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Bobby Lime's avatar

Ted, you should listen to "Watertown," his common guy/downwardly mobile/romantic loser album from around 1970. The music isn't particularly distinguished; instead of James van Heusen writing much of a new album for him, he had a couple of guys named Bob Gaudio and Jake Holmes. The liner notes don't tell the reader exactly how the Gaudio/Holmes team worked, so I don't know who should get the principal or entire credit, as the case may be, for the lyrics, but they are extremely moving in a way nothing else Sinatra ever sang was. The entire album is extremely moving in a way none of Sinatra's other heartbreak albums came close to being.

It's more than a concept album. I think of it more as a story album. The narrator's much loved wife has left him and their sons behind in Watertown, implicitly taking off with a lover. The cover drawing makes Watertown look like the sort of place which was the location of the first scenes of hundreds of Hollywood movies made during The Golden Era, in which, whatever the story, the main character, desperate to escape Nowhere, USA, catches the train for The Big City. ( New York, New York, maybe? )

But the narrator isn't going anywhere. He's a man of responsibility. He's going to raise their sons. Toward the end of the album, he thinks she may be coming back to him.

I think "Watertown" is a great work of art. It's the sort of thing I can imagine might have been written for Glen Campbell. I don't know much about its genesis, but my impression is that Sinatra commissioned its creation. I know he had strong hopes for it, and was hurt by its failure to catch on at all. If I'm not mistaken, one of his daughters said its failure was the deepest artistic hurt Sinatra ever suffered.

I think of it as his attempt to do penance for "My Way," a song which he seems to have despised. If you haven't heard "Watertown," you should.

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Larry.Deaton@gmail.com's avatar

Loved this column. Sinatra is so complicated in so many ways. He was able even to capture the hearts of many whom he abused. His problematic relationship with Australia notwithstanding, there is a radio station in Perth that still has a daily Sinatra hour radio show ... every day. While Frank remains my favorite singer ... well, after Ella Fitzgerald, I do regret what his career and influence did to the career of that other Hoboken singer, Jimmy Roselli, who deserved more and better.

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