It’s the song we all dread to hear — mainly because it has become the favourite of bores, egomaniacs and bad Karaoke singers all over the world.
But there was a time when My Way was regarded as the ultimate ‘self-expression’ song.
After all, if it was Frank Sinatra’s goodbye song, then it should have been good enough for everybody else. I was at a bar in Delhi last week where the audience kept requesting the singer to perform it. When she finally did sing it, the applause brought the house down.
The story of My Way is probably more interesting than the song itself.
Contrary to what some people think, Frank Sinatra did not write it for his retirement — Sinatra did not write his own songs.
Nor was it specially written for him to mark his first goodbye. (Frank would keep making comebacks and there would be many more goodbyes in the years to come). In fact, the song had been a hit in France long before Frank even heard of it.
It happened this way. The French original hit that country’s charts in 1967. The Canadian-American singer Paul Anka who had been a teen idol in the 1950s and who made a good living in the 1960s as a songwriter (he wrote Tom Jones’ She’s A Lady, for instance) and nightclub performer heard it while he was on holiday in France.
It is not clear how Anka managed to buy the rights especially as he says he got them for free. But there is a story to the effect that the French had also approached David Bowie (not quite the great star then that he was to become in the 1970s) to write English lyrics. But Bowie’s lyrics never got to reach a wider audience as Anka bought the rights to the song.
Anka says that he hated the French original. So why did he buy it? Well, he claims, it had a certain something about it nevertheless and he thought it could be improved.
As a songwriter, Anka’s job was to sell his songs to top singers. He met Frank Sinatra who told him that he was planning to retire. Anka told him he had just the song for him and promised to send it over.
So, was the English My Way written even before Anka had heard that Sinatra needed a song? Possibly. But for the record, Anka says that he wrote the lyrics only after speaking to Frank and tried to write them in Sinatra’s voice. Another possibility is that he had the song but changed it around slightly to suit Sinatra’s retirement.
Anyway, Sinatra recorded the song and it duly become a big hit because fans had no idea that it was an old French song and thought it had been written to summarise Frank’s feelings about his career.
Since then, My Way has always been around. It has become a torch classic. (There’s a wonderful over the top version by Shirley Bassey). And there are over a hundred cover versions. Anka has made enough on the royalties to retire and each time My Way (any version) is played on the radio, he makes more money.
But the song had a parallel life. The French song was translated into Spanish (as French pop tended to be in the Sixties) and released in Spain as Ai Mi Manera. It became a hit with an audience that had never heard Sinatra’s version and Ai Mi Manera has popped up on the Spanish charts again and again.
The best known today of the Ai Mi Manera versions is probably the Gypsy Kings recording. It is not clear to me whether the Kings simply re-recorded the 1968 Spanish version or, as is sometimes claimed, they wrote new lyrics that more closely approximated Paul Anka’s English words. Either way, it is a great version and the Gypsy Kings have even recorded it with Joan Baez (highly recommended).
So what makes My Way such a Karaoke classic? Well, for a start, it is not difficult to sing so every drunk in every bar thinks he can take a shot at it. But there’s more. It is also the male I Will Survive (have you noticed how all women, no matter their circumstances, identify with that crappy Gloria Gaynor song?) because basically the message is “So what if I screwed up? I had fun doing it.” This is a message most men seem, bizarrely enough, to identify with.
Obviously, not everyone likes this message. I remember, in the 1970s, listening to Cliff Richard who declared he would never ever sing My Way (yes!) because the ego-centric nature of the lyrics had convinced him that it was not a Christian song.
And while Cliff is a silly old fool, there’s no doubt that the lyrics do reek of smug self-satisfaction. Still, I guess that’s what Karaoke is for. It worked for old Frank. So why shouldn’t it work for the rest of us?