Stay little valentine, stay...

Today would have been Frank Sinatra's 100th birthday, and not surprisingly, his legacy is splashed across all media this week.  I could certainly add to that, talking about his greatest hits, his finest albums, his most outrageous antics.

But instead, I want to keep it small.  I want to talk about how Frank Sinatra made me love a song.

"My Funny Valentine" has been a linchpin of the Great American Songbook very nearly since it debuted in 1937.  It certainly has a solid gold pedigree, having been written by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, and being recorded by hundreds of artists over the years, including Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington and Miles Davis.  Chet Baker's version is in the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry for "cultural, artistic and/or historical significance to American society".  By every measure, a classic.

I never much liked "My Funny Valentine".  I can't specifically say why, other than that it never moved me much.  I guess I've felt that too many singers inject too much sentimentality into their interpretations, turning it into a somewhat cloying little love song, and the world already has an over-abundance of those.

But then I heard Sinatra's version, and the song hit me like a wrecking ball.  His take on it was not born of sentiment...rather, it was out of desperation.  The man singing these words isn't mouthing sweet nothings with his lover; he's pleading with her from a place of emotional agony.

It's easy enough upon first listen to not pick up on this.  There's nothing frantic in Sinatra's delivery.  Indeed, he's almost gentle in the way he enunciates the lyrics.  But if you know where Frank was in his life at the time he recorded this, suddenly much becomes understandable.

***

He remains such an icon to this day, it's often forgotten...indeed, even incomprehensible...that Frank Sinatra was a washed-up has-been in the early 1950s.  But after the dizzying heights of his success during World War II, his popularity began to fade.  Partly it was because the ballads that were his forté were falling out of favor, as postwar listeners tilted more toward jump music and novelty numbers (there's an audio recording from the late 40s of Sinatra on the Your Hit Parade radio show, where he was asked to sing that week's #1 hit, "The Woody Woodpecker Song".  He does so, but the vitriol in his voice for this wretched piece of doggerel comes through loud and clear).  Partly it was because Sinatra at his peak had stepped on a lot of toes and picked a lot of fights, and a good many people in positions to do something about it were actively rooting for his failure.  Returning G.I.'s resented that Sinatra stayed home as 4F, and Middle America felt revulsion when Frank left his wife and three young children to chase tail in Hollywood.  After one too many disappointments at the box office his movie studio, MGM, dropped him.  Not long after, after declining record sales his label, Columbia, did likewise.

He was still a concert draw, albeit nothing like he had been.  Gone were the days when he would pack the Paramount in Manhattan for multiple shows each day for weeks.  Now, he was doing one night stands in smaller halls and nightclubs, and started making a name for himself in Vegas.  But things kept going from bad to worse.  Bashing Sinatra became a popular hobby for newspaper columnists, and the papers played up every indiscretion.  Connections with mafioso got him labeled (and investigated) as a mob crony, and his longtime liberal politics got him smeared as a Communist in the McCarthy Era.  The IRS hounded him for back taxes.  Concert promoters weren't always taking his calls now, meaning the one career option left open to him seemed to be closing as well.

Is it any surprise that he began to lose his voice...and his hair...from the stress?

But worst of all for Frank Sinatra was Ava Gardner.

Ava, the love of his life.  The passion they shared was as brilliant to behold as it was ultimately destructive.  As Ava herself said many times afterward, she and Frank deeply, furiously loved each other, but they were too much alike, and if they stayed together, they would only wind up killing each other.  Their arguments were legendary, complete with flying plates, records and picture frames, trashed hotel rooms, and expensive designer clothes removed from closets and cut to shreds with knives.  And their brawls usually ended up after a week or two of sulking with Frank sheepishly flying halfway around the world to whatever foreign film set Ava was on to beg her for forgiveness.  Reporters would greet him at airports and gleefully needle him by calling him "Mr. Gardner".

(After one of their reconciliations, a co-star on one of Ava's films asked her why she was wasting her time with that hundred pound runt.  "Because ninety pounds of that runt is cock," she said with no small satisfaction.)

By 1953, after two tumultuous years of marriage, Frank and Ava were separated.  It was not a situation that pleased him in the least, and he was forever conspiring to find ways to win her back.  But 1953 was also a very busy year for Sinatra, for it was the year in which he began to rebuild his career.

He worked on two fronts, and both paid magnificent dividends soon enough.  First of all, after months of pleading and cajoling (and backstage string pulling from Ava, who was one of Hollywood's biggest stars at the moment and thus she wielded no small amount of power; she never told Frank what she had done, because she knew his ego would be wounded), Sinatra landed the role of Pvt. Maggio in the film adaptation of From Here to Eternity.  It's not widely known that Frank had been a voracious reader his entire life, and always had books handy during down times on film sets and between curtain calls on the road.  He had read the Eternity novel several times, instantly identifying with Maggio, and was determined to play him on the screen.  Columbia Pictures was highly reluctant to cast him, but finally relented...although Frank had to agree to work for so little money, he may have well just done it for free.  But the money wasn't important to him...he knew this part would either make him or break him once and for all as an actor.  It was straight drama, without so much as a few musical bars for him to hum.  And Maggio was central to perhaps the most powerful moment in the entire movie, his own death scene.

Rehearsing intensively with his co-star, Montgomery Clift, Sinatra was more than ready when the cameras began to roll.  And when it was over, there was complete silence on the set, as the cast and crew were too stunned to say anything.  Who the hell knew Frank Sinatra was a great actor?  He'd go on to win the Oscar for playing the role.  The movie was the biggest box office smash of '53.

Concurrent with this was Sinatra's reborn career as a recording artist.  After every other label turned him down, Capital Records finally took a chance on him.  He released four singles in 1953; all of them hits, although only one of them cracked the Top Ten.  Each of them displayed a greater maturity of delivery than Sinatra's Columbia sides had.  Age, booze and hardship had lowered his singing register, adding a new gravity that he had lacked in his bobbysoxer heyday.  One song in particular, "I've Got the World on a String", suggested even greater things to come.

For all of this chart success, as far as Capital was concerned, the real acid test would be Frank's inaugural LP for them.  The label was positioning Sinatra to appeal to an older listenership, and while hit singles were always welcome (and profitable), the real goal was to make Sinatra a central figure in the soon-to-be unveiled realm of the 33 1/3 RPM album.  So at 8:00 PM (Frank always preferred to work at night, as his internal clock was set to live performance time) on November 5th, 1953, Sinatra stepped into the studio to begin work on his first Capital album.

Sinatra had a specific routine for recording, beyond the late night hours.  First and foremost, he would sing live along with the orchestra.  He considered his voice as much an instrument as the piano and the trumpet, and he needed to hear, to feel the music around him as he sang.  He also had learned to take care of that instrument, forgoing alcohol on days when he was recording, and soothing his vocal chords with tea and honey.  He also was exceptionally well-prepared.  Rarely did he have to record a song more than once, unless a musician missed a cue.  As a result, he cut all of the tracks for his album, to be called Songs for Young Lovers, in just two evenings.

And I've told you all of that to get you to this point.

Song 1, Side 1 is "My Funny Valentine", gorgeously arranged by Nelson Riddle (giving credit where credit is due, working from charts done for Frank's nightclub act by George Siravo).  As the song that greets us, it not only sets the tone for the album that follows, but more or less for Sinatra's career to follow.

Frank sings with an almost plaintive gentleness, but there's a certain playfulness (hopefulness?) on the fringes throughout.  The creative chasm between "The Voice" of the 1940s, the idol of teenaged girls, and the man singing now is the difference between a talented amateur and a singer who has mastered his craft.  With this song, Frank Sinatra stakes his claim as one of the most important musical figures of the century...and in the years that followed, he quite possibly established himself as THE leading figure.

But there's one specific reason why this song resounds so deeply for me.  I knew it the moment I first heard it, because I knew enough about the backstory of Sinatra's life at that time to read between the lines.  And the secret is this:  he wasn't singing it as Frank Sinatra...he was projecting the lyrics onto Ava, and imagining her saying these words to him.

Tell me, is this how anyone in their right mind would describe Ava Gardner?:

Your looks are laughable/
Unphotographable/
Yet you're my favorite work of art.

Is your figure less than Greek?
Is your mouth a little weak?
When  you open it to speak
Are you smart?

But could those adjectives be used to describe Francis Albert Sinatra?  To a T.

This was Frank, yearning so deeply his heart must have felt as if it would burst out of his chest, desperate to reunite with his love.  But no matter how much he pleads, she won't take him back.  Still, he dreams of the day when she'll call to him, express her love in that sarcastic way she used as an emotional defense, and they'll be happy together forever.

Frankie, the tough Italian kid from Hoboken, New Jersey knew that was a fool's dream.  But SINATRA needed that dream.  It was the tonic that fueled him, much more so than the gallons of Jack Daniels he would consume each calendar year.  It's a dream so powerful, and so complete, that it transforms a song that never spoke to me into something almost spiritual upon every listen.  Sixty-plus years after being recorded, it still hits like a haymaker.  If one ever needs to make the case that Sinatra matters, then as far as I'm concerned, this is the only thing you need to play to win the argument.

***

There's something of a happy ending to this, in its way.  No, Frank and Ava never reunited.  They finally divorced in 1957, but oddly this seemed to have brought them closer together, and they remained friends and confidants (and occasional bedmates, what the hell, just to relive old times) until Ava's death in the 1980s.  Her last years were ones of illness, and Frank paid all of her medical expenses.  He also paid for her funeral.

Frank had a couple of broken engagements (first to Lauren Bacall, then Juliet Prowse) before jumping into a fairly disastrous marriage to Mia Farrow in the 1960s ("You're like the son Frank and I never had," Ava told the tomboyish Mia.  Despite this, Mia came to like Ava quite a bit.), before wedding Barbara Marx in a marriage that finally took.  The day before marrying Barbara, Frank called Ava and asked her to marry him again.  She turned him down.  Ava never wed again after Frank.

Two weeks after recording Songs for Young Lovers, with From Here to Eternity still doing big box office, with his latest single, "South of the Border", moving steadily toward the Top 20, and with every indicator predicting huge successes for him as both a singer and an actor in the new year to come, Frank Sinatra sliced open his left wrist and tried to kill himself.

His latest effort to woo Ava back having failed, Frank just didn't want to go on living.  His friend, songwriter Jimmy Van Heusen, found him as he was bleeding out, rushed him to the hospital, and spread cash around to the cab driver and the nurses to keep their mouths shut.  That bleak night was the last time that Sinatra would ever succumb to such despair ever again.

Of course, he went on to monumental, almost incomprehensible success.  And yes, the bad boy streak in him would not-infrequently get him into hot water.  But although the man could so often fall victim to his mortal failings, the artist...the man who transformed "My Funny Valentine" into an anthem of lonely hope...remains untouchable to this day.

Happy birthday, Frank...and here's to the next hundred years.

Only a child laughing in the sun...

Yesterday was the 73rd birthday of musician David Crosby, and I got to thinking that's a milestone worth commemorating.  Because other than Keith Richards, Crosby is probably the least likely rock 'n roll survivor we've got...and his survival was often in defiance of his best efforts to destroy himself.

There's something about Crosby that's fascinating to me.  He's always been easy enough to caricature...the walrus moustache, the halo of frizzy hair, the general outrageousness (this is the man, after all, who harshed the happy buzz at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 by taking the stage and condemning the Warren Commission, charging the U.S. government with covering up a conspiracy in JFK's assassination).  He's made more than enough poor life decisions to make anyone question his common sense.  And yet...and yet...his talent is undeniable.  He's a good singer, of course (not a great one...he'd never make it as a frontman in a rock back, but he's stellar on harmony), and an interesting songwriter (his arrangements and lyrics owe a great deal to jazz, particularly the spirit of John Coltrane).  But I think his greatest ability is simply the way he brings things together.  People and events seem to orbit around him.  There's a reason why there's never been a Stills & Nash album (they actually tried it once in the 80s, and the record label told them to forget it and bring Crosby back in)...he's the molecular bonding of that unit, and the guy who electrifies any room he walks into.  People are drawn to Crosby like moths to a flame.

The world at large first met Crosby as a member of the Byrds in 1965, but by that point, at the age of 24, he was already a journeyman folkie, having played throughout California, in Greenwich Village, and in many points in between.  But he wanted something more, to find some way to tap into rock 'n roll.  Meeting Jim McGuinn and Chris Hillman, fellow folkies, the trio went to see A HARD DAY'S NIGHT, and emerging from the theater, they knew exactly what they wanted to do with their lives.  The next day they traded in their acoustic guitars and banjos for electric models and amps, picked up a couple more members, and went on to create Folk Rock with "Mr. Tambourine Man" and Turn! Turn! Turn!", back-to-back number one hits that made the Byrds the biggest band in America barely a year after watching the Beatles cavort about on screen.

But Crosby was always a guy in search of something more, and despite the sudden fame and fortune, he wasn't satisfied.  Growing increasingly unhappy, and never one to keep his opinions to himself, he quickly began alienating his fellow Byrds, until finally they had enough, and they fired him from the band.

By that point, if he hadn't been pushed, Crosby probably would have jumped anyway.  His orbit had drawn a kindred spirit, Stephen Stills of the Buffalo Springfield, a band that was in the midst of a slow but inevitable disintegration (fellow Springfielder Neil Young quit the band not once, not twice, but three different times in less than twelve months), and they were already toying with forming their own musical effort (not a band in the traditional sense...both Crosby and Stills had had their fill of restrictive rock bands by that point).

Meeting Graham Nash was the lightbulb-above-their-heads moment, and the rest was history.  (Neil Young came along a little while later, but exercising the habit he had honed in the Springfield, he quit before too long.)

The phenomenal success of this musical collective made Crosby a national figure, and gave him the wherewithal to pursue the lifestyle most could only dream of.  Truthfully, wealth was never that important to him, and he gladly bestowed his money on friends and causes in need; for himself, his material indulgences were largely limited to a Mercedes-Benz and the Mayan, a 75 foot wooden schooner (an avid sailor, Crosby has expertly captained the boat around the Pacific and the Atlantic for decades.  Time spent under sail were the rare instances when he would not use drugs at all, wanting to stay completely sober and alert.  Sadly, due to ongoing financial problems, he had to put the boat up for sale earlier this year).  But when people now recollect so-called "hippie hedonism", what they're really remembering is David Crosby.  His home was a 24 hour-a-day bacchanalia, where the several women he was routinely sleeping with at any given time were strolling around the poolside naked, passing out joints to guests ("Cros always had the best dope", recalled Glenn Frey of the Eagles).  So many people were traveling through Crosby's home day and night, he often went to sleep at Graham Nash's house, where he knew he could get some peace and quiet.

By '71, CS&N (and sometimes Y) were taking a break from each other, and Crosby decided to do a proper solo album.  Bringing in Nash and Young, along with the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, he gave us If I Could Only Remember My Name, a record that was less the traditional collection of self-contained pop songs than a highly eclectic mixture of folk, country, jazz and ambient sound.  No one knew quite what to make of it at the time, but its since come to be regarded as a classic of its era and a harbinger of the later genre dubbed "Weird Americana".

After that, Crosby hooked up with Nash to form a new recording and performing duo, and entered into what I think might be his most creative period.  If CS&N could fill football stadiums, C&N had to content themselves with clubs and small theaters...but they seemed to enjoy such intimacy with their audiences a whole lot more.  And the music each of them made reflected new levels of maturity.

Unfortunately, from this peak, Crosby's life began to quickly spiral down.  By his own admission, rarely a day had gone by since the early 60s that he hadn't indulged in something that was mind-altering, from speed to pot to acid to coke to heroin.  He had always been able to handle it better than most, at least for a number of years, which probably led to a sense of invulnerability.  And that invulnerability evaporated like smoke once he started freebasing cocaine in the late 70s.

In the course of a few short years, he had spent all of his money on drugs, and had grown so desperate, he was trading the publishing rights to his songs to dealers in exchange for fixes.  Recording sessions for another album with Nash fell apart when Crosby couldn't get himself together enough to perform, and the same was true for a solo album he began and then abandoned.

You'll recall earlier in this piece that I mentioned that Stills and Nash attempted to record as a duo, but that their label refused to put the record out unless it were under the CS&N banner.  By this point, Nash and Stills were exercising 'tough love' on Crosby, trying to convince him to go into rehab, but each attempt by him to get clean failed within hours, as he quickly scurried back to his pipe.  With no other real choice but to reunite, Stephen and Graham invited David to join them again, but once in the studio, it was painfully obvious that his voice was shredded.  Although his background singing does appear on such tracks as "Wasted on the Way" and "Southern Cross", they are buried deep in the mix, and the harmony vocal parts normally performed by Crosby are, on this album, sung by Art Garfunkel.  The two Crosby originals that appear on Daylight Again are unreleased songs recorded several years earlier by David, with Stills and Nash adding new background vocals (in spite of their dubious origins, at least one of the songs, "Delta", is one of the best things Crosby's ever written, and remains a staple of his live performances to this day).

For better or for worse, the album was a huge hit, and that meant a major tour had to be mounted to capitalize on its success.  The better was that Stills and Nash were in great form on the road, and the success of the album had introduced them to an entirely new generation of fans; the worse was David Crosby.  He was so strung out by this time, he had to freebase several times during each concert just to be able to keep performing!  A small private area would be set up backstage for him, and he would stagger over during Stephen or Graham's solo sets and light up his pipe.  Great risks were taken in each city along the tour to make sure that Crosby had the freebase he needed, and that the authorities didn't stumble across him backstage.

For all of the trouble taken to accommodate him, Crosby brought little to the tour, other than the value of his name and his blurry presence.  He certainly wasn't up to snuff musically.

It was around this time that gallows humor became widespread about just when Crosby was going to become the next rock drug casualty.  I imagine the betting money had it that his life could be measured in months, not years.

Life got worse.  He was busted in Texas on drug and gun charges; skipping out on his court date, he had a warrant for his arrest placed on him.  Run-ins with the cops in California made that state inhospitable to him as well.  Winding up in Florida with his girlfriend, he was at the end of his rope.  He was broke, utterly addicted, ill, and facing prison if caught.  He had a hair-brained scheme of getting to the Mayan (which may have been docked in Bermuda, or Jamaica, or even somewhere in Florida...he could no longer remember), and sailing forever out of U.S. territorial waters, just drifting around the world.  How he could have managed that without any income, or without daily access to drugs, seemed not to have occurred to him.

Only one thing was for sure:  if he followed through on this path, he was going to die.

Instead, as Nash graciously put it later, "he chose life."

Barefoot and disheveled, Crosby walked into the FBI bureau office in Miami and surrendered himself, too tired and broken to run any longer.  He was shipped off to Texas, where he was sent to prison...and not 'celebrity jail'.  He would up doing hard time in one of the hardest penetentiaries in the Lone Star State.  He learned to make friends fast, so that someone could watch his back.  And he learned to make a small knife out of scrap metal and to carry it on him at all times, because there were more than a few cons who would have loved to have made a rep by killing a famous musician while in stir.  The barber cropped his hair close and shaved off his moustache (the luxury of facial hair was an earned privilege).  At that time, there was no prison drug rehabilitation program in Texas.  You were thrown into a cell and left to either get clean or die from withdrawl.

But he did get clean, and he rediscovered music.  As a reward for good behavior, he was allowed to join the prison band, which gave performances in the jail.  This earned Crosby genuine respect among the prison population, as he was no longer just a pampered rock star who had screwed up, but was instead one of them, and he was giving them the gift of his talent.

He behaved himself, was a model prisoner, and his many well-known friends petitioned the judge to show leniency.  Convinced that he had learned his lesson, the State of Texas released Crosby early, but only on strict probation.

Three decades on now, Crosby has had a few downs (mostly financial, the result of years of drug-driven tax evasion), but a great many more ups.  While he was locked up, his girlfriend went into rehab, and they married after his release, each having remained sober ever since.  They had a son together (Crosby also has a daughter born back in the 70s).  He reunited with Stills, Nash and Young to record and tour, did solo work of his own, and wrote a couple of books.  Life was good...maybe better than it ever had been.

And then he almost died.  Ironically, it wasn't the drugs he used to do that nearly killed him...not directly...but rather the damage they did to his liver, which finally quit on him in the mid-90s.  In critical need of a donor if he had any hope of survival, he remained in the hospital, growing weaker every day.  It was then that a man he had never met before entered his room, and Crosby's life made another massive sea change.

In the early 60s, barely an adult himself, Crosby had gotten a girlfriend pregnant.  His response was to grab his guitar and suitcase and scramble out of California.  In all of the years since, he had never inquired among old friends about the girl or the baby.  For all he knew, she had had an abortion.  But she hadn't; instead, she had put the baby, a boy, up for adoption.  The adoptive parents knew the names of the birth mother and father, and a few years later when David Crosby became famous, the parents realized that he was the selfsame biological father.  But they never contacted Crosby, and they never told their son, James Raymond, who his birth father was.

At least until the 1990s, when the press was full of stories about Crosby's potentially impending death.  Feeling that their adopted son ought to have the chance to meet his birth father at least once before he passed, they wrote to Crosby, who agreed to see James.  And amazingly, they hit it off immediately.  They bonded not in a father/son way, but rather over their shared passion for music.  James was a successful session musician and composer...and to David's relief, he inherited none of Crosby's self-destructive addictive tendencies.

Then, almost miraculously, a liver donor became available, and Crosby's life was saved.  When he was well enough, he formed a group with James, CPR, and got back to the business of making music.

(He also got into the business of making babies.  At the request of musician Melissa Etheridge, Crosby donated his sperm to artificially inseminate her girlfriend, director Julie Cypher, and thus fathered both of their children.).

By 2014, Crosby was doing better than ever, releasing an acclaimed solo album (produced by James) that earned some of the best critical reviews of his career.  True, a sold-out solo tour had to be temporarily halted when he underwent emergency cardiac surgery in the spring, but he bounced back quickly enough to launch a new Crosby Stills & Nash tour, and to continue work on what will be their next album.

And now he turns 73, no doubt much to the surprise of many.  And instead of retiring with his memories, Crosby continues to push himself, to make new music and reach out to new fans, and to savor this life he, by most rights, probably shouldn't have made it to.

Personally, I'm very glad he's made it this far, and I'll be very happy if I can wish David Crosby a happy birthday in many years to come.

So, Lauren Bacall did me a solid, once.  A few years back, I came across a nice copy of the famous photo of her lounging seductively across the piano being played by then-Vice President Harry Truman.  I bought it, and impulsively decided to mail it to her, with a note asking if, should it not be too much trouble, she could sign it for me.  A few short weeks later, my SASE appeared in the mail, and there was my very own autographed Lauren Bacall shot.

Bacall passed away today, and another of the very few remaining links to the Golden Age of Hollywood is broken.  Of course, she'll live on in the memories of classic moviegoers for a long, long time to come.  A majority of them will probably most easily recall her famous vamp line from "To Have and Have Not" ("You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve?  You just put your lips together and...blow.").  But for me, I'll always recall this photo sitting on my shelf.

To a Daydream Believer...

So, I have a Davy Jones story.

Yesterday, Davy passed away suddenly from a reported heart attack. I've been a fan of the Monkees since I was wee high, having discovered them through daily syndicated airings of their sitcom in the 70s, and very shortly thereafter hearing much of their music still being played on the radio a decade and more after their heyday. I've taken some good-natured ribbing over being such a fan of the group, for the usual reasons: "They weren't a real band!" and "They didn't even play their own instruments!"

Well, I don't know what a "real" band is. Do you have to be lifelong friends who grew up together and learned music playing in your basements? Or are you strangers to each other brought together by an outside entity? If we rule out the latter, then we have to eliminate the likes of Kiss, Supertramp and Metallica from the list of "real" bands, won't we?

And the old trope that the Monkees didn't play on their own records was shattered by their third LP in 1967, on which the four played virtually every note of music found in those grooves (and wrote most of the songs themselves as well). The reason they didn't play most of the music on their first two albums was a simple one: working 14 hour days filming their TV show, they only had a few hours to spare at night to record their song vocals before catching some sleep and repeating the grind the following day. There simply wasn't enough time to also let them lay down instrumentation tracks as well, although Mike Nesmith and Peter Tork were two accomplished professional guitarists more than up to the task, and even Micky Dolenz became proficient on the drums (he had to learn to play them for the show, having previously been a guitar player in various garage bands). Davy could play a bit of guitar and piano, but I think even he would admit he didn't have the chops to do much more at the time than shake the maracas.

So the music was performed by session men, including the legendary "Wrecking Crew" who, when they weren't recording with the Monkees, by the way, were laying down the music for PET SOUNDS and SMILE by the Beach Boys...and I've never heard anyone say as a result that the Beach Boys weren't a real band, have you? Later, after having proven they could play their instruments, the Monkees began using session musicians again, as the foursome essentially split into four solo acts under the Monkees name, each working in different studios with different sidemen (and often different producers), with only one or two other Monkees occasionally sitting in on the tracks. Nevertheless, the band earned a reputation as a tight touring outfit, and did many concerts across the U.S. and in Asia.

You could essentially split the Monkees into two factions: Mike and Peter were professional musicians with no acting experience when they were hired to be in the band, while Davy and Micky were professional actors. Jones, barely out of his teens, was already a veteran stage actor of musicals in the West End and on Broadway, and he had even recorded a couple of singles in the midst of the British Invasion bloom that went nowhere on the charts, so he knew his way around a song. Both sides approached the Monkees from vantage parts that were often diametrically opposed, but somehow it all meshed, and the group released what I feel are some of the absolute best pop singles of the Sixties. Go ahead, tell me that "I'm a Believer", "Pleasant Valley Sunday" and "Daydream Believer" aren't some of the finest Top 40 songs ever. You can't. because your argument is invalid!

Ahem.

Anyway, I told you all of that so I could tell you this, my Davy Jones story.

Now, I've seen the Monkees (minus Mike) twice in concert, and both of those shows rank in my Top Ten of all-time best live shows (and I'll even put one of those two concerts as #2 on my list). They put on fun, festive, frantic and phenomenal shows, and I wish a lot of supposedly "serious" artists today would take a page from the Monkees playbook when it comes to performing on stage.

Knowing how good they are on stage, I was particularly excited a few years back when the Mayor of Calumet City decided to work with our agency to promote a series of live outdoor concerts in town, and one of the artists booked was Davy Jones.

That was a particularly bad summer weather-wise, however, and our rainfall in August neared historic levels. The high school field we planned to use for the concert was flooded out, forcing us to move to a parking lot. Unfortunately, somehow the rumor had spread that the entire concert had been cancelled.

On the day of the show, threatening thunderclouds loomed, but the rain held off. Sadly, so did most of the expected audience. We couldn't really blame them...some had no doubt been misinformed that the concert was off, and others probably looked out of their windows and figured it was going to rain yet again, so why risk standing around outdoors getting wet and possibly smoted by Zeus? We had maybe 100 or so people there...far, far less than expected.

Before the show started, I recall hearing more than a few people commenting that, upon seeing the puny size of the crowd, Davy would undoubtedly quickly run through his numbers without much enthusiasm. After all, for an artists used to playing before thousands, how could such a tiny gathering whip up any excitement for him?

But I never doubted that Davy Jones would give us his 'A Game'. I'd seen the Monkees play live before, and I assured everyone that Davy was a pro, and he would give it his all.

This is the best part of my story: Davy Jones proved me everlastingly right. It didn't matter that the crowd was small...he had his band played as if they were before a packed house at Carnegie Hall. In the end, it was one of the best "house parties" any of us who were there could ever hope to attend.

Davy Jones was a professional in every good sense of the word. His obvious sense of joy at being on stage and performing was very nearly palpable, and it generated an electric buzz that connected him with his audience in ways that most musicians could only hope to achieve.

I'm very glad I got to see the Monkees twice on stage, but even happier that I got to spend that soggy night with Davy Jones, doing the thing he loved so much.

Yeah, and I came out the same way, too.

I wish math came this easily to me.

Because, three-and-a-half decades later, Dino is still the King of Cool

How, I ask you, can you top: "I don't drink any more...I freeze it now, and I eat it like a popsicle."?

"I'd like to do some more for you...but I'm lucky I remembered these." Heh

Worth Memorializing

Let's talk about Memorial Day for a moment.

A lot of people confuse it with Veterans Day, and presume it's a holiday to honor all of our men and women in uniform. Truthfully, our vets ought to be honored every day of the year, but that's another issue.

Memorial Day (still called by its original name, Decoration Day, in some parts of the South) is for us to specifically honor those soldiers, sailors and airmen who gave their lives in combat.

To underscore what this holiday (and I use that word in its most sober sense) is truly about, I'd like to talk about the 442nd Infantry Regiment. History tells us that the 442nd, during its years of service in World War 2, was the most highly decorated military unit in American history, with an astounding 21 Medals of Honor awarded to its members. They also received a staggering 9,486 Purple Hearts, awarded to those who were wounded in action.

The 442nd served with bravery and distinction in battles across Italy, France and Germany. Perhaps their greatest hour came in October of 1944 in the French Vosges Mountains. The 1st Battalion, 141st Infantry were completely surrounded by the Germans. Refusing to surrender, the Americans were facing certain death; two attempts by Allied forces to rescue them were repelled by the Nazis, and the so-called "Lost Battalion" seemed doomed.

But then the 442nd was sent in. After five days of horrific fighting, in which the 442nd suffered over 400 casualties (more than 50% of its active roster at the time), the Germans were defeated, and the 1st Battalion was saved.

By war's end, the 442nd has suffered a casualty rate of a soul-staggering 314%! But through their efforts and their sacrifices, the Axis were beaten.

But what makes the 442nd so unique is not the number of medals it earned, nor the number of battles it won. The 442nd Regiment was special, because it was the one and only unit in the American Army comprised of Japanese-American soldiers...virtually all of them having enlisted while being incarcerated in "Relocation Camps" back in the States, where their families were still being held as prisoners. The men of the 442nd risked...and often lost...their very lives in order to fight for a nation that treated them as second class citizens at best, and sub-human criminals at worst. Because they weren't fighting for the America they knew then, but rather the America they knew could be. But for that America to come about, the men of the 442nd knew they would have to find courage above and beyond.

And that's not only why we have a Memorial Day, but why we have an America.

To those who served and sacrificed, thank you.