Ten years before Revolver we wanted to be just like
him: the dolls, the highballs, Vegas, the big-shot friends and tough-guy
attitude. We'd finger-pop to Songs
for Swingin' Lovers, and we'd act like a million copy-cat lounge singers,
cheesy imitators of Ol' Blue Eyes. In 1955, the release of In the Wee Small Hours
caught us by surprise and captivated us on the Billboard charts throughout
1956. These weren't songs about getting a kick out of you (ooh, you
give me a boot), or wingin' down to llama-land. These weren't chestnuts in
blossom, or the roaring traffic's boom. These were songs about hurt and loss. We knew
about Ava Gardner, and the children, and the loving wife who'd been left
behind, and how eleven months later his whole world fell apart; these
songs told that story - not so much in the lyrics, or in Nelson Riddle's wisely
understated orchestration, but in the tenor to his voice, the pause, the
restraint, the catch, the waver. In the Wee Small Hours was the turning point
when we didn't want to be like him any more; we realized instead that he was just
like us (only cooler). Go ahead, listen to the sparse opening notes of "In
the Wee Small Hours of the Morning," and know that Frank wasn't just an icon,
he was a man, flesh and blood like you and me. And once we'd made this discovery, Sinatra's incredible connection to us - unlike that of any other performer in
our generation or any other - was complete.
On the iconic cover (a
copy of which hangs in my hallway alongside Come Fly With Me), Sinatra stands
on the corner of a foggy, lamp lit street in a crumpled suit, sleepy, dazed even,
his attempts to come to terms with what's just happened as elusive as the
cigarette smoke disappearing into the mist. In the Wee Small Hours is
arguably Sinatra's greatest 'heartbreak' album, but one more reflective than Only the Lonely, which seems to crack up with the
trauma of loss. Hours is an album of loss with the luxury of time passed - it's a
nocturnal album, a restless, can't-get-to-sleep album, one defined by solitude
and haunted by memories, dreams and delusions. In "When Your Lover Has Gone," tense
strings fill up the absence of the lover; the restless clarinet of "What is This Thing Called Love," the heaviest and darkest of all Cole Porter
interpretations, questions the unfathomable and unsolvable mysteries of love;
"Last Night When We Were Young," a male counterpart to "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?" broods with post-coital desolation, stumbling towards real
breakdown.
Although the cover art
proclaims Hours as an album of the blues, it’s a rarefied, turquoise blue:
exquisite, arch even. There is often a sense on the album of Sinatra stepping
outside of himself, catching himself in the act of being unhappy. "Mood Indigo" mocks Sinatra's pain with its over-literal instrumentation; the singer's
bravado at being abandoned in "I Get Along Without You Very Well" is undermined
by the music, especially the insistent solo violin, perhaps the you that
refuses to be forgotten; the noir drama beginning "Can't We Be Friends," comically descends into mellow cafe jazz, as a relationship of dark sexual
possibility cools into something blander; and the late-night, bar-room jazz of
'I'll be around' all suggest the drink-fueled delusiveness tacit in Sinatra's
hopes and promises. In the Wee Small Hours is an endlessly subtle, adult
masterpiece.
