HE KNEW HE’D GO FROM BAGS TO DITCHES!
Maestro of the Great American Songbook and Lady Gaga’s partner in crime, Tony Bennett has died aged 96. His death closes a chapter on music history as the last true star remaining of the pre-“Rock Around the Clock” era where crooners commandeered the airwaves. Off the endorsements of Pearl Bailey and Bob Hope, Bennett was signed to Mitch Miller’s Columbia label and joined the hits parade in the early 50s with US No. 1s “Because of You”, “Cold, Cold Heart”, “Rags to Riches” and UK No. 1 “Stranger in Paradise”.
As the crooner era gave way to the 60s, Bennett’s career fared better than most of his contemporaries, partly due to expanding his repertoire to include jazz, partly due to a talent edge over most of the others – no less an authority than Frank Sinatra deemed him “the best singer in the business”. He recorded his iconic “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” in 1962 and longed for San Fran so convincingly you’d be forgiven for forgetting he was a New Yorker. An all-around gentleman, outside the studio he marched for civil rights from Selma to Montgomery and later refused to perform for apartheid South Africa.
The seismic changes of Beatlemania were not kind to Bennett. To keep with the times, his label essentially Poochie-fied him and forced him to record contemporary rock hits he had no passion for. The prospect of recording Beatles hits made him vomit like TQR, and he spoke “Eleanor Rigby” Shatner style rather than sing it. His film debut was panned, his marriage crumbled, he descended into drug addiction. He was lucky to survive a cocaine overdose in 1979, but came back from the brink and staged a grand comeback.
His comeback blueprint was simple – sing the music he knew how to sing, but in contemporary environments like MTV and The Simpsons (he was in fact the first celebrity to guest star as himself on the show). It worked, and the acclaim was nonstop from there. He accumulated 20 Grammies amidst numerous other honours, recorded duets with Amy Winehouse and most famously Lady Gaga, and continued to tour and record largely undiminished even after a 2016 Alzheimer’s diagnosis.
In 2021, his disease had progressed enough that his family publicly revealed it, and his final performance, a TV special alongside Gaga, was recorded in late 2021. Previously thought of as one of the 1926 indestructibles, he only breached the Drop 40 after the diagnosis was made public. 65 teams huddle cheek to cheek, with the rags-to-richees including Deathlist.net, Ethnic Cleansing, and swooping into seventh place, I Like to Cease Beside the Seaside.
Tony Bennett
3 August 1926 – 21 July 2023, aged 96
65 TEAMS (💀💀💀💀💀 + 40 = 8 POINTS, 🃏 (x4) 16 POINTS)