When Frank Sinatra covered Alice Cooper
Frank Sinatra was never a fan of rock ‘n’ roll. When Elvis Presley emerged and started pissing on his patch, Ol’ Blue Eyes quickly condemned the hip-snaking youngster, saying: “His kind of music is deplorable, a rancid smelling aphrodisiac…It fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people.” Those are strong words, but they were fighting a losing battle.
Rock ‘n’ roll was not only here to stay, it was here to get racier. Alice Cooper typified this. That make-up-clad madman was making waves with the sort of antics that made Sinatra’s pomp seem like a hell of a lot more than 25 years ago. The 1960s had done their business, and when 1970 came around, Cooper’s first hit proclaimed that things were going to get even more carefree.
However, their worlds would not remain separate. They were bound by sport and The Friars Club, and weirdly, one night, Sinatra would see that this “deplorable music” had usurped him. As Cooper writes in his memoir: “I remember attending a Friars roast for Muhammad Ali when Don Rickles grabbed me and walked me up to Sinatra. ‘Hey, Frank,’ he said to the Chairman of the Board, ‘tonight I’m sitting with this guy. You know why? Because he fills up baseball stadiums! You play bars.’ Frank laughed and waved him off, with me standing there silently.”
It was an awkward encounter, but in a way, Cooper’s unlikely friendship with these fellows helped the classic entertainers to gauge an understanding of the new ways. Cooper just wanted to have fun. As he says, “Rock ‘n’ roll because rock is the antithesis of politics. Rock should never be in bed with politics.”
So, Sinatra may have been right when he called it a gaudy aphrodisiac, but with tough times around, it was understandable to want to cut loose in the extreme. As Cooper recalls: “Soon I felt totally at home with those guys. I sometimes think they saw the bigger picture of my music, more than a lot of my rock fans.”
Thus, Sinatra softened to rockers when he saw the human side. And that is what led him to cover Cooper one night. “There was a celebrity baseball game,” Cooper recalled. “This little kid was trying to get in the game and they wouldn’t let him. I went over and I took him, brought him in and sat him on our bench. I said ‘You’re our team mascot’. That night I’m in the casino and this guy comes over and says ‘Hey, the boss wants to see you’. I’m thinking like ‘Is this the Costello family?’ And I walked over timidly and there’s Frank Sinatra.”
Sinatra called him ‘Coop’ and purred, “You did me a solid today. That little kid you got in the game was my best friend’s son.” So, the crooned decided to pay Coop back. He invited him to the Hollywood Bowl, and “we go backstage and that’s when the picture was taken and he says ‘I’m gonna do one of your songs tonight’. That was the biggest compliment I ever got in my life. He said ‘You keep writing them kiddo, I’ll keep singing them’.” When Cooper went home and told his mam Sinatra had covered ‘You and Me’, that is “when she finally said ‘Ok, you’re a star’.”
