Monday, Jan. 15, 1973

The Saloon Singer

Part singer, part entertainer, part actor, the successful pop crooner spends the beginning of his career creating his own role and the remainder interpreting it. His songs are mini-dramas about love and sorrow, good times and bad, and if he is good enough, he can convince his audience that he has experienced them all. The great crooners--from Bing Crosby to Dick Haymes to Frank Sinatra--have usually required wide exposure in cinema or TV to get their total message across. Tony Bennett, today's outstanding exemplar of the line, has been very happy to remain, in his words, "just a saloon singer."

Bennett's notion of saloons must be pretty grandiose; in recent years he has sung at such places as Carnegie Hall and the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, the Empire Room in Chicago, the International Hilton in Las Vegas, the White House in Washington. From his club and concert engagements alone, he grosses $1,000,000 a year. In addition, he turns out a steady-selling LP approximately every six months. For that matter, he even makes occasional movie or TV appearances; last week he was taping a TV special in Hawaii.

Bennett has never lost his hold on the vast Middle American public that likes to hear standards done with melodic ease and a supple beat. Recently he left Columbia Records, the label for which he had sold millions of disks over 22 years, because "they wanted me to start singing Top Ten songs. I'm just not that kind of singer."

Bennett's new label, MGM Records, gave him 10% of its jazz subsidiary, Verve Records, and the right to produce his own recordings. His first LP for MGM, The Good Things in Life (adorned, as many of his albums are, with one of his own primitive-style paintings), confirms the wisdom of letting him follow his well-tried approach.

Vocally, Bennett sounds like a rather reedy clarinet next to the French-horn sound of the older crooners, but he compensates for this with a cunning sense of phrasing that has made him a favorite of many musicians (among those who have happily accompanied him are Count Basic, Woody Herman and Duke Ellington). On a ballad like It Was You, he has a knack of letting the song rise lazily above him like cigar smoke. On standards like Mimi and End of a Love Affair, he is in the jazzy, hold-your-hat tradition. No less an authority than Frank Sinatra once called him the best singer in the business--and now that Sinatra has retired, he may well be. "He's the singer who gets across what the composer has in mind, and probably a little more," said the Voice.

Big Boost. Born Antonio Benedetto 46 years ago, the son of Italian immigrants, Bennett grew up in a slum in New York City. One of his first professional bookings was as a singing waiter in a tough Italian restaurant on the Queens waterfront. "When the customers asked for a song, you knew it or else," he recalls. After a stint (1944-47) with the infantry in Germany, Bennett studied drama and music at New York's American Theater Wing. In 1950 he got a one-week engagement warming up the crowd for Pearl Bailey in Greenwich Village. When the week was over. Bailey told the manager: "Keep that boy on. I like the way he sings."

Soon afterward, Bob Hope took Tony along on a tour. Bennett recorded his first single for Columbia--Boulevard of Broken Dreams, which sold 500,000 copies, phenomenal for a new artist. Next came a string of million-sellers like Because of You and Cold, Cold Heart, and then near oblivion as Elvis Presley and his fellow rock 'n' rollers swept everybody under. But Bennett had staying power. In 1962, he surfaced again with / Left My Heart in San Francisco. "That song is the greatest boost that city ever had," he says.

It hasn't been bad for Bennett either. Partly as a result of it, he now maintains lavish apartments in both New York and London, and has the dubious distinction of being able to pay his first wife more in alimony and child support than most men make: $92,500 per year. Now that rock has lost its hard core, Bennett can afford to crow a bit over having outlasted Simon and Garfunkel and the Beatles. As he puts it: "The pros always come back."

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