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Sinatra Song of the Day
by John Kander and Fred Ebb

All this week we've been marking the tenth anniversary of Frank Sinatra's death by celebrating not only Sinatra the singer but also the Sinatra songbook, beginning on Monday with "It Was A Very Good Year", continuing on Tuesday with "I'll Never Smile Again", Wednesday with "I've Got You Under My Skin", Thursday with "Witchcraft" and Friday with "Somethin' Stupid". Today, we wrap up the series with a song that for the last 20 years of his career gave Frank's live shows a wallop of a big finish:

Start spreading the news
I'm leaving today
I want to be a part of it...

The composer who provided Frank Sinatra with that surefire showstopper was John Kander. He was born in 1927 – in Kansas City, Missouri, was educated at Oberlin, and then headed for New York, New York. He wanted to be a part of it and he has been - ever since 1957, when he was hired as rehearsal pianist for West Side Story. Two years later, he was the dance arranger on Gypsy, and a couple of years after that he began writing music with a young lyricist called Fred Ebb. Four decades later, their second show Cabaret was virtually a permanent fixture on Broadway and in London, and the film version of Chicago won 2002’s Best Picture award.

At the peak of Chicago’s success on stage and screen, Fred Ebb died of a heart attack, ending the last monogamous writing partnership on Broadway - George and Ira Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Kander and Ebb. ''One reason why they've avoided the career slumps that almost everyone else has had is simply that they've stayed together,'' Alan Jay Lerner once told me. ''A composer and lyricist grow together.'' Lerner had hits like My Fair Lady and flopperoo one-night stands like Dance A Little Closer, the kind of mega-disaster that Kander and Ebb, Broadway’s lone surviving words-and-music team, almost uniquely managed to steer clear of. ''Even when we write lousy, Fred and I always have a good time,'' Kander said to me a few years ago. And you can kind of hear that in the music. Sinatra didn't sing a lot of their songs - although "Maybe This Time" from Cabaret was part of the act for a while - but the one he settled on really stuck. Today we celebrate what is without doubt Kander and Ebb's biggest hit, one of those rare songs that (almost) everyone knows:

If I can make it there
I'll make it anywhere
It's up to you
New York, New York!

It’s a school of song that’s quintessentially American. As Will Friedwald writes:

It exemplifies the anger and the optimism, the ambition and the aggression, the hostility and the energy, the excitement and the excrement that is New York... 

“The excitement and the excrement” is a droll way of putting it: Kander and Ebb’s valentine to “the city that doesn’t sleep” is both a cliché and a triumphant vindication that rises above it. Fred Ebb’s words are the last from a lyric written in conventional American songbook style to become part of the vernacular. I especially love a column my old colleague at The Independent Miles Kington wrote a few years ago. Even in a denunciation of the buoyant razzle-dazzle optimism of American showbusiness, the headline was a kind of sour tribute to its potency:

There are lots of New York songs, and at least two others in the preferred Post Office city-state formulation. Gerard Kenny’s “New York, New York” (“so good they named it twice”) post-dates Kander and Ebb, and this one, by Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, pre-dates them by three decades:

New York, New York
A helluva town
The Bronx is up
And the Battery’s down…

There’s no copyright in title, though I think you’d have to be pretty demented to write a new song called “White Christmas” or a novel called Gone With The Wind. Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn wrote a song called “Time After Time” in the Forties and so did Cyndi Lauper in the Eighties, which irked Sammy Cahn no end. So, to avoid (or at least mitigate) offence to the man who composed the show on which John Kander got his Broadway break, the new “New York, New York” is officially called “Theme from New York, New York”. It was an assignment song. In 1977, Martin Scorsese was making a film about the big band era, with his on-screen alter-ego Robert De Niro as a touring musician, a sax player, one of the boys on the bus - like young Frankie himself in his days with the Tommy Dorsey band. The gal was Liza Minnelli, still hot(ish) from Cabaret and a seemingly shrewd choice for playing the band’s canary. That made it all but certain that the songs for the film would be by her off-screen mentors Kander and Ebb. It wasn’t a musical, but Scorsese needed a handful of numbers to establish the period and relate to the story, and in particular they needed a big title song to be “written” by De Niro’s and Minnelli’s characters in the course of the plot. The saxophonist was married to the vocalist, and he writes a tune, and several scenes and dramatic vicissitudes later she puts a lyric to it.

So Kander and Ebb went off and wrote a “New York, New York” number, and they played it for Scorsese and his two stars. Fred Ebb was a lethal song demonstrator, in the same class as Sammy Cahn. With Johnny at the piano, Freddie would put his heart and soul and guts into the song, and if he couldn’t sell you a new number nobody could.

And they thought it had gone over well.

And then De Niro beckoned to Scorsese. And, as Fred Ebb put it to me, “they stood up and took one of their famous Italian walks. And we could see but not hear De Niro talking.”

“And he was also gesturing,” said Kander. “Which we knew was not a good sign.”

When the Italian walk was over, De Niro and Scorsese came back to the couch and tried to explain it tactfully. Marty explained how much they liked “And The World Goes Round” and the other songs but that this song was the title song and “Bob thinks” it needs to be really strong and “Bob wonders” if maybe they wouldn’t mind trying again and Bob this and Bob that. “And we were kind of insulted,” chuckled Kander, “at an actor telling us how to write a song. But he turned out to be right.”

“Even though,” added Ebb, “we wrote the new song in a kind of rage.”

It began with a vamp, one of those little musical intros that, when they work, really kick-start a song. But nobody vamps like John Kander, the champ of the vamps. “With Cabaret, we were trying to find the piece, to write our way into it,” he once said to me. “The first thing we wrote was 'Willkommen' and the very first thing that ever happened was that little vamp.” It was the same with Chicago and “All That Jazz”. And, trying to write a big New York song that would be big enough for Robert De Niro, Fred Ebb tossed out a possible first line of lyric:

Start spreading the news.

John Kander liked it and out of the “start sprea-ding the” bit drew a vamp - the ''dum-dum-da-de-dum'', the all-time great killer vamp that’s recognized by the world as a kind of five-note abbreviation for the spirit of New York. That’s why Kander loves vamps: they’re a good way of letting you know whether you’re tonally on track. “When you find something you like, it tells you about the direction you want to go in. I don’t mean you go through the process in a doped-up haze, but you have to trust your unconscious.”

And from that vamp they never looked back. For a song that to its disparagers sounds like just a big up-and-at-‘em showtune, it’s actually quite unusually structured. Fred Ebb opted for a “Sunny Side Of The Street” rhyme structure – ie, rhyming not in couplets or quatrains but across the phrases:

Grab your coat and get your hat
Leave your worries on the doorstep
Just direct your feet
To the sunny side of the street

Can’t you hear that pitter-pat?
Oh that happy tune is your step
Life can be so sweet
On The Sunny Side Of The Street…

Likewise:

Start spreading the news
I'm leaving today
I want to be a part of it
New York, New York

These vagabond shoes
Are longing to stray
And make a brand new start of it
New York, New York…

It was a song that had everything going for it - if only the film hadn’t flopped. But it did, and, although “New York, New York” got a Best Song nomination, it lost to “You Light Up My Life”, which may be the silliest Oscar verdict in that category since “They Can’t Take That Away From Me” lost to “Sweet Leilaini” 40 years earlier.

What transformed the song was Sinatra. In 1978 he was playing a blockbuster engagement at Radio City and asked Don Costa to put together an overture of New York songs – “Autumn In New York”, “Sidewalks Of New York”, and so on and so forth, concluding with Kander and Ebb’s “New York, New York”. And right on the opening pow! of the vamp Frank would enter, wait for the cheers to die down, and, as Will Friedwald put it, “start spreading the news”.

The news spread pretty quickly. “Man, this thing is getting big,” he said to his pianist Vincent Falcone after the Radio City shows. “We have to take it out of the overture.” So they moved it down the running order and made it a stand-alone number, sometimes with the “other” “New York, New York” (from a Sinatra movie after all) serving as a kind of verse, sung slowly, dramatically and very sparely underscored:

New York, New York
A helluva town
The Bronx is up
And the Battery’s down
And the people ride in a hole in the groun’
New York, New York!
It’s a…
Helluva…
Town! 

Wham! On “town” the band would wallop in Kander’s famous vamp and the crowd would go wild. The song never looked back, although Fred Ebb had a few misgivings about Sinatra’s reworked second chorus. In the Liza original, rather than a straightforward reprise of “I want to wake up in a city that doesn’t sleep/And find I’m king of the hill, top of the heap”, Ebb modified it:

I want to wake up in a city that doesn’t sleep
To find I’m king of the hill
Head of the list
Cream of the crop
At the top of the heap!

That “crop”/“top” internal rhyme is typical of Ebb’s unobtrusive professional craftsmanship. Sinatra changed it to:

I want to wake up in a city that doesn’t sleep
To find I’m A-number one
Top of the list
King of the hill
A-number one! 

“I didn’t write ‘A-number one’,” said Ebb. “I don’t even like it. But I like Sinatra singing ‘New York, New York’, and I love having a song that everyone knows.” It got better. In his last years, Frank would blast the final word of that middle section, and then cripple up and clutch his side and howl “Ow!”, or “Every time I hit that note, I get a big pain right here” or some such. Eventually, his version of the song consumed Liza’s. On their tour together in the late Eighties with Sammy Davis Jr, the concluding medley was strung around a joke about Sam trying to avoid letting Frank and Liza sing “New York, New York”, until eventually he forgets himself, launches into “There’s A Boat That’s Leaving Soon For New York”, and bang on the “York” the familiar vamp comes blasting in. (Mel Torme built a whole concert medley round the vamp.) But it was Frank’s version, with Liza in effect sitting in on his cover of her song. In a guest shot on “Arrested Development”, Miss Minnelli hears Tobias Funke singing “New York, New York” and remarks dryly that when it comes to that particular song “everybody thinks of Frank Sinatra”.

Indeed. The song was taken up as the anthem of the New York Yankees: When they won, they played Frank’s version. When they lost, they played Liza’s. That’s one of the all-time greatest musical jokes. Miss Minnelli, alas, didn’t care for it, and insisted that after winning games they played her record. So they said nuts to that, lady, we won’t play your version at all. Liza subsequently and very wisely relented. But even that bizarre showdown captures the swagger and attitude of both the city and the song.

It’s one for the ages now, thanks to Sinatra and a song that, from that killer vamp, sounds as if it was built for him. It wasn't, any more than was his first "New York, New York" anthem - the Bernstein, Comden and Green opener from On The Town. But, between the first one on screen and its successor on stage, he has a hammerlock on both. In 1993, I interviewed the Broadway director, George Abbott, then aged 106, and asked him about working on On The Town half a century earlier, and in particular about the Bernstein “New York, New York”. “I always thought that was the best New York song,” said Mister Abbott. “But I must confess that new one is better. The one the little girl sings.”

The “little girl”, Liza Minnelli, had been given her big break by Mister Abbott on Flora The Red Menace in the early Sixties. It was Liza’s first show, and Kander and Ebb’s. But you can forgive Abbott, at 106, at still thinking of a star he’d directed when she was 17 and he was already in his 70s as a “little girl”.

“Oh,” I said, “you mean, ‘start spreading the news’? You think that’s better than your ‘New York, New York’?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you ever tell Leonard Bernstein that?”

“No.”

“Probably very wise.”

As for Sinatra, the last words he ever sang in public were the final "New York" of "New York, New York" at his 80th birthday in 1995: