The Shocking Reason Why Frank Sinatra Mocked And Called The Beatles:"Kid singers with mops of hair

 

The Shocking Reason Why Frank Sinatra Mocked And Called The Beatles:"Kid singers with mops of hair

The legacy that The Beatles garnered during their prime may as well be etched in stone now. For all of the older generations crying that the Fab Four may not have been proper musicians, the enduring power of the John Lennon and Paul McCartney songwriting partnership made for an impressive run of classics still unmatched in the pop sphere. Even in their prime during the 1960s, not everyone was a fan of what the Liverpudlians had to offer.

Long before rock and roll started, Frank Sinatra had been making soft hits for nearly a decade. Having already been an acclaimed actor and singer, Sinatra had pioneered the idea of the mainstream album with In the Wee Small Hours, drafting a concept record long before McCartney had the idea of making a set of songs about an imaginary bandleader named Sgt Pepper.

When rock and roll first started to rear its head, though, Sinatra had no time for the likes of Chuck Berry in the late 1950s, remarking, “Rock and roll smells phoney and false. It is sung, played, and written, for the most part, by goons. It is the most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has ever been my displeasure to hear.”

That didn’t stop The Beatles from indulging in Sinatra’s easy-listening hits. When dreaming up ‘When I’m 64’, McCartney originally composed the song as a Frank Sinatra tune, adopting the same jaunty rhythm commonly used by ‘Old Blue Eyes’. When Sinatra saw that he had competition, though, he didn’t bother watching it.

When talking about any competition with The Beatles in Esquire, Sinatra didn’t hold back in defending his reign as the king of sophisticated music, stating in a press release for A Man and His Music, “If you happen to be tired of kid singers wearing mops of hair thick enough to hide a crate of melons…it should be refreshing.”

For a while, Sinatra did live up to the potshots he was taking, though, consistently nabbing the Grammy Award for ‘Album of the Year’ away from The Beatles come award season. However, as the band started to make the studio their home in the late ‘60s, Sinatra would finally be dethroned by The Beatles, with Sgt Pepper winning the coveted Grammy award.

That said, things seemed cordial on The Beatles’ front. McCartney would eventually write a song during his first solo sessions titled ‘Suicide’, which he intended to give Sinatra to sing. John Lennon also had his fair share of cribbing from Sinatra, writing the song ‘Nobody Loves You’ from Walls and Bridges as a homage to the music that Sinatra was best at.

Even though Sinatra never completely warmed up to rock music, he did have a bit of a change of heart with The Beatles’ music, counting George Harrison’s ‘Something’ among the greatest love songs ever written. Regardless of Sinatra’s position as a music legend, there was no one doubting the influence The Beatles had in just under a decade. By the time they had split up in the early 1970s, Sinatra’s traditional approach to music had quickly become a thing of the past.