Sinatra! Deep Cuts, Part 1 - continued
“There's a Flaw in My Flue: Closer to You"
(continued from yesterday)
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, Brother 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 - continued
“There’s a Flaw in My Flue: Closer to You”
AND NOW WE RESUME -
Sinatra, who at two different points in his career had served on Your Hit Parade, got the joke. He heard the 1949 broadcast; the song might have also been brought to his attention by his best buddy, Jimmy Van Heusen. In a 1990 interview with the New York Times, one of the very few and very last interviews he ever gave, Sinatra told the story to William Kennedy. “Frank [...] said he'd heard the song on Bing Crosby's Kraft Music Hall [sic] radio show, a segment called 'The Flop Parade,' and he thought it was funny; what's more Bing had never recorded it.”
Sinatra first performed “There’s a Flaw in my Flue” on his CBS TV series, The Frank Sinatra Show, of 1950-1952, toward the end of the first of two seasons, on March 30, 1951. Don Ameche presents “Flaw” to him as a straightforward love song, telling him, “it’s a very tender thing.” Sinatra sings it more or less straight, but with at least a hint of mischief in his eye if not his tongue quite in his cheek. Some in the audience are hip to what’s going on, you can hear at least a few of them chuckling. Sinatra’s vocal is one of his better performances from this low period, especially on this show, which didn’t always bring out the best in him.
[To watch Sinatra sing “There’s a Flaw in my Flue” on his TV show in 1951, click here.]
Five years later, Sinatra was in an entirely different place career-wise. In 1956, the remarkable, underappreciated album Close to You was the culmination of a series of sessions Sinatra had been making since 1945, with his first album, The Voice. These chamber music-style used a combination of a string quartet, occasional classical woodwinds, a four-piece rhythm section, and guest horn soloists. Close to You represented the chamber music ideal now expanded into a full-length, 12” hi-fi LP. It’s a stunningly beautiful album - both Chuck Granata and I rhapsodize over it in our respective books, Sessions with Sinatra and Sinatra! The Song is You, with its masterful arrangements by Nelson Riddle and thoroughly superb singing by The Voice himself.
By 1956, Sinatra had not only established his resurrection, and, with the help of Capitol Records, re-established himself as one of the pre-eminent forces of the music business; he was already beginning to be dissatisfied with his professional relationship with that corporation. “There’s a Flaw in My Flue” was kind of a barbed joke that he played on the big-wigs at Capitol.
As William Kennedy continued, “So Frank - who felt that the executives at his record company never really listened to his songs - wanted to make that point; and he asked Nelson Riddle to orchestrate ''Flue'' for an opening slot in an upcoming record.
''When they played it,'' Frank said, ''one of the record company guys says to me, 'What is this?' and I said, 'It's a love song.' I said, 'There's a flaw in my flue, beautiful.' And so it flawlessly became, and Frank made his point doubly, with a leg pull that stands as a comic gem.”
You’d think they would have been paying attention especially since, as Kennedy states, “There’s a Flaw in My Flue” was originally the opening song on Close to You, or at least on the test pressing that producer Voyle Gilmore sent to the label’s top brass, presumably including president Alan Livingston - a real music man whom you’d think would have noticed.
In any case, Sinatra himself vetoed the test pressing, and had the production remastered with only twelve songs. “There’s a Flaw in My Flue” was one of three tracks recorded at the string quartet sessions that didn’t make the album, alongside Sammy Cahn’s “If It’s the Last Thing I Do” and Rodgers & Hart’s waltz “Wait Till You See Her” (from their triumphant final show, By Jupiter). Even so, one interesting consequence of the recording - even though it wouldn’t be issued for many years - was that in 1958, Burke & Van Heusen officially published “There’s a Flaw in My Flue” as sheet music, via their own “pubbery,” as Billboard would have said, based in the Brill Building.
In 1973, “There’s a Flaw in My Flue” turned up as part of a bonus disc, on a set licensed from Capitol Records EMI by the Longine-Symphonette society. The main package was a 10-LP set titled Frank Sinatra: The Works and the song in question was included on a bonus disc called Sinatra Like Never Before. The track achieved wider release when it was included in a 1978 release from British EMI titled The Rare Sinatra. The liner note text by Alan Dell, who credits the lyric to Sammy Cahn, is worth including. (I almost don’t blame him for missing the essential joke, since Sinatra & Riddle perform it so sincerely - unlike Crosby & Merman, who have their tongues deep in their cheeks. And I don’t mind the miscredited lyric. But I still can’t figure out what he means by “tempted to flush,” unless it’s a reference to another love song parody, “Flushed from the Bathroom of Your Heart” by Johnny Cash.)
In 1987, all fifteen tracks from the Close to You sessions were finally issued all together on the CD edition, now titled Close to You and More. This must be what prompted William Kennedy to ask Sinatra about the song in 1990. Even though the song has now been in general circulation for 35 years, strangely enough no major artist has come back to it - with the exception of Bob Dylan, on his three-disc package Triplicate (2017) a collection of standards and Sinatra songs.
There’s no other way to conclude this piece, except with Johnny Burke’s deathless closer, “so darling adieu - 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
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.
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.
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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You are correct! I meant to mention that in the essay; the first time I heard the song, on THE RARE SINATRA (this would have been about 1984) I myself had to look up the word "flue" in a dictionary.
My "hobby horse" is that Flue is not a bad song at all. An intentionally humorous song, of course. Just as Everything Happens to Me is intentionally humorous. I can't see it leading off the Close to You album, but I definitely think it was worthy of inclusion, and oughtn't have been cut.