Frankie Laine Didn't Give A Damn

[JSngry]

Rockin' was a Columbia record, with the concept of remaking songs that had been hits on Mercury. Laine had a clause that stipulated that he could not re-record any Mercury songs for 6(?) years after leaving the label. So, he was already "rockin'" more than most of his ilk. A LOT more.

As for the title, well, ok. But...Laine was already a star, so he didn't need any extra pull to sell records then. I think it shows how, at the time, nobody would be surprised that Laine "rocked" in a non-teen way. The teen market was not the only one that was evolving. Society as a whole was evolving, and Laine was having a hand in that.

And don't sell Paul Weston short. That dude could write!

I'd never make the case that Frankie Laine was some sort of lost genius or anything. But I will make the case that he was working in a niche that he created, a conduit of sorts, a transitional music that poked holes in the wall around White Pop. Current history overlooks this, but after having actual;ly listened to the music, I don't think that's right. There's a body of work there that still sounds good today. And a lot that doesn't. But it's better to actually listen to the records and decide for yourself than it is to just swallow the whole narrative whole.

That does not suck!

[Teasing the Korean]

@JSngry, Just curious, where does Jackie Paris fit into your chronology relative to Frankie Laine, in terms of jazz/swing vs. white pop?

[JSngry]

Jackie Paris seems to me to be more of a Billy Eckstine (on his most stretchy vocals) or ballad/early Sinatra than Frankie Laine. But I don't consider myself to be an expert. I do know that I like Jackie Partis quite a bit, that I can say with certainty!

One thin I it seems like though, is that most white pop/jazz vocalists were doing is, in fact, more of a Eckstine/Sinatra ballad style. In fact, Laine was the only one I can think of (off the type of my head) who was engaging in all-out/overt swing material to any meaningful degree in the early 1950s. Sinatra came along and switched all that over a few years later, but the records show that Laine was there first and quite comfortably there at that!

 

1951:

Hey, that's just good, period.

I think a big thing to consider is that Laine was very influenced by Black pop music, especially in his earliest days. Once stardom  came (and Mitch Miller) came, he would record literally anything. But something like this (and there's a good (enough) amount of it) show a certain bounce that the other guys - including Sinatra - had to figure out (if they ever did).

[gmonahan]

1 hour ago, JSngry said:

Jackie Paris seems to me to be more of a Billy Eckstine (on his most stretchy vocals) or ballad/early Sinatra than Frankie Laine. But I don't consider myself to be an expert. I do know that I like Jackie Partis quite a bit, that I can say with certainty!

One thin I it seems like though, is that most white pop/jazz vocalists were doing is, in fact, more of a Eckstine/Sinatra ballad style. In fact, Laine was the only one I can think of (off the type of my head) who was engaging in all-out/overt swing material to any meaningful degree in the early 1950s. Sinatra came along and switched all that over a few years later, but the records show that Laine was there first and quite comfortably there at that!

 

1951:

Hey, that's just good, period.

I think a big thing to consider is that Laine was very influenced by Black pop music, especially in his earliest days. Once stardom  came (and Mitch Miller) came, he would record literally anything. But something like this (and there's a good (enough) amount of it) show a certain bounce that the other guys - including Sinatra - had to figure out (if they ever did).

Nice record, but what's the story with the super old-style Columbia label on that 78?!

 

[JSngry]

It was a European version. British maybe?

In the US, you could have 78 and/or 45!

Land of the free, baby! 

[Teasing the Korean]

16 hours ago, gmonahan said:

Nice record, but what's the story with the super old-style Columbia label on that 78?!

The label that we know as Columbia in the US was CBS in England.  The older, pre-1948 Columbia Records was part of EMI in the UK, hence the older Columbia label.  UK EMI Columbia used the logo with the two 16th notes well into the 1960s if not later.

17 hours ago, JSngry said:

Jackie Paris seems to me to be more of a Billy Eckstine (on his most stretchy vocals) or ballad/early Sinatra than Frankie Laine. But I don't consider myself to be an expert. I do know that I like Jackie Partis quite a bit, that I can say with certainty!

One thin I it seems like though, is that most white pop/jazz vocalists were doing is, in fact, more of a Eckstine/Sinatra ballad style. In fact, Laine was the only one I can think of (off the type of my head) who was engaging in all-out/overt swing material to any meaningful degree in the early 1950s. Sinatra came along and switched all that over a few years later, but the records show that Laine was there first and quite comfortably there at that!

 

1951:

Hey, that's just good, period.

I think a big thing to consider is that Laine was very influenced by Black pop music, especially in his earliest days. Once stardom  came (and Mitch Miller) came, he would record literally anything. But something like this (and there's a good (enough) amount of it) show a certain bounce that the other guys - including Sinatra - had to figure out (if they ever did).

Are you familiar with Frank's Columbia album Swing and Dance With Frank Sinatra from 1950?  It sounds in some ways like a precursor to what he would do at Capitol, but he's not really there yet, not fully formed.  Frankie Laine seems much more in his element doing this kind of stuff than Sinatra did concurrently.  A few years and one record label later, though, that would change, at least to these ears.

[JSngry]

I am familiar with most of Sinatra's work, including that one. 

I'm probably in the minority on this, but I don't think that Sinatra really got a handle on swinging until his Reprise years. His Capital records themselves swung, and he himself often did, but there's always these little choppy spots. Maybe that was just his way. But the older him and his voice got, the fewer choppy spots there were. And of course, the ballads were and are beyond category.

But the Frankie Laine/Paul Weston records bear hearing. They seem to have been forgotten. And Weston shows a really deep feel for swinging arrangements that I guess I didn't realize he had. My bad!

And...you put Laine & Weston & Jo Stanford & Mitch Miller and shit can get downright crazy:

 

[Teasing the Korean]

37 minutes ago, JSngry said:

I am familiar with most of Sinatra's work, including that one. 

I'm probably in the minority on this, but I don't think that Sinatra really got a handle on swinging until his Reprise years. His Capital records themselves swung, and he himself often did, but there's always these little choppy spots. Maybe that was just his way. But the older him and his voice got, the fewer choppy spots there were. And of course, the ballads were and are beyond category.

I get what you're saying, although I think that he swings on "Come Dance with Me," on Capitol.  That said, my two favorite "swinging" albums of his are "Swingin' Brass" with Neal Hefti and "Ring a Ding" with Johnny Mandel, both early Reprise albums.  There is a narrative suggesting that Sinatra's Capitol years are unequivocally his best.  I would say while Capitol is more consistent, the highs were higher on Reprise.  Unfortunately, the lows were lower also.  But those who ignore the Reprise era are missing some of his best albums.

[Big Beat Steve]

3 hours ago, JSngry said:

And...you put Laine & Weston & Jo Stanford & Mitch Miller and shit can get downright crazy:

 

Not nearly as crazy as when you put Jo Stafford with Red Ingle! 😁

 

[Rabshakeh]

It seems to me that a lot of the comments above assume a gradualist approach to the development of popular music, rather than what I think is the more accurate step based approach.

I really don't think that it matters whether Frankie Laine "loosened up" white pop music.

I like that Jazz Spectacular record, but I think that the style of white pop music which Laine did or did not loosen up was, whatever way you look at it, one of the dead-est of evolutionary musical dead ends.

"Traditional pop" or "Pre-Beatles pop" - Really, I'm not sure whether Frankie Laine and his ilk actually made any lasting impact on white pop music.

I enjoy Laine like I enjoy Sinatra (or like I would have enjoyed Sinatra, had Sinatra had a record with Budd Johnson playing wicked solos). But it didn't go anywhere.

Edwardian banjo music probably had a bigger impact on the post-1964 pop scene.

What loosened up white pop music was white bands adopting R&B. Nothing to do with this lot.

Edited March 31 by Rabshakeh

[JSngry]

17 minutes ago, Rabshakeh said:

What loosened up white pop music was white bands adopting R&B.

Oh really?

 

White people didn't just all at once flip a switch and decide to play black 

[Rabshakeh]

9 hours ago, JSngry said:

Oh really?

 

White people didn't just all at once flip a switch and decide to play black 

These clips are just great. Watched them three times. 

[DrJ]

Interesting discussion. My thing with Frankie Laine is trying to get past this stuff, which I heard as a young kid via my parents' record collection: 

I still remember many of the lyrics, whole verses taking up perfectly good space in my gray matter where something important might otherwise live.

Like, say, "Wanted Man":

Bullet in my shoulder

Blood, runnin' down my vest

20 in the posse

And they're never gonna let me rest

'Til I became a wanted man

I never even owned a gun

But now they hunt me like a mountain cat

And I'm always on the run.

🤠

The earlier work posted in this discussion is certainly miles better - but I had to forcefully push away a strong reaction to get to the point of giving it a fair hearing - sometimes those kinds of associations can almost ruin a thing for a man! 

Keeping an open mind and with 50+ years distance, I have to say that earlier material in this discussion, at least some of it, yeah - pretty good! "Wonderful, Wasn't It" - hmmm, I like that one quite a lot. He sounds (to me) rather Nat Cole-ish on that one, the phrasing and yes "the bounce" - and even the voice quality in places - much rougher/rawer but it's in there - I haven't yet read the whole discussion, was Cole an acknowledged influence? Or maybe Charles Brown? 

Edited April 2 by DrJ

[JSngry]

Nat and Laine were actually buddies in the early L. A. days. In fact, some people thought that "Frankie Laine" was a pseudonym for Cole, on Laine's very first Atlas 78s.

Here's an example of early Laine that is QUITE Cole-ish:

And then there's this, composed by Laine & Carl Fisher, just a beautiful song:

I like Rawhide and it's kin.

But I like this stuff a lot more 

[gmonahan]

They continued to be friends. Laine appeared on Nat's short-lived TV show to support him. Thanks to TTK for the explanation on that label. I had no idea!

 

 

[medjuck]

19 hours ago, DrJ said:

I haven't yet read the whole discussion, was Cole an acknowledged influence? Or maybe Charles Brown? 

I mentioned in a earlier post that I'd heard an interview with him where he talked about being influenced by Charles Brown, but in fact it may have been Cole. Everyone was influenced by the King Cole Trio including Charles Brown. 

[JSngry]

7 hours ago, gmonahan said:

They continued to be friends. Laine appeared on Nat's short-lived TV show to support him. 

 

 

[Teasing the Korean]

@JSngry With regard to Laine "...working in a niche that he created, a conduit of sorts, a transitional music that poked holes in the wall around White Pop,"  where do Louis Prima and Sam Butera - as vocalists, specifically - fit into the discussion?  While I'm no expert on New Orleans music or culture, I do know that at the time Prima was coming up - and maybe Butera, who was 17 years younger than Prima - Italians were considered second-class citizens in New Orleans society, and they often hung out and gigged with African Americans.  And then there is the whole complex web of New Orleans accents, which include what we may think of as African American dialects spoken by "white" residents.  

I realize that this example is several years after the Frankie Laine cuts you posted, but if one were not familiar with Louis Prima or Sam Butera, one might assume that the vocalists on this track were African American.

 

[JSngry]

Prima was doing it in the Swing Era, and Buters was already doing R&B before joining Prima.

Neither of them sound "black" to me (nor does Laine), they just sound New Orleans. Then again, I heard all sorts of Southern accents - including Black - growing up, and have continued hearing them all my life.

To that end, both Prima and Buters didn't really bring anything "new" to their arena (even if it was an arena they pretty much created, the rowdy lounge band). Their miracle afaic is that it was ALL New Orleans, and it would seamlessly switch from a bouncy shuffle to a raucous honkfest to a boisterous collective improv and then back again without blinking an eye.

Laine, otoh, early on, did, imo.He didn't "sound black", but his phrasing was certainly not "white". In HIS arena, that was new (unless I'm forgetting somebody?), that "bounce", not just on swing tunes, but also on ballads.

I read somewhere, a liner notes maybe, that Laine got to be called "Mr. Rhythm" because of his body movements during the course of a song. Supposedly there were fans who would offer verbal encouragement to him as he did this. Shades of JATP?

What is interesting to me is that before he had a hit with "That's My Desire", he seems to have been working in jazz clubs. Then all of a sudden he was a pop star, and stayed one.

It was an interesting time, contrary to many conventional narratives.

[Chuck Nessa]