“Kid singers wearing mops”: Frank Sinatra and The Beatles’ strange feud
By the mid-1960s, Frank Sinatra was desperately trying to revitalise his career. His voice was still beautiful and beloved, yes, but he was no longer exciting, new and certainly not hip. Counterculture had taken root, and as he was getting older, his listeners were getting older, too, and he didn’t really have a place in it. Instead, he watched bitterly from the sidelines and seemingly one day decided to take a swipe at the kids at the top: The Beatles.
In terms of Sinatra’s many feuds, this one ranks low. But there is a pattern of him picking fights in the countercultural world as the middle of the decade seemed to come along with a strange annoyance that ‘Ol’ Blue Eyes’ didn’t have a place there. He would wind up marrying Mia Farrow, a soon-to-be darling of the blossoming countercultural film scene, only to break it off when she found that success and he stood outside of it, still in a more vanilla world.
It would lead to one of his more melodramatic feuds as the singer is rumoured to have tried to set the mafia on The Mamas & the Papas after John Phillips and Farrow started an affair. Apparently, Sinatra got his friends in the mob to deliver the musician a warning. “John told them all to fuck off,” his friend Bill Cleary recalled, “We did, however, buy guns after that!”
Sinatra didn’t go quite so far with the Fab Four. Luckily, there were no gang wars or mob bosses involved. Instead, there was a war of words launched by a press release Sinatra had sent round in 1966 when he was still trying to reignite himself. Or really, it started with a throwaway comment during an interview with Esquire. “Bird,” the journalist wrote, “is a favourite Sinatra word. He often inquires of his cronies, ‘How’s your bird?'”
Then came the press release. It read, “If you happen to be tired of kid singers wearing mops of hair thick enough to hide a crate of melons… ‘Tell me that you’ve heard every sound there is,’ crooned the world’s greatest kid singer in his enigmatic reply, ‘and your bird can swing. But you can’t hear me. You can’t hear me.'”
You can hear the music, right? That iconic guitar riff, the upbeat energy of that Revolver track singing, “And your bird can sing”?
That was the band’s comeback. After being brushed off as “kid singers” with mop tops, the band set about writing their own response, which they boldly titled, ‘And Your Bird Can Sing’. At one point, they basically directly quote Sinatra, singing, “You tell me that you’ve heard every sound there is / And your bird can swing, but you can’t hear me”, mocking his dismissal of their impact by releasing a talent-fueled track that would only keep the band’s domination going. It’s a fun way to take a jab at the old singer, who was simply jealous that he just couldn’t gain footing in the counterculture wave.
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