Tony. Tony? Tony! : Suddenly Hip Crooner, 67, Woos the MTV Crowd on 'Unplugged'

By JOHN MILWARD

April 15, 1994 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

NEW YORK — When word got out that Tony Bennett would be featured on MTV’s popular concert series “Unplugged,” the 67-year-old singer was quick to point out the obvious: “I’ve always been unplugged.”

On Tuesday night, near the end of the show’s two-hour taping at the Sony Studios here, Bennett took the concept one step further by turning off the microphones. As he sang “Fly Me to the Moon,” his voice hovered above the unamplified piano like a hummingbird before streaking to a finale that brought the crowd to its feet.

You’d think the Equator would have to move before MTV would devote an hour to a man who could be Beavis and Butt-head’s grandfather. For “Unplugged,” Bennett was joined for a song each by k.d. lang, Elvis Costello, the Lemonheads’ Evan Dando and Dinosaur Jr.’s J Mascis.

But none of that overshadowed hearing Frank Sinatra’s favorite singer introduce MTV’s audience to material drawn from what he called “the great American songbook.” An hour after the taping, Bennett pushed the envelope ever further by appearing on a syndicated radio talk show, “Modern Rock Live.”

After the MTV performance, which is expected to be aired by next month, Costello said, “You can imagine the fear and trembling that comes when standing up to sing next to Tony Bennett.

“But make no mistake,” the younger singer added, “this is not about kitsch but about a singer who’s emotional and sincere, and that’s the truest kind of style. He was modern to begin with, and the rest of us are just catching up.”

Of the “Unplugged” duets, the best by far was by Bennett and lang, who traded verses on “Moonglow” and joined for especially sweet harmonies. Bennett and Costello (dressed for the occasion in a three-piece suit) made for a pleasingly odd couple exchanging lines on “They Can’t Take That Away From Me.”

Dando, sporting a new short haircut, sat on a stool and bashfully sketched out his half of “Solitude.” Instead of singing, Mascis joined Bennett’s trio to contribute a blues guitar solo on “St. James Infirmary”--a song that he later said was new to him.

Bennett’s emergence as an alternative-rock icon is no accident. For the past 15 years he’s been managed by his son, Danny Bennett, 40, who remembers being awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of his father and Count Basie jamming in the basement.

“Tony said he wanted to follow his passion and to feel uncompromised in his pursuit,” says the younger Bennett, who used to play guitar in rock bands and who also manages a group called Tribe. Toward that end, he got his father booked not just on “The Tonight Show” but also on “SCTV,” “The Simpsons” and David Letterman, and engineered a return to Columbia Records that reunited the singer with his voluminous catalogue.

Bennett’s recording career built momentum with a four-CD retrospective collection in 1991 that set the table for two Grammy-winning albums in a row--”Perfectly Frank,” a selection of songs associated with Sinatra, and “Steppin’ Out,” which featured tunes introduced by Fred Astaire.

Both collections are songbooks in a style that recalls Ella Fitzgerald, and both have gone gold, more than doubling the sales of Bennett’s other recent recordings. It should come as no surprise that Bennett’s next album will be drawn from the “Unplugged” performance.

Bennett couldn’t be more tickled by this unusual turn of events. At the end of last year, making concert appearances with such alternative-rock bands as Belly and Smashing Pumpkins, he was shocked to be met with standing ovations and chants of “Tony, Tony, Tony.” Then he won a Grammy in a category, traditional pop, that everybody figured belonged to Barbra Streisand’s “Back to Broadway.”

“Now I’m accepted as a fashion of the day,” says Bennett, who cut his first record in 1952, “and I’m still singing my Cole Porter songs.”

Not long after Bennett cut his signature hit, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” the Beatles and Bob Dylan redefined popular music by making it all but essential for singers to write their own songs. Bennett asked Count Basie for advice. Recalls Bennett: “He said, ‘Why change an apple?’ ” So he didn’t, bolstered by his conviction that “when a songwriter sings his own songs it can be so much more mediocre than when a singer like Lena Horne knocks it out of the ballpark.”

In the beginning, Bennett would record four songs in 3 1/2 hours. The two-day session for “Steppin’ Out” produced 25 songs. Producer David Kahne, who’s crafted hits for the Bangles and is currently recording Shawn Colvin, was exhilarated by sessions in which his primary task was to focus maximum attention on Bennett’s singular voice.

“On most rock recordings,” Kahne says, “you punch in vocal overdubs to get a particular spin on a performance. With Tony, his tone is so strong that you get all the dynamics out of his voice.

“Tony’s taught a lot of people about the sheer physicality of singing. With highly amplified music, you lose the fact that people create a lot of tone with their body and can use their voice to create all kinds of dynamics. When Tony’s singing in a room, you can literally feel the air moving.”

Bennett says his heroes are people such as Bing Crosby, Duke Ellington and Pablo Picasso--”artists who lived long and worked up to the day they died.”

Bennett is happy to follow their lead. The singer is also an accomplished painter who takes out his brushes every day, just as he devotes at least 20 minutes to vocal scales. For Bennett, this is not work but the rejuvenating disciplines of a life that’s still in full swing. And the payoffs are grand.

“If anything,” he says, “I have more control than ever over my voice, because I know how to feel more, and because I have wisdom.”