It Was 50 Years Ago Today: “Strangers in the Night” by Frank Sinatra
August 23, 1966
“Strangers in the Night” by Frank Sinatra
#1 on the Media Control Top 100 Singles Chart [Germany], August 6 – September 30, 1966
In 1965, Frank Sinatra celebrated his fiftieth birthday with two albums overtly taking stock of his past: A Man and His Music, a mostly re-recorded retrospective of his biggest hits, and September of My Years, a concept album about aging. Sinatra had never exactly gone away — he spent the early part of the decade starring in a string of movies (mostly Rat Pack throwaways, but also The Manchurian Candidate), and his three or four albums a year regularly charted in the Top 20 — but his pop dominance of the mid-to-late ’50s had run its course.
Sinatra’s semicentennial heralded a comeback, one of half a dozen over the course of his career. September became his first album to go Top 5 since 1961, spawning a Top 40 hit with “It Was a Very Good Year.” More importantly, Sinatra sounded invested in what he was singing for the first time in years: a personal, melancholy reflection on regret and growing older.
Perhaps that’s why Sinatra so resented “Strangers in the Night,” his hatred of it — reportedly calling it “the worst fucking song that I have ever heard” — well out of proportion for a banal love ballad. September was Sinatra making an artistic statement; “Strangers” was one for the dinner show, guaranteed not to make the audience reflect on their life choices nor remind them of their nearing obsolescence. It worked: “Strangers” became his biggest single since the advent of rock and roll and cemented his comeback on the pop charts.
Nelson Riddle, whose sensitive arrangements brought out the best in Sinatra on ’50s classics such as In the Wee Small Hours and Only the Lonely, here layers the record with bombast and floridity. Despite his distaste for the song, however, Sinatra’s a pro – his phrasing is impeccable and his voice in fine form. Nevertheless, his delivery rings a bit hollow, his reading as rote as the arrangement’s emotional signposts (ritardando -> dramatic pause -> key change). The closest Sinatra gets to letting the curtain slip is in the famous “doobie-doobie-doo” outro, a parody of his trademark scatting that ebbs into tuneless blither.
“Strangers in the Night” solidified the comeback instigated by “It Was a Very Good Year,” becoming his first Top 10 hit since 1957 and his first pop #1 since 1955. It topped the Billboard Hot 100 for only a week — albeit long enough to prove he could still compete with whatever noise the kids were listening to today — but reigned atop the Easy Listening chart for seven weeks, and became his most successful single of the decade.
As well as “Strangers in the Night” fared in America, however, it did even better on the international stage. While the song was a hit in other anglophone countries in early summer, topping the charts in England (three weeks), Ireland (two weeks), and Australia (two weeks), “Strangers in the Night” was truly a phenomenon in continental Europe. Although it reached the continental charts later than in the English-speaking world — perhaps because it was promoted in Europe in the wake of its unexpected Anglo-American success — it stuck around far longer, topping the singles charts in Spain for four weeks, in Germany for eight weeks, and in Sinatra’s ancestral homeland of Italy for 10 weeks. (Of the major European markets, only the notoriously self-focused France declined to be swayed by those American doobie-doobie-do’s.)
Sinatra had long been a star around the world, but the European reception of “Strangers in the Night” vividly illustrates the state of pop internationally in the mid-’60s. In Europe, Sinatra was a purveyor of a tradition still very much in vogue: passionate, jazz-inflected love songs boomingly delivered against a churning orchestral backdrop — albeit with an ineffable American cool. (In Germany, it likely helped that “Strangers in the Night” was composed by Bert Kaempfert, one of its native sons.)
In America, however, Sinatra was an old-timer who had managed to break through the rock/R&B stranglehold on the pop charts — somewhat of an outsider, in other words, if the term could be applied to one of the most famous men on the planet. Notably, while he would go on to have hits for years to come, Sinatra would only pull out one more US #1 in the course of his career: 1967’s “Somethin’ Stupid,” a duet with his rock star daughter Nancy.
It Was 50 Years Ago Today examines a song, album, movie, or book that was #1 on the charts exactly half a century ago.
