The only track that has any real zest is the Bono-written novelty 'Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down),' the kind of dramatic song Cher could knock out in her sleep but also a song with no real heart. "Bang Bang" got to Number Two in the US, Number Three in the UK, and was by common consent the best thing on The Sonny Side of Chér. And it would prefigure the other story songs - "Half-Breed", "Gypsies, Tramps And Thieves" - that would define Cher's solo style until her re-invention in the Eighties. It's a simple idea, but very effective - even at mid-Sixties pop tempo. They used to play shoot-'em-ups when they were kids, but now they're grown up and he's shot her down metaphorically, straight through the heart. And then one day he's gone:Īnd so the pretend pain of childhood games is now real, and lasting. Be that as it may, he'd written a song for her that started in childhood, with boy-girl backyard playmates:
At this period in her career, Sonny had decided to Frenchify his Armenian mouthpiece, but somewhat erratically, so that her accents pointed in different directions according to whether she was spinning at 45 or 33 1⁄ 3. This one was written by Sonny for Cher's second solo album, The Sonny Side of Chér, and was released as a single by Chèr. Still, he had an eye for cute song ideas and, for a while, a cute gal to put 'em over. I didn't quite buy him in either incarnation, but I suspect, had any such choice confronted him in real life, his calculations would have been strictly economic. Not so long ago, zapping the remote in my hotel room, I came across a late-Seventies Love Boat in which Sonny was guesting as a hardcore glam rocker who secretly longs to be a romantic balladeer. Of course, in Sonny's case, the ersatz hippie and the opportunist promoter were the same guy. In his bobbed hair and bobcat vest, Sonny was more like some Tin Pan Alley opportunist promoter's idea of a folkie rocker than the real thing.
Congressman Bono, as he was by the time of his death, was even in his heyday a never entirely convincing face of rebellious youth:Įven then he seemed a good ten years too old to be singing about being too young.
For example, few of those who heard Cher's bouncy-bouncy kiddiepop hit first time round in 1966 would have imagined its transformation 15 years later into the title song of one of the darkest concept albums Sinatra ever made:Īnd so Sonny Bono wound up with the title track of an album with songs by Rodgers & Hart, Harold Arlen, Ira Gershwin, Jule Styne, Alec Wilder and Stephen Sondheim. Nevertheless, in this as in so many other things, Frank Sinatra got there first. The rock fans don't always take it well: I seem to recall John Pizzarelli's first jazzy album of Beatles songs was reviewed under the headline "Abbey Roadkill". After all, there have been plenty of rock'n'roll, rhythm'n'blues, doowop, Tamla Motown, folk-rock, disco, techno, punk versions of standards, so turnabout is fair play. One of the more heartening musical trends of recent years is the habit of young standards singers doing ancient rock songs in the American Songbook style: Michael Bublé's swinging version of "Can't Buy Me Love" is an early example, and I like to think of my version of Ted Nugent's " Cat Scratch Fever" as my own modest contribution to the genre.
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