“Watertown”: A Frank Look at Lost Hope

I’ve never been a Frank Sinatra fan (that’s why I have to wear a disguise in public), but way back when, Jim Knipfel made me a worn-down tape copy of the Watertown album from 1969. It’s not like anything else Sinatra did ­– not like anything anyone else did either ­– and it fascinated me from the first listen.

I bought the CD remaster recently (without the unfortunate and spurious later addition of “Lady Day”), and I’m still hooked. But it’s not something I can listen to in just any mood. It’s not something anyone should listen to while depressed or going through one of life’s ordeals.

It’s pigeonholed as a “concept” album, but it’s more like a short story set to music. You don’t know where it’s headed in the first couple tracks, and it takes awhile to get the whole picture. It’s mostly an interior monologue by a deserted husband, left to care for his two young sons, yearning for healing, filled with a loss that seldom consciously penetrates an otherwise unpeopled emptiness.

Watertown was a commercial bust for Sinatra, his only album that didn’t make Billboard’s top 100. Some have suggested that the timing was wrong – at the end of the upbeat ‘60s, a “downer” album lad to land like a lead duck.

But no, it isn’t that. This album would never have been popular, never will be popular. It’s simply the bleakest look at a slice of personal life that’s ever been recorded.

As a husband and father, I was amazed from the start at how surely the music and lyrics caught the sense of suppressed heartache that comes with a broken marriage, especially one that involves kids. At that time I seldom checked credits, so I assumed it was put together by an older songwriter who had gone through his own personal hell. But no, it’s the collaboration of two guys, Bob Gaudio and Jake Holmes, then about 30 years old, who seem, at least from Holmes’ interviews, to have just decided to do this kind of something together.

Holmes, who supplied the lyrics, mentions having lost a child in his first marriage, but he puts no emphasis on it. But that’s like the lyrics themselves, which simply state, with little or no emphasis, which only makes the underlying vacantness more prominent.

In talking about “What a Funny Girl (You Used to Be),” a song that reminisces on better times, Holmes suggests that “I was trying to put a little bit of sunlight everywhere I could.” If so, it’s the unflinching sunlight of the desert. I see it more as a slow drizzle, which can be pleasant if you’re in a “Singin’ in the Rain” mood, but can turn your clothes and mind to mush if you’re not.

There isn’t a bad or even a weak song in the 10 recorded, each supporting the other, each growing from the one before, each part of a magnificently horrific whole. Standouts (maybe) are “I Would Be in Love (Anyway),” with remnants of romance serving as pseudo-solace, “Elizabeth,” in which the loved one’s name becomes a mantra of loss, and “She Says,” where the narrator for the first time talks directly to his audience, the only place with a sense of hope returning.

I won’t say anything about the final track, “The Train.” This is, really, a story, and giving away the ending would be an unforgivable spoiler.

So much for the composition. What makes it all work is a letter-perfect and, I suspect, purely instinctive enveloping by Sinatra. This husband is not just left alone but emotionally eviscerated. It’s tempting to describe his singing as “bland,” because in a sense it is. But it’s the blandness of having everything removed, of internal numbness. He lives in a world of gray shades, a wasteland of stark but almost meaningless shapes from the past. He can’t fall any further, he’s at the bottom. Ghouls may roam, but they can do him no harm; there’s nothing left that could possibly harm him.

Maybe, as Holmes suggests, this isn’t what he saw when he wrote his lyrics. It’s certainly what the cover artist, Ove Olsen, heard. His stark pen and ink drawing, on a tan/mauve background, shows three tiny figures dwarfed by an architectural arabesque of stark emptiness, somewhere between Kafka and and a meticulous town planner’s leached design.

I don’t suppose I’ve made Watertown sound like a must-listen. But it is. Albums came no better than this, and no others were quite like this one. If it chronicles emotional devastation, it does so with an unerring sense of truth. I don’t think you can ask for more than that.

by Derek Davis

Previous
Previous

They Always Help Hitler

Next
Next

Izzy and Moe