Three very bad ads from 2011: Presenting the annual Amphon Awards

And now, we bring you the first-ever presentation of the annual Amphon Awards. This coveted honor has been created, by us, just this very minute, to recognize and pay tribute to the powerful societal force that is Bad Advertising.

Get ready to take them away, Rusty

By “bad,” we are not referring to routinely mediocre, ineffective, uninspiring or non-creative advertising; rather, we aim to draw attention to campaigns that are egregiously insulting to consumers, to the culture, and to human civilization.

To qualify for an Amphon, an ad must invoke a reaction from the viewer that would result in any logical and reasonable person demanding a lengthy jail sentence for the parties responsible. (The legal justification for insisting upon incarceration comes under the French lèse-majesté precedent, whereby it is a offence punishable by a jail term to offer an insult to the state. Thus, the Amphon is named to honor Mr. Amphon Tangnoppaku, a 61-year-old resident of Thailand who this year was convicted under a lèse-majesté provision, after sending offensive text messages to Queen Sirikit, the Thai monarch. Amphon is currently serving a 20-year stretch. That seems about right.)

So. Mr. Bailiff? Please stand by, as we are about to announce the three Canadian winners of Amphon Awards, for the year 2011. And here they are:

•  The BRONZE AMPHON goes to the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario, for their campaign known as “Dalton McGuinty is the Taxman.” Proverbially snatching defeat from the jaws of certain victory, these ads miraculously turned Ontario’s widely unpopular two-term Premier from a reviled lame-duck identified with eight years of unremittant scandals and ineptitude, to something very different and unexpected: the pitiable target of a bully’s taunts. The creators of this disastrous campaign didn’t bother to articulate the vision or policy ideas of the sponsor, PC leader Tim Hudak, likely because they miscalculated public sentiment, and deduced the province was crying out for anyone-but-McG. Which, arguably, they were — up to the precise point when Mr. Hudak’s people unleashed these uncalled-for TV spots, laden with sarcasm and negativity. Political attack-ads seldom backfire, but these did, allowing the Premier to crawl back into office and improbably form a minority government.

•  The winner of the SILVER AMPHON is a familiar name to those who follow the Bad Ad scene. It’s Rogers Communications, with their late-2011 campaign called “Free Tablet Offer.” Rogers, by word and deed, have maintained a longstanding habit of openly insulting their mobile-phone customers. Rogers has become famous for their usual practice of dangling a so-called “free” gee-gaw, contingent upon the client entering into an expensive long-term contract (which always contains convoluted terms, disguised service fees and onerous early-exit penalties.) It is a fact that these dodgy practices by Rogers, along with those undertaken by their few competitors, have spawned the creation of an entire federal agency, the Commissioner for Complaints for Telecommunications Services (CCTS.) It is also true that the number of complaints to CCTS rose by 115 per cent in 2011, over the preceding year. Additionally, there are numerous web sites and forums devoted to discussing the dubious tactics of Canadian mobile phone providers: A Google search of the phrase “I hate Rogers” returns a remarkable 7.6 million results. That number is roughly equal to the number of the company’s Canadian customers.

The contempt may be mutual. Rogers’ TV advertising has been distinctively snide in tone, often to the point of appearing openly contemptuous of its customers. The spots airing in Q4 of this year represented a new level of belligerence (watch one here.) The spokesman for the offer is an unpleasant young man who seems to have deluded himself into thinking, thanks to the current promotion, that he’s gotten the better of Rogers. This leads him to boast insufferably, in his wife’s presence, that he plans to purchase phones as presents for his children, simply so that he can obtain a “free” tablet. She makes a mild, passing suggestion that they share use of the tablet, at which point he conveys to the camera his open disdain for his spouse, and her wifely entreaties. This is how Rogers sees its customers: Vain, stupid, self-absorbed, easily duped. The same actor-portraying-weasel makes his unwelcome return appearance in a second spot, where he continues to bask in his ability to get one past his phone company, at which point he flamboyantly rejects the friendship of the cohort with whom he is watching a football game on television. Welcome to Rogers World, where there is no virtue or verity — no regard for truth, beauty, love, fellowship, or family — that counts for more than the vague promise of getting another crappy new toy for “free.”

• With that, we can now reveal the recipient of this year’s GOLD AMPHON. For several years now, the financial institution, TD Canada Trust, has been consistently waging its “Grumpy Old Men” campaign, which depicts the elderly in a mocking light. You know how the contemporary image of the senior Canadian is that of a vigorous, energetic, engaged citizen still active and happily making valuable contributions to our evolving society? In the vision presented by this big bank, you can forget all that. TD deploys two decrepit oldies as figures of ridicule, who have been trotted out for the sole purpose of standing in contrast with their dynamic, au courant money-lending operation.

On one level, this might be considered an audacious creative approach. After all, how many hundreds of billions of dollars have Canadian seniors placed in low-yield accounts in TD Canada Trust, and how badly does the bank want to risk pissing them off by portraying them as laughing-stocks — dehumanized props, unable to do anything, except kvetch into the camera? But, that’s just it. It’s as though, in the mind of TD, it’s not even worthwhile to imagine the consequences of offending that segment of the population. Aging Canadians, according to this view, are nothing more than the lumpen bodies you step around, on your way to conduct your important banking affairs. The two clueless fuddy-duds in the TD spots seem to play no role other than as objects. They are not fellow-citizens, neighbors, relatives, retired ex-colleagues, war-veterans, or your future self. They are caricatures, cynically objectified for the potential profit of someone trying to sell you a term-deposit, mortgage or car loan. And, make no mistake, these ads proclaim that by the time you’ve finished repaying your bank debts, the only interest TD will ever take in you is as something to point at, and laugh.

It’s stunning that any major institution would insult a segment of its depositors, with such casual cruelty, for so long a period, without resulting in a long series of complaints to a provincial Human Rights Commission. But, that is the Canadian way, to shrug in response to aggrievement. In many countries, those who give offense to such an extraordinary degree would answer not to a mere human rights tribunal, but to the criminal courts.

You may disagree with such draconian measures. You may feel that when a company insults its constituency with Bad Ads, it is sufficient punishment to avoid doing business with that organization. However, we say to you bleeding hearts: Nuts to that. Put the offenders behind bars.

That is the essential thinking behind the lèse-majesté legislation, and that is why these awards are named after Mr. Amphon Tangnoppaku. In a truly just world, the recipients of the 2011 Amphons, those parties responsible for perpetuating the year’s most outrageous Bad Ads, would have already been photographed and finger-printed, have completed the perp-walk, and would right now be taking their place alongside the unhappy Amphon, in detention, where for the next 20 years, the only audience for their disrespectful utterances will be… each other.

‘In retrospect, it was a mistake’: An Egyptian billionaire offers useful lessons in investing in Canada

Exposing his money to Canada still nags at Naguib Sawiris

I’m shaking my head in wonderment over the international telecom mogul who proudly goes by the imposing handle of Mr. Naguib Sawiris. I’ve devoted much serious effort to analyzing his name, using state-of-the-art anagram-finding technology, and I am now able to report that there are many revealing phrases concealed therein. By far my favorite is: “I saw gab-is-ruin.”

So true, so true. “Gab is ruin,” and it has been ever thus for consumers, as we regard the monthly bills from our mobile telephone carriers.

Mr. Sawiris saw this, and did more than merely observe. Two years ago he acted upon his vision by investing a half-billion dollars in a Canadian mobile telecom startup known as Wind Mobile. (If only Mr. Sawiris had performed the due diligence of seeking out anagrams within that brand, he would have found “I’d blow mine,” which, regrettably, appears to have foretold how his investment would perform.)

Last week Mr. Sawiris offered this forthright comment to the Toronto Star regarding his decision to sink dough into a Canadian business proposition: “In retrospect, it was a mistake.”

Mr. Sawiris flew in from Egypt, filled with big plans for his service, which operates in two dozen countries. But what Naguib Sawiris could not have understood is that Canada is not a country in the same sense as other countries, such as, say, Luxembourg or Slovakia.

Similar to those other jurisdictions, we issue currency, and passports, and maintain a state broadcasting service, display a smartly designed flag over courts and post-offices, and, all in all, evince a fairly presentable citizenry. But, to a greater extent than certain other nations, Canada has only ever been about one thing, and that is protecting the interests of its business establishment.

That’s the singular, overarching principle that forged this great nation out of disparate territories, built the railroads, tamed the wilderness to harvest and ship the natural resources, settled the Golden West and the uninviting lands north of the 55th parallel, established the Wheat Board and the Dairy Board, left the banks and underwriters alone to do their thing, created and perpetuated our unique culture. And, to enable the preceding accomplishments, Canadians devised the protective tariffs that kept the foreign robber-barons from acquiring and defiling our great commercial institutions; that is, until recently.

When Canada became a signatory to the supranational trading bodies created at the tail-end of the 20th century — your NAFTA, your GATT — it was suddenly a requirement that we become less obvious in using regulations to prop up the tiny number of groups that had thrived under our traditional mercantile system. And so we complied, but only to the extent of making it less obvious. The revised regulations seemed cleverly inspired by Barry Levinson’s great movie “Avalon,” especially the comment made by the teacher, after a student imploringly asks if he can go to the bathroom: “Yes, you can. But, no, you may not.”

That is essentially what Canada’s telecommunications regulators told poor Naguib Sawiris: Yes, indeed, foreign man, you can compete with our fat, sassy domestic suppliers, and certainly we wish you loads of luck. But, at the end of the day, no, you may not.

And so Wind Mobile, along with Mobilicity, and Public Mobile, and the other newcomers to the Canadian cellular scene, find themselves blocked by arcane stipulations that somehow seem not to pose much of an impediment to the three established providers, which in this case are Bell, Rogers, and Telus.

If you are used to this kind of distinctively Canadian situation, and it exists in absolutely every sector, you learn to merely shrug and mutter about it over your Tim Horton’s bagel. But, it will go without saying, that is not Naguib Sawiris’ way.

He calls Bell, Rogers, and Telus “pampered” – bound to be regarded as a hurtful descriptive — and demands to know, “Why would an Egyptian like me be in 25 countries, and a big company [like Bell, Rogers, and Telus stay] here? Because they’re pampered. How can you create innovation if you close up yourself like that? Why don’t we have Rogers in the U.K. or Germany? Why is Vodafone everywhere? Why is France Telecom everywhere? What’s the argument? I don’t see it.”

Of course, he doesn’t see it. That’s because, unlike Bell, Rogers, and Telus, he isn’t entirely fixated on cheesy little acts of prestidigitation intended to short-change the local yokels. Wind Mobile is so clueless to the ways of Canadian telecom that they don’t even charge the infamous monthly “system access fee” that Ted Rogers fabricated, and his heirs are still slapping on my monthly invoice. (Learning of Mr. Sawiris’ travails made me curious enough to contact Rogers to ask about the additional seven bucks I’m still required to fork over each month simply because Ted could never resist the urge to spearhead any small-scale swindle. “I thought Ottawa told you to stop billing these bogus charges,” I told the service representative. “That won’t apply to you,” was the response. “You’re still on a three-year contract.” You see? Sad, sorry Wind Mobile is ill-equipped to even think of keeping its customers captive through long-term contracts. Their middle-eastern philosophy of unaffected plain-dealing may suit a transaction in a Cairo bazaar, but in Calgary it will be regarded as something worse than merely suspicious.)

Naturally, the Rogers group didn’t need to respond to Mr. Sawiris’ criticisms about remaining parochial and cloistered; but they did, through Ken Engelhart, a regulatory affairs vee-pee. The Globe & Mail reports Mr. Engelhart’s comment that his company “once operated a U.S. cable business, but sold it in 1989 to invest further in Canada’s wireless sector.” Well, actually, that’s not the whole story. As part of its rationale for seeking permission to acquire Maclean Hunter, which owned cable systems in the New York City suburbs, Rogers persuaded Ottawa regulators that Canada needed a national “champion” to compete on a worldwide basis with global media giants such as News Corporation, and the like. Shortly after getting regulatory assent, Rogers decided they didn’t need to take on the entire world after all, or even take on Fort Lee, New Jersey. They ditched the Maclean Hunter asset, and concentrated on noodling out penny-ante schemes to squeeze a few extra nickels out of the domestic Canadian market, where the tough boys and bad girls they encountered in the vicinity of New York City were always turned back at the border.

Handed the chance to compete against the world’s best, Ted Rogers and his cadre did not much care for the odds, and high-tailed it back to their well-appointed club on a leafy street in Toronto, where Gus the barman never fails to make solicitous small talk about your children, doesn’t waste precious moments asking if you’d care for your usual order, and never bothers to ask you to sign a chit. We all know each other here. It’s true that occasionally one of the members will run afoul of some out-of-town chancers, or encounter some bad luck in any of its various forms, or fall victim to unforeseen circumstance. Pity about the Eaton family, wasn’t it? Always sad to see those you know so well ripped to small pieces by sharks.

But, you know, there’s nothing at all wrong with liking things the way they are. And one other lovely thing about being here is that there’s never a problem locating a parking spot not too far from the canopy that leads to the front door entrance, where the door is held open for those who belong. That’s what makes this our home, all the expected little niceties. The very word “home” will convey an exact meaning. Home should always be – homey.  Comfortable.

This is the mind-set of the very business class that Naguib Sawiris so horridly calls “pampered.” Well, how would the man from the land of the pyramids ever understand us? He’s not in the club, and he will probably continue to expose his resentment and frustration, even after Ken Engelhart thoughtfully has taken the time to sum it all up for him, as he did for the Globe & Mail reporter. “The fact that we are very efficient,” said Engelhart, “is one reason why I think [Wind] and the other new entrants are finding it so difficult to compete in Canada.”

Steve Jobs and Frank Sinatra: One destroyed a visual art-form, the other elevated it

Steve Jobs’ last words, it’s claimed, were, “Wow! Wow! Wow!,” ensuring that right up till the very end, none would dare label him non-enthused. What a salesman — still generating excitement for his products with his literal last breath. That conclusion might assume that he shuffled off this mortal coil, still pitching his favorite ‘80s musical act, Bow Wow Wow, available in the form of 99 cent downloads on iTunes, and the assembled witnesses just happened to mis-hear.

Speaking of iTunes, for all the eulogizin’ and wailin’ and breast-beatin’ over the death of Mr. Jobs, I’ve yet to hear anyone acknowledge his role in obliterating a significant 20th Century art-form, namely the record album cover.

It’s true that album covers have been on the way out since 12-inch LPs were downsized to CDs and cassettes — but it was Jobs who unleashed iTunes, and brought down the curtain on the days of music-as-packaged-goods.

Voormann's revolutionary 'Revolver' design -- an art-form made extinct by Steve Jobs

And, therefore, it was Jobs who took away the jobs from geniuses such as Dean O. Torrence, who started out warbling as the junior partner in Jan and Dean, and later became a pre-eminent designer of album cover art, through his firm, Kittyhawk Graphics. It was Jobs who might just as well have smashed the knuckles of Klaus Voormann, creator of the visuals on the Beatles’ “Revolver” LP. Perhaps Jobs didn’t exactly strut into the Rijksmuseum or the Musée d’Orsay, and spritz lighter-fluid over the displayed treasures, but that’s only because every vandal works to his own modus operandi.

The death of Jobs, coinciding with the rise of cloud computing — now, there’s a symbolic image that just begs illustration by a neo-Raphaelite — caused me to consider the rich heritage of the album cover, as a now-defunct art-form. Everyone seems to have their favorite cover, and it’s nearly always the Andy Warhol commission for the Velvet Underground and Nico LP (aka, “the Banana Peel cover”), the functioning trouser fly on the Rolling Stones’ “Sticky Fingers”, or that grossly overrated, committee-determined pastiche that is the fold-out cover of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

I would disagree. I say that a standard of graphics excellence was established by the Chairman of the Board, Mister Frank Sinatra, through the design of the jacket on his 1966 Reprise Records release (FS 1020), “That’s Life.”

I say further that the design of this album cover has never been surpassed, and it will remain eternally the ne plus ultra of the genre.

That's Life, baby: The greatest LP cover of all time

Where, you may demand, is the evidence to support this bold claim? Let’s begin with an examination of the title. The dominant element is typographical, deploying an Egyptienne Bold typeface, with the artist’s name rendered in an outline font, with the album title in a cyan-filled variant below. The color choice of cyan accentuates the mood of defiant cool that overwhelms the title track (exemplified by that tune’s familiar extended Hammond-organ introduction, performed by Michel Rubini.) We take note of the close-kerning, and the virtual absence of leading between lines, which creates a flow-together effect that unmistakably associates Old Cyan Eyes with the message of the title. Four words, one copy-block: FRANK/SINATRA/THAT’S/LIFE. The resulting conclusion can only be, here is Sinatra; here, inextricably, daddio, Life follows, Life in the only form we would ever wish to recognize. Cocktails. Cocktail waitresses. Rascally companions to join you in teasing the cocktail waitress. Late hours, a phone number scribbled on a cocktail napkin, and someone in the dim distance playing a Jimmy Smith tune on the Hammond B-3. So, set ‘em up, Joe. It is Joe, right?

FRANK/SINATRA/THAT’S/LIFE. Those are some powerful four words that can effortlessly evoke such a bacchanalian scene. Try adding just two more words, and you’d surely wind up in a gurney, awaiting a liver donor.

The secondary element is the pseudo-expressionist illustration, by an uncredited artist. On first glimpse, this seems like a typical mid-1960s pastel-stick execution following the fashion of the time. This is the halfway point of Modernism en route to becoming Pop Art. Peter Max has yet to attract any notice beyond a couple of blocks in the nascent East Village, and Leroy Neiman and Andy Warhol are not yet warmly received by their bank managers. But in 1966 the successful post-war commercial artist cleaned and put away his brushes, reached toward the oil-crayons, and learned the techniques of the forcefully applied smudge to canvas. What is implied through the pastel blur is a world finally gaining momentum on the declining side of mid-century, with the population engaged in gassing up their little Honda motor scooters, and wondering if it was too early to reserve hotel rooms for Expo 67.

Men with hats and amalgamated teeth, going places, mid-century

Mrs. Irma Councill was the most prolific and best-known Canadian working in this pseudo-expressionist genre, and for a time you saw her work everywhere. Her portraits of business moguls, politicians and hockey players were published in Weekend and The Canadian magazine, and it may have been her artistic approach that influenced period advertisements for the Meteor Montcalm, Macleans toothpaste, and Inglis appliances. Or else it was another crayon-wielder with reductionist tendencies, about to feel the hot breath of psychedelia charging in close from behind.

Was our Mrs. Councill the anonymous illustrator who painted Frank for “That’s Life?” Or — here’s an odd thought — was it Frank hisself who commissioned and undertook the work, as a self-portrait? It is known (through an episode of the Dick Van Dyke Show) that Sinatra painted recreationally in the Modernist style. Could it have been none other than the Chairman who is responsible for depicting himself as the distorted gargoyle who appears on the cover?

Whoever had the task of slapping pigment on medium, it was someone who saw the singer clearly, knew him well, and didn’t much like him.

Out-of-proportion headgear

The chapeau is the key element, recognizable from previous images of Frank, but here displayed out-of-proportion, with a tumefied hatband that could be taken, in a current context, as a gang-banger’s colors, or, from a timeless perspective, as a pirate’s bandanna. Why the giant lid? Through the late 1950s and early ’60s, the Chairman used fedoras to rakishly conceal his advancing male-pattern alopecia, and this great big hat nicely suggests a coming acceptance of the “I, Claudius” hairpiece he would begin to affect at the earliest point in the 1970s.

Suggestive sniffer?

Yet, here the shocking volume of the hat accounts for fully forty per cent of the composition of the head. Sombreros may take on these dimensions, or a Stetson worn whimsically, but never a hipster’s fedora. The explanation, as I see it, is that in the artist’s view, the headgear must form a convenient metaphor for male potency. This is a fully engorged noggin, and the artist has freely borrowed a pint of devilry from the caricature of “Mr. Punch” that appeared on the cover of the mid-1800s editions of the British humor weekly. And as is the case with Punch, there is something vaguely kinky about the way Ole Blue Eyes’ nose is drawn, a visual pun that should make normal people feel squeamish.

Having courted and won the television starlet Mia Farrow, who was half Frank’s age on their wedding day, Blue Eyes is seen through the artist’s eye as a satyr who is entirely self-delighted with his own extended capacity to pull hippie broads. The picture fairly cries, “Ring-a-ding-ding!”, with all the unspeakable connotations that phrase delivers.

The Chairman needs a rest

Frank was 51 when he waxed these sides, not necessarily a terrible age for a male, but a trying time for the self-styled Lothario. And, make no mistake, he was a terrible male, a surly survivor of a lifetime of bad behavior. The mid-stage Frank who could philosophize, “That’s life,” was a man entering his Pantaloon Years, the time of becoming an aging buffoon. A slender, handsome youth, known as The Voice, (nidus of swooning post-war bobbysoxers), Frank now appears well along the way to becoming hideous. His debauched expression, the pouchy eyes, the newly-forming jowls, all offer the visage of a roué who began his Las Vegas mornings in mid-afternoon, consuming what was reported to be his favorite breakfast: scrambled eggs eaten from the chest of a hooker.

Dental work projected toward your throat

The artist stylized the Sinatra smile, again appropriating the manner of the mid-century airline advertising illustration. His teeth are streamlined into a smoothly amalgamated band of white, in perfect contrast to the icy blue hatband. The teeth balance against the declaration of his name. The symmetry invokes mild terror in the viewer, as “FRANK/SINATRA” and his exposed teeth seem to be projecting from the album cover, and into your exposed throat. That’s how thin is his veneer of affability. Do not be deceived by the aging Pantaloon with the tired, but defiant eyes, this sad old dandy, costumed for the preceding decade, with the new young wife we all know he will not be able to hold past a year or two, at most. (His wife during the 1951-7 period, Ava Gardner, had already sized up the Twiggy-like Mia Farrow, and sniffed, “I always knew Frank would wind up in bed with a boy.”) They are lining up to bet against him in the Sands, the Sahara, and the Circus Circus. You two-dollar punters may not see past the Frank-smile, the smooth white-streak of molars, incisors, bicuspids, but that will be at your extreme peril. He is cornered, dangerous. Those capped white choppers — perhaps the best work ever by the very finest orthodontist in Beverly Hills, Dr. Lenny Bloom — will tear the flesh from your face where you stand, no different than if Frank were an alarmed orangutan set off by a moving shadow outside his zoo cage.

What kind of face would instill this type of fear? The journalist Gay Talese makes it crystal-clear in his revealing April 1966 profile of Sinatra, published in Esquire magazine, just as the lithographers were counting their cardboard inventory for the cover of the “That’s Life” album. Unforgettably, Talese recounts the Chairman’s impulse to pick on Harlan Ellison, a formidable figure in the L.A. entertainment community. Frank demands to know what Ellison, who is dressed in Carnaby Street gear, does for a living, and Talese records the ensuing dialogue here:

“I’m a plumber,” Ellison said. “No, no, he’s not,” another young man quickly yelled from across the table. ”He wrote The Oscar.”

“Oh, yeah,” Sinatra said, “well I’ve seen it, and it’s a piece of crap.”

“That’s strange,” Ellison said, “because they haven’t even released it yet.”

“Well, I’ve seen it,” Sinatra repeated, “and it’s a piece of crap.”

Now Brad Dexter, very anxious, very big opposite the small figure of Ellison, said, “Com’on, kid, I don’t want you in this room.”

“Hey,” Sinatra interrupted Dexter, “can’t you see I’m talking to this guy?”

Dexter was confused. Then his whole attitude changed, and his voice went soft and he said to Ellison, almost with a plea, “Why do you persist in tormenting me?”

Frankie goes to the Stony Lonesome

In sum, Sinatra arrived on the cultural scene already a bully (see mugshot, left), and, now, at his half-century, he suddenly found himself transmogrified into a square, to boot. This, from the man who is all set to set you straight on what life is: “Riding high in April, shot down in May.”

That’s Life? Sheesh. Frank was precisely one of those crazy adults you’d encounter somewhere, perhaps in your parents’ rumpus room, someone who would seem delighted to tell you all about the many fascinating experiences they’ve had — “I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate,/ A poet, a pawn and a king” — until you commit the error of trying to get an innocuous word in edgewise, along the benign lines of “Gee, Uncle Frank, you’ve certainly had some interesting jobs in your time,” and then he abruptly snaps and begins shrieking violent gibberish. “Pisherke! What the hell do you know? Hah?” All you can do at that point is walk away with your Hires Root Beer and try not to shrug too visibly while another adult says, “Frank, come on. He’s just a kid. He din’t mean nothin’.”

Yes, Frank belonged to, was the epicenter of, that unknowable Adult Life, into which you had to be out of your mind to peer too closely. Your child’s curiosity might want to know: What kind of songs could come out of someone with that kind of face? But the knowledge could never make sense; not then, not now.

For the music contained within this eternally perfect album-cover is as sorry a collection of schlock as it is possible to imagine. It is mercifully short: a scant 25 minutes of product, spread around 10 tracks. However, it is some crazy material, consisting of two Gilbert Bécaud compositions and one Michel Legrand, leading to the idea that this might have become Sinatra’s great lost Charles Aznavour/Jacques Brel project, if only anyone had thought to invite them. (Click here, if’n you dare, to hear the Chairman sing the album’s title track.)

But the rest of the brief LP is a mish-mash of movie soundtrack tunes (“The Impossible Dream,” “Somewhere My Love [Lara’s Theme”]), interspersed with the truly ridiculous. In the latter category is the Chairman’s take on “Winchester Cathedral,” a novelty record by the New Vaudeville Band that somehow caught on with the kids. The song was originally performed by some teenaged British musicians goofing on the music of their grandparents, a spoof of Rudy Vallee — which was the mannered crap issued on 78 RPM records in the 1920s and ‘30s that Frank’s natural, unaffected style (that is, Bing Crosby’s style, refined with a trace of ethnic flavor), pressed on 45 RPM sides in the 1940s and ‘50s, blew out of the water. The idea of Frank goofing through a version of this oddity could only have been intended by someone wishing to cause him harm: “Vo-vodey-oh-do.”

And, yet, there it is. Sinatra, the famed perfectionist, reduced to the most clueless form of pandering. Outside the studio, the Viet Nam war is the story. Frank’s son and namesake endures a kidnapping. Life magazine explains how the Negros are demanding their rights in the south. JFK is gone; LBJ will not run for re-election. Nixon’s in session with his Manhattan psychiatrist, Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker. Guns are being trained on RFK, MLK. And then Mia’s lawyer tells you she wants a divorce.

No wonder he appears so uncomfortable on the cover. You can read right through the look in his eyes, as interpreted by the illustrator, and know his thoughts: “Are you laughing at me? You’d better not be laughing at me. Christ, they’re laughing at me.”

This is plainly a man on the verge of something, wondering if it makes sense, at his stage of life, to keep tamping down that building force within him — or do you give in to your impulses? Only seven years earlier, he had sung, “Something’s Gotta Give,” and the audiences loved it, but in 1966 it seemed that the end-result of the long period of suppression would be blood running from the nose of some wise-guy Hollywood screenwriter, right down the punk’s ruffled Edwardian shirt. It would take three more years before that force would be unleashed, when the “Life” Sinatra was shouting about in “That’s Life” would veer into a different direction altogether.

That was the end of the ring-a-ding-ding decades, and the birth of his career-shifting LP, “Watertown.” The new release would be sheathed in a very different kind of record cover. Regrettably, that album’s cover-design would scupper the bold new venture, straight from the get-go.

To be continued