I heard him 4 times in Chicago, once in Madison, Wisconsin and once in Milwaukee (Alpine Valley). When Sinatra came back, it was with a new agenda: he planned to leave behind his beloved recording studio and regular releases of albums and instead take his music to the people (including the heartland, which is where I live, in Kenosha, WI). Hearing Peggy Lee forced to subject her material to a disco beat demonstrates the shabby treatment given some of America’s greatest artists by the demands of the new market place.

It was a “populist revolution,” producing reductive music by one amateurish performer after the other, with depressing results to the record sales of someone of Sinatra’s high standards (his last couple of albums sold in the hundreds, not tens of thousands, wtih “Watertown” the nadir, imo).Ī number of “traditional” professional singers persisted but with depressing results. Before he retired, Frank tried to meet the new low standard in pop music, which had been taken away from professional composers like Cole Porter and Richard Rodgers and handed over to the new guitar-playing singer-songwriters like the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Glen Campbell and Willie Nelson.

What album is young sinatra 1 on