LATE ARRIVALS

By MICHAEL PERKINS

FIFTY-TWO YEARS AGO, IN 1972, FRANK SINATRA RELEASED the most experimental album of his career. Watertown, a unified song cycle or “concept album” rather than a random collection of individual tracks, was devoid of the hip glamour of the Rat Pack, running cross-grain to everything the Chairman Of The Board’s fans expected of him. As a consequence, The album sank like a stone. 

Watertown is a study in the isolation and despair inside the Great American Small Town, as told through the eyes of a man whose wife has left him to care for his two small children alone, her dreams unknowable, her grievances uncertain. Several of the songs center on the center of the town, the local railroad depot. The nexus of comings and goings. Hopes. Disappointments. Soft escapes. Quiet desperation.

Recently, my mind travelled back to my student film days, when Watertown was new and I used its opening song as the soundtrack to one of my four-minute Super 8 epics, shot in my mother’s birthplace of Wellston, Ohio, a place which spent much of the 20th century and all of the 21st slowly sliding into oblivion. Years later, the film is long since lost, but, thanks to a critical re-evaluation and revised appreciation of Watertown, the inspiration for it, as well as newer images, survives, as Sinatra intones:

Old Watertown
Nothing much happenin’
Down on Main
‘Cept a little rain
Old Watertown
Everyone knows
The perfect crime;
Killin’ time

And no one’s goin’ anywhere
Livin’s much too easy there
It can never be a lonely place
When there’s the shelter of familiar faces
Who can say
It’s not that way

Old Watertown
So much excitement
To be found
Hangin’ round
There’s someone standing in the rain
Waiting for the morning train
It’s gonna be a lonely place
Without the look of familiar faces
But who can say
It’s not that way 

Sinatra, a singer known for signature albums like Only The Lonely, collections that wrung every last drop of sadness out of the particular kind of heartbreak that is America, really swung for the fences with Watertown, making more of a solid commitment to contemporary material than was typical in much of his later years. Half a century on, many critics have realized what a treasure the doomed project really was. There’s also a lesson in there for photographers, or anyone who ventures into unknown territory. Even when the trip seems to go nowhere, the journey is often worth the taking.