Fridays With Frank and Saturdays with Sinatra

Interview By Andy Butler, Photos By Stacey Mark

Our photographer friend Stacey Mark’s dad is really famous in Philadelphia. We know, to some of you that’s like saying he’s sexy to blind chicks. But Sid Mark is more than just a Philly radio icon. He’s also one of the last of an endangered species: guys with lots and lots of class. He’s a classy, classy guy. He is one of the preeminent Frank Sinatra experts in the world, he used to know Billie Holiday and many other jazz legends, and he even basically discovered Nina Simone. Come on! What did your dad do? Clean the wet leaves out of the gutter once a year?

Stacey was too nervous to interview her own dad because it probably addressed some strange Freudian intimacy issues she has, so she asked her buddy Andy to do it instead. He went to Sarah Lawrence with Stacey. And he’s in that band Hercules and Love Affair, didn’t ya know?

Vice: How many years have you been on the radio?

Sid Mark:

In November it’ll be 54 years. On the air from day one. Prior to that, I worked in a nightclub for three or four years, so I got to meet every major jazz performer there was.

Stacey was telling me about Billie Holiday, that you met her one night.

It wasn’t just one night. The week that Billie Holiday came in she was very, very fragile. We decided, if she would agree to it, that she could stay in an apartment in the next building, above the club. We said, “Would you like to stay there?” And she said that yes, she and her husband would stay there. My assignment that week was to be at her beck and call, even at 3 AM, when she would call and say, “Sidney, do you think you could go out and get me some orange juice?” So at 3 AM, I would go out and get her orange juice. And on Friday evening before the performance, my mother cooked her chicken noodle soup. I remember sitting at the table with her and she was so thrilled. And however she was at the time, when it came time to get onstage, she put the makeup on and the gardenia in her hair and she was Billie Holiday.

She of course was notorious for having her own demons and drug problems. So I imagine being in the music industry back then was no different from today.

Andy, the difference between the artists of today and the ones that I dealt with is that all those people paid their dues before they enjoyed any degree of success. Today you have one record and you’re in. These people knocked around forever. I know you have a fondness for Nina Simone and I heard Nina when she was just a piano player in a little nightclub in Philadelphia. She wasn’t even singing, she was a Juilliard-trained pianist, and she was playing with a trio. Eventually she got around to vocalizing, and our station, the folks there were responsible for her first major hit, which was “I Loves You Porgy.”

Do you still listen to a lot of jazz music?

Oh yes, absolutely. Sinatra and jazz.

When did you get hooked on Sinatra?

When I was in the service, really. My sister was a bigger Sinatra fan than I when we were younger. When I was in the service, on those lonely nights when you’re in Louisiana, you’d go back to the barracks and you’d turn on the radio and listen to whatever was on. Somehow his voice got to me and I realized he knew exactly what he was singing about. If he was singing about lonely, he knew what lonely was. If he was singing about love, he knew what love was about. When he was up-tempo and swinging, he was singing about the up-tempo swinging things he enjoyed in his life.

When did you actually start having the Sinatra show? Were you putting him into the programming of your other shows?

I started off doing strictly a jazz program. It was called

Sounds in the Night

, because I didn’t go on until two in the morning. The show that followed me, which was an all-night show, was called the

Rock and Roll Kingdom

. This was 1956. And one night the all-night guy didn’t come in. I got a call, “I can’t make it.” And the manager called and said, “You’re on the rest of the night. Would that be OK?” And I got on the air, and I said, “I’m gonna be here the rest of the night.” And not being unlike you, Andy, at that age, I said, “But I’m gonna do exactly what I want to do, I’m not gonna do what I’m told to do.” I got on the air, “Here’s what I have with me. It’s not going to be the

Rock and Roll Kingdom

. I got some Basie and some Ellington and some Brubeck, and I’ve got a bunch of Sinatra recordings too.” This was three o’clock in the morning, and a window trimmer called who was trimming a Christmas window in a men’s shop and said, “Why don’t you do an hour of Sinatra?” And this was a Friday night, and I said, “Yeah, I’ll call it

Friday With Frank

.” And I did! And at three o’clock in the morning the phones lit up, people saying, “My God, this is phenomenal.” On Monday of that week, I got a call from the manager of the station saying, “If you’d like, you can have the all-night show because the all-night guy’s been fired for not coming in. You’ll do your jazz program and then you’ll do the

Rock and Roll Kingdom

.” And I said fine, totally realizing that I was not about to do the

Rock and Roll Kingdom

. I figured in the middle of the night, management wasn’t listening anyhow. So I put Sinatra in on Friday, I put Ella Fitzgerald in on Thursday. I put in Nina Simone and Nat King Cole, I did what was called “block programming.” Six months later they caught on and called me in. I thought I was being fired. They called to tell me that all the college students in Philadelphia had fallen in love with the show and they said to me, “Would you like to move that show up? We’re going on FM.” They said, “Would you like to try FM?” I thought it was a drug so I said yes. Who knew what FM was in ’55? So we went on and became the first full-time jazz station in the United States, and we hired a complete staff. There was born the Sinatra show. I moved it out of the all-night show and moved it up to six o’clock, and it went six to eight, six to nine, six to ten. And it started to fly.

When was your first run-in with Sinatra himself?

In 1966, ten years later, Frank left Capitol and went to the Reprise label, and he recorded an album with Count Basie live in Vegas. I was program director, I had graduated to that level. I decided I was going to play that LP all day every day to see how well I could do with it sales-wise. We had a sponsor that came on as a promotion for the weekend, and at that time you could buy either mono or stereo recordings. So they took 1,000 mono and 1,000 stereo to cover them for the weekend. That’s a considerable sale. We started the sale on Friday night with the

Friday With Frank

program, and I got a call on Saturday morning from the sponsor saying he was sold out on Friday night. He had sold 2,000 units. The guy wouldn’t come in unless he ordered 1,000 more. He said he didn’t think he would sell that many. So I called him and I said, “Send it in. Can we have it on consignment?” And believe it or not, we sold those out as well, so on that one weekend we outsold the rest of the country. On Monday morning I got a call from the record label’s office, saying how thrilled they were, and “Is there anything we can do for you?” I said, “The only thing I’d like to do is meet Mr. Sinatra.” They said, “That’s not possible, would you like a television set?” I said, “I already have a television set, I want to meet Frank Sinatra.” And they said, “How about Buddy Greco?” And I said, “I know Buddy Greco.” “How about Sammy?” “I know Sammy.” “Well, hey kid, thank you very much.” On Thursday of that week, Mr. Sinatra’s office called and said, “We’d like you and your wife to be his guests at the Sands in Las Vegas.” And I said, “That’s all very well, but I make $100 a week.” And they said, “No, you’re his

guests

. You have two round-trip tickets, the room’s covered, and when you get there make sure to ask for Mr. Sinatra.” That was in 1966, and we were friends from that day forward.

Wow.

It was great. Las Vegas in the 60s. Frank owned the city.

Were you nervous?

Absolutely. We got there and got our reservation for the room, that was fine. We came up, had a suite with a circular bed. Everything in the room was white. Fantastic. I wanted to go down and make sure we had tickets for the show. I went up to the maître d’. I said, “Hi, I’m Sid Mark, I’d like my tickets.” And they said, “You don’t have any tickets.” And I said, “You don’t understand, I’m Mr. Sinatra’s guest.” “

You

don’t understand. Everyone here is Mr. Sinatra’s guest. There are no tickets.” What do you do now? You’re in Las Vegas with no tickets. I don’t know Frank. Was this a bogus phone call? Sylvia Sims, who was a cabaret singer in New York, said, “If you get into trouble, ask for Jilly Rizzo,” who was Frank’s right-hand guy. And I paged Jilly Rizzo and he said, “Yes, Mr. Sinatra’s waiting for you for dinner.” And we went in to have dinner, and sitting at the table were Jack Benny and Mary Livingston and Milton Berle and his wife and Nancy Jr. and the owner of the hotel, and Frank. There was no one else in the dining room, just us and our party. We sat down and had dinner and drinks, and long story short, he said, “I’ll see you at the show,” and I said I didn’t have tickets. He thought that was pretty funny, as did everyone at the table, and he gave me a little pinch on the cheek and said, “No, you’re sitting at our table.” I walked in with all these celebrities and everyone knew who everyone was, but they had no idea who we were. Like, “Who’s that with the pope?” And we all went out after and stayed up all night. It was great. I felt like garbage the next day, back to normalcy.

You were pretty straight, you were able to stay out of trouble. Was it ever hard for you to do that?

My brother was in med school, my sister was at Syracuse University, and I was to be in the family business. But once I got the taste of the forbidden fruit, I just enjoyed being around the artists. One of the jobs I had at the nightclub, which was the best part of all since I was new in the business, was I had to drive the lead performer to and from the club. That would be people like Count Basie or Duke Ellington. A marvelous case was when Lenny Bruce was there for a week. I got to hang out with Lenny every day. I hung out with Lenny Bruce!

Yes!

And Nancy Wilson and Sarah Vaughan, and the list goes on and on. On Sundays, we used to do matinees and it was four to six, and then we shut down from six to nine, and the owner of the club cooked dinner for everyone. You’d be sitting there having dinner with all of them. There were times when I would say to the owner, “I don’t think I should be paid this week. I can’t accept the money, I’m having too good a time!”

It was a labor of love.

When people say, “Where did you go to school?” I say I went to the University of Red Hill Inn. That was the name of the club. To be around all those people, to be at the rehearsals, to be at a Sinatra rehearsal with a 60-piece orchestra, is unlike anything I’ve ever seen in my life. He’d be in front of an orchestra and turn around, look into the string section, and say, “Fourth one over, did you just hit a clinker?” He could hear that. And to see him run through it, and the excitement of the orchestra sound checks, and the lighting, and then to see the performance after, you don’t get that kind of experience. I don’t know if they teach that at Sarah Lawrence, but it’s a hell of a course. I’d sign up.