From London Calling New York New York by Pete Silverton:

Also traveling with the Clash was cartoonist Ray Lowry, a whippet-thin manic Mancunian cartoonist who was ten years older than the band and liked a drink. He was sketching anything and everything that caught his eye, sending weekly dispatches back to the NME in London, describing himself as a “war artist” who was “covering the battle” — the kind of rhetoric that hung, comfortably, around that Clash tour.

While in Chicago, he took a cab out to 2449 North Lincoln Avenue, the location of Wax Trax, the city’s hippest record store, and bought a record. Not a new record but an old one, two decades old — Elvis Presley’s first album, the one with a wild cover picture of the singer onstage, rocking his microphone stand. His name is in giant capital letters: ELVIS down the left, in pink, PRESLEY along the bottom, in green. Lowry paid six dollars for it.

Five days later, on September 19, the Clash were in Boston, appearing at the Orpheum — the same day Frank Sinatra recorded “(Theme From) New York, New York” in Los Angeles. Their next two shows were in New York, at the Palladium, a (now-demolished) concert hall on East 14th Street. They took the stage to the sound of Sinatra’s “High Hopes.” “London Calling” was the fourth song in their set, as it was on most dates of that tour. Ira Robbins reviewed the night in Trouser Press magazine and called it “a sloppy mess of a wonderful show.” It was there, at the Palladium, that Pennie Smith took the photograph used for the album cover, an image of Paul Simonon smashing his bass down onto the stage, at 10:50 p.m.

The whole London Calling package was designed by Lowry — he placed Pennie’s blurry black-and-white photo within his reinterpretation of the cover of that six-dollar Elvis record. On the inner sleeve were lyrics in Lowry’s hand with funny little Lowry sketches dotted between them. Kosmo Vinyl: “Everything about the London Calling album was planned during that U.S. tour.”

“New York, New York” came to Sinatra via music publisher Frank Military, his right-hand man right through the 1950s. They remained in touch long after Military quit Sinatra’s employ, when the singer left Capitol Records at the end of that decade.

Sometime after the Scorsese movie came out, Military sent Sinatra a copy of Minnelli’s recording, with the suggestion that he cover it. When there was no response, Military — a man with the organizational inclinations of his surname — followed up his suggestion with regular calls to Sinatra’s secretary, Dorothy Uhlemann. “It’s on the turntable,” she’d tell Military. “He’s getting to it.”

And eventually Sinatra did. And he liked what he heard, enough to include it in his shows, long before he recorded it. Not that he liked it enough to give it its own spot in his act — not to start with, anyway. At first, he didn’t even sing it — not so much as a word.