My Tony Bennett Years

Tuning into Tony ever since the age of three....

On Sunday night, 60 Minutes presented a very moving Tony Bennett segment. There was a bit of hype, as a new duet album with Lady Gaga has just been released and CBS will be airing a special this fall covering Tony’s (probable) final concert, which happened in August, again with Gaga, at Radio City Music Hall. But the focus was on how Tony, afflicted with Alzheimers and now reaching age 95, returns nearly to his old self—almost magically—only when the music comes on. Then he remembers almost every lyric and ways to phrase.

A lot of late-blooming Tony fans have appeared in recent years, but I trace my fandom back 60 years, maybe 70.

In the early 1960s, rock ‘n roll hit a rough patch. This was after the excitement, and innovators, of ‘50s rock had faded and before Motown hit its stride, the British Invasion began, and Dylan went electric. (Yes, we did have Sam Cooke, Roy Orbison, and The Beach Boys, among others.) So Tony, just off his career comeback with “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” filled some kind of gap for me. Why? Maybe because the SF Giants were my favorite baseball team?

Or something else: When I was a lad of about 3, I was already a music freak, constantly spinning tunes on my record player (see below). A parlor trick in our house was for visitors to call out a tune on one of my kiddie records—and then I would find it even though I could not read the label. But within a year or two, a relative from Buffalo gave me as a gift my first adult record—a 78 of a recent hit Tony Bennett single. My memory is that it might have been “Stranger in Paradise” or “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” though perhaps it was Hank Williams’ “Cold, Cold Heart.”

Then Tony’s career faded badly. Obviously, however, like many others, I was ready for his re-emergence a few years later.

After his return to the charts, Tony faded again, and his career had many ups and downs before settling into a consistent “living legend” groove for quite some time, god bless him. Of course, the embrace of young talents such as Gaga, Diana Krall, and Amy Winehouse did not hurt.

Anyway, I thought I’d simply present below a bunch of the songs that brought me back to Tony in the early 1960s, written and arranged by some of the greats. A little trip down memory lane for me (and some of the album covers were once, or are still in, my collection).

“The Best Is Yet to Come”

“When Joanna Loved Me”

“I Wanna Be Around”

“A Taste of Honey”

“This Is All I Ask”

“The Moment of Truth”

“Who Can I Turn To?”

“The Good Life”

“Smile”

“Spring in Manhattan”

And one live, “Just in Time”

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Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including the bestseller The Tunnels (on escapes under the Berlin Wall), the current The Beginning or the End (on MGM’s wild atomic bomb movie), and The Campaign of the Century (on Upton Sinclair’s left-wing race for governor of California), which was recently picked by the Wall St. Journal as one of five greatest books ever about an election. His new film, Atomic Cover-up, just had its world premiere and is drawing extraordinary acclaim. For nearly all of the 1970s he was the #2 editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. Later he served as longtime editor of Editor & Publisher magazine. He recently co-produced a film about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.