This Town

"This Town" — Frank Sinatra

The Chairman in the City's Blood

By 1967, Frank Sinatra had already outlasted more trends, more cultural upheavals, and more dismissals than any reasonable observer would have predicted when he first rose to prominence in the early 1940s. He had survived the bobby-soxer phenomenon, the collapse of that first wave of fame, the wilderness years of the early 1950s, and then the improbable comeback through From Here to Eternity and the recordings on Capitol that had remade him as the premier interpreter of the Great American Songbook. He had started his own label, Reprise Records, in 1960. He had survived the British Invasion while many of his peers had not.

In 1967, the year "This Town" appeared, the popular music world was in the middle of perhaps its most turbulent and creative period. Sgt. Pepper's arrived that summer. The psychedelic era was in full bloom. Sinatra was fifty-one years old and making a record about Los Angeles. And somehow he made it work.

A Song Built for a City

Written by Lee Hazlewood, "This Town" is one of the great Los Angeles songs, which is saying something given the enormous body of music that city has inspired. Hazlewood, whose own recording career produced some of the more singular sounds of the 1960s, constructed the lyric around the idea of a city that both seduces and destroys, that offers everything and takes everything, that cannot be left behind because it has gotten into the blood. The narrator is deeply ambivalent about the place and yet utterly bound to it.

Sinatra was the ideal vocalist for this material. His particular gift had always been the communication of a certain knowing emotional complexity, the sense of a man who had seen too much to be naive but was not cynical enough to be cold. Los Angeles, which had given him his greatest professional triumphs and provided the backdrop for complicated personal passages, was territory he understood from the inside. The performance had the quality of lived experience, not because Sinatra had written the song or its specific narrative, but because the emotional posture it required was one he inhabited naturally.

Five Weeks on the Hot 100

The single debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on October 28, 1967, entering at position 78. It climbed to its peak of number 53 on November 11, 1967, where it held for two additional weeks before the chart run concluded at five weeks total. That performance, respectable without being spectacular, reflected Sinatra's complicated market position in the late 1960s. His core audience remained deeply loyal, and a Sinatra single could still chart; but the pop mainstream had moved into territory that his music did not occupy, and the chart heights of the Capitol years were not easily revisited.

The performance on easy listening charts was stronger, reflecting the degree to which Sinatra's primary commercial home was with an audience that felt somewhat removed from the pop chart's mainstream. That audience was substantial, devoted, and would support his recording career through decades more of work.

Hazlewood and Sinatra: An Unlikely Collaboration

The pairing of Lee Hazlewood and Frank Sinatra might seem improbable at first glance. Hazlewood was an outsider figure, a maverick producer and songwriter whose aesthetic was eccentric and whose career trajectory was deliberately unconventional. Sinatra was the most establishment figure in American popular music. But what they shared was a commitment to adult emotional complexity and a refusal to chase trends that made their collaboration feel natural once it existed.

Hazlewood's songwriting gave Sinatra material that felt contemporary without requiring him to pretend to be younger or hipper than he was. The Los Angeles setting and the ambivalent emotional content were both specifically of their moment, and yet the sensibility behind them belonged to an older tradition of crafted popular song that Sinatra embodied perfectly. The collaboration produced several notable recordings and stands as one of the more interesting creative partnerships of Sinatra's late career.

The City as Character

Los Angeles has a long tradition as a subject of popular song, and "This Town" belongs in the first rank of that tradition. The city that Hazlewood describes and Sinatra inhabits is recognizable to anyone who has spent time there: glamorous and corrosive, generous and vicious, impossible to fully love and impossible to fully leave. That complexity, rendered in plain and rhythmically assured language, is what gives the record its staying power. Press play and you can feel the Santa Ana winds in it.

"This Town" — Frank Sinatra's singular moment on the 1960s charts.