Rat package

Frank, Dean & Sammy's Summit

by Josh Kun

The June 1962 Frank Sinatra concert captured on Sinatra and Sextet: Live in Paris (Reprise) is, without question, my favorite Sinatra recording of all time. I love it not just because Frank gets a high-society introduction from Charles Aznavour, or because his rendition of "I've Got You Under My Skin" climaxes the way it never would again (with Sinatra growling "you fool" with particular venom), but because he finishes his eerie mimicry of a black stevedore on "Ol' Man River" by dedicating it to "Sammy Davis's people." The way Frank says it, you're not sure whether he's being Frank the paternalistic, Kennedy-supporting liberal (after all, Frank was always the "me" to Sammy's "shadow" when they did "Me and My Shadow") or Frank the wiseguy ("Ol' Man River" as a song composed by a Jew about the black South being about the "people" of America's best-known black Jew).

The dedication got no laughs in Paris, but it's exactly the kind of comment that brings the house down, over and over again, later that year when Frank takes the stage with Sammy and Dean at the Villa Venice restaurant in Wheeling, Illinois. Long one of the more omnipresent of Rat Pack bootlegs, the cocktail-clinking Villa Venice show is now "officially" available (as a gold disc no less) as The Summit (Artanis). The story behind the show is vintage cement-shoes-meets-the-White-House Frank lore: The Summit was payback to the Villa's owner, Chicago Sam "Momo" Giancana, who helped Frank help Kennedy secure his presidential bid by fixing the West Virginia primary.

The Summit is a thrilling recording, a relentless shtick-and-yuk fest performed with a bar on stage -- a polished, excessive gem of the kind of live entertainment that's been lost to tuxedo'd-showroom history. But the real reason for spending this hour and a half with these three crooning clowns is to hear a fascinating snapshot of inter-racial male friendship one year after the Greensboro sit-ins, one year before the march on Washington, and the same year that the black and white freedom riders headed South.

When Dean and Frank hog a medley, Sammy barks, "If I don't sing a song here soon, you gonna see some troops on the stage." Sammy interrupts his own rendition of "All the Way" to comment on black invisibility on the TV show The Millionaire ("You'd think he'd run into somebody in some of them neighborhoods he's in").

But it's Sammy's double status as black and Jewish that all three "pallies" have the most fun joking about. We get a story early on about Sammy burning a Star of David on the lawn of a racist club owner in Georgia. Sammy even feigns slipping into accidental Yiddish pronunciation on "She's Funny That Way" (he does "wudda" as "vudda"), and when Frank tells Sammy to shut up and sit in the back of the bus, Sammy strategically snaps back, "Jewish people don't sit in the back of the bus." Frank may get the last word -- "Jewish people own the bus" -- but Sammy, who could marry a white woman, out-talk Archie Bunker, and break bread with The Jeffersons, still refuses the seat.

In The Summit's new liner notes, critic John McDonough describes the threesome as embodying "the essence of the liberal vision, a future where friendship was blind to race." But The Summit isn't about color-blindness at all; it's about the opposite: Frank and Sammy and Dean goofing on their differences, color-obsessed, trying to work out the complexities of civil-rights America from behind the winking veil of booze, broads, cigarettes, and a schmaltzy seven-song medley. At the Villa Venice, the medley -- which covered everything from "Pennies from Heaven" to "The Lady Is a Tramp" -- lasted 18 minutes, but it could have gone forever.

On the radar

* Robert Cray recording his best songs yet by doing Al Green impressions on Take Your Shoes Off (Rykodisc).

* After months of being the heard-but-never-seen black id of blocked white sex drive on Ally McBeal, Barry White gets it over with and does a guest spot on the show.

* Vinicius Cantuaria reawakening the alterna-bossa tradition (especially the ghost of Tom Jobim's 1973 Matita Pere) with his gorgeous Tucuma (Verve).

* Why affirmative-action legislation should extend to national music magazines: Eminem on the cover of Rolling Stone, his third feature spread in the magazine since February.