I’ve Got You Under My Skin — Frank Sinatra w/ Count Basie & the Orchestra

#365Songs: May 17

My grandmother June gave me Frank Sinatra.

She also gave me Conway Twitty, Anne Murray, Spike Jones, and Roger Whitaker. My god was there was a lot of Roger Whitaker.

June was a funny lady. She’d never talk about herself or her childhood outside Chicago, but she kept mementos. I’d find them around her house, and if I asked she’d always shrug the memory aside. Her favorite phrase was “You don’t want to hear about that.”

For example, she had a small stable of Hawaiian records. Don Ho, of course, but also some of those traditional hula and mele records from the 1950s. A mixture of American singers capitalizing on the fad and some authentic Islander recordings. She honeymooned in Hawaii with my grandfather who’d come back from a Pacific station during WWII. She never talked about it or those Hawaiian records. She never talked about him. (He died when I was only 2 years old.) And I don’t think I ever saw one of those Hawaiian records on the turntable unless I put it there.

She also kept my mother’s abandoned accordion. She moved it five times. We found it, clearing out her basement, preparing for her estate sale. I also found a diary she kept as a teenager. She wrote down all the movies she saw, all the boys she thought were cute, all the times she snuck out to take a trip into Chicago with her girlfriends… to meet a boy.

My floral-print, quilt-happy, fabric-store loving, flavorless pot-roast cooking midwestern grandmother was boy crazy.

I learned more about her in an afternoon, my eyes glazed with tears, reading her diary, than I had in more than 25 years of conversations. I never asked the questions — or at least I never asked the right questions. I didn’t push because I was young and she was an immovable force of nature, always willing to deflect a personal question with sarcasm or a change of topic. “You don’t want to hear about that, but how are you doing in school?”

I never stood a chance.

What I knew — what I always knew — was that music moved her. The records I liked, the records I put on during our Sunday nights together when my parents went bowling. Louis Prima, Dean Martin, Bobby Darin, Frank Sinatra.

Reading her diary, Sinatra came up a few times — it seems she was a little smitten with ol’ blue eyes. Of course I drifted back to those nights with the crooner records. Sunday night television, tuned with a rotary device on the top of the set that adjusted the antenna just so. Every Sunday we watched Married With Children together. And it dawned on me, perhaps for the first time, that she may have only watched that show with me because it opened with Sinatra’s “Love and Marriage.”

Or maybe she liked Al Bundy.

The last time I saw my grandmother was at my wedding — where my wife and I danced together (for the first time as an old married couple) to Frank Sinatra and Count Basie’s rendition of “Fly Me to the Moon” from Sinatra at the Sands.

The truth was that I couldn’t have picked another song. It wasn’t my favorite Sinatra song, but it was the right amount of happy and danceable. It’s a celebration, after all, and that recording hit the right note of optimism. Happy but realistic, owing to Frank’s particular tenor in 1966. Later on, we danced to “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” from that same live album.

Frank released his first recording of “I’ve Got You” on 1956’s Song for Swingin’ Lovers! He never even released it as a single. It was just a B-side album track that grew in popularity over the years until it became an anchor of his set.

Swingin’ Lovers! falls between the Swoonatra and the Chairman of the Board eras of his career. On the original, Frank sounds positively youthful, giving us a broader vocal range. The orchestration is also breezier, opening with a single oboe instead of Basie’s orchestra. Conducted by Nelson Riddle, 1956’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” is a pristine, workmanlike and upbeat affair about puppy love until the string section ushers in Milt Bernhart’s trombone solo, which is beautifully, unassailably, perfectly imperfect.

On the Quincy Jones arranged Sinatra at the Sands, Frank has slipped into the Chairman’s loafers. His vocal range has narrowed and he’s as prone to talking his verses as he is to singing them. The difference is only ten years, but Frank’s ten years of living equals 25 for mortal humans. The Chairman’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” projects differently. Frank’s voice doesn’t suggest innocent, teenage puppy love anymore — it’s weary, almost regretful in its statement of obsession. When he says “Run for cover — run and hide” before Dick Nash’s trombone solo (Bernhart was unavailable for the recording), it’s not strictly playful anymore.

Don’t you know, little fool, you never can win?
Why not use your mentality? Step up, wake up to reality
But each time I do, just the thought of you
Makes me stop just before I begin
’Cause I’ve got you under my skin
Yes, I’ve got you, under my skin

This push and pull of love and obsession and Frank’s hard-lived years of love and women give 1966’s recording a more interesting friction. By this last chorus, he’s serious — don’t get involved — but he’s also knowingly helpless. He’s going to fall in love again and again.

It’s only during these final moments of the song that the Chairman breaks character. You might have missed it, but he’s belting this verse, milking every syllable alongside Count Basie’s blaring big band. It’s a thrilling climax to arguably Frank’s greatest standard.

I listen to Sinatra at the Sands whenever I get a Sinatra craving. Of course, it triggers memories of our wedding. A lot of those memories were captured in photos — but some escaped documentation. Like my grandmother, sitting in her wheelchair drinking champagne while we danced to Frank Sinatra. I hope she realized that playing that song for our first dance was, in my own way, a thank you for sharing the music in her life — and giving me a glimpse of the girl she once was, even if she wouldn’t willingly share the stories themselves.

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