Caesars Palace, 1982: Frank Sinatra is building to the climax of maybe his 500th show on the Strip. He's just run through an awesomely dire song with his daughter and some horseplay with Dean Martin, but now he gives the rubes what they've been waiting for. "Here's your chance; horns up fellas," he tells his band, and, as they rev up for the opening, high-kicking bars of his latter-day signature tune, Frank takes a moment to tease the crowd, to remind them of where he and they've come from, and where they're heading back. "Chicago! Chicago! A wonderful town, a toddlin' town!" And then: "I left my heart in…Kansas City!". Waiting for the laffs to subside before finally tearing into a showstopping "New York, New York"-- John Kander and Fred Ebb's irresistible, cornball hymn to little-town blues and vagabond dreams.
But for all Sinatra's poise and pose as the voice of 20th century loneliness, when he's singing about "My Kind of Town" we know he really means Vegas. Did he ever dedicate a song to it? You imagine, even in his most desperate attempts to broach a truce with rock'n'roll, he had too much class for the shit-kicking redneck glee of "Viva Las Vegas". Of course, he didn't have to sing about the place because he so successfully embodied it. More than Maggio in "From Here to Eternity", than Major Bennett Marco in "The Manchurian Candidate", maybe even more than the "Frank Sinatra" conjured up across those 1950s Capitol recordings from In the Wee Small Hours to Where Are You?, Sinatra's enduring role was King of Las Vegas-- a method performance built up over three decades.
With the first disc-- 1961 at the Sands-- he's already got the role down cold. Recorded off the back of the brazen yet triumphant folly of Ocean's 11, it finds a Sinatra arrogantly, effortlessly on top after his long 1950s of dog duets, voice-loss, and Ava Gardner. He can't help guying his maudlin persona in front of the guys. If Casablanca was essentially a "women's picture for men" (as David Thomson puts it) then Sinatra had been a torch singer for tough guys-- he took so much from Bogart, even down to the name of the Rat Pack. But here he goofs his way through "The One I Love Belongs to Somebody Else" and "Imagination", indulges in a half-baked parody of "River, Stay 'Way From My Door" so that it refers to Jack Entratter-- Manager of the Sands, Mob veteran, one of the guys who'd leant on Warners to ensure Sinatra got the career-saving role in Eternity. The closest he gets to the performance of sincerity is "Young at Heart": "Fairytales can come true, it could happen to you".
The second disc is taken from the same 1966 set that became Sinatra at the Sands (the one live show released in his lifetime), and though Frank sounds heroically sloshed the performance is supercharged by the astonishing power of Count Basie's band. "Hold on a second," says Sinatra in a lull midway through "I've Got You Under My Skin". "We're going to take this here building and move it three feet this way… hold onto your handbags" as the band roar out from behind him like a brass jet engine.
You also see the smooth showbiz veneer begin to slip. "Good morning you bunch of drunks," he greets the crowd. "Oh, I see a lot of booze and wine flowin' around here tonight! Hot damn! This is a night, eh? Saturday?"
"I didn't ask you to answer me," snaps back Sinatra. Idolizing Dean Martin, appreciating his hip screwball act with Jerry Lewis, Sinatra tried to capture their ironic repartee within himself, but was so often revealed as naturally humorless-- his idea of wit being a few supposedly affectionate cracks at Sammy Davis Jr. But even here he delivers a terrific, sensitive performance of "The September of My Years", easing into his late mode as bittersweet nostalgist.
By 1982, after some epic disagreements, Sinatra was through with the Sands: "Welcome to the Palace of the Caesars, where there are now 13-- me. There were 12 before, but we chased them out of town because they couldn't swing." The little Caesar role feels more like bravado now; he seems happier with the old saloon songs. "I Can't Get Started" is a sublime acknowledgment of the failures behind all the fronting, while "These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You)" is cracked, flawed, and utterly captivating.
1987, now at the Golden Nugget and he's beginning to sound a little like a Sinatra impersonator. "Guess what?" he announces, "I've got the…World on a String!", like Steve Martin declaring that he's got happy feet-- but his phrasing is beginning to let him down, he's easing round the swerves in the melody gingerly, like a guy concerned about the ache in his hips. Introducing a Garlandy medley of "The Gal That Got Away" and "It Never Entered My Mind" he gets sadly befuddled about the songwriters, and you worry it may become a camp fiasco. But he wins the songs over determinedly, as though he still had the notion that he could woo back Ava, even after all these years.
He seems genuinely excited to be singing a Stevie Wonder song-- "You Are the Sunshine of My Life"-- but sounds stilted in the big band arrangement. Having brazened out the approach of rock'n'roll for so long, now, in his seventies, a lion in winter, he finally sounds like a man out of time. The finest song here is "I Get Along Without You Very Well", almost whispered over a swoon of strings. "It's about a big fat liar," he declares at the end, as though to an earlier self, almost amazed he got out of it alive.
