“A piece of shit”: The classic song Frank Sinatra hated with a passion
It’s not outrageous to posit that Frank Sinatra couldn’t have had many artistic regrets, despite his oscillating personal life.
One of popular culture’s ultimate icons, the crooning maestro is so inextricable from the golden age of entertainment that one of his many nicknames was the ‘Chairman of the Board’. One of the world’s best-selling artists, he’s shipped roughly 150million records to date, which brings into focus his imposing cultural stature.
Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, Sinatra enjoyed one of the most storied lives in music history, brimming with soaring highs and crushing lows, complete with A-list friends, famous loves and no end of adventures unfathomable to us laypeople. There are even those rumoured links to the mafia. It’s fair to think that a life so well lived would rarely feature mistakes.
For obvious reasons, many believe Sinatra to be an ardent student of music. However, he rarely studied the craft, adding another layer to his complex character. Luckily for him, he was blessed with an exceptional degree of natural ability and charm, which allowed him to reach the heights that no one before him had. Sinatra provided the soundtrack as America was ascending on the world stage and asserting itself as a superpower.
Ironically, for someone who rarely concerned himself with practising his craft, over his lengthy 54-year career, Sinatra released 59 studio albums and was a master of proliferation. His output was so extensive that he released an unprecedented 297 singles in his time, a feat likely to go unrivalled in popular music. This extensive collection features hits such as ‘New York, New York’, ‘That’s Life’, ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ and ‘I’ve Got the World on a String’, and all did their bit to change popular culture and cement Sinatra as a hero of the 20th century.
The leading figure of the swing era, his segue from seedy New York clubs to the shining auditoriums of Las Vegas remains one of American music’s ultimate success stories, setting a precedent for all subsequent showmen such as Elvis Presley.
Whilst Frank Sinatra’s reputation precedes him, and he will forever be discussed as one of modern entertainment’s leading lights, he hated one classic song with a passion. He detested it so much that he wasn’t afraid to let people know. This was the 1966 number one, ‘Strangers in the Night’, a number also notorious for its authorship dispute. As well as criticising fans who requested the track at shows, Sinatra would begrudgingly introduce performances of it by saying: “Here’s a song that I cannot stand.”
Part of the frustration stemmed from the fact that the song became one of the biggest hits of his later career. ‘Strangers in the Night’ topped the Billboard Hot 100 and helped reintroduce Sinatra to a younger audience in the mid-1960s, at a time when rock and pop were beginning to dominate the charts. In many ways, it revived his commercial standing, even if he personally felt little connection to the material.
That contradiction only seemed to deepen Sinatra’s dislike for the tune. While audiences embraced the sweeping orchestration and romantic sentiment, he felt the song lacked the sophistication and emotional nuance he valued in great standards. To Sinatra, it represented a rare moment where popularity triumphed over taste, even if the rest of the world heard something entirely different.
Why did Sinatra hate the song so much? In Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan’s 2006 biography, Sinatra: The Life, it is recorded that he loathed it so much that he even called it “a piece of shit” and “the worst fucking song that I have ever heard”.
Shockingly, and showing the dark side of the star, he was hesitant to record it because he said it sounded like it was “about two fucks who meet in the bus station bathroom”. Despite his shocking homophobia, though, it gave him his first number-one hit in 11 years.
Listen to ‘Strangers in the Night’ below.
