Among the many Sinatra tributes this centenary year is Bob Dylan's idiosyncratic and brilliantly titled album Shadows In The Night. These are not Frank covers, he says, but "uncovers", which is a cute line. But you can't say Dylan doesn't know his Sinatra. This isn't "New York, New York" and "Come Fly With Me" and the other staples of the Salute to Ol' Blue Eyes CDs. There's a song Frank co-wrote ("I'm A Fool To Want You") and a song Rachmaninov co-wrote ("Full Moon And Empty Arms") and an eerie number Jerome Moross and Carolyn Leigh wrote ("Stay With Me") at a time when the rock critics and cultural commentators were assuring us that the times they were a-changin' and fellows like Dylan were sweeping away the likes of Carolyn Leigh ("Witchcraft") forever. It's a very interesting track listing.
There is, however, one of Bob Dylan's very favorite Sinatra numbers that didn't make the album - and I suspect it's because he so loves the original that he didn't want to mess with it. He's listened to it ever since it first came out, back when he was in high school:
First the tide rushes in
Plants a kiss on the shore
Then rolls out to sea
And the sea is very still once more...
The words are by Carl Sigman, writer of what I (if not he) like to think of as "my" signature song, "A Marshmallow World", as well as such Sinatra staples as "What Now, My Love?", "The World We Knew" , "A Day In The Life Of A Fool" and "I Could Have Told You". The music is by Robert Maxwell - and, for the benefit of my fellow ink-stained wretches, no, not that Robert Maxwell, not the former owner of the London Daily Mirror and New York Daily News who mysteriously drowned while yachting off the Canary Islands in 1991, owing me a modest and years overdue freelance fee and owing his lifelong employees an awful lot more, having looted their pension fund in an effort to prop up his floundering empire. That Robert Maxwell was a wholly repellent figure whom even his fellow press barons loathed: Mort Zuckerman, who subsequently bought The Daily News, joked to me, after the would-be Citizen Kane's aquatic misfortune, "What were Robert Maxwell's last words? 'Rose-glug.'" So Cap'n Bob, the bouncing Czech, has no connection with the Robert Maxwell who wrote "Ebb Tide" - except that, after his fatal yachting accident, Private Eye published the cover of the song's sheet music with the composer's name prominently displayed as a poignant comment on his watery end.
This Robert Maxwell was a harpist, born Robert Rosen in New York in 1921. He studied at Juilliard, became the youngest member of the National Symphony Orchestra, gave solo recitals and appeared with Toscanini and Koussevitsky. And he gave no thought to popular music until war came and he found himself in a unit of the United States Coast Guard commanded by Rudy Vallee. Vallee booked him into shows for America's servicemen and he started to play harp in a pop style. After the war, he played on radio, and for one summer hosted the seasonal replacement series for Frank Sinatra's show on CBS. By now he was arranging, and also composing. And one day in 1953 he wrote a melody to which he gave the name "Ebb Tide". The tidal bit is obvious: The main theme is built around a three-note lapping phrase ("First the tide/Rush-es in/Plants a kiss/On the shore") evoking very vividly the tide running in on the beach, and then receding. The "ebb" part is harder to explain: that's when the tide dies away, and is furthest from the shore - which doesn't seem quite right for the climactic part of the melody when it's pretty obviously crashing around at high-water mark. On the other hand, the tune then slips quietly away, and does, indeed, ebb. So in that sense the final bars, if not the ones preceding, certainly justify the title.
The orchestral boys loved the tune - it was Britain's Frank Chacksfield, aided by several introductory seagulls, who would have the big instrumental hit - but the singers who heard it liked it too and the publisher came under pressure to come up with a lyric. So he called Carl Sigman and said he'd like him to rustle up some words for this "Ebb Tide" thing.
"Usually," recalled Sigman in a chapter for his uncompleted autobiography, "when we get melodies to write lyrics to, the tunes either have no titles at all or titles which somehow fit naturally into the tune, with respect to accents, etc. But 'Ebb Tide'? I knew from the start that those words would never fit into that tune, and in addition I had no idea what kind of meaningful lyric I would write that would even remotely connect itself to the title."
After four days, Sigman had nothing, and figured he needed a break to clear his head. How about a movie? He opened the paper to check the listings and there was an ad for From Here To Eternity, the 1953 film that won Frank Sinatra an Oscar and played a key part in his big comeback. But Frank wasn't the guy in the newspaper ad. Instead, it showed Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in their most famous scene in the picture, locked in the throes of passion on the sand as the tide washes over them. If you don't remember the original, you might recall the parody in Airplane!, when the tide goes out, leaving the two lovers covered in seaweed, barnacles, miscellaneous crustaceans, etc. At any rate, Carl Sigman looked at Burt and Deborah rolling around in their swimsuits and the ol' lightbulb lit up. He never got to the movie theatre.
"I couldn't understand why I hadn't thought of it before," he wrote years later. But once he had, the lyric poured out of him "with scarcely a moment of reflection". Its genius is that it follows the ebb and flow of the melody absolutely precisely yet so naturally you're all but unaware of the trick. First the tide rushes in:
First the tide rushes in
Plants a kiss on the shore...
And then it recedes:
Then rolls out to sea
And the sea is very still once more...
Then, having established the tide's literal presence, Sigman makes it metaphorical:
So I rush to your side
Like the oncoming tide
With one burning thought
Will your arms open wide?
"If listened to in the right frame of mind," explained the author, "the melody rises and falls in a way which uncannily resembles an orgasm, with one of the most stirring climaxes I've ever heard followed by a beautifully relaxed, restful and contented ending. At the same time, this rising and falling is a perfect symbolization of the movements of the tide. Now the connection begins to come into focus: two lovers meet on a beach, their expectations rise together as the tide is rising..."
I'll say. By the time we get to the middle section, the "stirring climax" isn't so much stirring as boiling over:
At last we're face to face
And as we kiss through an embrace
I can tell
I can feel
You are love!
You are real!
"They love," wrote Sigman, and then "they are at peace together as the tide ebbs." I like the way he gets back from the big climactic "You are real!!!!!!!" to the gentle lapping of the main theme:
You are love!
You are real!Really mine, in the rain
In the dark, in the sun
Like the tide at its ebb
I'm at peace in the web
Of your arms...
The "really mine" is an ingenious transition that ties the big intense orgasmic moment to the post-coital peace and content afterwards. And it all happened so effortlessly once he'd seen that poster of From Here To Eternity. As Sigman put it, "The whole wedding of the tune to the lyric (or, I should say, of lyric to the tune) is the most natural, the best and the easiest (once the idea was there) I've ever written."
Vic Damone had the hit, in a smooth professional treatment, and the following year - 1954 - the r'n'b singer Roy Hamilton took it back into the Billboard charts. If you're looking for something a little different, try Bob Hope's sidekick, the extravagantly mustachioed Jerry Colonna. His "r"s roll at least as much as the tide, which, underneath the honking seagulls, sounds more like bilge lapping against a rotting wharf. The record ends tragically, with the tide rushing out and taking poor Jerry with it.
But "Ebb Tide" had to wait another decade for the real cashbox combination of singer and song. In 1965, Phil Spector put the Righteous Brothers at the microphone and gave it the full Wall of Sound treatment - which David McGee, in his study of Carl Sigman, characterizes thus: "The tide is cast more as a tsunami destroying everything in its path than a mere wave breaking on the shore." The Righteous version also removed "Ebb Tide" from the select category of songs whose title never appears in the lyric. Right at the end, Bobby Hatfield gives an oceanic roar: "Ebb Tide!"
By the way, lest you doubt Carl Sigman's thesis of the melody as orgasm, consider its most famous cinematic deployment. You'll recall Jerry Zucker's 1990 film Ghost in which the Righteous Brothers' recording of "Unchained Melody" accompanied Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze's heavy duty make-out action over the pottery wheel. A couple of years later, in Naked Gun 2½, directed by Jerry's brother David Zucker, Leslie Nielsen and Priscilla Presley wound up spinning the potter's wheel to that other slow-burn Righteous Brothers hit "Ebb Tide", with the rushing tide climaxing as the wet clay suddenly spurts from Lieutenant Frank Drebin's hands all over him and his lovely bride. Truly a seminal film moment.
Midway between Vic Damone and the brothers Righteous came Frank Sinatra's version. He had always liked the song, and perhaps, without knowing its origins, sensed that it would have made a much better theme for From Here To Eternity than the boilerplate ballad concocted to promote the movie. So half-a-decade after the movie Frank decided to record "Ebb Tide", for Only The Lonely (1958), the album he named as his personal favorite - even if the Grammies frosted it out in every category except its cover art, whose maudlin Sinatra-as-Pagliacci clown pic is absolutely the worst thing about the LP and very misleading as to the tone of the set.
"Ebb Tide" is in very good company, with A-list songs by A-list writers - Rodgers & Hart, Mercer, Harold Arlen, Jule Styne... And given that, by comparison, Robert Maxwell is a Z-list name, Nelson Riddle approaches the tune more respectfully than any of the others in a formal, almost tone-poem arrangement commencing with waves crashing on the beach, then evoking seagulls and swirling eddies, and generally nodding in the direction of Debussy's La Mer. And Frank too has a rare formality when he gets up to the high-F stuff around "I can tell! I can feel! You are love! You are real! Really mine..." - before returning to a more comfortable range and the intimacy he usually brings to love songs. The Carl Sigman musical orgasm is not so very far from the preferred Sinatra/Riddle model: place the big-voiced climax a little way before the end, and then come back down for a quiet cigarette with the band. They pull it off brilliantly here.
Robert Maxwell went on to write "Shangri-La" with Carl Sigman, which you can hear in our special Sigman centenary podcast. But other than his pair of hits with Sigman his reputation rests on classics like "Song Of The Nairobi Trio".
As for "Ebb Tide"'s lyricist, summing up his father's work for a centenary appreciation, Carl's son Michael Sigman said:
He saw himself as a craftsman rather than a great artist: He mostly wrote on assignment instead of being a great artist working in the middle of the night, making music out of his dreams. He was the go-to utility guy - and that's how he thought of himself. He thought 'Ebb Tide' and 'It's All In The Game' were inspirational works of art, but the rest was craft.
To his son "Ebb Tide" is "transcendent". It's of a different order from, say, "You're My World" or "My Heart Cries For You". The words and music are almost eerily matched, and a lyric mostly of monosyllables on a commonplace romantic theme takes on a rare intensity. "I used to play the phenomenal 'Ebb Tide' by Frank Sinatra a lot," said Bob Dylan, "and it had never failed to fill me with awe. The lyrics were so mystifying and stupendous. When Frank sang that song, I could hear everything in his voice - death, God and the universe, everything." "Mystifying and stupendous" is a good way of putting it. Carl Sigman had a phenomenal career - from "Pennsylvania 6-500" in the big band era to the theme from Love Story in a wholly transformed pop culture - but "Ebb Tide" is a trick that's hard to pull it off. It can easily come off like a giant slab of overripe ham - the Righteous Brothers version, even without Leslie Nielsen and Priscilla Presley squirting wet clay, trembles perilously on the brink. But Dylan appreciated the way Sinatra and Riddle took it completely seriously and utterly sincerely, and made it work, navigating that dangerous "Ebb Tide" to bring the ship home, to peace and quiet and contentment:
I can tell
I can feel
You are love!
You are real!Really mine, in the rain
In the dark, in the sun
Like the tide at its ebb
I'm at peace in the web
Of your arms.
~Mark and his pal Jessica Martin sing Carl Sigman's "Marshmallow World" in regular and disco flavor via CD and digital download. And there's lots more Sigman and Sinatra on our Carl Sigman centenary podcast. The stories behind many Sinatra songs are in Mark Steyn's American Songbook, and Steyn's original 1998 obituary of Frank, "The Voice", can be found in the anthology Mark Steyn From Head To Toe. Personally autographed copies of all three books are exclusively available from the SteynOnline bookstore.
~For an alternative Sinatra Hot 100, the Pundette is counting down her own Sinatra hit parade, and is up to "I'll Be Seeing You" at Number 35. Bob Belvedere over at The Camp Of The Saints is also picking the hits on a Frank countdown and has rocketed all the way through to "It Happened In Monterey" at Number 17. The Evil Blogger Lady offers Sinatra, Riddle, Rodgers & Hammerstein on "This Nearly Was Mine".
SINATRA CENTURY
at SteynOnline
6) THE ONE I LOVE (BELONGS TO SOMEBODY ELSE)
8) STARDUST
10) WHAT IS THIS THING CALLED LOVE?
11) CHICAGO
12) THE CONTINENTAL
13) ALL OF ME
15) NIGHT AND DAY
16) I WON'T DANCE
17) I'VE GOT YOU UNDER MY SKIN
19) EAST OF THE SUN (AND WEST OF THE MOON)
21) A FOGGY DAY (IN LONDON TOWN)
24) OUR LOVE
27) FOOLS RUSH IN
32) I'LL BE AROUND
36) GUESS I'LL HANG MY TEARS OUT TO DRY
37) NANCY (WITH THE LAUGHING FACE)
38) SOMETHIN' STUPID
40) I GET ALONG WITHOUT YOU VERY WELL (EXCEPT SOMETIMES)
41) SOLILOQUY
42) THE COFFEE SONG
44) HOW ABOUT YOU?
46) LUCK BE A LADY
48) (AH, THE APPLE TREES) WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNG
49) I HAVE DREAMED
51) I'VE GOT THE WORLD ON A STRING
52) YOUNG AT HEART
54) BAUBLES, BANGLES AND BEADS
55) IN THE WEE SMALL HOURS OF THE MORNING
57) THE TENDER TRAP
59) WITCHCRAFT
