Just because you become one of the biggest rock stars in the world doesn’t mean the ideas you had as a 16-year-old were particularly good, which is something Paul McCartney learned the hard way when he unintentionally angered Frank Sinatra over a song the ex-Beatle sent the blue-eyed crooner to record. McCartney had been sitting on the song for literal decades and, coincidentally, had written the song with Sinatra in mind as a teenager sitting at his father’s piano. When Sinatra rang McCartney asking for a song, the phone call seemed like kismet—a chance for this song to see the light of day.
Back when McCartney first wrote the song, he said, “My feelings were, then, that if you were ever going to be a songwriter, the height of it all was Sinatra. That would be the greatest stuff that you could do, really a little bit before rock ‘n’ roll. So, you were thinking of standards and things. So, around that time, I wrote, ‘When I’m 64’ and this other thing. I thought it would be a bit of a Rat Pack, smoochy, with words like, ‘When she tries to run away, uh-huh,’ Boom! Stabs from the band, you know.”
The flashy, cabaret-style song had a less-than-sparkly title: “Suicide”. Speaking to Barry Miles about the track in the late 1990s, McCartney said, “Very Sinatra, I thought. ‘She’ll limp along to his side / I call it suicide.’ It was murder! Horrible song! But you had to go through all those styles to discover your own.”
While that might be true, Sinatra wasn’t interested in that discovery.
Frank Sinatra Thought Paul McCartney was Trying to Play a Joke on Him
Even after a meteoric rise to fame in the mid-1960s, Paul McCartney still found himself starstruck when Frank Sinatra called him on the phone at Abbey Road studio. When Sinatra asked McCartney for a song, the former Beatle immediately thought of the one he had written with Sinatra in mind as a 16-year-old. (Oh, to be able to tell that young kid that he would have the chance to send that song to Sinatra directly.) It was a bit dramatic and over-the-top, sure, but McCartney thought it was just tongue-in-cheek enough to work. As it turns out, Sinatra didn’t agree.
“Apparently, he thought it was an almighty p***-take,” McCartney told Barry Miles. “‘No way!’ He’s supposed to have said to one of his people. ‘Is this guy having me on?’ So, my career with Sinatra ended in terrible ignominy. I think he couldn’t grasp it was tongue-in-cheek. It was only supposed to be a play on the word ‘suicide,’ not actual physical suicide. If a girl lets a guy trample all over her, she’s committing some sort of suicide. I think he sent the demo back. Looking back on it, I’m quite relieved he did, actually. It wasn’t a good song. It was just a teenage thought.”
“Maybe I should have changed it a bit to send it to him,” McCartney later added. Maybe. But where’s the fun anecdote in that?
Photo by Rob Verhorst/Redferns
