by Tony Bennett
It’s hard to attract attention at the MTV Video Music Awards, but our little bit turned out to be one of the highlights of the whole show. At the reception afterward when kids came up to me, I half expected them to ask, “What are you doing here, Grandpa?” Instead they said, “Hey, that was really cool. What’s your next album, man?” I happened to be walking by a room where the Red Hot Chili Peppers were giving their after-show interview to the Entertainment Tonight news crew, and I stuck my head in the door and said, “Hey! My mom has all your records!” That really cracked them up.
A week later two programmers from MTV called and said, “We have some news for you: We’re going to add ‘Steppin’ Out’ to our Buzz Bin.” Buzz Bin was considered the hippest show on MTV, usually reserved for “cutting edge” rock acts. It was by far the single best place to be in the MTV universe. So “Steppin’ Out” was a bona fide hit. Thanks to MTV, I finally fulfilled my dream of breaking the generation barrier.
But I hadn’t yet performed in front of a rock audience.
WHSF, a rock radio station in Washington, D.C., invited me to perform at their Christmas festival, so I went down to D.C. with the trio. While we were backstage, we could hear the audience cheering, waiting for the show to begin. Danny stood in the wings along with a Columbia rep and everybody crossed their fingers and wished me luck.
I walked out in front of five thousand screaming kids and hit them with “Old Devil Moon,” a favorite opening number. By the time I got to the section where I hold the word “love” for something like thirty-two bars, I had them in my pocket. They were cheering, “Tony! Tony! Tony!” It was pandemonium, one of the most amazing things I’d ever experienced. A couple of days later I did a show on Long Island for the popular rock radio station WDRE. I was on the bill with the groups the Cowboy Junkies, the Teenage Fan Club, and Squeeze, and as I was walking through the backstage area to my dressing room, they were all sitting down to dinner. When they saw me come through, they all stood up and started clapping. I couldn’t believe it! These weren’t just kids in the audience, these were rock musicians, and they were showing me their respect. That really got to me. A lot of the musicians asked me for my autograph, and I ended up sitting down and talking with them for a while before I went on stage. That night was really something else. My acceptance by the young people of today is such a change from what was happening to me in the 1960s. Back then, I was told that I had to change my music in order for the kids to accept me; today I’m encouraged to be myself and the kids will come to me. You can’t imagine how rewarding this is, and how much it affirms what I fought so long and hard for. People sometimes criticize the kids of today, calling them “slackers,” or “Generation-Xers,” but I don’t understand that way of thinking. Kids today are just like kids from any generation: intelligent, open-minded, and excited about life. They don’t want to be pigeon-holed when they listen to music, or anything else—they want to be free to experience everything, and choose for themselves, it was never the kids who asked me to change; it was those people who were interested in telling the kids what they were supposed to like. Well, young people have accepted me all over again, and I couldn’t be happier. I did a series of those Christmas shows all across the country and I got the same response wherever I played.
All this attention encouraged MTV to offer me another opportunity to appear on the network, this time to do MTV Unplugged. Unplugged was a series where rock superstars like Eric Clapton and Paul McCartney appeared in front of live audiences without electric instruments. We taped the show on April 12, 1994. The trio and I really felt the energy in the room, that night. It galvanized us.
As a special surprise I invited a couple of my favorite contemporary performers to sing with me: k. d. lang on “Moon-glow” and Elvis Costello on “They Can’t Take That Away from Me.” I consider Elvis to be a very talented songwriter and a dynamic performer. I first worked with him back in 1983 when he and I were both guests on one of Count Basie’s final TV appearances, k. d. lang has a magnificent voice. She thrills me every time I hear her sing, and I really mean it when I describe her as being in the same class with Edith Piaf, Hank Williams, and Billie Holiday.
It was a triumphant evening for me in every respect. We released an album of the evening’s performance, and Tony Bennett: MTV Unplugged became the biggest-selling album of my entire career. It was also the second-most-watched episode in the entire history of MTV Unplugged, In fact, the president of MTV, Judy McGrath, told me recently that the Whitney Museum selected my show out of all of them to be included in their contemporary television and media collection. What a great honor.
In early January 1995, Danny and I were out having breakfast when Sylvia Weiner, my press agent extraordinaire for the last thirteen years, and Fran DeFeo, my publicist at Columbia, called me on my cell phone. They were so excited that I couldn’t understand what they were saying. The Grammy nominations had been announced and Tony Bennett: MTV Unplugged had been nominated for three Grammys, including the coveted “Album of the Year.”
So in February Danny and I were in our seats in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles at the Grammy Awards ceremony, waiting for the winner of the “Album of the Year” to be announced. We told each other before the ceremony that if we didn’t win, wed still consider the night a success. I can’t describe how elated I felt when they opened the envelope and said, “and the winner is... Tony Bennett.” The audience jumped to their feet, and Danny and I gave each other a knowing look that made it clear that we were the only ones who truly knew how much this night meant. I was so proud that I invited Danny to join me on stage. To say it was a personal triumph would be an understatement: it was the culmination of everything I had been working toward for the last fifteen years, and it exemplified everything I had dreamed of accomplishing thirty years before that. It was Incredible. I was at the top of my game at the age of sixty-eight, and it was an honor to be recognized by my peers. What meant the most to me was that I had accomplished all of this without compromising my music. I felt like I had been to the moon and back. As a result, I have finally reached a point where I have total freedom, both economic and artistic, to do whatever I want to do.
But without getting on a soapbox, I want to say that I think that the Grammy victory stands as a positive example of what can be achieved by someone who sticks to his guns, who doesn’t give in to the naysayers. It’s a lesson that all acts should learn: they shouldn’t make the music fit the marketing but the other way around.
I wanted to follow up my salutes to Frank Sinatra and Fred Astaire with a tribute to the great female vocalists who have influenced me so much over the years. Instead of honoring just one great woman singer, I decided to pay tribute to all of them, and the result was Here’s to the Ladies, recorded and released in 1995, and again I won the Grammy for “Best Traditional Pop Album.”
In 1996 I got to make another long-time dream come true. I’d always thought it would be a great idea to do a show in which the audience could call in and request their favorite songs and I’d sing them, live, right there on the spot. I’d been playing around with this idea for years and Danny hooked up with Paul Rappoport at Sony to test it out on radio. On Valentine’s Day 1993, I did a live-request radio broadcast to stations across the U.S. It was a huge success, and I did another live one on Mother’s Day the following year. It was so popular that we decided to bring the show to television. Danny and Paul pitched the show to the Arts & Entertainment Network (A & E) and they loved the concept. Live By Request debuted on A &E on Valentine’s Day 1996. To my delight, that show was nominated for and won an Emmy® Award. It worked so well that A&E decided to continue the format featuring other artists, and I’m proud to say we’re now entering our third year.
I decided to dedicate my next album to the greatest lady of them all, Billie Holiday. It was called Bennett on Holiday, and it was a kind of tribute album that had never been done before. People often focus on the negative aspects of Billie’s short and tragic li
fe, on her sad songs. But I wanted to concentrate on the optimistic side of her legacy. Naturally I didn’t overlook her classic ballads like “Willow Weep for Me,” “Crazy She Calls Me,” and “Good Morning Heartache,” on which Jorge Calandrelli again supplied wonderful string arrangements. But I wanted to put the emphasis on her upbeat songs like “All of Me,” “Laughing at Life,” and “What a Little Moonlight Can Do.” I’ve traveled the world over, and I’ve found that musicians know Billie Holiday’s songs—from Australia to Malaysia, from Singapore to South America. She was truly the Goddess of Style, and she changed music forever.
Bobby Tucker, Billie’s pianist for a few years, was a great help in putting the album together. While we were picking the songs, he mentioned that Billie had once told him that Irene Kitchings’s “Some Other Spring” was her all-time favorite song. When I heard that, I knew I had to include it on the record. The cover shows me standing in front of a large mural of Billie Holiday that I painted on a brick wall. She looks young and beautiful and full of hope, and that’s the way I’ll always remember her. I’m very proud of that album, which also won a Grammy and I hope that Billie is too.
I got to see Billie when she was playing with Duke Ellington at Basin Street East years earlier in New York. She approached me after the show and said, “Come on, lets go uptown and sing together.” I wanted to go, but the people I was with weren’t too keen on the idea and talked me out of it. If I knew then what I know now, what a night of singing that would have been.
One night after I’d made an appearance on the Tonight Show shortly after Bennett on Holiday was released, I got a call from the great silent movie star Gloria Swanson. She lived in Englewood too, although I’d never met her, and she had called out of the blue to tell me how much she enjoyed seeing me on the Carson show. She said, “Whatever you’re doing, just keep doing it like that, because you’ve never looked better.” And then she added, “By the way I was a very good friend of Billie Holiday, and once when we were talking she said, ‘Look out for this boy Tony Bennett, he’s really going somewhere.’ I’d never imagined that Gloria Swanson and Billie Holiday actually talked about me. What a lift that phone call gave me.
Another unexpected compliment came when Danny got a call from Madonna’s press agent in early December 1996, explaining that Billboard wanted to present Madonna with a Lifetime Achievement Award, but that the only way she would appear on the show was if her favorite singer, Tony Bennett, presented the award to her. I was really knocked out. I’ve always admired Madonna. I think she’s a great artist. The way she continuously reinvents herself is amazing, and I was honored that she wanted me there with her when she got such a prestigious award.
I met Madonna in Los Angeles and we flew to Vegas together on her private plane. She was very sweet, but since it was the first time she’d been away from her newborn baby, Lourdes, she was really anxious, so we ended up talking about the baby for most of the flight.
In December 1996 President and Mrs. Clinton invited Danny and me to the White House for a Christmas holiday dinner. Earlier that year I’d had a hernia operation, and as we were pulling up to the White House gate, my hernia ruptured! I told the guard at the gate that I had an emergency, and he rushed me to the president’s private infirmary right there on the White House grounds. I was in the doctor’s office while the festivities were going on upstairs. While the doctor was examining me, the president suddenly appeared and asked me how I was doing. It was an awkward moment to say the least, but he was extremely gracious and quite concerned about my condition. I ended up being rushed from the White House to a nearby hospital, where the president’s surgeon performed emergency surgery I couldn’t have had a better doctor, and everything turned out fine.
Donald Trump heard about my condition and sent his plane to take me from the hospital to his mansion Mar-A Lago, in Palm Beach, where I recovered in luxury. I don’t think anything like that will ever happen to me again.
I recently signed a new contract with Columbia, one that gives me total control over my career. Proving that what goes around comes around, Dee Anthony’s daughter Michele, Danny, and I work closely together. How could I have ever imagined that things would turn out this way? You just never know what’s going to happen. Michele grew up with Danny and Dae, and just like them she learned about the music business from the inside out. She’s had an amazing career. What a pleasure it is to work with someone you love. It’s strange to think that she and Danny used to play together; it always brings a smile to my face.
In my new partnership with Sony I essentially own all my masters from 1950 on, and Columbia can’t reissue anything without first getting my approval, I have total control over all my new albums—the recording as well as all the publicity None of this would mean anything to me if I weren’t singing the music I love. You could offer me all the money in the world and I still wouldn’t sing a crummy song I didn’t care about.
There have been some other changes in my professional life lately. In 1997 Paul Langosch rejoined the trio, replacing Doug Richeson, who recently joined Phil Collins’s big band. That year the trio became a quartet when I added Gray Sargent on guitar. He’s phenomenal. One night I heard him play, and I called Ralph and said, “Wait till you hear this guy! I know you’ll agree with me that he could fit right in with what we’re doing.” He did. Gray is a swinging, graceful player, and he knows when to get funky and when to be delicate. He’s quite an old-movie buff, and he can quote the credits and the dialogue of almost any classic film—quite an entertaining diversion during those long hours on the road.
In the spring of 1998 it occurred to me that it had been four years since I’d had the MTV “breakthrough,” and some of the kids who had been in their twenties in 1994 would now be starting families of their own. I thought It would be cool if I could do a record for their kids. As a parent and a grandparent, I’m always thinking about how important it is to expose young people to the best music and culture that the world has to offer—the earlier the better. That’s when I decided to do an album of children’s songs called The Playground, a title suggested to me by my great friend Professor Freddy Katz. The swinging beat I used on Steppin’ Out helped that album find favor with the MTV generation, who now tell me that their own children are dancing to “Steppin Out with My Baby” This was to be an album that children of all ages could dance to.
Many of the great “rhythm tunes” of the past work great as children’s songs. I didn’t want any jive nursery rhymes on this record, only first-rate songs of the same caliber that I’ve always prided myself on delivering in my “grown-up” albums, like Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer’s “Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive” and “Swinging on a Star” from Going My Way, and “Just Because We’re Kids.” As a special and personal tribute to my mom and my dad, I recorded “My Mom,” by Walter Donaldson, the song my dad sang to me on our stoop in Astoria.
CODA
My sister, Mary and I were having brunch one Sunday morning at the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City and we reminisced about the people in my life who are no longer with us. A lot of great artists have passed on, but I have to say that Frank Sinatra’s death hit me hard. It’s difficult to accurately describe the effect he had on my life. At his funeral in May 1998 it hadn’t really hit me yet that he was gone. It wasn’t until I was flying to Washington, D.C., a few days later that I realized that Frank had really left us and he wasn’t coming back, I accepted an award in Sinatra’s name from the Sons of Italy that had been scheduled months before his death, an honor that I was proud to accept on his behalf. A few nights later I stopped in at Rainbow and Stars in Rockefeller Center to pay my respects to Rosemary Clooney. She was celebrating her seventieth birthday that night, and she introduced me to the crowd by saying that with Frank gone, “the torch has now been passed on” to me. I was flattered, but no one will ever replace the Chairman of the Board. He was my best friend and I was his.
Lately I’ve been enjoying my life more than I have in years. I turn
ed seventy-two last August, but I still love going on the road—I’m booked straight through the year 2000! I’ve never wanted to live extravagantly never wanted to own yachts or fancy cars, and most of my life I’ve lived simply. The one luxury I’ve afforded myself is a lovely apartment on Central Park South. The view is spectacular, a painters dream, and I spend a lot of time in front of my window. I’m looking forward to doing more painting in the future. It brings me an enormous amount of pleasure, and I’m thrilled to say that my paintings have been accepted as serious art by critics and fans alike. Rizzoli published a collection of my paintings called Tony Bennett: What My Heart Has Seen, in 1996. The publication of What My Heart Has Seen, is one of the proudest accomplishments of my entire career.
These days, I spend as much time with Susan and my dog, Boo, as I can, as well as with my family—something I rarely had the luxury to do earlier in my career when I was struggling to make things work. Mary is doing fine, and she has remained the wonderful lady she has always been throughout my entire life. Sadly her husband, Tom Chiappa, passed away a few years ago, and he is sorely missed by the entire family John continues to be my good friend and champion, and my children and grandchildren bring me great joy.
Daegal is a musical engineer and producer. He’s doing a great job running Hillside Sound Studio in Englewood, producing platinum records for great artists. His two boys, Austin and Jared, are wonderful kids. Danny’s daughter Kelsey is studying guitar and voice, and coincidentally wound up taking lessons from Maurice Finnell, one of the same teachers I had more than fifty years ago. She, like her father, started her first musical group before she reached the age of thirteen. Her sister, Rémy is studying acting at the Actors’ Studio in New York City, I can’t wait to watch my grandkids grow up.
