Tony Bennett

Tony Bennett Oh suuuuure, ya dig Tony Bennett now. He's the hip, suave 79-year-old who's widely recognized — especially now that Ol' Blue Eyes and the Velvet Fog are gone — as the last of the great jazz-informed pop crooners who ruled charts and hearts beginning in the mid-20th century. But where the hell were you in the late '70s, when the one-time singing waiter from Queens, New York, needed you, when he couldn't sell a record or a concert ticket to save his life and was sucking in cocaine like it was oxygen in order to dull the pain? Oh, right, you were in diapers or nonexistent or listening to that godawful disco, punk or whatever other crap knocked him off the airwaves and turned him into a walking punch line for nearly two decades. That's OK, though — Bennett got his manager-son to help engineer a remarkable comeback in the early '90s by getting him on MTV and The Simpsons.Nowadays, Bennett is firmly ensconced as a living legend, his voice is still strong, and he'll take you on a fun ride through the same Great American Songbook that Rod Stewart insists on slaughtering every year. And he won't even hold it against you if your love for him is only ironic. What a guy!