Ring a Ding Ding

It is one of the great regrets of my listening life that I never saw Frank Sinatra in concert. Even toward the end, when his voice was a vestige of what it once had been and he was a little shaky on some of the lyrics, it would have been worth the experience. It would have been a kick just to be in the same room.

Last week Frank Sinatra Jr. was on our show. He sings the old man’s songs now and for many years was his father’s orchestra leader. While he sat for our interview I could not help but silently size up the physical similarities between father and son. You catch that profile in the right light and there’s not much doubt about the gene pool.

Sinatra’s music is important to many people for many reasons. Some of these have very little to do with the actual songs or how he interpreted them. My mother was a big fan. She would have been right in that bobby-soxer wheelhouse that catapulted Frank into the stratosphere of popular culture. When my Mom died at the age of 44, I found that listening to Sinatra somehow connected me to her memory better than just about anything else.. My father…thin as a rail for much of his life…once told me that Frank Sinatra made being skinny fashionable , if not downright sexy.  Like I say…people have their reasons.

My favourite Sinatra song keeps changing. It is hard to argue with the way he swings through The Best Is Yet To Come.  It is, after all, the line you’ll find on his headstone should you ever make the pilgrimage to the family plot in Cathedral City.

Then I got kinda hooked on It’s My Heart…just for the simple sake of the melody alone. And now I find a show tune like All I Need Now Is The Girl  (from Gypsy) to be at the top of my ever-evolving Sinatra list.

Sinatra Jr. is not the old man..and he would be the first to tell you that. Yes, he sings the great American songbook but it is also part of his mission to preserve his father’s legacy. My co-hosts found him aloof, if not a tad arrogant. I didn’t react the same way. Maybe I thought I knew more about the family dynamic…and what a family it must have been! There are more books about Frank Sinatra on my bookshelf than any other entertainer. And I have a lot of books.

I found Jr. to be reserved, thoughtful and a tad defensive. Plus, he’s a night owl. Saloon singers…no matter what  generation…are not at their most personable when you drag them out of bed at 6am. That’s just about the time Frank Sr.was finally getting some shuteye for much of his performing life. As he was standing up to leave the set , Frank Jr. looked at the other members of the team (each of them a stunner), then looked back at me and said, ‘Boy, you’ve got a tough job’. I think his must be lot tougher..but in a Sinatra kind-of-way, I knew exactly what he meant.

Snug as a Bug

I believe long underwear season has officially descended upon downtown Toronto. It’s unseasonably late but now seasonably cold and I welcome it. I extend an official greeting because I happen to own a set of the world’s best long underwear. This is no vainglorious boast. The long johns I sport are so comfortable that you can wear them about indoors just for sheer comfort. And I do.

I am at the age now where just about every product reminds me of a story and long johns are no exception. I did a television piece many years ago about a delightfully irascible fellow in Nanaimo, B.C. who was making it his business to build the world a better set of cold weather skivvies. He was well into his seventies when I met him. He had a shock of white hair, piercing blue eyes and swore like a sailor. (Does that metaphor still hold water?) We got along like gangbusters and ,naturally, he made for terrific television!

Anyway, he had discovered a type of French fibre that could be used to make remarkably warm, yet light weight long johns. And he so believed in the product that he was willing to go anywhere, anytime to make his pitch. In fact, he related how he had gone to a trade show and proceeded to tear a strip off members of a Russian delegation by informing them that that they didn’t know jack about thermal underwear. Imagine telling the Russians, who’ve got places like Siberia in their backyard, that they didn’t know how to dress for the cold!

The gregarious garment man had me sold before I even finished our interview so I bought a pair of those long johns and they served me well until I basically wore them out. Then I promptly bought another pair.

They are like a form-fitted security blanket because I know that no matter how far the temperature plunges I will survive, perhaps even thrive.  Forget about layering, hell I’d go out in these things and these things alone if it was fashionably acceptable!

Understand, I am not shilling for the product. That delightful fellow I met all those years ago is probably long gone and I can only hope that the people who picked up the thermal mantle have continued his quest for excellence. There is something to be said for a product that delivers, though..really delivers. When it’s your butt out there at minus 20 you can’t afford to be cutting any corners.

Cold comfort? You betcha!

The Sad Song

She's gone

I’m listening to Hall and Oates and ‘She’s Gone‘ while I write this. My television co-host Liza Fromer gave me a Greatest Hits cd for Christmas (a gentle joke) because I had told the story during the show of how some of my fishing buddies once threw my Hall and Oates collection out of a speeding car one wild weekend during the early 1980′s. The mere possession of blue-eyed soul was apparently enough in those days to seriously impugn your manhood. I don’t quite remember why and it doesn’t really matter.

The point is that She’s Gone is a sad song. It’s a sad song for me because someone I valued had just walked out of my life right around the time that tune was getting a lot of radio airplay. This is, of course, how sad songs work. They hit you at the right time and they stick there forever. They are emotional, individual fingerprints, a kind of syncopated scar. It doesn’t take much…a clever evocative lyric, just the right combination of notes… and that song will go straight home. It’s a musical land mine that can lie buried for years. We all have these tuneful touchstones, though they are often very different. My sad song is not likely your sad song.

Gladys Knight and the Pips had a very sad song with Neither One of Us. It’s hard for me to listen to Neither One of Us without getting a tad verklempt. I’ve written on this blog before about Whitney Houston’s Why Does it Hurt So Bad. I don’t have a melancholy memory connected with that particular song but it’s still a killer. When she was on her game, Whitney could break your heart by proxy.

In 1970 The Fifth Dimension had a big hit with a Burt Bacharach sad song, One Less Bell to Answer. At 17, I lost a girl to that one but as fate would have it I got that same woman back many, many years later. I got her back to the Bee Gees’ How Deep is Your Love.

We’ve been married 30 years.

Nothing quite tracks your life like the tracks of your life.

Time After Time

I think I should tell you that last night I managed to either truly reverse time  or achieve some kind of nocturnal time travel…all from the comfort of my bed. This may make me eligible for the Nobel or , at the very least, some other kind of international cash prize.

The discovery came after a typical evening of painting, wine, latin music, wine, wine, and Mad Men episodes. (temporary , enforced bachelorhood is so rich!)

Eventually, I placed the BlackBerry on the bedside table in the clock mode and promptly drifted off to Neverland. I awaken frequently during the night..and so , after what felt like an hour or so, I groggily attempted to bring the clock face somewhere within my field of vision.

It was 7:45 . How could it be 7:45?   I couldn’t see the big hand or the little hand very clearly. My glasses were a couple of inches further than my body was prepared to reach.

So I rolled over. Next time I awoke and gauzily gazed at the BB it was 9:10.  Nine-ten?  What the hell! I stuck my arm out from under the sheets just to look and make sure I wasn’t having a Benjamin Button experience.

So, back to sleep and the next time I cocked one eye open from the pillow I believe it was actually yesterday !

Only after I had wasted precious hours fretting and theorizing did I switch on the light and realize that I had been looking at the BlackBerry upside down all night.

I still have a report card from Grade 4 where the teacher wrote, ‘David just needs to focus‘. Some things never change with time.

Cleanse Thyself

This week, as one of the co-hosts of a morning television show, I have started a raw food cleanse.

I did not ask for it.

Why would I?

This is the notion of a producer. Producers exist mainly to think up ways of filling television time. If they can do it at the expense of a host while sitting in the bar laughing about it later with other producers..so much the better. Please, producers, keep your holistic dementia to yourselves!

I kid. I like all of our producers. It’s a great group, maybe the best I’ve ever worked with. But to subject a 58 year old man to some kind of dietary reaming..one I could accomplish myself in Mexico with a good week of hard drinking and one bad burrito…seems misguided in the least and cruel in the extreme.

My younger co-hosts are jumping up and down in anticipation of a week’s worth of juice and carrot sticks. It’s the same kind of reaction they have whenever any member of a former boy band appears on the show. They’re all still, clearly, in the ‘magic bullet’ years of their lives. I took all the bullets years ago…the thermal mud immersion, the sensory tank deprivation…walking on hot coals..twice. I have consumed a beverage brewed from beans that have passed through the anus of a civet cat. None of it did anything for me. Everyone finds their lifestyle balance, eventually. If it happens to be good scotch and cigars, so be it. Who’s to say you won’t live to be 100?

We had two choices of cleanse. You could drink juice for a week (just juice)…or go on a raw diet of fruits and vegetables. I have a glass of V-8 occasionally and, frankly, that’s all the juice I need. I have spent a long time carefully calibrating the toxins in my system. Why would I mess with this now?  If I feel like guinea pig it’s only because I will have to eat like a guinea pig for the rest of the week.

The Cleansing People supply you with all the food you’re supposed to eat each day. Knowing this, I did not buy a single leafy item at the supermarket last weekend. Instead, I loaded up the cart with toilet paper and several large blocks of cheese.

When I’m through being cleansed another producer has suggested that I have a series of vitamin injections in my face !

I’m serious.

I may have to get off this show before they kill me.

 

AN ADDENDUM: I lasted a little over 24 hours. I walked across the street from the studio this morning after suffering an unrelenting ripping headache (not to mention two shows that I did in an organic fog)…and sat down to a plate of steak and eggs.