We're coming up on the 10th anniversary of the beginning of the 2016 annus horribilis for popular music, the year we lost two and one-half great artists. I mean no disrespect to George Michael for the "one-half" thing, as you'll see momentarily.
2016 kicked off inauspiciously with the death of David Bowie, two days after both his 69th birthday and the release of his haunting final album, "Blackstar." Bowie's death might have been a shock but it was no surprise. He wasn't exactly old, but let's be honest here: if there had been online betting in the 1970s, money would have changed hands every day he remained alive after August of 1976 — when he moved to West Berlin and spent two years snorting the city dry.
Then we lost Prince in April, and I still have trouble talking about that in much detail. His music helped pull me out of a teenage funk and made my early 20s a delightfully extravagant mess. I left all that behind, but never Prince.
On Christmas Day, George Michael died and nobody who knew much about him was particularly shocked. He'd spent at least a decade trying to kill himself with drugs and anonymous sex. Michael's difficulties with celebrity were so well-known that Frank Sinatra wrote a public letter of encouragement to "Calendar" magazine around the time Michael's second solo album, "Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1" was released in 1990.
"When I saw your Calendar cover today about George Michael, 'the reluctant pop star,'" Sinatra opened, "my first reaction was he should thank the good Lord every morning when he wakes up to have all that he has. And that'll make two of us thanking God every morning for all that we have."
When Frank says he's a fan of your work, you really ought to take that to heart.
Sinatra closed with something reminiscent of Rush Limbaugh's line about "talent on loan from God." He wrote, "Talent must not be wasted. Those who have it — and you obviously do or today's Calendar cover article would have been about Rudy Vallee — those who have talent must hug it, embrace it, nurture it, and share it lest it be taken away from you as fast as it was loaned to you."
That talent was first put on full display in his first solo album, "Faith," released in 1987. The standout cut is a quiet affair called "Kissing A Fool," and, in this amateur music critic's opinion, it deserves a late entry into the Great American Songbook (that unofficially closed in the early '60s).
Even the video was delightfully pared down. It takes me back to all the smoky jazz clubs I got dragged to as a kid — reluctantly at first and then with enthusiasm.
Also take a listen to "Cowboys and Angels" from his second solo outing.
When your heart's in someone else's plans
Things you say and things you do
That they don't understand
It's such a shame
Always ends the same
Michael would even poke fun at his arrest and conviction for some lewd public act or other with another of his patented dance-floor extravaganzas, "Outside," in 1999. The lyric turned his community service sentence around to "service the community." As I said, he tried very hard to kill himself with drugs and anonymous sex.
For all of his records sold, songwriting skills, and decades spent in the spotlight, it seems almost impossible that he produced just five solo studio albums — and that one of those was an unexpected collection of jazz covers of popular songs from throughout the 20th century.
It was released in 1999 and titled, appropriately enough, "Songs From the Last Century." Michael's song selections include everything from a '30s jazz standard ("My Baby Just Cares for Me") to "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" (which I was shocked to learn began life as a folk song in 1957) to U2 and Brian Eno's "Miss Sarajevo."
Talk about unexpected, the man with the voice like an angel closed out the album with a lovely instrumental.
I should add that I might be a bit biased on this one. I missed it on release but a couple of years later, a lovely young woman introduced me to "Songs" on our second date. We were married 18 months later. We still are.
"Songs" opens strong with a tender recording of the Great Depression classic, "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" The story is of a once-wealthy man who lost it all in the stock market crash, and Michael sells it like someone who has experienced too many losses of his own.
Michael's take on "Secret Love" — and I do not bestow this honor lightly — comes straight out of the playbook Sinatra established during his mid-'50s/mid-'60s heyday.
His cover of The Police's "Roxanne" might be better than the original. It's certainly his own. Where Sting's vocals were the raw cries of a desperate young man, Michael's reflect a more mature longing. He raises an intriguing question: how does an earnest grown man find himself enraptured with an Amsterdam prostitute?
When I say that we only lost "one half" of a great artist when George Michael died, it isn't because he died so young — or at least not only because. It's mostly because such a major talent produced so little original work. The talent Sinatra praised was given too little chance to shine by Michael's demons of drugs and fame.
But, damn, the one time he recorded an album of covers, he made you forget all about his demons — and yours.
