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Good evening, and welcome. Pull up a stool.
My name is Leo Castagna. I'm 61 years old, I spent thirty-one years filling prescriptions at a drugstore in Mid-City, and for the last twenty-two years I have sung Sinatra every Thursday night in the lounge of the Beauregard Hotel on Canal Street, with my old friend Augie Theriot on piano and whoever Augie can talk into playing bass that week. My granddaughter set up this page for me for the first anniversary, back in May, and now I can't stop fooling with it. She says I have to tell you it is "under construction." Consider yourself told. |
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The night he died
It was a Thursday. May 14, 1998. Half the country was home watching the last episode of Seinfeld, so the room was about empty, and I sang my regular set to the bartender, two conventioneers from Memphis, and a couple on their honeymoon who asked for "The Way You Look Tonight" three times. I closed, like always, with "One for My Baby." Out in Los Angeles, while I was singing, he was dying. He was 82. I didn't know till I turned on WWL the next morning with my coffee. I sat in the kitchen for an hour. My wife Rosalie came in and turned off the radio and put on In the Wee Small Hours and sat with me. That's a good wife. In the days after, they lit the top of the Empire State Building blue for him, and out in Las Vegas the big hotels on the Strip dimmed their lights. The next Thursday at the Beauregard we had a full house, and nobody asked for anything but Frank. |
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The career, in one set
Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, December 12, 1915, the only child of Sicilian and Genoese parents. (My own people came from Sicily to the French Quarter in 1904, so I always figured we were practically cousins.) The band years. Sang with Harry James in 1939, then with Tommy Dorsey from 1940 to 1942. The story goes that he learned his breathing from watching Dorsey play the trombone, holding a phrase forever without seeming to take a breath. That is the whole secret, friends. It's the breathing. The Voice. On his own by 1942. The bobby-soxers screamed and fainted at the Paramount Theater in New York. My mother was one of them, in 1944, and she never let my father forget it. The comeback. By the early fifties everybody said he was finished. Then he won the Academy Award for playing Maggio in From Here to Eternity, signed with Capitol Records, met an arranger named Nelson Riddle, and made the best records anybody ever made. I'll fight you about that. The Chairman. Started his own label, Reprise, in 1960. Sang with Count Basie. Retired in 1971, got bored, came back in 1973. Kept singing into the nineties. His last concert was in Palm Desert in 1995. The honors. Kennedy Center Honors, 1983. The Presidential Medal of Freedom, 1985. The Congressional Gold Medal, 1997. He is buried in Cathedral City, California, and his stone carries the title of one of his songs, "The Best Is Yet to Come." |
| Leo's Ten: records every home should have | ||
| 1. | In the Wee Small Hours Capitol, 1955 |
Riddle. Ballads for three o'clock in the morning, when she's gone and the ashtray's full. Put it on alone. I mean it. |
| 2. | Songs for Swingin' Lovers! Capitol, 1956 |
Riddle again, the other side of the coin. "I've Got You Under My Skin" and that trombone solo by Milt Bernhart in the middle. If you don't grin, see a doctor. |
| 3. | Come Fly with Me Capitol, 1958 |
Billy May's big brassy charts. A trip around the world, and you never leave your chair. |
| 4. | Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely Capitol, 1958 |
The saddest record ever made. "One for My Baby" is on it, the song I close with every week. A bartender, a piano, and a man who won't go home. |
| 5. | Ring-a-Ding-Ding! Reprise, 1961 |
The first one on his own label, with Johnny Mandel arranging. You can hear how happy he is to be the boss. |
| 6. | It Might as Well Be Swing Reprise, 1964 |
With Count Basie's band and a young Quincy Jones writing the charts. "Fly Me to the Moon" the way God intended. |
| 7. | September of My Years Reprise, 1965 |
Gordon Jenkins' strings. Frank turning fifty and looking back. "It Was a Very Good Year" gets me every time now that I'm older than he was when he sang it. |
| 8. | Sinatra at the Sands Reprise, 1966 |
Live in Las Vegas with Basie, Quincy conducting. I was in that room one of those nights in 1966, a skinny kid from New Orleans in a rented tux. I have never been the same. |
| 9. | Strangers in the Night Reprise, 1966 |
He didn't care for the title song, so I'm told. Buy it for "Summer Wind." Best song for a slow drive along the lakefront ever recorded. |
| 10. | Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim Reprise, 1967 |
Bossa nova, soft as a whisper. Frank almost never sang this quiet. Rosalie's favorite, and she is right about most things. |
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If you sing him yourself
Every Thursday some young fellow comes up after the set and asks how to sing like Sinatra. You can't, and neither can I. But here's what twenty-two years of trying has taught me: ♪ Learn the words till you could say them as a speech. He told the story first and sang it second. ♪ Breathe where the sentence breathes, not where the bar line says. ♪ Stay a hair behind the beat on the swingers. Let the band pull you. ♪ Don't do the voice. Nobody wants a Sinatra impression. They want you, meaning it. ♪ And for heaven's sake, don't sing "My Way" at a wedding. |
