"My Way" by Frank Sinatra: Everything You Didn't Know

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret histories and little known facts behind your favorite movies, music, TV shows and more. We are your fedora wearing friends of Factoids. You're chairman of the board. As in I'm bored, Let's listen to TMI regrets. We have a few, including that last joke, which worked a lot better on paper. My name is Jordan Runtag and I'm Alex Heigel. And today we are talking about one of the most enduring songs of the last half century, a song that's been embraced as a stirring anthem of defiant individualism or a hymn to self delusion and self aggrandizement, depending on which side you're on. We are talking about My Way, made famous by Old Blue Eyes himself, Holwoken's very own Frances Albert Sinatra. It's self reflective lyrics and especially for Sinatra on the eve of his retirement, at the request of his friend, a young pup by the name of Paul Anka, who was just twenty six years old when he wrote the words to a pre existing French pop tune. Now, folks, I'm going to veer into what may seem like a shameless plug for a moment, but bear with me. I swear it's not intended to be one of my new projects. My friends at iHeart had me working on as a talk show hosted by Paul Anka, appropriately titled Our Way. Working on this show has led me to become pretty friendly with Paul, and he's been very generous in sharing his memories of frank and what it was like writing these lyrics for his friend and idol. I was just so fascinated by the story, and when I realized that this spring was the fifty fifth anniversary of the song, I figured it was as good an excuse as any to dive in. Oh does that mean it can sign up for AARP?

00:01:47
Speaker 2: Now?

00:01:47
Speaker 1: Is that sixty five? Okay?

00:01:49
Speaker 2: Just me.

00:01:49
Speaker 1: If there's anyone under forty who knows these rules, it's me Higel. What are your thoughts on this song? Or Sinatra? Oh?

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Speaker 3: I mean, you know, I'm Italian and like I gotta, I can't say a bad word about Frankie on air on Area He's hilarious. He's like one of the greatest Napoleon complexes and music.

00:02:09
Speaker 1: I don't even know if he's small. He might be the his Napoleon complex is so strong that it transcends his height.

00:02:14
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean he was. I know, he was like really real thin. I mean in my college house, we had a picture of his mug shot up on.

00:02:20
Speaker 1: The wall, which I realized is probably a problem. Is a cliche?

00:02:24
Speaker 3: Well it's a cliche, but it's also a problem because wasn't that for when he got picked up for stature rape?

00:02:29
Speaker 1: Oh I didn't know that. Oh. Oh, I assumed it was like for like driving a golf cart through a window or something, which we'll touch on. No, but we'll get to that. No, I don't know.

00:02:41
Speaker 3: I mean I predictably I fall into the sort of middle aged white in olden days what they would call a hipster listening habits of Frank, which means I like stuff like all the Nelson Raal stuff we small hours, and then some of the weirder stuff with like when we had like electric bass on the records Watertown.

00:02:59
Speaker 1: That's Watertown. Yeah, that's in here we're gonna talk about that is weird concept album that nobody bought. It sold thirty thousand copies at a time when stuff wasn't selling thirty thousand copies.

00:03:12
Speaker 3: Yeah, so yeah, I mean he's great. He's also hilarious and embarrassing in the way that so many prominent Italians are like you're like our family, Yeah, you're Andrew Croomo's so yeah, I don't know, he's frank.

00:03:27
Speaker 1: What are you gonna say about Frankie Frank He's frank. Yeah. I mean I kind of took Sinatra for granted, as you know, is the case with so many musical touchstones that were born knowing He's just sort of become part of the architecture. Obviously, everyone talks about the brilliance of his phrasing. I think it was Charlton Heston who said that every song he sings as a four minute movie. You had something to say about his phrasing earlier, which I wasn't aware of.

00:03:52
Speaker 3: Oh well, I mean, so Sinatra in like the he's really interesting because crooning as a like singing genre really kind of had just come into form, because you know, prior it was like shouting, like you had to be heard over a big band like Caruso. Yeah, Caruso were like I'm thinking of like the jump blues, Like there's like four Big Joe Williams, but like, you know, these guys who would like come in and you could hear them singing from like the back of a bar. And so consequently, like even your guys like Cap Callaway, once they started having access to good studio technology, they were still kind of in that vein. But because Sinatra bridged that, he was able to like really bring all this depth and nuance into, you know, this storytelling aspect into his vocal performances, because he wasn't singing to the rafters, he wasn't like trying to force his body to put out as much sound as possible. But he like got all that phrasing admittedly from Billie Holliday, who you know obviously did not live long enough to profit off of it. Or you know, as this story is told time and time again, white guy took something from a black lady and took it further to the bank than she did. But you know, he's like such a big influence on people that it's it's easy to understand how like guys like Jim Morrison would have picked up his vocal phrasing having heard Fraim before Billie Holiday. You know, so I don't know if I can really begrudge him that, but I think he's fascinating because of that, you.

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Speaker 1: Know, I mean just to explicitly state crooning really became an R form because of just the technological advance, but of microphones. Yeah, that's that's what I mean.

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Speaker 3: Is really yeah, and then you think about it, I mean, yeah, it's like illustrating the difference between like Bessie Smith or like one of those people who's like forty fives, like even they're old, like or thirty. They're really old, like Depression era ones sound like they're you know, it's so blown out. And then you're like, holy shit, I can sing soft into this thing.

00:05:45
Speaker 1: You can hear my lips sound, you can hear the breathing. Yeah. Well yeah, I mean.

00:05:51
Speaker 3: It was my favorite moment of that is on that on that Rod Stewart record, the first two just have mistakes all over them, not Gasolene Alley, but the two he made with the Faces crew, And.

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Speaker 1: There's one I think it's every picture.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, where he just like audibly like tries to come into bar early and you just hear him go yeah and then like back off the bike real quick.

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Speaker 1: So it's just I mean, it's really funny.

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Speaker 3: When you think about the way that singing evolved to catch up to the technology rather than the other way around.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, and the other thing that I didn't really think about until researching this episode, and you hear people say this, how I kind of took a dim view of Sinatra and people of his ilk because I'm a Beatles guy and a Bob Dylan guy and a singer songwriter guy, and so anyone who didn't write their own material. I was just kind of like, you know, well, there was a certain level of respect I felt like I couldn't achieve for him. But you hear all these people claiming that Sinatra invented the concept album. That's the phrase you always hear, sure, and there really is some truth to that, because he was the first to use the LP as a medium. You know, even if he didn't write the songs himself, he would choose every track himself and work with the arranger very closely, or in some cases work with the songwriters personally to kind of impart whatever mood he wanted, And so he would create these albums that were an entire mood. I just I appreciate the way that he would sing too. He would stand in the middle of an orchestra, no headphones or anything, and just like be part of the music. I just I love that.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, and went deaf, did he? I mean, I assume that's really bad for you?

00:07:29
Speaker 1: Yeah? Well back to My Way for me. There are two distinct ways to look at My Way. The first as a lyrical autobiography or a sort of musical mission statement of a very singular man, Frank Sinatra. It was one of the eleven songs he sang and his famous nineteen seventy one retirement concert, a show that was meant to wrap up his public life. The retirement lasted two years, but let's let's not talk about that. My Way was intended to be a swan song for a career that endured for a then impressive three decades, from Bobby Soxsers to the Beatles and beyond. And there were many times when Frank was counted out, but like the former boxer that he was, he kept getting back up. And the song's a summation of his rich life, sung by a guy who'd truly seen it all, and only he could summon the prerequisite swagger to pull off lines like the record shows I took the blows and did it my way. I forgot.

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Speaker 3: He was also like basically the first guy to start an artist owned record label too.

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Speaker 1: I can't he can't sell short for that, oh repriz. Yeah, I mean let the record show. Frank always knew how to make a buck. It was very quick to act when he realized that someone was taking a buck from him, unless they were the mafia. Yes, so My Way. One way of looking at it is as a musical biography of autobiography of Frank Sinatra himself. But to me, the songs endured because of what it's done for regular people. Singing My Way is like the musical equivalent of wearing a Superman cape or a fine tuxedo, take your pick. The real theme of My Way is that every life is a triumph, not just Frank Sinatras. That's why it regularly tops karaoke charts around the world, and it's also the most popular song be requested at funerals. It's the center point of event diagram between Trump's inaugural ball any funeral for murdered rapper Nipsey Hustle. It's arguably the only thing those two events have in common. This isn't my favorite song by any stretch, sorry, mister Anka, but I'd argue that for good or ill, it lays claim to the closest thing we've had to a new national anthem in the last one hundred years. And I don't necessarily mean that as a compliment. It's a song that defines American individualism and American exceptionalism. But on a more positive slant, it's a song that will live forever because it makes whoever sings it feels like there's somebody damn it well said thank you. I should have saved that for a kicker. Well, you know what, Let's screw the factoid teasing. Let's just jump right in, folks. Here was everything you didn't know about My Way, made popular by Frank Sinatra. I call this section having the gall the French origins of My Way. That's good, that's proud of that. Yeah, thank you. The song My Way has this origins in Heigel's beloved France, where it was a hit in February nineteen sixty eight under the name gomb Debut. Dude, can you say that for me? My French accent is so bad? Gomb debuted Thank You, which means as usual, and it was a hit by the French crooner Claude Francois. I'm not familiar, but the Guardian would describe him thus, if it's possible to imagine a surrealistic glic Rod Stewart, nothing anyone would want to Francoise? Was it our second mention of Rod ste in the first five minutes of this program?

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Speaker 3: So deeply unappealing? Like didn't they already have that? Wasn't it an old sex pest?

00:11:11
Speaker 1: Serge Gainsburg? Yeah, I had the pause and figure out which French singer you're talking about.

00:11:16
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's not a good He's not as good as a singer as Rod Stewart, but as far as lush, disgusting men convinced of their own genius, go like, he's got.

00:11:24
Speaker 1: To be up there right. I don't think Rod Stewart's convinced of his own genius. I think he's full aware of what he is. Okay, interesting take. Claude Francois would also have a hit with another song that would be we worked in English, this time Feelings by Morris Albert, which was a huge hit. Though my way shares the same melody as his golic cousin. The words have absolutely nothing in common. Written by Parisian composer Jacques Riveau, who wrote three other songs that day, and Giles Tibaut the lyrics to comb debutued chronicle couple whose relationship is disintegrating due to the boredom of every day life, hence the title as usual, And it's quite the gloomy little number in a uniquely French kind of way. It opens with the line I get up, I shake you, you don't wake up as usual? Weird, and it closes with we will make love as usual, we will fake it as usual, especially for nineteen sixty eight too. Yeah that's great, brutal Yeah yeah. Singer Claude France Will received a co write on the song because he tweaked the lyrics to be more autobiographical, which is a hell of a thing to admit. He'd recently split up with the Iconic Yeah yea Chantu Yeah yeahs say that the French pop.

00:12:44
Speaker 3: I don't even know the first I heard of that bullet It was from mad Men, and then no one's ever talked about it ever since.

00:12:50
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, Iconic Yeah Yeah Chantus France, Gaul France gall their name is Redundant. I just can't wait for the section to be over.

00:13:03
Speaker 3: Sorry, I don't want to get into a whole thing about yeah yeah, but.

00:13:06
Speaker 1: Please get into a whole thing about yeah yeah. This isn't that long of an episode. What is the point of it. It's just like louds music. It's French pop. It's French pop filtered through lounge. Yeah, all right. Did we need that at the time, No, but they did. It's not about us, just so funny had the good music.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, it's just so funny that at the height of like the British rock revolution and you know, soul in America, the French were like, what if we took our already boring music and made it more precious and fanciful.

00:13:37
Speaker 1: I mean, I think a lot of European countries in the sixties did that. I mean Germany had I think it was called Schlager.

00:13:43
Speaker 3: Germany had nothing before there was a huge blank carry between Wagner and crowd rock, and when the Beatles were in Hamburg, there's the only interesting things that happened in German music.

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Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, it's you're correct. I sorry, but Schlager was like German. Yeah yeah, it was like, just that's not locking awful. Yeah yeah, yeah yeah, it was just In case you think this story can't get even more frenchly melodramatic, Claude Francois died a decade after the release of Comb Debbie Twod while changing a light bulb in a bathroom lamp while in his bathtub. That is how the French Rod Stewart died. That sounds like a Polish joke, gonna ry embarrassing people.

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Speaker 3: Can't rock and roll electrocute themselves in bathtubs accidentally invented. Yeah, yeah, what a decrepit culture. You should have shut it down after Camu.

00:14:46
Speaker 1: That was their high point.

00:14:47
Speaker 3: It's just been a ever since Gerard Depardue started getting starring roles. It's just been all downhill from there. So what are we talking about again?

00:14:56
Speaker 1: David Bowie? Yes, yes, she didn't think were going to get the David Bowie in this episode, did you, Folks? In the mid sixties, it was fairly common for successful European hits to be rewritten with English lyrics and issued in the lucrative US and UK markets. That's the backstory of songs like Seasons in the Sun by Terry Jacks, which was another French song. The Beach Boys almost released that song in the early seventies before deciding to shelvet. Dusty Springsfield's torch song you Don't Have to Say You Love Me was originally an operatic Italian pop song. Beyond the Sea made popular by Bobby Darren was a French song called Lamaire by Charles Trenet. It's now or never made popular for me at least by Elvis Presley was an Italian standard called Oslo Mio. Pretty famous song. Yeah, so it is Lamaire, though, I mean that's Across the Sea by Bobby Darren. Yeah, that's why I mentioned it. Oh yeah, you did say that. Sorry, disassociate because it's to bok about the French for too long. Yeah. Yeah, I just went back into a fugue state. All this to say, it became a fairly common practice for young songwriters under contract to British or America and publishers to get commissioned to write English lyrics to these European imports, and one such writer was none other than a young David Bowie. Before Paul Anker reworked Come Debbie Tuta's My Way for Frank Sinatra, a pre fame, pre space oddity. Bowie was the first to take a shot at it. This was nineteen sixty seven or early nineteen sixty eight, right around the time he was singing about the Laughing Gnome, so, as you may expect, the results were not spectacular. Bowie himself would dismiss his attempts in a two thousand and two interview by saying, I wrote this god awful lyric. God it was dreadful, but I think he's been a little hard on himself. The lyrics are better than you might expect for a twenty one year old. Bowie's early hero was a man named Anthony Newley, who was a British light entertainment star who's best known to our demographic for co writing the songs in nineteen seventy one's Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. He's been described as the British equivalent of Stephen Sondheim, which feels generous. But he was also married to Joan Collins, so he is that gone for him, which is nice. All this to say, it's not too much of a stretch to see why Bowie would have been drawn to a melody like this. His version was called even a Fool Learns to Love, and Anthony Newly had a big song called what kind of fool am I? So, as usual, David Bowie's influences are not warn lightly. His lyrics went like this, I'll try to give my approximation to the meter that they would have had in My Way melody. There was a time, the laughing time I took my heart to every party, They'd point my way, how are you today? Will you make us laugh? Chase our blues away? They're a funny man. Won't let them down. No, he'd dance in prance and be their clown that time, the laughing time, when even a fool learns to love? That's tough to sing. Thank you, thank you. That's it's hard to find where those words fit in the melody that I know. There is a demo version of Bowie singing these lyrics, which went unheard until a BBC Arena documentary on My Way in nineteen seventy eight. Fittingly, it was directed by famed UK TV documentarian Alan Yentobb, who directed the seminal Bowie dot Cracked Actor for the BBC a few years earlier, which if you're a Bowie fan you should definitely check it out. That is when he is at his cochist. That's the one where he's like paranoid in the back of a limo, thinking that they're being followed in La and I mean living on milk and peppers and cocaine. Who among us? Yes, yeah, there was.

00:18:46
Speaker 4: A time, the laughing time he took his plot to every.

00:18:55
Speaker 1: Party they find.

00:18:58
Speaker 2: His way Holly, you today, William make us laugh.

00:19:06
Speaker 1: Jay sadly, I don't believe Bowie's version of the proto My Way has been officially released. Ultimately, the world would get a very different version of comb debut Twode. As Bowie would recall during an interview with the legendary British journalist Michael Parkinson. I wrote some really terrible lyrics. I sent it back and thought that'll be the last I hear of that. Then I heard the song on the radio and I thought, that's that tune. It must be my song. But hang on, those are different lyrics and it was Sinatra singing My Way. Bowie was somewhat understandably pissed off by the fact that his lyrics had been elbowed in favor of somebody Else's Paul Anka will Discover. He added in the Parkinson interview that the success of Sinatra's version quote really made me angry for so long, for about a year. Eventually, I thought, I can write something as big as that, and I'll write one that sounds a bit like it. So I did Life on Mars, which was sort of my revenge trip on my Way. Bowie acknowledged the influence on the back cover of his nineteen seventy one album Hunky Dory, writing inspired by Frankie next to the song's title, do you know that Life on Mars was My Way? Yeah? I told you We're gonna get to some interesting places in this episode. Can you imagine frank singing that song? This is a part of me that wonders if there was a time when he was like trying to grab on to pop cultural relevance, he would have. There's some truly wild clips of frank in like anahrew Jacket and Love Beads with the Fifth Dimension on like some TV special. It is it is something who made that pairing a talent booker was that high? I mean it kind of worked earlier in the decade he did a TV special with Elvis.

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Speaker 3: I just imagine every single of those misplaced interactions going like Phil Hartman's impression of him on SNL with Connor, like just being utterly baffled but still like aggressively in charge and a weird dick. But now enter Anka. I was trying to think of an enter Sandman thing, but I realized I don't actually ever say enter Sandman in that song.

00:21:12
Speaker 4: Yeah now anyway, So, but we missed out to mister Paul anchor Paul Anka, not the semi low tier brand of Bluetooth accessories.

00:21:25
Speaker 1: And on your thanks, Anka singer songwriter teen Idol, youngest member of the rat Pack and personal friend and co worker of Jordan Runt Toss. I hear from it more than my own family anyway.

00:21:41
Speaker 3: Anka has struck it big in the nineteen fifties with songs like Diana, which he wrote when he was fifteen. Man, that's like a Jackson Brown writing these these days, like sixteen or seventeen, after he'd been heartbroken by like a decade older Nico blowing his mind sexually.

00:21:57
Speaker 1: I just saw him something he oo Puppy Love, another one of his songs, Lonely Boys the deathless, TikTok hit put your Head on My Shoulder, which Paul loves to change to put your legs on my shoulder, to shock me during tapings.

00:22:13
Speaker 3: Pause to let that one, belly fop, Johnny Carson's Tonight Show theme, which was actually the instrumental version of a song he'd written for a Nette Fornicello, and get this not for nothing, folks. He also wrote Buddy Holly's last single it Doesn't Matter Anymore?

00:22:28
Speaker 1: Did you know that? I didn't? I mean for real? Though his own hit songs, the Tonight Show theme, Frankie and Annette songs, and Buddy Holly's last single and this is pre my way. The man is an octopus tendrils and everything. The man is an octopus eight arms or otherwise. I don't even know where I was coming with that. This was all before the Beatles. Naturally, Hey you Bob Dylan too, well he didn't have the same chart success though. No, but there wasn't money to be made from writing your own songs until the Beatles came. What year was free Yllain? I think sixty three? What year they come to America? February sixty four? How about that? Well, come on, there wasn't hit potential.

00:23:21
Speaker 3: What Jordan and I are debating is that essentially the old model of the music industry was that you would have professional songwriters. This is a tinpan alley kind of situation where it was literally a lot of Russian Jews sitting at pianos in New York banging out songs like on an eight hour shift, which would then be scouted and shipped to whatever kooner singer of the day was going to sing it their label or their agent or whatever deemed was going to be hit for them. And then this changed with Bob Dylan. Not that I'm a Dylan stand I'm just arguing for like historical accuracy and not everything being about the damn Beatles. You know, Dylan really revolutionized publishing rights and songwriters singing and writing their own songs, because it used to be even if you were a singer and you wrote your own song, it would just immediately get taken away from you.

00:24:10
Speaker 1: And he and his voice.

00:24:11
Speaker 3: Completely revolutionized that. And I would argue the commercial impact came from people covering his songs.

00:24:18
Speaker 1: Oh certainly, yeah, but I think that came later. We're tabling this, We're gonna have it out on this some other time. I'm not talking about who's doing a first. I'm talking about who did it in a way that made so much money that everyone was like, oh, we got to do that now.

00:24:29
Speaker 3: Oh okay, just changing the rules of debate on me. Yeah, okay, that's fine. Paul was on vacation in southern France, where he spent most of the sixties bouncing between Vegas and Europe, and when he first heard combe debutide on the radio, and as he would say, it was a song, but I felt there was something different in it. Something about the melody of the tune captivated him, and he tracked down the publishers. He got them to sign the adaptation, recording and publishing rights over to him for one dollar, an astounding feat of negotiating, as long as the melodies composers would retain their original share of royalty rights.

00:25:06
Speaker 1: I just want to say, it's funny because we have to license my way for the podcast I'm working on, and it's extremely easy to get that song cleared because even though he doesn't own all of it anymore, they're just like, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever, because they're so great. Sure him for turning that song into what it's become.

00:25:23
Speaker 3: Yeah, this would have been at some point in early nineteen sixty eight, and for a few months Paul just sat on his new investment, just mulling it over, you know, looking at this little French nest egg in these files. And that is until his buddy Frank Sinatra called him up one night and invited him to dinner.

00:25:44
Speaker 1: We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in just a moment.

00:26:00
Speaker 3: Now we segue into the history of the rat Pack. Just the best name for a bunch of filthy rich celebrities. Anko was significantly younger than Frank, something like twenty six year difference. They met when Paul Anka started headlining at the Sands Hotel in Vegas when he was just sixteen years old, and at the time that was the home base for the rat Pack.

00:26:23
Speaker 1: Frank and Dean No like Dean Dean forgot his last name for a second mark Frank Sinadra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, and so forth. But they were actually the second generation the popularized ones rat Pack UH one point zero as you put it, rat Pack Beta version was led referred to Humphrey Bogart and his running, drinking and smoking buddies who would hang out in Vegas. According to a possibly apocryphal story, the term was coined by Bogie's wife, Lauren Bakal, who walked in on Humphrey and his cronies and said, insultingly, don't you look like a regular rat pack? I know it smelled crazy in there. It was like pre the rise of commercial deodorants. You're talking about a bunch of chain smoking alcoholics. Sinatra woorl lavender. Apparently lavender was a scent that he liked very much. Oh smells like cancer. Uh.

00:27:18
Speaker 3: Lauren Pocau would later be linked romantically with Sinatra after Bogert kicked It in nineteen fifty seven. So perhaps she was really the one that we owed the transference of that nickname over to.

00:27:28
Speaker 1: He died, He wasn't hanging out. That's the different use of kicked it.

00:27:32
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, sorry, he died horribly of lung and throat cancer. Up right, Yeah, seriously, don't smoke, especially as.

00:27:40
Speaker 1: Much as he did unfiltered sawdust. Yeah, Frank, it should be said, never referred to his group as the rat pack.

00:27:50
Speaker 3: Apparently he called it the Clan, which is so much worse. Now here's where we get into parsing it, because if you sticks some else in front of clan, it sounds fine, like the rat clan.

00:28:03
Speaker 1: That's hilarious, that's cute, the rat family. Just again, you're just spinning out things that are adorable. The clan. Yeah, he did spell it with the c though, so at least he had the awareness there. Paul Anka would tell me that after all the shows that they would do, there was like a steam room that all the rat Pack guys would go to and they would invite Paul along, and Frank had everybody They had a made custom robes that he would embroider with the nicknames Frank gave everybody nicknamed. Paul was the kid because he was still like a teenager at this time. I think Frank's was the Pope. I want to say Dean's was Dago because racism, and Sammy's was Smoky. I think for smoking the bear, is that racist? I think so, I assume, yeah, Okay.

00:28:56
Speaker 3: Anyway, Sinatra's history with Vegas really began in nineteen fifty three, when he started singing in the Copa room at the Sands. The hotel was aptly named At this point in Vegas history, the town was still a dusty desert outpost. The Sands Hotel was one of the first truly elegant establishments, and Frank who would be joined by Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Junior, Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop. Listed in descending order of rank. You noted so Dean Martin, Lieutenant, Sammy Davis, Secretary, Peter Lawford Assistant to the Secretary, and Joey Bishop intern.

00:29:28
Speaker 1: Yeah. The only cool thing about Joey Bishop is that he gave Regis philip In his big break. He had a talk show and then Regis philbim was like is Ed McMahon. Basically, I don't care about that.

00:29:38
Speaker 3: This group was largely responsible for bringing a dose of glamour to the town and helping make Las Vegas a tourist destination. Prior to this, hoteliers were struggling to fill their new casino resorts. Now people flocked to the area for a chance to rub shoulders with Sinatra and Co, who were famous for treating the town as their personal playground. You'd see them at casinos, dropping in on each other's performance as it lounges up and down the strip. As a result, they were treated like kings by the powers that be in the town and generally allowed to do whatever they wanted. Sometimes this would result in hilariously diva esque or divo esque, not like the band, but the masculine form of the word diva. The joke is always better when you explain it. For example, one of the matre d's at the Kopa Room, a guy named George Levin, recalled that Sinatra had a phobia of mushrooms. When he discovered some of his dish at the White Gloved Garden Room restaurant, he was displeased.

00:30:27
Speaker 1: As Levin would later recall, everything was silver at that time, silver plates and silver toppings. Frank lifts the cover up in their mushrooms. He took the bowl and threw it over his head. I stepped to the side and I started to laugh. Frank gets up and he starts coming after me, and I run into the kitchen. He comes after me into the kitchen and says to me, you want to fight. I said, I'm not a fighter, I'm a lover. Were they making eye contact anyway? Sinatra? He says. Sinatra broke up. He hugged me and that was it. Sinatra wud ultimately depart the Sands for the newly build Caesar's Palace. On September eleventh, nineteen sixty seven. The lead in the New York Times piece covering his exit read, Frank Sinatra walked out on his contract with the Sands Hotel last night because the management quote cut off his credit. A spokesman for the singer said, today, you see the Sands have been sold to Howard Hughes and old pissbottle Howie, who was not as lax in his attitudes towards Sinatra's casino debts.

00:31:25
Speaker 3: Truly hilarious nickname. Thank you for putting that in there. You know, C's famously died surrounded by or did he clean up first? So he died among him? He didn't clean up.

00:31:34
Speaker 1: No, he died with broken the hypodermic needles broken off under his skin and was like seventy six pounds.

00:31:40
Speaker 3: Surrounded by jars of his own piss and long gross fingernails.

00:31:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, long hair and beard watching the same weird sixty sci fi movie Ice Station Zebra over and over and over again and.

00:31:53
Speaker 3: Yeah again, who among us? Sinatra's rage at this turn of events was swift. According to witnesses, he climbed onto one of the casino tables and began screaming before throwing a chair at the casino boss. The pit boss then responded by punching him in the face. Sinatra left the hotel via the most dramatic and immediate route. He drove a golf cart through a window, and the following day upped sticks to Seas Palace.

00:32:20
Speaker 1: Very nicely read I just want to praise you for that. That was extremely well delivered. Oh well, thank you. So that wasn't very cool. But on the flip side, or was it, well, you put it that way, it was very cool. But this is very cool too. S Ultra also put himself on the line to help fight racial segregation in Las Vegas in the mid fifties. Hotel owners knew they had the book Black Acts because the revenue they brought was enormous, but headliners like Lena Horne and Fat Stamino were forbidden from meeting in the dining room at the venues where they performed. Instead, they were sequestion in the kitchen or sometimes a dressing room. There's a famous story where Frank saw Inn that King Cole eating in his dressing room by himself. Sinatra invited him to be his guest at his table in the whites only dining room, summoning a hutzpa that only fifties era Sinatra could muster. He told the hotel management that if African Americans weren't allowed in the dining room, he would have the entire weight staff fired. I have no idea whether or not he actually had the authority to do that, but surely no one doubted him. He would also assign some of his bodyguards to follow some of the black acts around, telling them, if anyone looks at them, the black art is funny, break both their legs. That does rule. I love a guy who gave money to both the NAACP and the mob. That seems that's nice. Yeah, he's just he's leveling all sides. Yeah. Sinatra threatened to end the rat Pack's popular summat at the Sands Show if Sammy Davis Junior wasn't allowed to stay at the same hotel with the others. Hotel management gave in the Sinatra's demands and Sammy was given a suite, helping to pave the way for equal treatment of black entertainment in the city. Well, since we're talking about the rat pack and Vegas, we should really close the loop and touch on the mob and JFK. Sinatra met Kennedy through second tier rat packer Peter Lawford, who was married to JFK's sister, Patricia Kennedy at the time. Frank contributed Kennedy's campaign theme tune, which was a revamped version of Sammy Cohn's High Hopes. With In nineteen sixty election against Richard Nixon started to look a little too close for comfort, Kennedy patriarch Joe Senior put in a call to Sinatra and supposedly said, I'm going to ask you a favor. I need your help in Illinois and West Virginia. I want you to talk to the guys you know in the mob to get the unions of both states to vote for Kennedy. Frank had known these guys since he was singing in bootleg saloons in the thirties, but his ties with them had really become cemented when he started working in Las Vegas, because Vegas was where all the mobsters went in the forties and fifties, because all the illegal stuff they did back east was legal there. Brothels, gambling. Surely there are others of things, hunting men for sport, I assume. Yeah, Suddenly they went from being organized crime kingpins in the East to being legitimate businessmen in Las Vegas on you guys have seen The Godfather, right. Plus it was out in the desert where law enforcement and regulations weren't very strict, so it was a good place to kind of dip your toes in legitimate business without having to really be all that strict about it. Anyway, when Joe Kennedy asked for help, Frank put in a call to Chicago mob boss San Jiancana. Sam liked hanging out with Frank because he liked hanging out with famous people, and Frank liked hanging out with mob guys because it enhanced this bad boy reputation, So it's a perfect match. Samsu and Khana had a vested interest in Kennedy owing him a favor since the FBI were tailing him day and night, and he figured that having a sitting president in his corner would be pretty helpful for calling off the dogs. This backfired when JFK went and appointed his brother Robert as Attorney General. RFK famously became one of the most fervent anti mafia crusaders this country has ever seen. The mobsters were apparently furious at these little, ungrateful Boston brats who were biting the pinky ring clad hands that fed them. No, not even no, no, that's good. Just tried carefully, you know, sensitively. This is still a sensitive topic in the community. I have distant family members who split on the ground whenever RFK is mentioned. I don't I was making that up. Well. This is all cited as a circumstantial evidence by conspiracy theorists who say that the mob at a hand and killing JFK in November nineteen sixty three. Another way Frank possibly helped set the wheels in motion for the most infamous assassination in American history is by introducing JFK to was former girlfriend, Judith Campbell. Campbell would go on to become Kennedy's mistress as well as Sam gen Conna's mistress. Ooh. This is a relatively open secret in government circles, and the Court at Camelot was understandably freaked that the president was sharing a girlfriend with one of the most prominent mob bosses in the country. Who his own brother was trying to put away. This is like breaking bad the way the layers here. I mean, you couldn't even write this. It seems to what do you I mean, like, yeah, what do you even put it? When there was like one of the biggest musicians in the world was like in bed with the mob and the president was fighting the mob and the president was also sleeping with the mob guy's girlfriend. Like you imagine that. That's like a Shakespeare farce. I mean, that's like a right people would the comparison be like it was like some Italian prime minister Berlosconi. Well, Pearl SCARONI, yeah, just did it for real with porn stars. But who's like the big male star that It's got to be some country to be hilarious. It was some country just in Timberlake. No, no, well, finish what you're asking.

00:38:04
Speaker 3: Luke Combs, like if what it was like the most like milk toast, like good old boy country artist and he was like, you know, trying to impressure Joe Biden. But at the same time he was also like in QAnon and one of the QAnon women.

00:38:19
Speaker 1: Was having sex with Joe Biden. Does that make sense? Sinatra was a milk toast though. I feel like he still had kind of but he was like mainstream appeal, you know. I mean like that's what I'm saying. JT. His time is pasted. Also at Franks by nineteen sixty. I'm warning you, you're just like the community is getting mad at me. You are.

00:38:39
Speaker 3: You are pushing a lot of my buttons today.

00:38:44
Speaker 1: I mean, Okay, how is Luke Colmbs more like Sinatra than JT? I don't know, he just had that big hit. I was thinking like chart topping, you know, like Okay, I just think, yeah, I don't know, they aren't like all the male stars now, like coming from country. I just heard of this guy jelly Roll. You heard of him, jelly Roll Morton. No. No, he's a large man with face tattoos. So it is jelly Roll Morton. No. I don't think he had a face tattoo. No, I don't care to know about that. Yeah, you wouldn't would make you unhappy. FBI chief slash garbage human Jaggar Hoover wrote irate memos to Bobby Kennedy while wearing women's underpants. Probably yes, the hypocrisy of Jaeger Hoover that's a whole other podcast.

00:39:30
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, my fun my, funniest niche fact about Old Hooves is, uh, j Eddie Hooves as we call him around the way. Uh. Matti Klarwine is this famous like psychedelic album sleeve designer painter from the sixties. He did the cover of a Braxis by Santana, and he also did the cover of Live Evil, which is a Miles Davis live album, and on the back half of it is this repulsive frog beat looking thing that's very like obviously psychedelic, and he said his facial model for it was j Eddie Hooves.

00:40:07
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, Oh, you can totally tell. Yeah, So that's funny. That is very funny. So Jaeger Hoover wrote furious memos to Bobby Kennedy about the fact that his brother was sleeping with a mobster's mole. Is that what you'd call her? Oh, mobster's girlfriend. Yeah. Needless to say, all of us strain the friendship between Sinatra and JFK, and soon relations between them began to sour. But the real split between Frank and JFK came in March nineteen sixty two, when Kennedy was supposed to visit Sinatra at his home in Palm Springs. Frank was so thrilled about hosting the President that he went all out and had his tennis court turned into a helicopter pad for the President's Marine one chopper to land. But then at the last minute, Kennedy called and told him that he was going to stay down the street with Bing Crosby instead. Bing Crosby a well known Republican who also had mop It's worth noting. Kennedy claimed that this was due to security concerns, but Sinatra knew it was because Bobby Kennedy was putting the muscle on JFK to distance himself from him, and consequently Sinatra took it as a betrayal. He was so mad that he went into the backyard at night, turned on the lights and smashed up the helipad with a sledgehammer, with Vince Grolty's Christmas Time is Ar playing in the background. Oh that's so funny. How mad do you have to be to smash up an entire helipad by yourself with a sledgehammer? I mean, Frank, Oh, a rageful man, to be sure, yes, yes, also a slight one, you know. I don't think he was that. This is post Bobby Socks or era.

00:41:45
Speaker 3: He was like he got some he had some drinking weight on him, but I think he was ever like beefy.

00:41:51
Speaker 1: You know, Paul was talking the other day. This was great. I mean, just it's so weird that, like, I talked to this guy fairly text with this guy at a fairly regular basis. He was like, yeah, and that King Cole. He was really grateful to Frank about, you know, all that he did for him, helping integrate you know, the casinos and stuff, and helping fight racism in Vegas. But he didn't really like hanging out with Frank because and his voice kind of trolled off, and I was like, well why, He's like, well, it's a tough crowd to hang out with. They just it was tough to keep up with Frank and those guys just drinking wise, joking wise, everything wise, really racially. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure it was in hell for Sam a man. Yeah, oh my god god. Yeah. So yeah, So Frank was really heartbroken that JFK blew him off and making matters worse for him. The mafia still thought he was buddy buddy with the Kennedys, and so they didn't trust him anymore either. And the real falling out with Frank and the mob cam when then the Vada Gaming Commission started to investigate mob run casinos in nineteen sixty three, which possibly not coincidentally, was the year that JFK was murdered. Ji and con blamed this investigation in the mob run casinos on Sinatra, which was untrue, but he severed their relationship, and Mobster started openly talking about assassinating Sinatra and Dean or poking Sammy Davis's other eye out he lost an eye in a car accident in the fifties. All of this is charming. Yeah, that's Dube because you know that was the one that he could have pulled off with zero repercussions. Kill and Frank or Dean Martin probably would have gotten some notice from the press, but they you would have been able to kill Sammy Davis because of racism or blind him, I'll say. Evidence of all this came to light after the FBI wiretapped g and Conna's phones. Frank's FBI file, meanwhile, has nothing to sneeze at either. He was under surveillance since the forties due to his new deal politics during the Roosevelt administration. Sinatra has a file that totals some twenty four hundred and three pages, some of which include accounts of him as a target of death threats and extortion schemes. Hell yeah, so this is a rough time for Frank Kenny. Administration didn't like him, the mobsters didn't like him. He was on his way out musically because the Beatles had kind of supplanted him by the late sixties. He was having a tough time and this is why he started to think about retirement. Heigel, take us there, retirement and you and you a primer, what can it do for you? Around the same time, Sinatra's divorce from twenty one year old Mia Pharaoh was almost finalized. That was was that over Rosemary's Baby? Yeah? Yeah, they were supposed to make a movie together and Rosemary's Baby shoot ran long and she refused to leave, and then she was served divorce papers on the set. And if I recall, Harkley ran into the open embrace of Roman Polanski Black not the man you want comforting you. Yeah, but I do want to say she was on the right side of history there. Well, yeah, what movie did he make. Oh it was bad.

00:45:02
Speaker 3: It has to be called like running wild or like you know. No, he did a lot of like serious with the.

00:45:09
Speaker 1: Golden arm Manchurian Candidate, et cetera, et cetera. I think it was called the Detective. That was kind of on the nose. Yeah.

00:45:19
Speaker 3: So, at his wits end, Sinatra decided he was going to retire from public life again who among us? While in Miami making the thriller Lady and Cement. Yeah, this is I'm talking about Lady and Cement.

00:45:34
Speaker 1: Oh what's it about? I think Lady Cement referred to murdered mob victims. No, I get it. Okay, did you not? Did you? I thought you were thinking about like like some Benny Hill like woman who's like, you know, in a bikini running around and excellently falling into a wheelbarrow of like wet Cement. And I mean it was Raquel Welch. So can it be both true?

00:46:00
Speaker 3: So he called Paul Anka to dinner and said, kid, we're going to do dinner and told him per Anka's recollection. I'm quitting the business. I'm sick of it. I'm getting the hell out, but I'm doing one more album and you never wrote me that song. There had been a long standing and possibly tongue in cheek request from Sinatra to Paul to write him a song, but Anka was always too intimidated. He would say, I couldn't. I was scared to death. I was writing all this teen stuff. In a different interview, he added, you have to remember, as you're growing and maturing and working at your craft, that's not overnight. There's a certain kind of song that you write for your age, and your intellect comes from learning your craft and maturing as a person. I would never would have written the song when I was younger. I wasn't capable. But Sinatra was always talking about aging. He hated getting old, he hated old age, and the song is about being old. You're old, your vintage. But it bugged me that I couldn't write him a song because I loved him and adored him like all of us did. So I decided that day I was going to do it. The day finally came when Anka was back in his apartment in New York City. It was just after one am once tore me City night, when Anka sat down his IBM electric typewriter and began putting words to the French melody that he'd loved so much. He put himself in Frank's shoes and began to write the song he felt Frank would have written. I thought, what would Frank do with this melody if he were a writer. All of a sudden, it just came to me. And now the end is near. I faced the final curtain. The lyrics went from being about a dead love affair to a man looking back fondly on a life he'd lived on his own terms and the mobs. Even the word choice was steeped in Sinatra's own unique dialect. I used words that I would never use, Anka said, I ate it up and spit it out, But that's the way he talked. The rat pack guys. They like to talk like mob guys. Musically, it was interesting because it had an interval of a sixth, which is an aspiring interval because it likes to resolve to a fifth, and gave the song stirring and theemic quality. And for the title, Anka more or less looked to the zeitgeist. He said, I read a lot of periodicals and I noticed everything was my this and my that. We were in the me generation and Frank became the guy for me to use to say that. Anka ultimately finished the song as the sun came up at dawn, and at last he knew he had a song that was worthy of his idol. He called Sinatra, who is at Caesar's Palace in Vegas, having already crashed his golf cart through a window of the sands, and said, I've got something really special for you. He recorded a demo of the song and flew to Vegas to play it for Sinatra, who immediately replied, I'm doing it. Two months later went by before Anka got a call from Frank. He says, kid, listen to this, and puts the phone up to the speaker. I heard My Way playing for the first time, and I started to cry.

00:48:38
Speaker 1: That's cute. Yeah, I mean, I actually have tape of Paul talking about writing My Way on a recent episode of our podcast Our Way. We had Gail King on this week's episode, actually, and the topic came up, and I don't think he'd mind if I spiced that in right here. It's just cool. It was rare that we actually get to hear the person who wrote whatever it is we're talking about discussing it, and it's a nice little plug for the show. So here we go, put a little teaser in for that right here.

00:49:08
Speaker 2: Well, I started with those guys, Gail back in the early fifties. I went to Vegas at fifty eight, and then I wound up with the rat Pack, and there with guys I idolized, Sinatra, Sammy Davis, who was the most talented of everybody, and Dean Martin, and you know, through those years I got to know them well, but I was still the kid. You know. These guys were twice my age, but I was working for the mob like they were, and they controlled and we had our life and we were having and frolicking and having fun. But I'd always wanted to write for Sinatra because he was like the guy. And I was at the Fountain Blue Hotel in the late sixties. He was in town doing a film called Lady in Cement, and with the guys we worked for, it could have been a documentary, you know, but he was he was very cool. And he called me up and he said, dinner, dinner, I want to talk to you. So I went to dinner with him. So we're at dinner and one thing led to another. He said, kid, I'm quitting show because I've had enough. I'm tired. Rat packs over. Yeah, we all had nicknames. Sammy had a name, Dean had a name. I was the kid, and we're on our bath roads because all the fun was in the steam room when our shows were over it. We won't go into that. So he at dinner, he said, I'm quitting and I wan to do one more album with Don And he said, you never wrote me a song. So I go home to New York. I sit down. In five hours, I finished the lyric of my Way, and I fly out to Vegas the next night and he said, kid, I love it. Two months later he called and said from a studio in La he said, kid, listen to this, and he played it over the phone. That's the first time I heard it. I started crying because my life changed, so did His was such a big hit.

00:50:57
Speaker 1: He stayed for ten years.

00:50:59
Speaker 2: That your point, he was retiring, but he stayed ten more years because the song was huge.

00:51:04
Speaker 1: But when you finished that, because the song still, that song still holds up still. When you finished it, did you know that it was a hit? Did you know that?

00:51:13
Speaker 2: I know it was different and very special.

00:51:15
Speaker 1: Different.

00:51:15
Speaker 2: Yeah, you don't it was a spiritual moment for me. I believe that a lot of creative people are really sensing some kind of spiritualism in creative and I knew that it was different than everything else that had ever written. And I was kind of metaphorically writing it with him in mind, because I was moved to the fact that he was leaving. So I wrote it as if he were writing. But it just came together, and it hit me very very hard that I knew it was. It was going to be something very special.

00:51:44
Speaker 1: We all knew so.

00:51:47
Speaker 3: In the history books, it says that Frank Sinatra recorded My Way on December thirtieth, nineteen sixty eight, at Western Records in LA where so many classic sixties pop tunes were cut. There's a favorite haunt of Jordan's beloved Brian Wilson, who worked on What Else Pet Sounds there. Sinatra was a night owl, as Paul Anka is to this day.

00:52:05
Speaker 1: Yeah, guys up like all night. But this was a rare afternoon recording session. At roughly three pm, forty musicians strolled into the studio. If you're interested, Lou Levy took over his pianist for this song with Sinatra. Regular Bill Miller cut his hand on a shart of glass. Miller did, however, conduct the orchestra for the recording. But here's where it gets weird, he said, not knowing what this story was going to be.

00:52:33
Speaker 3: There's a story that the recording of My Way was attended by none other than George guitar beatle Harrison. Is that his popular damn that just came out of my mouth? I'm an idiot. This story comes from his wife, Patty Boyd, who discussed it in both her memoir and in twenty twenty two photo book, which contains a photo of her, George and Sinatra at a recording studio control booth, and the caption reads, while in Los Angeles, George and I were invited to go and meet Frank Sinatra and his recording studio. Thrilled, we were ushered upstairs to the control room, where Frank was surrounded by many guys at the mixing desk. We briefly met him before he disappeared downstairs. We then watched as he proceeded to sing My Way with a full orchestra. Wow, it was extraordinary. It doesn't recite quite as well as it reads, although with the whole period no exclamation point. Wow, it was extraordinary.

00:53:23
Speaker 1: She's English. Listen.

00:53:25
Speaker 3: Yeah, right, he listened back to this one take and said, Okay, that's it, let's go. We pulled himTo Limos to a club. When we got there, George quite rightly thought he would sit next to Frank, but the big guys from the Bronx moved him down the table. And you have firsthand confirmation of this story from Patty.

00:53:43
Speaker 1: Yeah, she interviewed her for this book and she said that she was there the night Frank recorded My Way. But she lied to your faces. True. Yeah, she's been lying to all of us this whole goddamn time. She's never even met George. How far does this rabbit hole go? Never met Eric Clapton, never met any of these people.

00:54:04
Speaker 3: So Beatle nerds and Sinatra nerds are probably two of the most archival obsessed sub fans. Yeah, they have receipts and prove that Patty's incorrect. George and Patty were in LA in mid November to, among other things, appear on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour TV show and record with Apple artist Jackie Lomax. Jackie Lomax pull out some weird Beatle thing. What's he known for.

00:54:33
Speaker 1: He was in a Liverpool band when the Beatles were in their Cavern days, and then he was one of the first artists signed to Apple Records, the Beatles record label that they started in nineteen sixty eight, and George Harrison took him under his wing and gave him a song that he'd written called Sour Milk Sea, which is written around the same time that George is writing songs for the White album. It's like a good song. It deserved to do a lot better. And I want to say it's got some crazy star to line up with. Eric Clapton's on it, Nicky Hopkins on it, Ringos on it, Paul McCartney's on it, a lot of the Wrecking Crew guys like Larry Nektel and Joe Osborne and Klaus Vorman's on it too. Yeah, it's got like a really stacked lineup. But yeah, didn't didn't really do much. Thank you, Jordan.

00:55:24
Speaker 3: We need a little audio stinger for when your Beatles is done every episode. Soyer Milk Sea is so disgusting, I know, awful, awful turnip phrase. So, having said all that, evidence suggests that George and Patty dropped in on Sinatra November twelfth, nineteen sixty eight, during which time he recorded the songs Little Green Apples, Gentle on My Mind and by the time I get to Phoenix for his album Cycles. Frank's preferred technique was to work live in the studio by standing in the middle of an orchestra, and he often only did one or two takes. So it is possible that Sinatra performed a version of My Way for the benefit of George and his super hot model wife, or she's.

00:56:04
Speaker 1: Spent most of the sixties in a drugs I will say it probably sucked to be patty board around Frank Sinatra. He liked all bonds, Oh yeah, and he was a weird, angry little man. Hey mc garter was a blonde though, that's true, I guess I'm thinking of I mean, he just divorced me a Pharaoh. M hm.

00:56:27
Speaker 3: He's like, he's hey, now, I got a long haired Mia in front of me because me and Pharaoh cut her hair famously against Frank's wishes. Something possibly I.

00:56:38
Speaker 1: Thought it was when she was on Peyton Place and it was almost like a Britney Spears moment where she was like, I'm sick of this. I'm sick of being like because Peyton Place was like this, like the Dawson's Creak of its day, and she was this teen star and she was like trying to rebel against that. That's that's my dim memory of that. I don't know. I wasn't there.

00:56:59
Speaker 3: It is also worth noting, to further puncture an elderly legends recollections of her youth, that Western Studios where My Waiver was recorded is all on one floor and doesn't have an upstairs downstairs. So you, Patty Boyd, you've had it too easy for too damn Longe, for holding your feet to the fire.

00:57:21
Speaker 1: She just sold all the love notes she got from Eric Clapton and the painting they use for the Leila album cover. Sad between the George years and the Eric Clapton years. He's got a lot of good stuff. Always makes me sad when these people of a certain age part with their treasures, and that these big auctions. You gotta have something when you don't have any talent. She's a photographer. In a cute coda to the Beatles Sinatra connection, Frank would later record George's Something, calling it one of the best love songs written in fifty or one hundred years.

00:57:54
Speaker 3: And he also introduced it as my favorite Lennon McCartney composition.

00:57:58
Speaker 1: Yes, which I'm sure annoyed George to no ends, but it must have given him a small amount of satisfaction because Frank had reportedly rejected a song that Paul McCartney had pitched him at the rule.

00:58:14
Speaker 3: Uh cut to Paul angrily driving a tug boat, his fists white knuckled as he listens to.

00:58:23
Speaker 1: But still yeah, of course in his like eighties mullet phase. Oh I'm just I'm just so angry right now, that's a really that's a very good Paul. I'm I'm yeah, I'm very impressed. And you know I would know, and she would you would. No. So the song that Paul pitched him was called Suicide, which is somehow worse than Sour Milk Sea for a title. I'll talk about him over correcting, trying to fix his image as the lame Beatle. No, it gets worse. He wrote the song as a teenager back in Liverpool, a tongue in cheek Sinatra parody, because remember, one of the first songs that Paul ever wrote was when I'm sixty four. This is the era when he was trying to make a go of writing, like, you know, music hall songs. So when the man himself came calling, Paul had no problem sending one of the greatest interpreters a popular song, a joke tune that he'd written as a fourteen year old. This is one of the ways that Paul McCartney and Paul Anka are different. Paul Anka had the wherewithal to be afraid when Sinatra asked him for a song. Paul was like, Oh, yeah, there's this thing I wrote when I was foring a teenage bullshit. I wrote to make fun of you. Uh. McCartney has told this story many times over the years, often in the most avuncular Paul McCartney esque way possible. Here's one incarnation of that. I was once wrung up by the great Frank Sinatra himself. I was in the studio and a phone call came in. I goes, I goes hello Frank, and he said, have you got a song? I've heard about it all that. I said, I've got just the song. I'll send it right over. I secretly hoped, as a songwriter that he'd ask so I had one ready, but he turned it down. I think it was something to do with the fact that it was called suicide. A fragment of this song can be heard on Paul's debut solo album nineteen seventies McCartney. I think it's at the end of a song called Glasses, which is just like a musical tone poem piece where he's just playing glasses filled with water and it cuts into that, segues into that. Yeah. Interestingly, George Harrison claims that his song Isn't It a Pity, a standout album cut from his epic nineteen seventy triple disc All Things Must Pass, was also offered a Sinatra at some point before he recorded it, but apparently that didn't come together. See what I did there? Either? I did friends not doing Isn't It a Pity? Would be hilarious. Isn't It a shame? Bit Jack? And yet there's a Sinatra connection with a third member of the Fab Four, Ringo Starr. Ringo's wife, Maureen, was a huge fan of Sinatra, and for her twenty second birthday in nineteen sixty eight, he somehow got Sinatra to record a special version of The Ladies a Tramp retitled Marine's a champ all out. They roped in Sinatra's longtime lyricist Sammy Kahn to pen lines like this is pretty good. She married Ringo and she could have had Paul. That's why the ladies a champ. That's pretty good. And though we've not met, I'm convinced she's a gem. I'm just fs but to me she's big m mainly because she prefers me to them. That's why the lady is a champ. That's pretty good. That's pretty funny, Sammy cohn Man. And this gift, the song this Gift for Ringo's wife was actually the very first record press for the Beatles record label Apple, giving it the catalog number Apple one, making it one of the rarest records on the planet and worth god knows how much. And you can hear it online a very kind of low quality version of it circulating online, which I will. I think I can splice in here without getting in trouble with copyrights. Oh, I forgot one thing that you'll enjoy as a comic book fan. When Paul presented Sinatra with suicide, he commissioned a Marvel comic book artist named Bob Larkin No to do a watercolor portrait of Paul dressed like Frank in a Fedora standing next to Frank in a Fedora. I'm gonna send it to you right now because i want your live reaction to this. It's and you know, Paul McCartney's my favorite human on the planet. But it's pretty cringe. Oh my god.

01:02:55
Speaker 3: I like how he deliberately gave him an ill fitting hat like a too small Fedora to make him look like even more of a tool.

01:03:06
Speaker 1: Classic so Sinatra not only turning down a Beatles song, but turning down a Beatles song after he presented him with a portrait of the two of them standing together. That is cringe as hell. God, he's so kind of love it though. I'm so thirsty, I know, even the look at his face and this picture is so earnest and eager. I love it like a kid playing dress up with his dad. The candy cigarette. All right. This concludes our Beatle section of this episode. As you meditate on that, we'll be right back with more too much information after these messages. My Way entered the Billboard charts in the last week of March nineteen sixty nine at number sixty nine. There you Go, making it nice highest new entry there, making it the highest new entry that week. Six weeks later, it reached its peak at only number twenty seven, nice lower than Sinatra's previous top forty single cycles. This is surprising given the song of that stature, but it's in good company, however. Other beloved classics that missed the Hot one hundred entirely include Robin's Dancing on My Own a Crime, Garth Brooks' Friends in Low Places, Tom Petty and The Heartbreaker's American Girl, David Bowie's Heroes, Jeff Buckley's Hallelujah, The ramones I Want to Be Sedated, Billy Joel's New York State of Mind, Dean Martin's Ain't That a Kick in the Head, Elvis Costello's Alison Cole Plays the Scientist, Grace Jones Pull Up to the Bumper, the Postal Services, Such Great Heights, Weezer's Island in the Sun, and George Thoroughgood and The Destroyers Bad to the Bone. All of those missed the Hot one hundred entirely.

01:05:03
Speaker 3: Kind of amazing to mention Grace Jones and George Thoroughgood in the same breath, especially because.

01:05:09
Speaker 1: Her all observed it better. Well, what's it about pull up to the bumper? Yeah? Isn't it about like going to the car wash? Yes, Jordan, you sweet child, going to a parking garage. My way didn't fit with the spirit of nineteen sixty nine in the United States, Q Along the Watchtower or Fortunate Sun here, but it fared slightly better in the UK, where it peaked at number five and reentered the charts six times between nineteen seventy and nineteen seventy one. All told, its spent by my count seventy five weeks in the UK Top forty, which was a record until it was broken by Wham's Last Christmas in nineteen eighty four, Fairytale of New York by the Poges and Christy McCall in nineteen eighty seven, and All I Want for Christmas Is You in nineteen ninety four. But to this day it holds fourth place on the list of songs that have the most weeks on the Top forty in the UK, and it's the only non Christmas one, so I think it's the only one that earned it, so it would really be number one. That's pretty wild, the number of weeks that song spent in the top forty yeah in the United States, My Way would be Sinatra's last top forty hit until nineteen eighty when he returned with New York New York. But that didn't stop Frank from kind of growing to hate My Way after a while. He performed the tune at his farewell concert, along with ten other songs that he felt summed up his life, which I'm sure was a very high honor for Polanka. But then Sinatra decided two years later to come out of retirement, and his return to the stage meant that audiences would come to expect what had become a signature song, and Sinatra started to resent it. Introducing My Way at a nineteen eighty four concert at Carnegie Hall, he told the audience, we have a song we haven't done in a long time. We're going to drop it in here right now. I think we did it for about ten years and it got to be a real pain and that you know where. During a gig at London's Albert Hall that same year, he muttered under the instrumental outro, I can't stand this song myself. Music critic Will Friedwald explained, or over intellectualized the precise reasons why the bomb bast of My Way might have bothered Frank. In a piece for NPR called a toast to my Way, America's anthem of self determination, he says it's this song that really inflates Frank and inflates his persona to stadium size proportions. Whereas Sinatra's trademark is patented approach. The thing that people like most about Sinatra before My Way was the intimacy, the idea that this is a guy who's experienced life and love the same way as we have. It's kind of the ethos of crooning, really, that kind of intimacy, that closeness. And my Way's not really a krooner song. No, No, it's a belter. It's a torch song. No, it's a barn burner. What's the the old show busy term for what my Way is a dud? No, I'm kidding. Uh yeah, it is funny when you put it like that.

01:08:08
Speaker 3: It's like he's got this you know, huge, sensitive, soft spoke inside. Allegedly, some of his records would have you believe.

01:08:16
Speaker 1: When he's not driving golf carts through the dose, belting about his life of personal triumphs, Sinatra's youngest daughter, Tina, conveyed the two diametrically opposed, but equally true views of the song in two separate interviews. Talking to NPR, she recalled the first time she ever heard her father sing My Way. You could feel the energy, electricity in the room. That song became his that first night. I think it was a song waiting for him to happen. Well, that's true, she said. In a two thousand interview with the BBC show Hard Talk, he Sinatra always thought the song was self serving and self indulgent. He didn't like it. That song stuck and he couldn't get it off his shoe. Frank Sinatra Enterprise as vice president. Charles Pegone meanwhile, soft pedaled Frank's feelings on My Way in an interview with songfacts dot Com. I don't think he hated it as much as he disliked it, he said. I don't think he hated any of those songs. I just think he probably may have gotten tired of people yelling for it and of singing it. It's a fan favorite, but I wouldn't say it's a Sinatra favorite, Sorry, Paul Man. Frank Sinatra would have loved the TikTok generation at his concert Can You Say Hi to My Mom? Punched and beats a fifteen year old girl? Uh So.

01:09:41
Speaker 3: It might not have been a favorite of Old Blue Eyes, but it was certainly a favorite of many other singers. The list of artists who record My Way include Aretha Franklin, Tom Jones, Dion Warwick, and Andy Williams. Elvis Presley began performing the song and concert during the mid seventies, despite Anka's suggestions that the song didn't suit him. It was included in the setlist for his famous Aloha from Hawaii Satellite Concerts, where it was a cute callback to the nineteen sixty timex TV special Welcome Home Elvis, which featured Sinatra and Elvis dueting on a medley of Love Me Tender and Witchcraft. Each man does the other one's songs, and it's kind of cute, despite some of the mean things that frank had said.

01:10:17
Speaker 1: About rock and rolls the genre in the past.

01:10:20
Speaker 3: After Elvis's death in nineteen seventy seven, a live version of My Way was released as a single, going to number twenty two in the US, or higher than Frank's original, which probably chopped his ass A bit. Presley's version is featured in the climax of the two thousand film Three Thousand Miles to Graceland, in which Paul Anka has a cameo as a casino boss who hates Elvis. Anka would say that his view of Elvis's cover has softened in the wake of his death, and now he hears it as a sort of eulogy. The Gypsy Kings recorded a Spanish language rendition of the song called Ami Minerira, and Jay Z interpolated Paul Anka's version of his track I did it my way, but without a doubt and in the popular consciousness, I like to believe. The most famous cover version of the song is the version recorded in nineteen seventy nine by The Sex Pistols for the Julian Temple mockumentary The Great Rock and Roll Swindle.

01:11:13
Speaker 1: Have you ever seen that? Not good? Oh? Not good? I don't even know what it's about. I mean, they're people who would say it. I don't know.

01:11:19
Speaker 3: The Sex Pistols were like a joke band, Like really they literally would not let Sid play bass live, so you were just hearing like cacophonists, drums and really loud guitar. Half the time, and I read a book it's called Twelve Days in America when I was like fifteen. That kind of soured me on them in particular because they were like touring through America and it was just wildly obvious to anyone that Sid was falling apart, literally dying, and they were just so pissed off about the whole thing. And you know, American audiences were really to them. And they only had one American tour, but that was the show that culminated in them in San Francisco when Johnny Rodden took to the stage and just said, everget the feeling you've been cheated after like three songs and walked off.

01:12:00
Speaker 1: Well, and he wasn't a part of this documentary, right, Yeah. My favorite fact about Sid Vicious is that his favorite food is Chinese food, because he said it made pretty colors when he threw up. But you didn't think you'd hear that from me, No, I didn't. But Sid us a famously doomed bass player who would achieve a measure of iconiz What am I looking for? A measure of infamy?

01:12:26
Speaker 2: Yeah?

01:12:26
Speaker 3: But infamy but also like doomed romance. When Alex Cox put out Sid and Nancy and sort of romanticized their disgusting, codependent, drug fueled relationship which ended in murder by the way. So anyway, where was I going with that? Listen to the clash.

01:12:45
Speaker 1: Ah. My favorite thing about Sid Vicious is that I think Freddie Mercury might have been bullshiting when he said this, but he was like, yeah, I met one of them at a party once and I called Sid Vicious Simon Ferocious and he didn't like that very much. Oh yeah, that's incredible. There must be Simon Farotius Darling arguably a better name. Yeah.

01:13:11
Speaker 3: The lyrics were changed by said and his girlfriend Nancy Spongeen to include numerous obscenities that were not you would have a hard time believing. Perhaps in Anka's original, Vicious took a dig at his ex band namee Johnny Rotten by referring to a pratt who wears hats, because Johnny Rotten wore hats and was kind of a dick. On one hand, their version of My Way could be viewed as a mocking bit of punk performance art a la the version of God Save the Queen. But on the other hand, the ethos of the song has a remarkable core of punk rock hutzpah, let's call it. The song appeared on the Sex Pistols album The Great Rock and Roll Swindle, which was issued after two members of the band died. It was the film came out two years after their breakup, so then the album dragged on after Rotten had already left, and then Vicious died, so the song's obviously. His version of the song obviously drew criticism from all the right places. Sid died of a heroin overdose when he was eaten jay Or had just been released.

01:14:13
Speaker 1: On bail for killing Nancy. I think Dorothy Squire's a Welsh singer who features in the film, and she'd had a UK hit the song. Herself was quoted as saying Vicious should be crucified. He should have been crucified before he crucified that song. But hearing from quite a different source. Anton LeVay, the founder of the Church of Satan, had nothing but nice things to say about in his memoir The Secret Life of a Satanist. Arguably the greatest fan of this version of my.

01:14:40
Speaker 3: Way will folks, if you can believe it, Leonard Cohen, who spoke eloquently of it. He said I never liked this song except when sid Vicious did it. Sung straight, it somehow deprives the appetite of a certain taste we'd like to have on our lips. When sid Vicious did it, he provided that other side the song, the certainty, the self congratulation. The daily heroism of Sinatra's version is completely exploded by this desperate, mad, humorous voice. I can't go round in a raincoat and fedora looking over my life saying I did it my way well for ten minutes in some American bar over a Gin and Tonic. You might be able to get away with it. But sid Vicius's rendition takes in everybody. Everybody is messed up like that. Everybody is the mad hero of his own drama. It explodes the whole culture this self presentation can take place in. So it completes the solve the song for me that rules.

01:15:33
Speaker 1: Yeah, just Leonard Cohen to make the sex pistols sound deep. Paul Anka, perhaps unsurprisingly, never heard this sex Pistols version until Martin Scorsese came his way, Oh.

01:15:51
Speaker 3: Jordan, until until old Marty brown eyes. Ah, Martinus Scorsese said, super eyes. I assume spiritually he does Martin Scorsese. He's Italian.

01:16:09
Speaker 1: Have you ever met an Italian with blue eyes? Yeah? Oh, Frank, well yeah, but his family was probably from the North, because that's where all the vampires come from. That's not a real Italian. Yeah, he's got Martin's got beautiful brown eyes. Just get lost in uh.

01:16:27
Speaker 3: About Martin Scorsese got in touch with Paul Ankett to secure the rights for My Way for the closing credits of Goodfellas, the Said Vicious version. Anka tells the story of Marty giving him a call asking permission, and Anka says, I said.

01:16:40
Speaker 1: Great, who's doing it? He said, the sex Pistols? I said who? He said, said Vicious of the sex Pistols. I'm not the front of that line. You know, I'm buried under music. I said, I don't know who the hell that is. So he sent it to me.

01:16:54
Speaker 3: I was jolted. I said no, to be honest. Then I started thinking, who am I to tear down somebody's right in terms of interpreting a song that meant a lot to them. Now I did my homework. The guy went to Paris, got a jazz band. They pulled amps apart to get the sound. I said, this guy is sincere about it. It's the only way he can present it. I called Marty back and told.

01:17:12
Speaker 1: Him do it. I don't care. It's music. It's art. Art has no time.

01:17:16
Speaker 3: You put it in the hands of someone that believes in it. That's just what music is about. To get it out there. Honestly, that's a great take from Paul.

01:17:22
Speaker 1: That's very Paul. He That's exactly how he is. He's a cool guy.

01:17:26
Speaker 3: I want to use the term I need to start using the phrase I'm not the front of that line to talk about things I'm not into.

01:17:33
Speaker 1: He is so many great terms aphrase. Yeah, not at the front of that line.

01:17:39
Speaker 3: Ancher remains very particular about how the song gets used, though Frank's version was included in a two thousand and six episode of The Sopranos titled Mo and Joe, and also in a twenty fourteen episode mad Men called The Strategy, which takes place in nineteen sixty nine. It comes on the radio as ad executive Don Draper, who you may have heard of, stars.

01:17:59
Speaker 1: In the show. You see. It's a play on the phrase admin commercial executives is there nineteen sixties, Who's well, let's say their lives Got a little mad Sundays on TBS right up after Young Sheldon. Yeah, I don't know you would like it all week up and trying to tell you how much I think you'd like mad Men in all weeks and now it's boring.

01:18:26
Speaker 3: Well, you know what I watched last night instead of checking out mad Men? Finally what Hanso the Razor Sort of Vengeance, which is a samurai film from the seventies that is one of the most bad things I've ever seen. As I broke it down earlier. It is seventy five percent sultifyingly dull dialogue about period political drama in the age of Damnos in Japan, about twenty five more percent of gassing up its protagonists dick good, fifteen percent of graphic sex scenes shot in like borderline in psychedelic ways, another five percent of truly poorly choreographed samurai fights. And the entire thing is soundtrack to like a seventies funk soundtrack. Incredible movie. Does that insult you? Does that offend you?

01:19:14
Speaker 1: Yeah? As I mentioned, avoiding one of your.

01:19:18
Speaker 3: Beloved pieces of American art to watch, just garbage, just trash. How does that make you feel? White boy?

01:19:24
Speaker 1: That doesn't sound like trashy.

01:19:25
Speaker 3: It was awful. It's a truly awful film. He has this thing where he's like, he's like, you know, the police have gotten so corrupt that we've been torturing suspects with interrogation techniques, so I have to understand all of them. So he's been like literally torturing himself self, mutilating and everything. And in a prolonged scene, he gets out of this an onsen Japanese spa kind of thing and places his penis on a sort of wooden stand that clearly has been hammed carved with an outline like an indentation for his talking balls, and then proceeds to wail on it with a wooden club. This goes on, and we do see his penis in soft focus and then like a when you say soft focus.

01:20:14
Speaker 1: Ah, and then like a boxer, he then submerges his penis in a bag of rice, which he does by repeatedly from a standing position. And again this goes on. This film really lingers, awful.

01:20:30
Speaker 3: Awful piece of movie, awful piece of cinema, but truly fascinating. Anyway, I prioritize that over your recommendations. Jordan ah, he smiles, but it hurts him.

01:20:44
Speaker 1: I am so mean to you, so so mean. What were you talking about?

01:20:49
Speaker 3: Yeah, so, I guess they hear the song on the radio. It's a whole thing with Peggy who. I'm told they dance the dance alone in their office or something. It's about the death of American masculinity.

01:21:04
Speaker 1: In the inherent trust in American institutions, in the family unit, and yeah, yeah, it's a good time, okay.

01:21:14
Speaker 3: The sex Pistols version has been using some high profile productions as well, including a twenty ten episode of The Simpsons So well Past its Prime Simpsons, and the twenty fourteen episode of Californication. Jordan, I dare you without wikipediaing and I will hear tell me about Californication.

01:21:32
Speaker 1: David the Covny is a college professor who I believe sleeps with a lot of students. That's that's all I close.

01:21:38
Speaker 3: I think he's a became screen Yeah, he's screenwriter and all of his movies are all of his books are named after Slayer albums.

01:21:45
Speaker 1: How is that close? I don't know. I wanted to give you one that's this very kind, that's uncharacteristically kind for a thing I care not a whit about.

01:21:52
Speaker 3: I watch take a season of that show in college because when they we got our internet hooked up at our apartment, they were like, you.

01:21:58
Speaker 1: Get the free show Time. Okay, just watch whatever garbage came on showtime, and this was one of them. Not a good show. Does have Natasha mcelhorn in there as David Decompany's ex wife, and she's.

01:22:10
Speaker 3: A pretty lady. Not a good series. Much like the Samurai movie I was just talking about, which again is called Hanso the Razer. Not to be confused the well, hang on, there's several hans of the Razor movies. It's a trilogy, and I am, of course talking about Hanso the Razor of Justice, not Hanso the Razer The Snare released the following year, or Hanso the Raizer Who's Got the Gold released a year after that.

01:22:41
Speaker 1: I mean, this is interesting to me because Hanso the Razers sort of Justice. The movie you watched was released on December thirtieth, nineteen seventy two, four years after the very day that Frank Sinatra went into the studio to record My Way. See It All connects. Yes, it should probably come as no surprise at this anthem for unre pen individualism has become extremely popular with politicians. For example, my Way was a favorite of former Serbian president Slobodam Melosovich. He often played it in his cell at a loud volume during his trial for crimes Crimes against Humanity in two thousand and two. Are endorsement of this song under if Paul knows that, I hope he's not going to listen to this. He listened to our Taco Bell one. Yeah, that was funny. He wanted to like see what was under my fingernails, so we like listened to shows I worked on with that Like he just googled me, like I didn't send him anything. And the thing he listened to was our hour and a half treaties on Taco Bell And somehow he was like, this is the guy for me. I'll work with this guy. Yeah. On a slightly less genocidal note, although maybe not really, former German Chancellor Gerard Schroeder, Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder requested my Way for his final send off or Zapfren's strike in German prior to the inauguration of Angela Merkel, more than seven million German television viewers watched tears well up in his eyes as a military band saw him off with a version of My Way embarrassing. Not a serious people. You notice I don't like anyone. Yeah, cool, There's going to be a country, a culture you like Mauritana, Mike Ronesia because it's small Eritrea Poienker himself has noticed that this song appears to uh, what I'll generously call a certain kind of person, and this category also includes Vladimir Putin. He's an egomaniac, Anka says. When I went to Russia, he's walking me through the museum and giving me cavia out of tubs. Loving my Way. You've got every malignant egomaniac love it. I don't know. It just did what it did. It has a life. It's like your children, and a fluke of editing that is in no way intentional. You hear that, Apple podcast commentswers. Donald Trump chose this song as the first dance at his presidential inauguration. He danced to it with his wife Malania at the Liberty Ball is second inaugural ball of the evening. Two days earlier, Nancy Sinatra, Frank's daughter was asked on Twitter what she thought of Trump using the song. Her reply, just remember the first line of the song. Those of you not familiar, The first line is and now the end is near, and so I face the final kurt that's ominous? Is she wrong? Speaking of the final curtain? Let's talk about death Baby, We should really take a look at the morbid streak that runs through my way. It is, after all, sung from the point of view of a man looking back on his life, presumably at its end. Hence it's become a very popular song at funerals. In a two thousand and five survey by Cooperative Funeral Care, this song is at the top of the song's most requested at funerals in the UK. Spokesman Phil Edwards said it is that timeless appeal. The words sum up what so many people feel about their lives and how they would like their loved ones to remember them. Nipsey Hustles, we mentioned, had it played at his funeral, and performance artist Marina Bramovich had requested it if he played at hers. And Warren Buffett has recorded his own version himself, featuring new lyrics written by his friend Paul Anka. I believe I think I'm allowed to share this. He's recording a hologram version of himself singing of a song to be played at his own funeral. I hope I didn't just break some kind of serious NDA. Himself is well aware of the song's reputation as a real perspective check on mortality. He says, the content of that lyric hit everybody. Back then, when I wrote it, I saw we were getting into the MEMI me generation. I was only twenty six. Boys scientifically don't become adults until they're thirty. But somehow it hit everybody. People get married to it, get buried to it. Guys write me letters from death row. They say they identify with it. I've sung my Way for Putin for Trump. Narcissism runs rampant, but when it's under control, this is the perfect song in terms of wrapping up one's life. We're all ego driven. Read enough Freud and you get that he's a very interesting, well read, fascinating guy. Yeah, for sure. Many people play My Way at funerals, but a bunch of people have killed each other over My Way. Welcome to the segment we like to call the my Way, MOI. It does, Oh that's good. That's good. No, it's not. No, it is.

01:28:00
Speaker 2: No.

01:28:01
Speaker 3: Go Google, it's weird. There's a whole Wikipedia entry from My Way killings, as well as an entire New York Times article from twenty ten. Within just a decade, it was suspected that at least twelve people were killed in connection to singing Frank's hit song My Way. The song is a phenomenon in the Philippines, where karaoke is something of the national sport. There are upwards of a dozen karaoke bars in each village or barangay. As you hopefully note for all of our people interested in Filipino, they really know how to cook a pig. Yeah they do, yeah, As.

01:28:37
Speaker 1: An article in Esqui. As an article in Esquire Philippines explains, life in the Philippines is hard, especially for the predominant sector of society living under the poverty line. It makes sense that karaoke, which is only about P five per song roughly a dime, became a sweet escape to forget life struggles for a while. It also makes sense why they be angry at people who inadvertently ruined that sliver of peace in that country, as is the case with the US. My Way is one of the most popular songs to sing, and versions of the song have been known to provoke fights at karaoke bars, where naturally there is quite a lot of drinking going on, and occasionally this violence escalates to death. Some people have been killed for singing out of tune, some people were killed for hogging the microphone, and quite a few were killed for singing the song on repeat for hours at end like that. One guy even wrote a Vice article up playing the Boys are back in Town like forty times on a jukebox and John Molaney talking about doing it with What's New pussy Cat. Yeah, there's one thing you can say about this country. No one killed either of them. Yeah. As a result, many bars don't even offer it on their playlists, and even if they do, many customers won't dare to sing the song in public without getting a private room so that their off tuned vocals will not inadvertently cause death. A sill in Filipino Congress.

01:29:56
Speaker 3: Was proposed to set a curfew on karaoke to lessen alcohol related deaths or violence.

01:30:04
Speaker 1: One follows the other. Some critics and sociologists postulated that the triumphalist Sure Bravado of the song paired with alcohol makes for a uniquely combustible situation. Butch Albarasen, the owner of a Manila based singing school, elaborated on this in a twenty ten interview with the Huffington Post. The lyrics, as he explained, evoke feelings of pride and arrogance in the singer, as if you're somebody when you're really nobody. It cover ups your failures. That's why it leads to fight. In two thousand and seven, a.

01:30:36
Speaker 3: Twenty nine year old man singing My Way was reportedly shot to death by the karaoke bars bouncer when he accidentally got off rhythm while singing My Way and struggled to get back on track. When he wouldn't stop singing, the guard pulled out a thirty eight and killed him. Three years later, in twenty ten, a chairman of a Tondo village was shot alongside his aid by motorcycle riding gunmen while singing the song during a Christmas party. The chairman died on the spot, while the aide survived in critical condition. It's said that the killing was possibly politically motivated, but this interpretation is more fun. A man was killed and being very flip. The my Way killing struck again in twenty eighteen when a sixty year old man was stabbed by his neighbor, who was twenty eight, during a birthday party. According to reports, the senior grabbed the mic from his neighbor just when my Way was about to play. A fistfight ensued, and the younger man stabbed the elder, who was pronounced dead.

01:31:36
Speaker 1: At the hospital. Regrets they all had a few. Well, folks, the end is near, and we face the final curtain, but we will end on a quote from not aforementioned NPR piece, a toast to our Way. It's from Jason King, a professor at NYU's Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. He says, you could read my Way as a kind of metaphor for the World War II generation that Frank Sinatra represented, looking back at the twentieth century history in this kind of cosmic defiance, saying, look, I did it the way I wanted to do it, and I did it right. I'm looking back at all this history and I'm okay with it. I won't be I'm okay with this episode. I'll be on my deathbed, still trying to hate, trying to he died doing what he loved, being a hater. Yeah, great song. It's good to try though, it's good to try. It's nice that you're still trying well.

01:32:42
Speaker 3: You know, you get older, your mellow a bit, so you gotta work a little bit harder to put your hating hours in.

01:32:48
Speaker 1: You just lose the fire you had as a young hater. This has been too much information, folks. I'm Alex Haiegel, Jack, and I'm shortan run talk next time. Too Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtog. The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June. The show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan Runtog and Alex Heigel, with original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.