches out across the table, looks at me and quietly says ‘goodbye’”).
I’ve read some interpretations of this song which suggest the woman in it is actually dying, not just leaving our narrator (which puts a whole new spin on the last song) but it’s too mundane for that. It’s the ‘always-strangers’ that gets me, here. The narrator, who is never named, clearly adores his wife Elizabeth beyond all reason, but doesn’t actually know her at all.
For A While is, in the context of this album, almost a cheerful song – “Lost another day, turned another way/With a laugh, a kind hello/Some small talk with those I know/I forget that I’m not over you for a while”. Musically, this sounds quite a lot like some of the waltzes Brian Wilson was doing around the same time, like Time To Get Alone – all light and breezy. Sinatra genuinely sounds like he means lines like “Days go by with no empty feeling/until I remember you’re gone”. It’s also the first song to be addressed, as most of the album is, directly to his lost love (incidentally, if you *do* want to argue that she’s dead rather than just having left him, this is an important point – the song about her leaving is told abstractly, not to her as a listener. Possibly because our narrator doesn’t want to face knowing that she knows it’s not true?)
Michael And Peter is a letter to Elizabeth about their two children (“Michael is you/he has your face/he still has your eyes/remember?/Peter is me/’cept when he smiles/And if you look/at them both for a while/you can see/they are you/they are me”) and about the mundane details of everyday life (“I think the house could use some paint/you know your mother’s such a saint/she takes the boys whenever she can/she sure needs a man” – and what does THAT say about the relationship, that the mother-in-law is still helping out her son-in-law, while her daughter is God knows where?). Constantly skirting around the problems he’s having, we still have hints that something’s not right in this narration “As far as anyone can tell, the sun will rise tomorrow”, “You’ll never believe how much they’re growing”, “Guess that’s all the news I’ve got today/Least that’s all the news that I can say”
I Would Be In Love Anyway is one of the most conventional songs on the album. The main message is that even though their marriage has ended, it was worth it (“If I lived the past over/saw today from yesterday/I would be in love anyway”) and once again we have the recurring themes of the lack of communication between them, the narrator’s unreliability and general inability to talk (“Though you’ll never be with me/And there are no words to say/I would be in love anyway”).
The thing I’m not getting across here is that this is, by this point, a fully-rounded character, who isn’t even aware of everything he’s telling us – “If I knew then, what I know now/I don’t believe I’d ever change, somehow”. Yes, he’s saying that he’d still love her – that he *DOES* still love her – no matter what, but he’s also saying *he won’t ever change and has never changed*. She changed, and grew up, and he didn’t. And the poor man doesn’t even realise it.
Elizabeth is just a fairly standard song of lost love sung to the person lost, one of the comparatively weaker songs on the album, although the narrator’s view of his wife as a fantasy, a dream, and the utter lack of detail about her other than her name, is telling. And “Dressed in memories/you are what you used to be” is simultaneously beautiful and creepy as hell.
On the other hand What A Funny Girl (You Used To Be) says *far* more about his wife’s character. “You always had a thousand things to do/Getting so involved in something new/Always some new recipe, the kitchen always looked like World War Three/What a funny girl you used to be”. “You’d fall for lines so easily, whatever they were selling, you’d buy three”. Suddenly, for the first time on the album, the ex-wife is a character, and we can see that someone so full of life and energy could never, ever have stayed with someone so fundamentally conservative (not to mention patronising – he almost sounds more like her father than her lover. This is especially worrying when you factor in the lines a few songs earlier about how her mother ‘needs a man’). He’d never understood that the things he loved most about her were precisely those things that meant they could never stay together.
What’s Now Is Now is… Christ, this is just the most astonishingly upsetting song ever. “Some day I know you’re gonna find/Just one mistake is not enough to change my mind/What’s now is now and I’ll forget what happened then/I know it all and we can still begin again”. The song is all about him forgiving her for her adultery – and assuming that the reason she’s left is just because she thinks he won’t forgive her, or that she thinks the people around will disapprove. He thinks she’s *run away from him*, rather than having grown away from him. The turning point of the song: “Now that you know how much I understand/You have no reason to be gone”.He’s talking about how much he understands, how much he knows, but he doesn’t have a clue. The poor, poor man…
She Says… and he’s actually got a letter back from her. And she says she’s coming home! So why is the song all minor chords, and why do we have a creepy chorus of small children singing “so she says” at the end of each verse?
The Train And we’re back where we started. “And now the sun has broken through, it looks like it will stay/Just can’t have you coming home on such a rainy day”. “This time around you’ll want to stay/Cause I’ve had so many nights to find a way” “Pretty soon I’ll be close to you and it will be so good/We’ll talk about the part of you I never understood” Just like at the beginning, he’s waiting at the train station. This is where we came in.
Except… when we came in, it was the morning. And now “the kids are coming home from school”.
And “I wrote so many times and more/but the letters still are lying in my drawer”.
He’s been standing there in the rain all day, waiting for her, because of a reply he got to a letter he never sent…
the passengers for Allentown are gone
the train is slowly moving on
but I can’t see you any place
And I know for sure I’d recognise your faceAnd I know for sure I’d recognise your face…
And the album ends there, with the train pulling out in the fade.
And now, after having listened to that album three times during the writing of this, I’m going to have to dissolve into a quivering mass of sobs. Goodnight…
Albums You Should Own – The Four Seasons: Genuine Imitation Life Gazette
I’m not a fan of the Four Seasons, generally. This may come as a surprise to some of you, because of my love of the Beach Boys’ music, but while the two bands share some superficial similarities (mostly in that both were vocal harmony groups with falsetto leads), they were in fact very different bands. The Beach Boys used a much wider musical palette, combining elements from Gershwin, the Four Freshmen, Phil Spector, Bach, Bacharach and Chuck Berry, while for the most part the Four Seasons seemed limited to Dion-esque white-boy doo-wop, but with a four-on-the-floor Motown beat rather than the swing time of songs like The Wanderer.
To make matters worse, Frankie Valli’s falsetto is, frankly, horrible. Where Brian Wilson had a sweet, pure, full tone, Valli’s was thin and nasal, and he often had pitching problems – if you listen to him carefully, you can often hear that he flats the note then swoops up to hit the correct one.
But Bob Gaudio, one of the backing vocalists in the band, and co-writer with producer Bob Crewe of most of the band’s biggest hits, was quite an accomplished composer when he was allowed out of the formula the band got into. And with lyricist Jake Holmes he wrote two of the very best albums ever recorded. I wrote a little about Watertown by Frank Sinatra last week, but Genuine Imitation Life Gazette, the album the two wrote for the Four Seasons, is, if anything even better. It’s also even less widely known – it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page.
Right from the start, this album, from 1969, sounds nothing like the doo-wop/Motown hybrid of their hits. Starting with a fanfare, opening track American Crucifixion Resurrection sets the tone for much of the rest of the album:
Unbound slaves stand outside the gate
With lengths of broken chain they wait
Empty stomachs filled with hate
No-one told the heads of state, the Prince of peace is sleeping late
Who will wait on the lords and ladies, who will cry when they lose their crowns?
Sleeping through the years of error, waking in a reign of terror
Conceptually, the album is something like the Monkees’ Head – a band who had been pure pop stretching out into something very different – but musically it’s far more interesting. The closest comparisons I can think of are Van Dyke Parks’ Song Cycle and Scott Walker’s early solo work – all Hollywood orchestrations, oblique, vaguely unsettling lyrics, and unconventional song structures. American Crucifixion Resurrection, for example, is nearly seven minutes long, and ranges from atonal orchestrations to extremely fast honky-tonk piano and back again.
Mrs Stately’s Garden is the closest thing to the normal Four Seasons sound, sounding like it could easily fit on the Turtles’ Turtle Soup (another album I need to deal with here). Lyrically, it’s quite biting, reporting the conversation of a few old ladies over tea, discussing the suicide of a young girl:
saltines and jasmine tea in Mrs Stately’s Garden
…
There has even been talk of a child (Well, the Millers have always been wild, poor thing).
…
The boy that she’d been seeing moved to Watertown…
Do you think he knew what she had done? My boy Roger would never have run…
…
I don’t think we should see Marge Miller any more… you can’t mingle with people like that (get up Alice, you’re crushing my hat), poor thing
Look Up, Look Over, from its melody could almost be a Barry Manilow song or something equally treacly, but the production, sparse and empty and funereal, sounds almost like some of the Velvet Underground’s more downbeat music, like Ride Into The Sun. A minor track, but quite interesting.
Something’s On Her Mind sounds like something off the Zombies’ Odessey And Oracle, a happy, cheerful uptempo pop song, but with strange honky-tonk piano with tons of tape wobble put on it.
Saturday’s Father on the other hand is just about the saddest song ever written – a song about a father visiting his children after a divorce, it’s the clearest pointer on this album to the themes of Watertown:
He’ll take them to a puppet show, the little one can’t wait to go
Today is father’s day.See them always smiling for what games to play
Fun to have a daddy every Saturday
Like with much of the album, it’s not so much the lyrics as the orchestrations – the album has a curiously flat production so I can’t make out individual instruments, but it sounds like a mixture of harmonium and accordions and honky tonk piano. Almost everything on this album is ever-so-slightly out of tune – everything’s a discord, nothing feels right or comfortable at all. It’s slick and full orchestration, but with beats dropped and tempos changing almost at random. Lots of the orchestration sounds like early Mothers Of Invention albums – all thin, reedy discords.
Wall Street Village Day is one of the more normal sounding songs on the album, sounding vaguely Jimmy Webb.
Genuine Imitation Life is trying a bit too hard to be ‘psychedelic’, with lyrics like “Chameleons changing colours while a crocodile crys/People rubbing elbows but never touching eyes/Taking off their mask, revealing still another guise”, a piano introduction that seems to owe a little to Hurdy Gurdy Man and an ending ripped off from Hey Jude. It feels very much like the Monkees’ Porpoise Song, another piece of forced psychedelia from this time period, but is nowhere near as good as the Monkees’ song (which manages to overcome its silliness), Probably the weakest song on the album by a long way.
Idaho is irritating me right now, because it has the exact same melody as an old standard by someone like Stephen Foster, but I can’t for the life of me think what it is. Sung in near-unison over the same bassline as Heroes & Villains, this could quite easily have fit on the Beach Boys’ Smile.
Wonder What You’ll Be reminds me of After Hours musically, with a little bit of Frank Zappa’s America Drinks thrown in. A jazz flavoured crooner, with chord changes that go all over the place and drums that sound like they’re sampled.
Soul Of A Woman, the final track, goes from a Neil Diamond-esque ballad into uptempo sections that sound like the Four Tops into big swooping Hollywood orchestration almost at random. It’s far too long at seven minutes thirteen seconds, but it’s still a fascinating closer.
I’ve not really done justice to this album – it’s a profoundly strange record, and bears almost no relation to anything else in the Four Seasons’ catalogue. If you can imagine a combination of the Mothers’ Absolutely Free, the Kinks’ Arthur, the second Velvet Underground album, Scott 3, Pet Sounds, Song Cycle, and the best of Andy Williams, listened to through a couple of tin cans on string, then you might just about be able to imagine it.
The album can be heard at last.fm, and you should really listen to it – especially if you’re one of the apparently growing number who love Watertown, this album’s younger sibling.
Linkblogging for 01/11/08
When I said “I’ll try to get stuff written over the next couple of days” what I *should* have said is “My wife and I will spend the next week like the little weather people in the clock, each being sick when the other is better, and I will miss two important Lib Dem events this week and my wife will have to take a few days off work, and so I won’t be able to get any writing done.”
However, we’re both well now, and I plan to spend *all weekend* writing…
Frankosonic has an interesting post on Frank Sinatra’s Watertown album, and a link in the comments takes me to this very thorough review of the album.
While it’s great to see Watertown get this much attention, I do think that the interpretation that both people put on it (that the narrator’s wife has died, not just left him) is strained. For a start, Jake Holmes and Bob Gaudio had previously written Saturday’s Father on Genuine Imitation Life Gazette, another song very specifically about the aftermath of a divorce (“fun to have a daddy every Saturday”), and the song Goodbye (She Quietly Says) is too explicit to read as her dying without missing out half the lyrics. Still an interesting look at the album, though, and that mournful tone is certainly suited to their interpretation…
Incidentally, if any of you haven’t heard Watertown, you *must*. I’m not usually a huge fan of Sinatra, but give him the right material, as here, and he could rise to it. It’s sort of a middle-aged divorcee’s Pet Sounds, but better. What’s Now Is Now and Michael And Peter in particular are just stunning.
Emily Short is trying a unique idea – a collaborative player-generated interactive fiction game called Alabaster. I’ve not had a chance to play with this properly yet, but it looks fascinating. I hope she releases the conversation system as a proper I7 extension, as it looks very, very useful…
Fred Clark writes about the hypocritical tactics of anti-abortion Republicans in the US.
Even neo-nazis think Obama is better than McCain…
I posted a link to the prologue to Scholars & Rogues’ incredibly long analysis of the Jon-Benet Ramsey case’s portrayal in the media, but this part, talking about cultural values, is worth reading too – the whole thing is, in fact, but I’ve not linked the other parts because of how disturbing people might find them.
And Brad Hicks on supply-side economics.
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