Frank Sinatra "COME FLY WITH ME": Stereo & mono questions (and other neat stuff)..

Or access to Capitol's recording session files!

 

Bump - I'm glad I found this thread! So interesting...deserves to be at the top of the pack!

Steve, it surprises me to hear that no Sinatra sessions during the time Capitol recorded binaural duplicates included those of his singles. When Peggy Lee returned to the label for her first sessions back in (April?) 1957 it was to record singles. The following is from the peggylee.com discography:

Capitol single #3722, 1957, cond. Nelson Riddle
Every Night
Baby, Baby, Wait for Me
Capitol single #3811, 1957, cond. Nelson Riddle
Listen to the Rockin' Bird (Hal Levy / Alice Hawthorne)
Uninvited Dream (Sammy Gallop / Burt Bacharach)

These cuts, believed to have been recorded around the same time as her first Capitol LP after returning from 5 years at Decca, The Man I Love, which Sinatra conducted (but has never been mixed to stereo), were presumably recorded at the album sessions or only a few weeks earlier. The singles, however, appear to have been mixed to stereo and have surfaced in recent Collector's Choice issues, save for Rocking Bird which I've only ever heard in mono. Her next two singles:

Capitol single #3998, 1958, cond. Jack Marshall
Fever (John Davenport / Eddie Cooley)
You Don't Know (Walter Spriggs)
Capitol single #4071, 1958, cond. Jack Marshall
Sweetheart (Winfield Scott)
Light of Love (Charles Singleton)

Also appear to have been mixed to stereo, or in some cases the alternate takes, while the master take has only been heard in mono.

The 2004 Capitol Jazz reissue of her 1958 "Things Are Swingin'" LP includes Fever/You Don't Know as bonus tracks with a note indicating they were recorded during the album sessions, however an "unsatisfactory mix" due to technical limitations resulted in no stereo masters, and thus the two bonus tracks appear in mono.

Then, in 2008 Collector's Choice reissued "All Aglow Again!," a 1960 singles compilation armed with bonus tracks that includes Fever & You Don't Know in stereo, although the mix is less than perfect. Fever is drowned in reverb and lacks the "punch" and excitement of the mono master, and the stereo version of You Don't Know is an accidentally leaked alternate take, also with an unsatisfactory mix in which the bluesy guitar all but disappears while the piano booms forth louder than Peggy herself, completely destroying the mood of the tune. In fact, even Peggy sounds off, as if it was more of a rehearsal or a practice take than it is a true alternate.

What surprises me is that Capitol bothered experimenting with stereo on Peggy's 1957 sessions while they might not have been with Nat and Frank's singles, though it would seem far more likely that they'd put more time, effort and money into their two most cherished artists.

There's also a discography somewhere (although I can't readily remember where), that shows Peggy went into the Capitol tower on more than one day to re-record some of the above mentioned singles, within a span of 2-3 weeks, some resulting in completely different orchestration and delivery. An alternate version of "Uninvited Dream" appears on the 4-disc Peggy Lee Singles Collection by accident, mixed to stereo, featuring a rock & roll doo-wop treatment with male chorus whereas the commercial single is in an intimate jazz setting sung an octave higher!

It really is a mystery. As you've said before, it's anyone's best guess as to what's survived and what has is really by accident, and while some master takes only appear in mono, alternates have been found and mixed to stereo at some point, presumably by Norberg as they have that "vacuumed then reverberated" sound.

 

Here it is - I've found the discography:

http://www.peggyleediscography.com/capitolee2a.html

And quoted is a note about The Man I Love sessions from April 2, 4 & 8 1957:

"On vinyl, the album The Man I Love was originally issued in mono. Reissues in re-processed, electronically channeled stereo did appear during the LP era, but no vinyl in true stereo was ever issued. Among the labels which resorted to "fake stereo" were EMI itself (see 1970 album listed above) and the World Record Club, a British/Australian mail label with ties to EMI.

On CD, the album has appeared only in mono. Although various Japanese CD editions have been advertised as being in stereo, such EMI Toshiba ads are wrong. (Internal data about the electronically processed stereo LPs might have confused the makers of the CDs, leading them to make the incorrect statement. So improved and brightened is the sound quality of EMI Toshiba CDs that also listeners might easily deceive themselves into believing that they are hearing a stereophonic The Man I Love, when in truth they are still listening to a monophonic one.)

Should we then conclude that The Man I Love was taped in mono only, or could it have been recorded in (hitherto unissued) stereo as well? At the present time, there is no definitive answer to this question. Granted that all issued versions are in either mono or fake stereo, a couple of insiders with access to the Capitol vaults have claimed seeing tapes that were labeled as stereo. Their sightings happened decades ago, however, and recent vault searches have not succeeded in locating any stereo items. The tapes could have been mislabeled, of course, and currently lost as a result. By the same token, the insiders could have been mistaken.

It is worth adding that, chronologically, there is no objection to the possible existence of stereo Man I Love tapes. Capitol's earliest-known pop stereo date took place four months before these April 1957 sessions. (It was a Nat King Cole session, dated December 19, 1956.) In the ensuing months, the company followed an experimental, inconsistent approach on this matter: some sessions were recorded in mono only, some in both mono and stereo, irrespective of the artist involved. (For instance, some of Sinatra's and some of Cole's subsequent sessions were exclusively in mono, some also in stereo.) ".

It's worthwhile to note that 5 days later, Peggy returned to the studio for this session:

Date: April 13, 1957 (1:00-4:30 p.m.)
Location: Capitol Tower, 1750 North Vine St., Hollywood
Label: CAPITOL
Capitol Session #4960

Peggy Lee (ldr), David Klein (om), Nelson Riddle (con), John "Plas" Johnson (sax), Robert "Bob" Bain, Jack Marshall (g), George "Red" Callender (b), Ray Sherman (p), Roy Harte, Raymond Martinez (d), Peggy Lee (v), Unknown (bkv)
a. 16840-14 Master Every Night - 2:32 (Scott J. Johnson, Jr., Ronie Rae, Ed Townsend) / arr: Nelson Riddle
USA Government's Navy "Music On Deck" Recruiting Service Series transcription: No. 26 — [AFRS Navy] "Music On Deck" Show
CAPITOL 45: F 3722 — {Baby, Baby, Wait For Me / Every Night} (1957)
► www~ World Record Club reel/LP: (England) Ttp/Tp 352 — The Fabulous Miss Lee [=Capitol Presents Peggy Lee -1/+ 5 tracks] (1963)
b. 16841-rejected Master Uninvited Dream (Sammy Gallop, Burt Bacharach) / arr: Nelson Riddle
unissued
c. 16842-rejected Master Baby, Baby, Wait For Me - 1:57 (Marilyn K. Hooven, Joseph Davis Hooven) / arr: Nelson Riddle
DRG CD: 97484 — JUMP FOR JOY (2009)

Which has been mixed to STEREO at some point.

 

For anyone interested in this, the supplementary page on Lee's 1957 sessions makes for an interesting read:

http://www.peggyleediscography.com/LeeSpec1957Singles.html

It appears that the released material from Peggy's April 13th & 22nd sessions have, at some point, been mixed to STEREO, whereas the singles recorded during her August 30th session have only appeared in mono.

 

For what it's worth, Sinatra's first binaural vocal session was April 10, 1957, for the album WHERE ARE YOU?. (At least, it was the first session for which true stereo masters have been released by Capitol.) That was just two days after the final session for Peggy Lee's album THE MAN I LOVE.

For more details of the Peggy Lee sessions, see my 50th anniversary posts from a few years ago at the Sinatra Family Forum:

Tuesday, April 2, 1957
Thursday, April 4, 1957
Monday, April 8, 1957​

I believe it's been established in one of the Nat Cole threads that Sinatra was NOT (by several months) the first to be recorded in stereo at the Capitol Tower, so the stereo setup was operational long before the Peggy Lee album recordings. Can it really be that the three-track machines were rolling on Wednesday, but not on Monday evening?

​

__________________
~ Frank's Albums

 

Who was the bloke on the album cover? Did we ever solve it? It wasn't Frank was it?

 

No, it's not Frank. It's been suggested that's guitarist Dave Barbour, who was Peggy's ex-husband.

 

I didn't think it was completely solved.Thanks Bob.

 

I believe they hired a male model who resembled Sinatra or Sinatra's movie stand-in as Sinatra himself was unavailable at the time of the photo shoot.

 

Interesting, now we need to find the stand-in or the model

 

Could be he was up in the snack room fiddling with the tempermental three-track tape machines which failed to record the Peggy Lee sessions.

 

Have any pictures surfaced online of the MAN I LOVE sessions? I checked mptv and quickly searched through Google images, and didn't find anything beyond a close shot of Peggy at her vocal mic, and that might not be from these sessions. I'm curious if they are any shots from those sessions that show off the area around and above where Frank would have stood, to see if there might have been the "binaural" mics for the stereo recording in place.

 

I don't that's his head either. Though the part where Sinatra's forceps scars would have been looks like a part that's been brushed out, for whatever reason.

 

I haven't found any. The MPTV shots of Peggy are the closest I've located; a couple of those are included in the session posts at the SFF which I linked [post=6831288]above[/post]. There IS a pencil sketch on the back cover of the LP which shows Peggy, Frank, and some of the orchestra in the background, but it's not nearly detailed enough to show the ork mics. Perhaps there's a matching photo somewhere that was used as a model for that?

​

 

He's got a lot of hair in that sketch (for 1956.) And he's wearing cans. Maybe that was dredged up from the Conducts Alec Wilder sessions, or something.

 

It's been confirmed in the recent biography Fever: The Life & Times of Peggy Lee that the gentleman on the cover of this LP was her current husband of the time, actor Dewey Martin.

 

Here's one shot from those sessions. He actually did have some hair left, enough to make the album sketch plausible.

 

Frank is wearing a toupee.

As to the cover photo the shape of the man's head and his physique is more like Sinatra than Dewey Martin. Martin was broader and had a thicker neck.

Dewey Martin starred with Dean Martin in "10,000 Bedrooms" Dean's first film without Jerry.

 

Thank you, George! I suggested exactly that, when Dave Barbour was mentioned at the SFF. It didn't make sense that Barbour (whom she had divorced in 1951) would be chosen for that pic in 1957. Dewey Martin, on the other hand, was an actor who was perfect for the role and really was "the man she loved" at the time.

 

Makes perfect sense. Rock & roll was in full force upon Peg's to the label, and it seems like the A&R heads may've talked her into trying some doo-wop numbers with sax & male chorus (or perhaps Peggy herself thought it'd be fun).

Either way, the fact that she went into the Capitol tower on 3 different dates to record Uninvited Dream in 3 distinct styles shows there may've been disagreements on the arrangements or perhaps because of the so-called 'technical difficulties' in getting a satisfactory stereo mix with such a small combo.

Either way, The Man I Love sessions were very clearly intended for LP release as it was a concept album planned by Frank & Peggy as they were neighbours and 'close friends' at the time.

So....

where's our three-track masters, Steve?

 

Well that little mystery didn't take so long to solve this time. What shall we come up with next? Anyone?

 

OK...we've gone thru everything else. Let's concentrate on the ear of the man on the LP cover. This is the ear that suffered injury at birth. Most of the lobe was removed.

Discuss.

 

Frank may've been the one to convince Peggy to return to Capitol, for all we know! Secrets taken to the grave, perhaps.

Though it would seem that if they really, really wanted to collaborate a concept album badly enough, it's unlikely it would ever materialize if Peggy had stayed with Decca while Frank was still at Capitol...