Sinatra! the Song Is You by Will Friedwald

Author:Will Friedwald
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2018-05-03T04:00:00+00:00

* As mentioned, I had heard this story from numerous musicians, although only one of them was actually an eyewitness, and that was May himself. Billy objected to this story and insisted that it never happened this way; that it was just a minor incident that got blown out of proportion. In his own account, he simply sat on the chair in question, and accidentally broke it. After twenty years, I find that it’s still prudent not to name the other arranger (who died in 2017) directly, though, Lord knows, his identity would be easy enough to find out through Google or any rudimentary internet search. The “other” arranger himself told a version of the story that’s closer to Clooney’s account than May’s: “Billy May, when sauced, was awful to me. [He said] ‘How the hell does a kid like that get to work with Ella? He knows shit about music!’ … In a drunken rage, Billy May picked up my chair and threw it against the wall, breaking it in pieces.”

* May and all the other Miller men were later surprised to learn that with the ongoing interest in the band in the 1950s, even their minor numbers were restored to print by RCA, along with many charts that Miller had performed only on airchecks. As part of a divorce suit in 1954, May let his ex-wife keep the royalties for his tunes and then learned afterward that Universal Pictures was about to make The Glenn Miller Story with Jimmy Stewart. As a result, his ex’s first royalty check amounted to about $12,000.

* “Brassmen’s Holiday,” the opening track of his highly successful 1958 album Billy May’s Big Fat Brass, is the May arrangement that sounds most like Sauter-Finegan.

* Sinatra took special delight performing “Mandalay” before an audience of mostly British descent in Melbourne, Australia, in 1959: “This particular song was written from the poem by Rudyard Kipling. Now it seems that we have done a rather different version of ‘Road to Mandalay,’ so that his family has objected, and anywhere in the British Empire it’s not to be played on the record. So they took it off the long-playing record of Come Fly with Me and replaced it with ‘Chicago.’ But this is an unusual version of ‘Road to Mandalay,’ it’s comedic, but it swings, it jumps. I think that Rudyard Kipling’s sister [sic] was chicken not to let us put it on the record.”

* The strangest result of Sinatra’s fascination with Kipling and “Gunga Din” is a 1966 spoken-word recording that he made at his home in Palm Springs. In 1962, ABC-Paramount had released a very bizarre 45 rpm single, “The Last Blast of the Blasted Bugler,” credited as a Phil Cammarata production. It sounds like someone conceived of this as a spoken word/ dramatic reading record, but the label decided to release it as a novelty/comedy record. We hear the narrator (one Sonny Gianotta) briefly describing the climactic scene of “Gunga Din,” in which a bugler warns

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