(A sidenote: I re-listened to a large portion of Sinatra at the Sands in order to write this review but realized very quickly that I remembered it almost exactly how it is and ever shall be, every breath, note, and inflection, including the exact joke that ends the first monologue, officially called “The Tea Break” for you afficanadoes (sp?): “Now I think I better sing before I turn 51…I mean 29! Excuse me!” Basie’s menacing, stick-to-your bones bass line gets stepped on, of course. Still Frank, deft as ever, pulls off mic to bellow a nearly inaudible but audible nonetheless, “Hep! Hep! Hep!” before gliding greasy-skiddle-perfect into his latest threat: “You make me feel so young.”)

I once wrote a poem about Frank Sinatra when I was in my twenties, after I wasn’t supposed to like him anymore:

They say Sinatra was farting all night at the Sands
with no regard for
the band
or the production staff
left to fumigate the wings
every time he went back on stage.
The story can’t be 100 percent true because
everybody knows
that concert was recorded over several nights.
And they had to be careful because Frank was a
Legendary Lout.
One thing you have to give him though:
he sang his ass off that night.

Other notables of the program:

• Sinatra calls “The Shadow of Your Smile” (m: Mandel; l: Webster) “a brand-new song,” which, technically, it was at that time, despite the fact it has always sounded ripped from the bosom of Methuselah. He sings it prettily; he knows no other way. But it is a slight song, and Frank knows it, as evidenced by the tune’s invisibility across the rest of his recorded history.
• Later, he half-heartedly huffs “Where or When” (Rodgers and Hart), a song he gets through by throwing around the melody with an insouciance to match the title. Even Basie sounds bored. And this is Rodgers and Hart!
• As much as I love The Count, I hate “All of Me.” Too much of a brass shout. Tiny piano followed by cartoon horns, like an excellent Venetian Hour band – and the chattering of glasses in the background, absent during any portion of Sinatra’s set, doesn’t help. The Count ain’t no sideshow. Still, this piece is just another American diddie, background music twiddling over squeaky-wheel carts offering over-processed sugar to under-seasoned Americans. Can you imagine Vegas in the sixties? I think it’s one of the few things Hollywood has ever gotten right.
• Has there ever been a more insidiously sexist standard than Ervin Drake’s “It Was a Very Good Year?” I understand, it’s a high bar to cross. Still, it’s essentially an implicit criticism of the Women’s Movement. How dare our hero have to adjust from “small town girls” to those of “independent means”? Yeah, they’re all very good years. But the protagonist’s surprise is a glimpse into the vacuous souls of Mad Men-era white men. Frank, no friend to women, does his best at the end to rescue the situation – “It was a mess of good years” – while holding a preposterously long D. (The lyric is absent from the original recording.)
• “Makin’ Whoopee” is on this album. I have heard it before. I refuse to hear it ever again, if at all possible.

Soon after Sands was released, Frank entered into a particularly outrageous portion of his career. He was an avowed Kennedy guy – in some ways, it’s hard to tell them apart – but Kennedy’s death and numerous entanglements I won’t bother to get into here made Sinatra a different kind of person during the September of his years. And even when Frank went full out Republican, chumming it up with what turned out to be the first reality star president on the White House lawn in the eighties, I never thought it was as bad as the way he pandered in his music. Have you seen the cover of She Shot Me Down? (Note to editor: I’d like a pull quote here with a reproduction of the cover art. Do you need me to find this for you? I can ask my son to scan and send it over. I just need a few days notice.) Did he get that smoking jacket from an Ed Wood tag sale? And what about Trilogy? There’s probably no more bloated release in the history of popular music. No less an authority than Sinatra scholar Jonathan Schwartz – not that he’s unassailable – said so at the time, calling the album “narcissistic” (sp?) which, in retrospect, seems soft. If memory serves, the press release literally said it was an album about “the epochs.” All of them!

That’s not to say it was all bad. Sinatra’s work with renowned Brazilian songwriter Antonio Carlos Jobim is an admitted guilty pleasure. Jobim has his own history as one of the most revered songwriters and vocalists of these Americas – if not exactly a jazz artist – but Sinatra casually reduces his decorated counterpart to an appendage, looking for even the tiniest, smidgiest amount of international cred. And it works! Nobody else could sing the words “Agua de Beber” so arrogantly accentless and not sound like a fraud. There is an almost sexual symbiosis between the two natural tenors as they bounce around each other, a temporary armistice of predator and prey emerging as perhaps the most exciting interracial marriage until the Obamas. It is an arousing appropriation. ¹

The undisputed highlight of the second half of the record, though, is the vastly underrated 1938 Rube and Koehler composition, “Don’t Worry About Me.” Frank introduces the song over xylophonic twinkles, resorting to his one and only aw-shucks Gleason-esque delivery of the night: “I frankly believe that this next song is one of the great American standards of our repertoire in this nation.” (And that was the cut they kept.) He’s right. He forgets to credit the songwriters, though I’m willing to chalk that up to an impossibility. No way to fit in the names if Frank is going to slide unctuously into that bittersweet vibrato-lite half-sentence of irreducible self-indulgence: “Don’t Worrrrrrrrrryyyyyyy ‘bouuuut meeeeeeeeeeeeee…” The first time I heard it was the first time I understood my grandfather’s obsession with Sinatra’s phrasing. It is truly an astonishment. A clinic on breath control, if nothing else. He hasn’t stopped speaking for a hair’s breadth before he’s singing. The equivalent for me and you would be to run full speed for one minute. Then stop running for precisely one second. Then resuming activity at exactly the same level of speed and efficiency.

As it is, Frank gamely recovers to deliver a scathing soliloquy in the direction of some former lover who – aghast! – has chosen someone else. Whether that was the exact intention of the songwriters, I leave my readers to debate. But isn’t that Frank’s gift? He can remake history with that voice. Turn up into down, black into white, rice into wine. Man woman and child are bound to be raptured by his smoke and mirrors. Which is exactly why we love him. We may not realize it, but we ask our entertainers to be magicians too. That’s why they get paid so much. Frank can rewrite history, spit on it, resuscitate it. And all in the same stanza! Nice work, if you can get it.

But “Worry” isn’t just about the vocals. Not nearly. In fact, the first line is merely an amuse-bouche. The lyrics are interesting enough, although a bit scathing for your typical standard. And yet, after that first line, Frank seems to be waiting. Or rather, lying in wait as he dawdles along. And when the twist comes, it’s unexpected, even though it’s been staring us in the face all night long. For once, Frank is simply our guide, and he leads us into the fire as passive-aggressively as any good Virgil would: “So if you can forget…don’t you worry about me…”
And then 29 seconds.

Horns fall from the rafters, a litany of Lucifers immolating halfway down, unceremoniously cast out by a sophomoric overseer. 29 seconds. Unlike other portions of the program, these horns are earned from thousands of nights the opposite of this one, no gimmicks, no distraction, just agony and decency like the wounds of a terrified child. 29 seconds. Strings are a portent, turn and yearn, yeah, they’re gonna take us down into the middle of the night when the night isn’t the night but a sleeping bastard too drunk to care that the chips are down and the bowties are torn and every neck has already been broken. 29 seconds. Other things do other things. A final drum roll seems to never quite resolve and always makes me think about getting better speakers. Glints of rescues and hoodwinks and twinkled glass and a hurried promise of more to come because that’s all you’ve ever had and all you’re used to so you might as well make it feel like…

29 seconds.

Again, I have not seen this show with my eyes; there is no known video I am aware of. But I can bet right now, from what I know of Basie, that he could barely stand to play his instrument. He knew his Grand, part of an impressive backline at Sinatra’s hotel, was never getting over the horns, no matter how well mic’d, no matter how hard he played it. (And Basie wasn’t known for playing it hard, anyway.) By that point in his career, he was still a sterling pianist, but his role as bandleader made him an auteur of the moment. I don’t have to see it to know he is hopping out of his seat, one hand nominally on the keys, sweating angry, like somewhere early on he learned that when jump is happening, the room doesn’t matter anymore, no matter the swank, and from that day forward he never gave a shit if the people inside the room couldn’t have the wherewithal to figure it out. Fuck ‘em. Could be 29 hours. Or 29 minutes.

Or 29 seconds.

When it’s over, even Frank seems discombobulated. His embarrassed “dee-dah” (or is it “bee-cause”? I’ve never been able to tell) is clearly rushed, almost comically swallowed in a rare moment of microphone misuse from the GOAT. Kudos to him and his producer (it says Sonny Burke, but you can’t tell me Frank didn’t have final cut) for keeping it in.

(You can distinctly hear someone yelling “Frank!” in the aftermath, something they must have caught off a room mic and decided to leave in. I want to kill that motherfucker today as much as I did back then.)

It’s probably not a coincidence that Frank decides to introduce the orchestra after “Worry.” Then again, who knows when any of these things happened. It sounds like a post-production splice on my CD. “There’s nothing further to be said except the magnificent Count Basie and his great orchestra,” Frank says. And then he takes a break to go offstage and fart in the faces of the peons.

The Final Tally:

Despite all its flaws, Sinatra at the Sands is an outstanding concert album. Or, as Frank might say, “mahvelous.” Especially in light of his next attempt (his only other coordinated attempt at a concert album, so far as I can tell), The Main Event, eight years later. ²
Some gal I met a few years back turned me on to a gal named Ani Difranco. I looked up some of her stuff on YouTube. Most of it was fine, but she had one song in particular that caught my eye. I don’t remember the name of it, but I’ll never forget the lyric that made me stand up straight from cleaning the cobwebs out of the closet or making beans or whatever old man activity I was engaged in at that moment: “People used to make records, as in a record of an event, the event of people making music in a room.” Right on!

And maybe most importantly, Sands just sounds like the best night out. Ever. You can hear how good the food tastes. It doesn’t matter that the whole thing kind of reminds you that one of the reasons people love music is because they believe it doesn’t really matter. Fuck it. This is an epic recording of one of those nights out with your wife you’ll talk about for all time, and it’s worth all the thousands and thousands of hours of nights NOT like Sands just to have been there. To say you saw it. To say you were there in January (or February) of 1966. In Vegas. At The Sands.

After all, who is the bigger idiot? Frank? He makes the rules. He farts in people’s faces. He ends a jangly rendition of Fred Loewe’s idiotic “Get Me to the Church on Time” by singing (and this is exact, I carved a slash count on my desk to be sure) “ding dong ding dong ding dong ding dong ding dong ding dong… ding dong” to the frothing thrill of an adoring crowd. He gets free tuxedos that are just a little bit too tight. He gives you The Sands. Even if you weren’t there, you have The Sands. I mean, you have it. Right now. Right on your computer. It’s not the same as being there, but if you put the music up loud enough (and have the right kind of speakers) it’s going to sound pretty goddamn close.
Or me? I counted the dingdongs. I slashed up my desk in order to write this review. I have been working on this goddamn thing for what feels like thousands of hours with no promises, no guarantees, because there’s nothing else left for me to do. I haven’t been outside in weeks.

And all I have is you.