Phil Ramone

摘要

A few months ago I claimed in these very pages that Jeff Lynne of ELO assembling his new best buddies Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr to tart up the deceased John Lennon's 'Free As A Bird' home demo and release it as a Beatles single was the worst musical idea ever. Well today, dear reader, I humbly recant that claim for what follows is surely far more dreadful. In 1993, two years before that Fabs monstrosity, Capitol Records saw fit to inflict upon the world an album called Duets in which Frank Sinatra, nearing the end of his illustrious career, was teamed up with lesser talents such as Bono, Barbra Streisand, Kenny C and Gloria Estefan on a series of, yup, duets of some of his best-loved tracks. Except that Frankie baby never actually met, engaged with or sang along in the studio with any of the chosen unlucky-for-us 13 in the process. The great man performed in isolation and the others just took the tracks, warbled along to complement his vocals and then, quite literally, phoned their takes back into the studio via a fiber optics system called EDNet.