On my 21st birthday (February 14, 1977), I was scheduled to work with Frank Sinatra and since the session didn’t start until the afternoon I decided to defrost my refrigerator.  Butter knife in hand I chipped away at the glacier surrounding my ice box thinking how unglamorous my life was.  By then, I had moved out of the Bretton Hall and into a ground floor apartment on West 85th Street between Central Park and Columbus Avenues. My new 2-room flat cost $165 a month. Since Central Park, at the time, was lousy with rapes and robberies held at gunpoint; in some senses my new address was a scarier place to live then my previous neighborhood. Living park side was considered even more dangerous than living in a brothel, which is probably why the landlord pressed me to sign a five year lease. The street was tree-lined so I felt as if I’d moved up a peg. The only drawback, my bathroom and kitchen shared a room. The footed tub, toilet, thirty-inch wide stove and the 1950’s ice box were miraculously squeezed into a space the size of a walk-in closet.  The only other slightly bigger room contained a loft bed, one round table and two chairs. From the tiny barred window I could almost see a tree.

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“The only reason you were picked to work with Sinatra is because you’re Italian,” someone murmured as I entered the studio.  I wondered; how do Italians behave?  I decided to keep as quiet as possible during the sessions lest producer, Charlie Calello, somehow detect that I was also Swedish and German.

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In some ways, the Sinatra project was an oddity starting with the fact that two of his 1940’s classics, ‘All or Nothing at All’ and ‘Night and Day’ were slated to become disco songs. Another curiosity was the trading of places between two record producers, Charlie Calello and Joe Beck who each requested entirely different engineers. Calello booked the straight-laced Joe Jorgensen (father to Wilco's Mikael Jorgensen) while Beck insisted upon the somewhat lawless Godfrey Diamond. I was the only constant staff member on both songs. Beyond that, everything else was ‘professional’.

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In the days leading up to the vocal session, the rhythm tracks—drums, bass, and guitars—were recorded followed by the ‘sweetening’ which consisted of horns, reeds, strings and percussion—all without Sinatra present. Every player read music arranged by either Calello or Beck—even the drummer.

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Sinatra arrived with a couple of body guards in tow and his fourth wife Barbara Marx, a model and show girl formerly married to Zeppo Marx of the Marx Brothers. He was reserved and business-like, relaxed and dutifully friendly. It was hard to get an exact read on him—did he like the disco direction? Patiently, he stood in place while I positioned his microphone. Then, as per Media protocol, I explained how the headphones worked—namely, the adjustment of the headpiece in relationship to the ear cups and the operation of the volume control which was located on the music stand. To ease the tension I joked, “You’re new at this but you’ll get the hang of it,” and we shared a chuckle. Once I was out of the vocal booth, Sinatra began to croon. Well, almost.

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Right out of the gate, his vocal performance was not as stellar as I had expected. He had a hard time fitting his signature phrasing into the disco beat and he forgot the lyrics. In the wee hours, we had to beg the owner of Colony Music to open the store in order to buy the sheet music so that Sinatra could finish the song. (Personal computers were unheard of back then and therefore downloading the lyrics was impossible.) The next day gossip queen, Liz Smith reported the incident in her New York Daily News column.

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I couldn’t tell if it was the incessant bass drum or the phlegm in his throat that was holding Sinatra back from just sailing through the number as ‘real’ singers do. Calello and Beck seemed taken aback having realized they were suddenly in the unexpected and very awkward position of coaching a legend. Sometimes Sinatra would say, “Let me do that again,” and at other times either Calello or Beck would shyly ask him to sing the whole song once more. Clearly, no one wanted to tell the ‘Chairman of the Board’ how to improve his performance. If it were anyone but Sinatra, this would be done without question. I wanted to jump on the talk back mic and say, Drink some water, clear your throat, and listen to the beat. The tempo’s a lot faster than you think. And drop the signature phrasing for a while just to get the hang of it.” But of course I wasn’t the producer. When out of ear shot, someone offered an excuse for Sinatra’s inability to instantly nail the part, “He just got off a plane from Barbados.”

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At one point, Jorgensen gave me a wink, very uncharacteristic of him, and crooked his head toward the quarter-inch tape machine. At first I thought it was a signal for me to do something important so I jumped over to the machine as fast as possible. To my utter surprise, Jorgensen was bootlegging the session complete with all of Sinatra’s mistakes. The bootleg was never released but it was such a taboo move on Jorgensen’s part that I never saw him as straight-laced again. I still have the session on cassette tape.

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In the end, Sinatra’s vocal was pieced together from several takes—a reliable method when one is paying $250 an hour for studio time. If I had known that my picture with Sinatra was going to give me a lifetime of clout, instead of defrosting the ‘frig’ that morning, I might have focused more on my hair and makeup.

 

JANTURAN chose to re-imagine ‘Night and Day’, a Cole Porter tune, for its classic craftsmanship of melody and lyric.