Frank Sinatra's pals cultivated their cool in a bubble of chicks, booze, wiseguys, nicotine and neon.
Had there not been three notable singers in the party it would surely have fizzled, haggard and sheepish, one Vegas dawn around 1964. Instead, three voices made legends of half a dozen cross-addicted scoundrels who defined hip for a year or two before feminism and The Beatles started them on the long, slow journey to the celebrity roast.
The Rat Pack movies are thought to reveal the essences of these men, but the real story is in the music they chose and the way they sang it. And the man who defined the eccentric pack vocal style was not Frank Sinatra, but Sammy Davis Jr. . Frank was simply too genuine a vocalist to shill for something as shiny and hollow as the pack, so it fell to Mr. Davis to define the style. Only Sammy fully mastered the strange blend of bluster and suavity.
The truckload of Davis material found in the Rhino Records 1999 boxed set was almost more than a body could take, but a number of gems were missing, including songs from the movies. Although I don't recall public disturbances regarding that oversight, Rhino has nonetheless topped off last year's box with a new single disc of Davis rarities, Sammy and Friends, which includes collaborations with other packsters and the missing movie songs.
It was in fact Sammy who was on the rise at the time. Throughout the 1950's Sinatra had topped the charts, but by the Pack's glory days he was way off his stride, strangling himself with cigarettes and struggling to keep his pitch. Except for a brief vogue in 1965-66, he would be commercially significant again only after he died. As for Dean Martin, well god bless K. D. Lang for continually promoting him as Sinatra's better, but by 1962 Dino's taste was wrenched and his delivery plain loopy -- if he wasn't drunk, he believed he was, and that's what counted.
But Sammy still had pipes, even if he was rarely sure what to do with them. His singing, indeed his life, is a story of racial ambiguity. He made his mark singing pop in a Broadway style with no perceptible black inflection, and that's pretty much what's on offer on this CD. As Broadway singers go, he was superb, and could have been satisfied with that. But when he felt the call to get down his bad black self, the results vould really make you wince. Broadway singers always had trouble with the blue notes, and Mr. Davis lands on them, in Birth Of The Blues for instance, no more comfortably than Matt Monroe or Jerry Vale. He was the first African-American to live in Bel-Air and perhaps he believed that if he ever sang like a bluesman, they'd make him leave. Perhaps they would have.
So he brought Broadway, not the blues, to the recording studio, and that created a dissonance. His body is doing things you can't see. He shouts to reach the back row. He relies on stage techniques -- on several occasions he builds false endings and then reprises the chorus. This works best when the audience can actually be heard demanding that he wind 'er up one more time. When they're not there, it's a bit of a laugh. Sammy, save it for the next show.
A man with so reckless an overdrive should never have attempted a song as slippery as Begin The Beguine. But at least Davis doesn't fail in just a small way on this one, he bombs Imax size, with a hilarious hepcat arrangement subverting his most earnest Connecticut white-guy delivery. The pickled Irish tenor on the Lawrence Welk show did a better job.
The quaint artificiality, that lingering old-time show biz ethic, pretty much dines Davis' work. Nonetheless he remained a remarkably clear and engaging singer. He kept his pitch, he knew when to park the vibrato, and he could swing. He's one of the few people who could open his mouth alongside Sinatra, as he does twice on this disc, and not immediately prompt the question: "Yah, but who's the other guy?"
The disc's highlight is one of half-dozen defining moments from Davis' career. It comes appropriately, from the essential Rat Pack movie, Ocean's Eleven. Yes, it was breathtakingly misogynist and a glide-through for every one of this sozzled posse, but is there is a Zen of old school cool, these men were its sublime masters and Ocean's Eleven was its holy book. Sammy's rendering of the tune here is worth a third of the price of the disc. The other movies songs are some fine moments as well.
As always in recordings like this, you can hear the distant whistle of a freight train called history. The pack was ill-prepared for a strange new world of temperamental women unschooled in the ways of the martini. The pack "philosophy" (I use the word as Hugh Hefner would) was so callous on so many levels that surely it facilitated the sexual realignment of 1960's by offering such rich evidence of what needed changing. To know where it would lead to, to hear its essence, you need only listen to the crass, almost sinister Sinatra, live at the Sands in 1966. These men owned the world around them because they had created it. They were not required to notice if anybody cared. And for that reason they could not comprehend what had happened when one day they woke up as cartoon characters.