Sinatra! Deep Cuts, Part 1

“There's a Flaw in My Flue: The All Time Flop Parade"

The last two weeks of September are always pledge weeks at KSDS jazz radio San Diego, and the station’s majordomo I always try to come up with a strong theme for my Saturday series Sing! Sing! Sing!, and it’s usually something Frankish.  This year I decided to do a show called “Sinatra! Deep Cuts,” meaning rare and, usually, wonderful tracks.  I consulted a specific group of FS loving friends whom I refer to as “The Frank Tank” (as distinct from “The Nat Pack” and “Ella’s Fellas”) whom I shall credit below. I also decided to start a series of Substack posts to some of these tracks.  Yes, I know I have already written a 500-page book on the subject of Sinatra and his recordings, which I subsequently expanded into a 600-page revised edition, and I have also devoted large portions of at least four other biggish books to Sinatra.  Is there more to say about him?  You be the judge! 

(PS: I’m doing another all-Sinatra show for KSDS Sing! Sing! Sing! at the end of October. It’s going to be a whole program of Sinatra singing songs by Jule Styne, which in honor of Halloween we are titling, “A Tribute to Frank-and-Styne.”)

Special thanks to “The Frank Tank”:  Kenneth “Hutch” Hutchins, Michael “Contentious” Kraus, Anthony Di Florio III, Steven Kramer, Rob Waldman, and Chuck “Pops” Granata.  (And thank you to Stan Edwards, for the above joke, hey.)

Sinatra! Deep Cuts, Part 1

“There’s a Flaw in My Flue: The All Time Flop Parade”

“There’s a Flaw in My Flue” is the original Sinatra bonus track. This has got  to be the major instance when the singer went to the trouble of working out an arrangement for a song, then singing and recording it, knowing all the while he was not going to release it, and that, essentially, that nobody would ever hear it.  

Even heard today, it’s one of the more mysterious items in the Chairman’s canon; at least one knowledgeable commentator described it as “a plaintive, wistful ballad.” In a sense it is, at least if one doesn’t actually listen to the lyrics.  To hear the words is to realize that it’s actually an incredibly subtle parody of a plaintive, wistful ballad.

“There’s a Flaw in My Flue” derives from the relationship the great songwriter Jimmy Van Heusen enjoyed with both of the two most essential singers of the 20th century, Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra.  Crosby, on his long running radio series - in 1949 it was Philco Radio Time - had been doing a recurring gag routine.  For almost 25 years, Lucky Strike Presents Your Hit Parade was one of the most popular shows on the air, first on radio and then television.  The basic idea, which took hold to the point that it was echoed deep into the rock n’ roll era and even today, was that the most popular songs of the week (through a combination of record sales, sheet music, and radio performances) were presented in a countdown fashion, from ten down to one.  

“The All Time Flop Parade” was an overt parody of the Hit Parade, with Crosby and his guests - among them Judy Garland, Dinah Shore, and Ethel Merman -  mimicking the often-sanctimonious attitude and high-energy tempo of the Lucky Strike program.  I keep hoping some ambitious producer will gather all of the Flop Parade segments - there are about seven, from 1947 to 1950 - onto a single CD at some point.  The earliest Flop Parade I’ve heard comes from Command Performance (#129), an AFRS production from 1944, with Crosby presiding over Judy Garland and the Andrews Sisters; some of the songs include “Yachting,” a very catchy spoof on a sentimental waltz called “Hammacher Schlemmer, I Love You” and “Yes We Have No Bananas” sung backwards. 

The idea probably originated with Crosby’s team of radio writers, but it’s also something that the mischievous Irish leprechaun, lyricist Johnny Burke, might have come up with.  It’s certainly a concept that Burke and his partner Jimmy Van Heusen, could sink their teeth into.  Not all the composers of the Flop Parade songs have been identified, but the majority are believed to be by Burke & Van Heusen.

Interestingly, the song wasn’t actually published until 1958, two years after Close to You. Burke and Van Heusen - who had already stopped working together - went through their Brill Building-based “pubbery,” Burke & Van Heusen Music Company, 1619 Broadway.

“There’s a Flaw in my Flue” was introduced on the Flop Parade segment of Philco Radio Time on March 23, 1949 - along with “Rhythmitis,” “Grace,” “On A Rainy Day,” and “Silver Coated Moon.”  It was the second of the Flop Parade segments to costar Ethel Merman with Crosby, and they sing “There’s a Flaw in my Flue” as a duet. It was part of Burke’s brilliance that these gag numbers are so well-crafted that they could, in fact, pass as actual hits. (I’ve always felt the same way about Stan Freberg’s comedy productions - you wonder why he didn’t turn his creative energies to the more lucrative practice of making hits.)  On the February 25, 1948 Philco show, Crosby sings another parody of a contemporary love song titled “Tortured” - he credits the composer as “Miss Bessie Patterson of Tucumcari, New Mexico.” (And he doesn’t inform us that she is, in fact, Mrs. Johnny Burke.)  The bridge goes as follows:

I may say I feel all right, but I feel all wrong.
My heart is crying its eyes out, as hearts will do in a song.

“There’s a Flaw in My Flue” draws on tropes that go way back all over the history of popular song lyrics; late at night, the protagonist is reminiscing over youth and lost love, essentially the same idea as Van Heusen’s classic “Deep in a Dream” and even “Stardust.” This hero is reminiscing in front of his fireplace - shades of “Smoke Dreams” (from After the Thin Man) by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown, and “Smoke Rings,” the theme song of the Casa Loma Orchestra, music by arranger Gene Gifford, lyrics by the brilliant Ned Washington. Famously, the best known song to use smoke as a visual element in a love song is “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes,” by Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach, from Roberta (1933), which is directly referenced in “Flaw / Flue.”  On the March 23, 1949 Philco show, Crosby introduces the song as being “written by a chimney sweep who was thrown out of work when his employer switched to natural gas.”

To be continued 

Here's the original Bing Crosby version (with Ethel Merman). This is full flop parade segment of March 23, 1949:

Or if you want to skip directly to “There’s a Flaw in My Flue”:

I used to sit by my fireplace
And dream about you
But now that won't do
There's a flaw in my flue

Your lovely face in my fireplace
Was all that I saw
But now it won't draw
My flue has a flaw

From every beautiful ember a memory arose
Now I try to remember and smoke gets in my nose

It's not as sweet by the unit-heat
To dream about you
So darling, adieu
There's a flaw in my flue

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Special thanks to Elizabeth Zimmer, not only  for proofreading, but for reminding us about following epic piece of 20th century poetry by Ogden Nash:

A flea and a fly in a flue
Were imprisoned, so what could they do?
Said the fly, “let us flee!”
“Let us fly!” said the flea.
So they flew through a flaw in the flue.

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Sing! Sing! Sing! : My tagline is, “Celebrating the great jazz - and jazz-adjacent - singers, as well as the composers, lyricists, arrangers, soloists, and sidemen, who help to make them great.”
A production of KSDS heard Saturdays at 10:00 AM Pacific; 1:00PM Eastern.
To listen to KSDS via the internet (current and recent shows are available for streaming.) click here.
The whole series is also listenable on Podbean.com, click here.

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Four Episodes of Sing! Sing! Sing on KSDS (88.3 San Diego) spotlighting the life and legacy of Tony Bennett: 

SSS 59 2023-08-12 Tales of Tony

SSS 58 2023-08-05 Tony Bennett sings the George & Ira Gershwin Songbook

SSS 57 2023-07-29 Tony Bennett - Van Heusen, Burke, Cahn, Styne, Sondheim, Comden & Green 

SSS 5 2022-07-30 Tony Bennett @ 96: The Johnny Mercer Songbook

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