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Vegas, Frankie, Vegas!
October 30, 2006

As Frank Sinatra performed live for some 50-plus years, it’s no surprise that “never-before-heard” concert recordings by The Voice continue to trickle out eight years after his death. The latest batch comes in the form of Frank Sinatra: Vegas (Rhino, street Nov. 7), a five disc collection of material from Reprise records that spotlights the singer in performing in his kind of town—Vegas—in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties.

The Voice didn’t quite have the voice that he had earlier on (is there any baby-boomer out there whose

parent didn’t tell them that Sinatra had lost it as early as 1959!?), but his bigger-than-life presence, style, phrasing and lyric amendments remained undisputed and unmatched. Only Sinatra could take a line like “She’d never bother with people she’d hate” from his crowd-pleasing standard “The Lady Is A Tramp,” and ring-a-ding it up to “She’d never bother, baby, with a bum that she’d hate.”

The fifth disc of the bunch is a DVD that features a complete concert from May, 1978 at Caesar’s Palace (one of some 500 show he performed there over the years). The cameras were taping the show for a portion of an upcoming CBS-TV special. A few of the songs were broadcast on the tube, but the whole show is included here. The 16-song set offers a intersperses the usual standards (”All of Me,” “My Way,” “Someone To Watch Over Me,” “My Kind of Town,” “Send in the Clowns”) with a tasteful oddity or two (George Harrison’s “Something,” “America The Beautiful”). When Sinatra’s not crooning, he’s monologuing about what “those schmucks” William Randolph Hearst and Louis B. Mayer (both of whom had been dead for more than 20 years) and introducing celebs in the audience including Orson Welles and former L.A. Mayor Tom Bradley.

But what we enjoy by most on the DVD is the great footage of Sinatra readying himself backstage before the show while stand-up comic Jackie Gayle is heard entertaining the crowd. Straightening his collar, sipping at a tumbler of Jack Daniels on the rocks and regally surveying the wings like “The Greatest Roman of them all” that Caesar’s touted him as, Sinatra is here seen as the state of mind—and the way of life--that he a represented for so many. And he ain’t even singing!!

Posted by Laurence Lerman on October 30, 2006 | Comments (0)