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Wednesday February 24 3:31 AM ET
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By Steve James
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Nine months after his death, Frank Sinatra's unfinished project is about to see the light of day.
It's a live recording of one of a series of outrageous cabarets Sinatra performed with ``Rat Pack'' mates Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. in 1962 at a Chicago-area night club.
The remastered disk -- titled ``The Summit -- In Concert'' -- captures not only the songs and the politically incorrect banter between the superstars but the sounds of clinking cocktail glasses and flicking cigarette lighters in an age when it was still cool to smoke and booze.
``All three (performers) are gone, but on this CD, it's like they're alive and well, which is kind of the point,'' recording engineer Steve Hoffman said of the disk being released March 2 on DCC Compact Classics' 24-Karat Gold audiophile label.
``I wanted to capture the real authentic evening. They didn't vary the routine much, but the ad-libs changed from night to night. That Friday night there were lots of celebrities in the audience,'' he said.
The 16 shows the trio performed from Nov. 26 to Dec. 2, 1962, at the Villa Venice in Wheeling, Ill., attracted a who's who of 1960s glitterati, from boxer Sonny Liston to Playboy-in-chief Hugh Hefner and his attendant bevy of bunnies. Sinatra's buddy, reputed Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana, was in the house sometimes.
The three even joke about Giancana in one exchange in which Sinatra exhorts his friends to keep down the noise. ``Whoa! Whoa! There's a gangster sleepin' upstairs! What the hell's the matter with you? Keep it quiet.''
Hoffman said he was approached by Sinatra's daughter, Tina, before her father's death last May to remaster the original tapes the singer had had recorded when he was head of Reprise Records. The tapes had sat around in a vault at Warner Bros. for 36 years and were never made public.
``It was daunting at first,'' he said of the 52 reels of three-track tape. ``I listened to every second of them, it was very exhausting, but eventually settled for this Friday night show.
``The old tape sounded good, and I did not add anything, but I recorded it with vacuum tube amplification to give it a rosy, nostalgic sound.''
So what about the Jack Daniels and martini-induced joshing between the three in which they poked fun at everything from race to politics? Won't it offend the sensibilities of fin-de-siecle America?
``We thought about it a lot, but I felt that in the historical context it was important to leave it unedited,'' Hoffman said. ``No one thought about it at the time, but now we're so P.C.! If I had edited out all that, I'd have been left with nothing.''
On the CD, Martin, who joked about his love for alcohol, sings a spoof ``When You're Drinking,'' and Sinatra makes constant references to ``broads'' and sex.
They both constantly tease Davis for being black and Jewish and dating a white woman. But the singer-dancer draws a big laugh when he declares: ``If I don't get to speak soon, there's gonna be troops on this stage!''
``The political incorrectness of it all has been overblown. You've got to understand the times,'' said Bill Zehme, author of a Sinatra book, ``The Way You Wear Your Hat.''
``In fact, you notice Sammy Davis Jr. always prevails. Their mocking of racial issues and general japery were going on all the time,'' said Zehme who also wrote the CD's liner notes. ''(Radio's Howard) Stern is crucified for the same thing, but he has Robin (Quivers) to tell him to shut up. Sammy did the same with Frank and Dean.''
For Zehme, the disk is a historical capsule of a time in America before the Kennedy assassination, before Vietnam and before the Beatles, when the Summit -- Sinatra's preferred name for the Rat Pack -- held sway and Italian mohair suits were de rigueur.
``This, children, is what really went on: what went on was a miracle, fused purely of a nocturnal moment and of a sublime chemical collision between three grown boys in formal wear ... and you had to be there.''
For Hoffman, remastering the far-off voices from a long-dead era was a labor of love.
``Hearing him (Sinatra) day after day, night after night, when he died I felt like I had lost a member of my family.''
Reuters/Variety