Paul McCartney’s song inspired by Frank Sinatra was sent to the Rat Pack member, who thought he was “taking the piss.”
McCartney would suggest some songs he wrote when in The Beatles were influenced by the legendary crooner, though one song left Sinatra horrified. The Wings frontman would write up Sinatra-like songs because the My Way hitmaker was the “height of it all” in music. Times changed, and rock and roll would become a prominent influence on McCartney, but not before he wrote a song in line with the Rat Pack fundamentals. While When I’m Sixty-Four would be the song McCartney wrote to mimic the Sinatra-like sound, a track he wrote for the Fly Me to the Moon hitmaker left the man horrified. Though he could write a Sinatra-like tune, when it came time to actually write for the veteran singer, it seemed McCartney was too far along on his own career path to do Sinatra justice.
It wasn’t just the title of the song, Suicide, which caused problems, but the writing itself. McCartney said: “It was a real early song of mine, and I used to do it as a joke, really. I actually once got a request from Sinatra, for a song. And I spoke to him on the phone and told him about it, ‘Great, Paul, send it along’. ‘Thank you, Frank’.
“And I sent it to him and he thought I was taking the piss. ‘Is this guy kidding?’ You know, sending Sinatra a song called Suicide. He did not get it! But I did think, ‘Oh God, maybe I should have changed it a bit to send it to him’.”
Despite this, the experience would form another song from McCartney, Glasses. The track featured briefly on his solo debut, McCartney. He added: “So I never did anything with it but around the time of McCartney, I was just goofing around on piano and at the end of one of the takes, there was a little bit of tape left, so I just did it and didn’t think to use it because it was Rat Pack, tongue in cheek. But I used that little fragment at the end of one of the tracks, Glasses.”
It may come as a surprise that McCartney was asked to write a song for Sinatra, as the crooner had little positive to say about the group around the time of Rubber Soul. In the hopes of reigniting the flames of his career, Sinatra took aim at John, Paul, George, and Ringo in an interview where he dubbed them “kid singers”.
The journalist who conducted the interview also noted Sinatra’s fondness for the word “bird”, which The Beatles would use in one of their songs as a counter to Sinatra’s comments.
He told the journalist in 1966: “If you happen to be tired of kid singers wearing mops of hair thick enough to hide a crate of melons… ‘Tell me that you’ve heard every sound there is’ and your bird can swing. But you can’t hear me. You can’t hear me.”
The Beatles responded to Sinatra’s comments with a song featured on their masterclass album, Revolver. The Lennon-McCartney-penned song proved a hit at the time, though one half of the writing duo would later sour on And Your Bird Can Sing. The group even quote Sinatra directly in the song, with their lyrics lifting the “your bird can swing” line.
