Frank Sinatra
Sinatra 65

Is the title a play on Capitol’s gazillion selling Beatles 65? Only Frank really knows.

This original tri-color stereo pressing has the sound we look for -- big, rich and tubey.

Frank Sinatra led a double-life as a recording artist in the 1960s. One side of him pursued his vision as the nation’s greatest interpreter of American standards (“adult music,” he called it), while another side of him was obsessed with making records that cracked the Nation’s Top 40 playlist (“kiddie pop”).

This album reflects that attitude, with pop tunes produced and arranged by the proven hit-making team of Jimmy Bowen and Ernie Freeman, and standards arranged by Nelson Riddle, Don Costa, and Billy May. In fact, Sinatra 65 is very much like Softly As I Leave released the year before, a mix of pop tunes and standards, only better.

Two of the songs -- “My Kind of Town,” arranged by Nelson Riddle, and “Luck Be A Lady,” arranged by Billy May, went on to join the short list of Sinatra’s greatest and most recognizable signature songs for Reprise Records. Three of the four songs produced and arranged by Jimmy Bowen and Ernie Freeman joined the list of Sinatra pop tunes that reached the Top 40, a list that includes “Strangers in the Night” and “Somethin’ Stupid.”

All in all, the album makes for an entertaining listening experience, but there’s no mistaking the Bowen-Freeman tunes with their heavy emphasis on beat, countrypolitan cadenzas, and doo-wah choir. According to the liner notes, Riddle, May and Costa employed four-or-five piece rhythm sections, while Bowen-Freeman stacked the deck with ten-or-twelve piece rhythms sections. “That’s the basic difference,” says Bowen, “the big, heavy, thumping rhythm section.” Why the heavy rhythm? “That’s where the feeling comes from,” says Bowen. “Feeling is the most important thing in any record.”

Bowen refers to the tunes he recorded with Sinatra as country music. “Every time you do something with a country song or a country flavor you have a better chance of reaching more people than with any other kind of song.” And there you have it, an album of four Bowen-Freeman countrypolitan tunes designed for the masses, and seven standards that defy time and fickle trends, five arranged by Nelson Riddle, and one each by Don Costa and Billy May.

Ricardo Mio, Amazon

What The Best Sides Of Sinatra 65 Have To Offer Is Not Hard To Hear

• The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
• The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1965
• Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
• Natural tonality in the midrange -- with all the instruments having the correct timbre
• Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space

No doubt there's more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.

What We're Listening For On Sinatra 65

• Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
• Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren't "back there" somewhere, lost in the mix. They're front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would put them.
• The Big Sound comes next -- wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
• Then transient information -- fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
• Tight note-like bass -- which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
• Next: transparency -- the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
• Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing -- an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.

Vinyl Condition

Mint Minus Minus is about as quiet as any vintage pressing will play, and since only the right vintage pressings have any hope of sounding good on this album, that will most often be the playing condition of the copies we sell. (The copies that are even a bit noisier get listed on the site are seriously reduced prices or traded back in to the local record stores we shop at.)

Those of you looking for quiet vinyl will have to settle for the sound of other pressings and Heavy Vinyl reissues, purchased elsewhere of course as we have no interest in selling records that don't have the vintage analog magic of these wonderful recordings.

If you want to make the trade-off between bad sound and quiet surfaces with whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing might be available, well, that's certainly your prerogative, but we can't imagine losing what's good about this music -- the size, the energy, the presence, the clarity, the weight -- just to hear it with less background noise.

Side One

• Tell Her (You Love Her Each Day)
• Anytime at All
• Main Theme From “The Cardinal” (Stay With Me)
• I Like to Lead When I Dance
• You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me
• My Kind of Town

Side Two

• When Somebody Loves You
• Somewhere in Your Heart
• I’ve Never Been in Love Before
• When I’m Not Near the Girl I Love
• Luck Be a Lady