A dear and now departed friend of mine used to have a flat in the handsome red-brick building that sits on the southern end of Abbey Road in St John's Wood in north London - at the corner of Grove End Road. And, whenever I went round for dinner, it was always a kick to walk over the street via the internationally famous zebra crossing - not because I was a tourist or a Fab Four fanatic but just because that was where the taxi from the West End would always drop me off.
At one level, naming an album after the studio in which you recorded it suggests a certain slackening of creative energy, at least by comparison with the title of its immediate predecessor, Yellow Submarine, and especially so given the studio itself is named merely for the leafy thoroughfare on which it sits. And then you double-down on your lack of imagination with a cover photo of your stars crossing said thoroughfare. But the stars were the Beatles, and Paul forgot his shoes and socks that day, and what with one thing and another the zebra crossing connecting the studio with my friend's flat soon became the most famous and recognizable pedestrian crosswalk in the world, and has held that title for half-a-century.
The photograph was taken fifty years ago this month - August 8th 1969 - and the album itself wrapped up fifty years ago this week - August 20th. So I thought we'd mark the occasion with the best song of the set - don't take my word for it; John Lennon himself pronounced it "the best track on the album":
All four Beatles chicks are in the video, but the one at the heart of the song is George Harrison's. He had been working on the ballad for almost a year, since the previous September:
Something in the way she moves
Attracts me like no other lover
Something in the way she woos me...
The tune was so good that Harrison initially assumed it must be something he'd heard before, somewhere or other, and put it aside. (He would have been better advised to do that a few years later with "My Sweet Lord", which was to prove a rather expensive mistake.) He wrote it on a piano at the Abbey Road studios while Paul McCartney was in the adjoining studio laying down overdubs for the White Album, so there was a lot of music around the building and one can understand his momentary fear that "Something" might have been something else. It took him a few months to accept the melody was actually his, and a few more to work out the middle-eight in contrasting key. Although not exactly conventional in one important respect, it was an AABA song, with what Harrison's biographer Simon Leng calls "harmonic interest" throughout "almost every line".
The first phrase of lyric was a more conscious borrowing: The Beatles' Apple Records had just signed James Taylor, whose debut album included a song called "Something In The Way She Moves":
Harrison used Taylor's line just to get him started, intending to replace it eventually with something else. But it fit so well - better than it fits the James Taylor, in fact - that he grew too attached to it and decided to keep it: James doesn't seem to mind. George had even more trouble with the second line, which originally came to him as:
Attracts me like a pomegranate...
Which probably would have eliminated most of the cover versions.
According to Pattie Boyd, George wrote the song for her:
I don't want to leave her now...
According to George, he wrote it for the Hindu deity Krishna:
You know I believe and how...
The first line originally ran "Something in the way he moves". But he was worried that it might make him sound "a bit of a poof". So he feminized the pronouns:
Somewhere in her smile she knows
That I don't need no other lover
Something in her style that shows me...
If Krishna gets "Something", Pattie Boyd inspired Eric Clapton's "Layla" and "Wonderful Tonight", so she still comes out ahead on the pop front. During its composition, he heard it not as a Beatles song but in Ray Charles' voice - and indeed, eventually, after everybody else on the planet had recorded it, Ray got around to hit - somewhat half-heartedly, I always feel:
Was that really the way George heard the song? Whatever the answer, on February 25th 1969, his 26th birthday, he made a demo at Abbey Road. "George's material wasn't really paid all that much attention to - to such an extent that he asked me to stay behind after [everyone else had gone]," recalled the studio engineer Glyn Johns. "He was terribly nice, as if he was imposing on me. And then he plays this song that just completely blows me away." But he still didn't think it was a Beatles song, so he gave it to Joe Cocker.
In the end it wound up as Side One Track Two of the Abbey Road album. On our podcast together, Sinatra's conductor Vincent Falcone and I discuss the fiendish difficulty of Nelson Riddle's subsequent arrangement for Frank's "Something", and Vincent explains that he'd sometime play the Beatles record and then Sinatra's to show how a relatively simple record can grow into something far more complex and sophisticated. But, in fact, the Beatles track took half-a-dozen recording sessions over several months of overdubs upon overdubs to reach its final form - whereas Sinatra's very tricky arrangement was performed live by Frank and Vinnie and whatever string section they happened to have with them on stage around the world night after night.
You're asking me will our love grow? Well, the song grew during all the edits and dubs, and so did George Harrison, to the point where he found himself sharing the conductor's podium with George Martin during the final string session. Eventually the two Georges got it into a shape that satisfied them, and, as noted above, John Lennon declared it "the best track on the album". This was high praise, considering that neither Lennon nor McCartney considered Harrison much of a songwriter. "It took my breath away," said George Martin, who understood immediately that this was more than a Beatles song. "Something" became the first George Harrison number to be made the A-side of a Beatles single, and thus his only Beatles composition to make Number One on the Billboard Hot 100. "They blessed me with a couple of B-sides in the past," he observed. "But this is the first time I've had an A-side. Big deal, eh?"
And then it really took off: Within a few months of its release, "Something" began piling up more recordings than any Beatles song since "Yesterday". The easy-listening crowd loved it: within a few months, Perry Como, Johnny Mathis, Della Reese, Engelbert Humperdinck, Peggy Lee, Tony Bennett, and Andy Williams had all had a warble of it. After hearing Liberace's version, George Harrison accepted his song's fate: "It's one of them that ends up in an elevator." In contrast to the Lennon & McCartney songs of this period ("Maxwell's Silver Hammer", "Come Together") and even Ringo's ("Octopus' Garden"), it was a sincere, direct romantic ballad of universal application, even if the song's hook - first heard as the guitar phrase that opens the Beatles track - doesn't actually have any words to sing to it.
The definitive record in the MOR style was Shirley Bassey's:
"Something" went to Number Four on the UK charts in 1970 and gave Shirl her first Top Ten hit since 1963. The zippy bit at the end is always thrilling if you see Dame Shirley in concert - even if the teenyboppers in the "Top of the Pops" audience look somewhat bored by it.
That same year, on October 28th 1970, Sinatra went into the studio to sing "Something" with Lennie Hayton conducting and arranging. Frank had met George Harrison two years earlier, when George and Pattie Boyd attended the recording sessions in Hollywood for Sinatra's album Cycles. Harrison does not seem, at this stage of his life, to have been much of a fan of Frank's: He was 25, and half Sinatra's age. But, at the upper echelons of stardom, these celebrity summits go with the territory, and there was nothing unusual about it. Whatever they talked about that day, the conversation would have gone a lot better had George let Frank in on the new song he'd started work on just a few weeks earlier. The Chairman of the Board was not altogether hostile to the young whippersnappers: "Something" was his second recording of a Beatles ballad - after Lennon & McCartney's "Yesterday", with Don Costa, on the My Way album. Costa's string writing on the track is beautiful, one of his best since the glory days of Sinatra and Strings at the start of the Sixties, and Frank certainly seems to be trying to dig deep into the song. But I'm not sure it can quite bear the weight he and Costa are trying to place on it. In the Sinatra songbook, "Yesterday" was here today, gone tomorrow.
"Something" had caught his fancy when he heard Nancy sing it at Caesars Palace (although I don't believe she ever recorded it until a couple of years ago), and so he rustled up an arrangement from Lennie Hayton. Frank and Lennie went back to MGM in the Forties, when the latter was a big part of the studio's music department and won an Oscar for his work on the Sinatra film On The Town. Aside from his movie work, Hayton was also Mister Lena Horne, not an easy role in an America still full of anti-miscegenation laws. Mr and Mrs Hayton stayed married but spent a lot of time apart, which is presumably how Lena came to make her recording of "Something" with an arrangement by Gary McFarland while her husband's arrangement went to Frank:
On our Sinatra audio special, Vincent Falcone characterizes Hayton's chart as in a "soft rock feel" and "really kind of boring". He's not wrong on that. Shirley Bassey can somehow infuse this type of arrangement with an oddly persuasive melodrama, but Sinatra just seems to stick it on autopilot and take a nap. It was supposed to be a single, and it wound up on one, but they flipped it with the B-side, "(It Isn't Easy) Bein' Green", as introduced by Kermit the Frog. Muppet covers came easier than moptop covers.
For a while Sinatra would occasionally tell people that "Yesterday" was "the best song written in the last 20 years" or whatever. I doubt he really meant it: I think he was just trying to signal that he was in touch with what the younger cats were writing - like I do when I say "I Kissed A Girl And I Liked It" is the best song written in the 21st century. But at some point Frank began instead to describe "Something" as "the best love song written in the past thirty years" - and this time I think he very much did mean it. Sinatra only recorded two Beatles songs, and they happen to be the two most recorded, which suggests someone was just shoving under his nose the hits that everyone was doing. But "Something" came to mean something, and "Yesterday" didn't. Nancy Sinatra describes "Something" as "the only Beatles song of I know of that Dad really liked".
The Seventies slipped by and he looked again at the ballad and commissioned a new arrangement from Nelson Riddle. He and Riddle hadn't done much since the Strangers In The Night album a decade earlier, just a few odds and ends: the title song of I Love My Wife, Barbra Streisand's "Evergreen", and a handful of tracks - "Emily", "Linda", "Nancy", "Sweet Lorraine" - for an aborted album of songs featuring girls' names. But Sinatra had a dramatic re-conception of "Something" and it's doubtful anyone other than Riddle could have pulled it off. In contrast to the gazillion elevator versions (including his own with Lennie Hayton), Frank had in mind something closer to a Broadway soliloquy. For the bulk of the song he wanted just a very classical string section:
Something in the way she moves
Attracts me like no other lover
Something in the way she woos me...
But then he'd give a finger-snap and go into:
Don't want to leave her now
You know I believe and how...
And suddenly there'd be a very jazzy rhythm section. That transition from what he calls "one of the most complex string-writing things I have ever seen" to "the jazz portion" was, according to Vincent Falcone on our podcast special, Sinatra's idea. "He came up with that," says Falcone. "And that's magnificent." His dynamics in the performance were also a study in contrasts, from the shrugged, conversational "Don't want to leave her now" to the great wail of a crescendo on "You're asking me will my love grow..."
The classical strings-plus-rhythm combo is beautifully layered, but I have to say I have a fondness for the orchestration Falcone and Sinatra would use when they were with hard swingin' bands, and the reeds had to sub for the violins. The famous performance at the 1982 Concert for the Americas, conducted by Vinnie, is particularly strong dramatically, and beautifully supported by the Buddy Rich band - even if Frank miscredits the arrangement to Don Costa:
Along the way, night after night, on stages all over the world, the singer also solved the problem of the unsung hook, by simply growling along in a low gravelly hum. He also clarified the scenario. As Harrison originally wrote the song, the object of his affection does not appear to be present. He's talking about her in the third person:
Something in the way she knows
That all I have to do is think of her
Something in the things she shows me...
So, if "she"'s somewhere else, who's the "you" demanding all the answers in the big dramatic high point of the song?
You're asking me will my love grow?
I don't know
I don't know
You stick around now, it may show
I don't know
I don't know...
Most singers assume that's the guy's chick asking will his love grow. But as Frank saw it it was a guy's confessional - not so different from all those saloon songs, quarter to three, no one in the place but you and me - me telling you about something in the way she moves, and you demanding to know will my love grow. So he made it explicit:
You're asking me will my love grow
Well, I don't know
No, I don't know
You stick around, Jack, it might show
I don't know
No, I don't know...
What did George Harrison make of the introduction of "Jack" into his love song? For many years the composer would identify James Brown as his favorite interpreter of "Something". "At the time I wasn't particularly thrilled that Frank Sinatra did 'Something'," said Harrison. "I'm more thrilled now than I was then. I wasn't really into Frank - he was the generation before me. I was more interested when Smokey Robinson did it and when James Brown did it." But, if you chanced to catch George Harrison on tour in the early Nineties, you'd have noticed an interesting evolution in the in the second chorus of the songwrirer's best known song:
You're asking me will my love grow
I don't know
I don't know
You stick around, Jack, it may show...
You stick around, George, and this Sinatra dramatic monologue kinda grows on you. "Something" was an instant easy-listening classic, and it's easy to do it that way. But Frank made it real, pulling it out of time and taking all the space he needed to make his point. I always liked the way he'd build to the final section, adding a syllabic emphasis to Harrison's text: "Something in the way she knows..." And he'd thumb his chest: "...me!" It had a grit and a toughness that no other version ever did. It was "Something" more. Not "One For My Baby", but in the same terrain of lived experience. He took it out of the elevator.
"That's one of the greatest arrangements Nelson Riddle ever wrote," says Vincent Falcone in our conversation. He's right. But it was also the last arrangement Riddle ever wrote for Sinatra. By the time Frank came to record it in 1979, the two halves of the greatest singer-arranger partnership in popular music were no longer speaking to each other. Like the song says, "I don't need no other lover" - until I do. As Riddle said shortly before his death:
He had to think of Frank. I was hurt by it, I felt bad, but I think I was dimly aware that nothing is forever... I saw him do it with Axel Stordahl, my favorite; I should have realized that it would be my turn. He just moved on.
You stick around, Jack, it might show. Then again it might not. And so the relationship that began in 1953 with "I've Got The World On A String" - and what I called "the sound he was born to sing" - ended a quarter-century later with "Something". In 1979, when Sonny Burke came up with a triple-album concept for Sinatra - "The Past", "The Present", "The Future" - it was assumed Riddle would be on board for at least one of the sets. Vinnie Falcone was asked by Frank to give him a call:
And I said, 'Wow, this is like history!' So I picked up the phone and called Nelson. I said, 'Nelson, Mr Sinatra asked me to call you. He would like to know if you would write an arrangement on...' And there was just dead silence on the other end for a good ten or fifteen seconds, and then Nelson said 'Tell him I'm busy,' and hung up.
So Billy May got to score "The Past", and Gordon Jenkins "The Future", and Don Costa "The Present", within the small print of which you can find "Something" credited to Nelson Riddle - the very last Sinatra/Riddle collaboration.
It was something to do with a testimonial gala for Riddle that Sinatra was supposed to emcee. For whatever reason, he didn't show, and dispatched Gregory Peck in his stead. Which isn't the same - as you can count on no fingers the number of great records Greg Peck had made with Riddle. Frank Sinatra Jr explained the breach this way:
It was another person who had brought that about, an intermediary who took it upon himself to speak for Frank Sinatra.... That person should remain anonymous. It kept the two of them apart for several years. I find that unfortunate.
It's generally assumed Frank Jr is referring to Mickey Rudin, Sinatra's lawyer and business manager and not always the most agreeable fellow for those operating at the artistic end of things (on meeting Vincent Falcone, for example, he said, "I don't shake hands with musicians"). Yet in the end that's Frank's responsibility, too. And sometimes something in the way he moves makes you want to close the door and get on with your life. So Nelson Riddle did, and enjoyed phenomenal commercial success with Linda Ronstadt in the Eighties. Just before his death, he reconciled personally with Frank, but never professionally.
As for George Harrison and Pattie Boyd, their love didn't grow, either. Miss Boyd took up with Eric Clapton, and a rueful Harrison recorded a song from a Sinatra movie, High Society - Cole Porter's "True Love".
Of course, John and Paul were always the famous writers of the Beatles catalogue, and in the early days, on the road here and there, Sinatra, who enjoyed crediting composers and arrangers, would accidentally re-assign "Something" to George's more celebrated bandmates:
"I don't think [George] thought of himself very much as a songwriter," said Paul McCartney, "and John and I obviously would dominate - again, not really meaning to, but we were 'Lennon & McCartney'. So when an album comes up, Lennon & McCartney go and write some stuff - and maybe it wasn't easy for him to get into that wedge. But he finally came up with 'Something' and a couple of other songs that were great, and I think everyone was very pleased for him. There was no jealousy. In fact, I think Frank Sinatra used to introduce 'Something' as his favorite Lennon & McCartney song. Thanks, Frank."
~Mark's conversation with longtime Sinatra conductor Vincent Falcone, discussing "Something" and many other songs, can be heard here. Steyn's original 1998 obituary of Frank, "The Voice", can be found in the anthology Mark Steyn From Head To Toe, while you can read the stories behind many other Sinatra songs in Mark Steyn's American Songbook. Personally autographed copies of both books are exclusively available from the SteynOnline bookstore - and, if you're a Mark Steyn Club member, don't forget to enter the promo code at checkout to enjoy special Steyn Club member pricing.
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