He was met by a tsunami of hysterical screams from a passel of young female fans. ‘And now, Frank Sinatra …’ The 27-year-old Francis Albert Sinatra stepped up, and history turned a small corner. And so, on 30 December 1942, Sinatra was brought onstage, in an almost desultory way, by Benny Goodman. As Donald Clarke puts it in All or Nothing at All: A Life of Frank Sinatra (1997), the Paramount Theatre was ‘one of the shrines of the Swing era’. When Sinatra’s new booking agency, GAC, persuaded the owners of New York’s Paramount Theatre to add him to its big New Year show, their driven young client had none of the star power of already signed performers like Benny Goodman and Peggy Lee his billing read ‘Extra Added Attraction’, and for Sinatra this particular gig was a pretty big deal. But a hesitant jockeying for power had started up among band leaders, singers, agents and arrangers,and what came next would surprise nearly everyone. Vocalists had little real power: they were smiley, yes-sir emblems over the arch of touring big bands. This was an era when audiences bugged out to live music, rather than losing themselves in recorded sound. It was a personal turning point for the young man Jimmy Durante dubbed ‘Moonlight Sinatra’, at a moment when bigger changes were in the air. He had just left the Tommy Dorsey band, had a slick new press agent called Milton Rubin, and the beginnings of what we would now call a posse. Even at the time, Sinatra’s cameo didn’t cause much of a stir, and Reveille doesn’t feature in many official filmographies but it did mark, in its modest way, the inception of Sinatra’s solo career.
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