"Are you ready, Mr. Basie?" So goes one of many immortal lines on the new box-set Vegas (Warner/Reprise), which finds Frank Sinatra away from home yet on home turf. The collection—four discs of live recordings from different eras, plus a DVD—has the voice, in fine fettle and full of easy charm. It also boasts one hell of a personality. Sinatra, like most comedians, saw the world in black-and-white, which gave his showmanship crispness and cut.
We hear generous Sinatra. Before or after, and sometimes both, he credits the composers and arranger of the songs he sings: They're "swell," "lovely," "marvelous," "tops." He thanks, mocks, and effuses over his musicians. He toasts his audience: "To you and your families."
One-liners overfloweth. "Good morning, you buncha drunks." "I gotta stop sleepin' in the pool." "As Joe E. Lewis said, 'A friend in need is a pest.'" His persona often blends with Phil Hartman's Saturday Night Live impression, full of menacing humor and jokey threats. "What are you staring at?" he asks. Or, in reverse, "I'll stand and stare at you as long as I want to." "When I'm on this stage, I'm the boss."
Here he is at the end of "Get Me To The Church On Time": "That's from the production Mary Poppins Was A Junkie."
Sinatra ribs his friends, dancing from digs to deprecation to twinkling menace. On Dean Martin: "He's a drunk—I say that unequivicibbibbally. He wears curb feelers instead of cufflinks, so he can feel the curb when he lays down."
On Sammy Davis: "You know, he wrote a marvelous book called Yes I Can. The other day I saw his first television show and I sent him a wire that said, 'No, you can't.'"
On Don Rickles: " What chance am I gonna have of singing a couple of songs when he's on the same bill? Aw. That's gonna be laughs." (Beat.) "It better be, or he'll never work here again."
There's a Tough Crowd vibe to the discs, taking talk of race and culture to the offensive borderline. Frank asks, "Did you hear the marvelous story about the fact that since the ecumenical council decided it wasn't the Jews who killed Jesus, the Jews have now lowered the rent at the Vatican?" He trills Italian at Don Costa, and then: "That's Sicilian, folks. Don't get excited—it ain't Vietnamese. That's what you call Wopahu language—that's the tribe we come from. The other guys are the Navajews and we're the Wopahus."
Music and musicianship associated with the chauvinism of an era must be judged on its own merits. Here, horns blast and blare, blissfully over-bearing. Soon Sinatra salutes the strings, whose poignancy is almost unbearable. On some of the songs with the Count Basie band (most conducted by Quincy Jones), vibes peal, bells ripple, silvery saxes create soaring melodic counterpoint.
As a singer, Sinatra transcends. His delivery is rhythmic, jagged, tart, rough, precise, loose, embedded in the groove while stretching it a mile. Drive to "Luck Be A Lady" (recorded at The Sands in 1966) and prepare to shell out on speeding tickets. In ballads, he coaxes out individual lyrics, approaching each phrase, sometimes each word, with a slightly different touch. Referring to himself as a saloon singer, he can turn the gaudiest Vegas hotspot into the most squalid of nowhere dives, and it's magic.
Both audio and video show a man vainglorious of tux and shoes he calls "Mary Janes‚" self-aware yet always moving and thinking ahead. His lack of formal music education was possibly his biggest asset, for his abilities—to improvise, to connect, to retain and create an inimitable way of speaking and doing—suggest an uncluttered path from heart to head to action. His focus is of someone whose craft has been built from genuine need, rather than academic interest or intellectual curiosity.
Sinatra was a uniter of people; his was no modest conviviality. He was extremely protective of those he liked and blunt in his distaste for those he didn't. His combination of soother and sentinel, peacemaker and pugilist, has lost none of its mesmerizing qualities.
There are bones. Sinatra's embrace of progressive politics stops short at feminism; even in concerts by a Rat Pack of one, the boys-club atmosphere is oppressive. The pair of songs that close the DVD, recordings of "My Way" and "America The Beautiful" from 1987, can't help but conjure memories of an embattled Sinead O'Connor and Reagan-era fascism.
Yet Vegas is indispensable, one of the biggest reasons being that Sinatra the man was essential to Sinatra the artist, and vice versa. More than just a strong voice, he had a strong character. And the masses, lacking one or both, responded. In a version of Stevie Wonder's "You Are The Sunshine Of My Life‚" Frank sings: "You must have known that I was lonely / That's why you came to my rescue." From our hearts to his lips.
Nellie McKay is a songwriter and performer who came up in New York clubs and cabarets. Her new album is Pretty Little Head.