Interviewing Tony Bennett: ‘I had the screaming teenage girl fans way before The Beatles’

Interviewing the renowned singer Tony Bennett, who died on Friday aged 96, for The Irish Times some years ago, I thought it only right and proper to address him as “Mr Bennett”. I could still hear his laughter today. “The only people who call me Mr Bennett are the IRS (the US tax body) – everyone calls me Tony and I insist you do as well.”

He was a man who wore his fame lightly and was full of gossipy tales about figures he knew, from Bob Hope to the Rolling Stones. It seems strange now to remember that the man born Anthony Dominick Bennedeto in New York in 1926 came to fame when screaming teenage girls packed out his shows in the early 1950s as he sang pop hits such as Because of You, Blue Velvet and Rags to Riches. It was an early form of Beatlemania that would hit a decade later.

Blessed with Italian good looks, Bennett told me about those early days of fame. “People think I’m lying or exaggerating when I tell them that in those days of the early 50s I had the screaming teenage girl fans way before The Beatles. And in those days, pop singers worked, as in really worked. I would perform at the Paramount Theater in New York. My first show would be at 10.30am in the morning and there would be six more that day. Imagine having a show that begins at 10.30am these days,” he said.

But the musical earthquake that was rock ‘n’ roll music (then known as beat music) was just beginning to take hold and by 1956, when he was still just 30 years of age, Bennett was becoming a has-been.

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[ Tony Bennett: A 70-year career of popularity that spanned across generations ]

“I was bluntly told that singing sweet, saccharine songs such as Blue Velvet just wouldn’t cut it any more and was told to either become a rock ‘n’ roller or to start singing jazz in order to prolong my career.”

Bennett’s singing voice – once memorably described by Frank Sinatra as the best ever – was unique for the time in popular music as he had been trained in the Bel Canto vocal technique. By strengthening his voice and making it more expressive, he was a natural tenor who sang like a baritone.

He politely demurred when I asked him if he thought that Sinatra was correct and he had the best popular music voice of the 20th century, but he did say that Sinatra’s high-profile and dramatic personal life meant he was perhaps better known than the gentlemanly and relatively low-key Bennett.

The move into a more jazz-oriented vocal sound was easy enough for him. He had long worshipped the greats such as Dizzy Gillespie, Nat King Cole and Fats Waller. “All those old jazz guys were completely being themselves but when the rock ‘n’ rollers came along, like the Rolling Stones, they all looked the same and sounded the same to my ears. A bit like rap music today,” he said.

A true jazz singer at heart – “jazz had a huge influence on my vocal phrasing. I still think of jazz as the greatest cultural contribution to music in the 20th century” – he had his biggest and most enduring hit with I Left My Heart in San Francisco in 1962.

Yet by the end of the 1960s, Bennett was, as he none too subtly put it, “a mess”. He had become ravaged by cocaine, divorce and a sense that he had been sidelined.

His rebirth, orchestrated by his son Danny, was to interpret the Great American Songbook.

“Whatever trends are happening in music, there always remains the songs of Hoagy Carmichael, Irving Berlin, Duke Ellington and Cole Porter. I relaunched myself interpreting the songs, kept wearing the tuxedo even though I was told to ditch it and soon found myself doing the Letterman show and appearing on The Simpsons!” he said.

In this sixth decade as a performer, he found himself doing an MTV Unplugged album and coming full circle, being embraced again by a teenage audience. Amy Winehouse said it was a career highlight for her to be able to duet with Bennett.

As some indication of the power and efficacy of his voice, at almost every concert he would sing one song without using the microphone. “They always said that Al Jolsen could hit the back of his house without using a mic, I wanted to show I could do the same.”

Over the last few years, he was still working hard – most notably recording a pair of collaborative albums with Lady Gaga.

With more than 70 albums to his name and having had chart success in every decade from the 1950s to the 2020s, he was one of the best popular music vocalists who ever lived.