Something for the weekend. Fly Me to the Moon seems appropriate as Artemis II returns to the Earth from the Moon, splashdown is at 8:07 p.m. EDT today, April 10. Written in 1954 by Bart Howard, and originally entitled In Other Words, it was first sung by Kaye Ballard who passed away in 2019 at age 93. The most famous rendition was that by Frank Sinatra in 1964.
Home again. Hit it Mr. Rhysling:
We pray for one last landing
On the globe that gave us birth;
Let us rest our eyes on the fleecy skies
And the cool, green hills of Earth.
Sing it, Frank. Makes me start dancing immediately.
I’m an 80s kid. Graduated H.S. in 1990. So there’s a ton of 80s pop/rock music that I like, a lot.
That said, I agree with Allan Bloom that pop music went to hell sometime between the Beetles and the Rolling Stones and ever since has been burrowing deeper into the circles of Hell.
All that majesty and precision and then the phones don’t work after splashdown??
The crew seemed exasperated with the question from Mission Control in Houston if they were “pushing the PTT button”.
My favorite rendition of Fly Me to the Moon was this Sinatra live performance at the Kiel Opera House St Louis 1965.
https://youtu.be/Y2rDb4Ur2dw?si=0xpKlSCr1Fex5CZD
Sinatra was a real pro. He always prepared going into recording sessions nailing it usually in one take.
Ted Templeman, who made his mark producing bands like The Doobie Brothers and Van Halen tells a story about the time he witness a Sinatra recording session. Sinatra stopped the session because he heard a trumpet player playing a wrong note. No one else heard it. But Sinatra insisted he heard a wrong note. Sure enough, there was a note written wrong in one of the trumpet players sheet music. Hearing one wrong note in a band with multiple horns and more than one trumpet player takes a good ear to catch.
Yeah, Sinatra was so flamboyant, with his mob connections and turbulent private life, it is too often overlooked what a master craftsman he was. He became famous for his singing at a time when great crooners were common and good ones existed in hordes.