"It is sung, played and written for the most part by cretinous goons..." [View all]

[Miles Archer]

Sinatra Rocks! Ol’ Blue Eyes' Best, Worst and Surreal Pop Covers

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/sinatra-rocks-ol-blue-eyes-best-worst-and-surreal-pop-covers-20150203

In the Fifties, Sinatra made his contempt for rock more than obvious. In an article he wrote for a French magazine in 1957 — then widely reprinted in the U.S. — he decried what he called "the most brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious form of expression it has been my displeasure to hear, and naturally I'm referring to the bulk of rock 'n' roll.... It fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people. It smells phony and false. It is sung, played and written for the most part by cretinous goons and by means of its almost imbecilic reiterations and sly, lewd — in plain fact, dirty — lyrics, and as I said before, it manages to be the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the earth." (Sinatra himself didn't exactly associate himself with the most wholesome characters on the planet, but that's another story.)

Roughly a decade later, with rock now commandeering the charts and crooners in danger of extinction, Sinatra softened a bit. From then through the early Eighties, he took periodic stabs at post-Elvis pop and rock songs: Paul Simon, Jim Croce, Neil Diamond, Jimmy Webb and Billy Joel all got the Ol' Blue Eyes treatment. Here are the surprising highlights — and surreal low points — of the times Sinatra tried to rock out.

Few moments embody the generation gap of the Sexties more than Sinatra's gin-and-tonic takeover of Simon & Garfunkel's hit from the soundtrack of The Graduate. The brassy-fanfare arrangement that tries to imitate Paul Simon's guitar lick is clunky enough. The uncredited rewrites of the lyrics are downright cringe-worthy: the way Sinatra inserts the name of his restaurateur pal Jilly Rizzo ("Jilly loves you more than you will know!&quot or the insertion of an all-new verse. "And you'll get yours, Mrs. Robinson — foolin' with that young stuff like you do... Boo hoo hoo!" — he cut the line about Joe DiMaggio for that?