‘Sinatra at the Sands’: When Frank Sinatra Ruled Las Vegas
“Being in the room where Sinatra was performing could make a man feel, if not immortal, at least wholly alive.” — Charles Champlin
What was it like to watch Frank Sinatra perform at the height of his creative powers in Las Vegas, the place where the gods of entertainment descended to rub shoulders with mere mortals amid garish neon and the eternal whirl of slot machines? Sinatra at the Sands, recorded in 1966 at one of Frank’s favorite places to swing, offers a glimpse.
It’s been said that during Sinatra’s glory years, men especially loved him because Sinatra lived a life without limits that men could only dream about: having unfettered access to anything he wanted at any time — money, women, booze, fine hotels, fast cars, fancy threads, and the unfailing loyalty of other men. And Sinatra possessed power. The power to summon a flight to Las Vegas on a whim if he felt like hitting the town. The power to snap his fingers and surround himself with the best musicians and song arrangers when he felt like recording an album. The power to help or hurt. Once, he used his muscle to secure a role for Sammy Davis Jr., in the movie Never So Few, only to kick Davis off the movie over a personal slight. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.
The Man Who Built Las Vegas
Las Vegas is where Sinatra created the mythology of the man who could have it all and do it all. He’d begun performing there in 1951, when his career was on the rocks, and only the mob-owned casinos would have him. At the time, there were only seven hotels on the Strip, and Las Vegas was still finding itself.
But after Sinatra won an Oscar for his performance in From Here to Eternity in 1952, everything changed for both Sinatra and Las Vegas. He became a one-man magnet for the hotels he performed at, luring gamblers to Las Vegas for a dash of celebrity to spice up the slots, dice, and cards.
As James Kaplan wrote in Frank: The Voice,
. . . suddenly, in this two-horse town, Sinatra meant excitement, excitement meant crowds, crowds meant gambling, and gambling meant money for the casinos, especially the ones where Frank was playing. Ten years later, Billy Wilder summed up the phenomenon: “When Frank Sinatra was in Las Vegas, there is a certain electricity permeating the air. It’s like Mack the Knife is in town, and the action is starting.”
He played a major part in transforming the city into not just the gambling capital of the world, but also the self-proclaimed Entertainment Capital of the World.
Kaplan summed up Sinatra’s impact succinctly: “In a very real way, Sinatra built Vegas: not only was he present at its creation, but he was responsible for it.”
Sinatra had plenty of help, notably from the so-called Rat Pack, consisting of Joey Bishop, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, and Dean Martin, who performed with him off and on at the Sands in a series of now-legendary gigs, known as the Summit, from January 20 to mid-February 1960.
Thanks to effective PR and their casting in the popular Ocean’s 11 movie (set in Las Vegas and the reason the Rat Packers were in Las Vegas when they performed the Summit gigs), the Rat Pack made Las Vegas not only a gambling destination, but a desirable playground for grown-ups.
Stories of their hedonism while they shot Ocean’s 11 — skirt chasing, drinking, all-night parties in hotel suites, and orgies with hookers in steam rooms — created a naughty allure the way Keith Richards’s decadence would for rock and roll fans years later. They were, in the words of James Kaplan, “a sharkskin-suited, skinny-tied, chain-smoking, chain-drinking, Dionysian parade float.” During the Rat Pack’s Summit appearances, the Sands, a hotel with 200 rooms, turned away 18,000 requests for lodging.
It Was a Very Good Year
By 1966, when Sinatra at the Sands was recorded and released, the Rat Pack had faded away, and Sinatra had turned 50. He’d greeted middle age by recording the exquisite September of My Years, which contained “It Was a Very Good Year,” a beloved ode to middle age, whose narrator reflects on past romances and takes the measure of how his life has turned out. The Beatles were already rewriting the rules of modern-day music when Sinatra at the Sands came out; Sinatra sensed a threat, and he hated it. The days were soon coming when he’d respond to that threat with some miscalculated song choices, but not just yet.
In Las Vegas, Frank Sinatra continued to reign as the king, and he was worshipped by the white, middle-class America that associated Las Vegas with pleasures forbidden in Peoria. There were no Beatles, Rolling Stones, or Bob Dylan anywhere around (Las Vegas was just too square for rock stars, although Elvis Presley would soon change that perception). This was Frank Sinatra’s town. He literally owned a piece of it — a 2 percent stake in the Sands.
“Seeing Sinatra perform in Vegas was like nowhere else — it was his home ballpark,” according to film critic Charles Champlin, in an essay written for the liner notes of the Sinatra: Vegas box set released in 2006. “Raucous, exciting, almost obscene, a Sinatra show was an event. In those days, the Sands Hotel was Sinatra’s home away from home, and there was an incredible family feeling in the room, which was always packed with adoring fans up to the rafters.”
But there was more to Frank Sinatra and Las Vegas than music. Las Vegas was also the epicenter of the good life. People came to see Frank Sinatra sing, yes, but they also hoped that if they got very, very lucky, they might rub shoulders with him, too. For Las Vegas was his playground, and it was not out of the realm of possibility that if you hung out at the casino wherever Sinatra was singing, you might actually see him there, exuding kinetic energy while he played a round of craps, drank, smoked, and basked in the glory of his entourage. And no one lived large like Frank Sinatra. He was legendary for creating a whirlwind of constant energy, going to shows, then hitting the tables. And if you didn’t see him, at least breathing the same air that Frank was breathing at that very moment somewhere in Las Vegas made you feel like you were somehow “part of it,” as if his presence in the casinos conferred coolness on your losing hand of blackjack.
Author Ronald Brownstein described some of that electricity in his book The Power and the Glitter:
For Sinatra, for his cronies, life seemed a canvas with no borders . . . There was an electricity to it: to walk into the Sands Hotel with Sinatra, a phalanx of guards leading the way, heads turning, whispers rolling through the casino like waves, men in tuxedos rushing to greet you, was mesmerizing, almost otherworldly. Just the sheer scent of celebrity at Sinatra’s parties was intoxicating.
But Sinatra was a performer first. The whirlwind was a byproduct of his performance, not the other way around. And his shows were legendary. He surrounded himself with great musicians and meticulously prepared. Sometimes he rehearsed his band at 2:30 a.m. after watching someone else perform, because he wanted to get a feel for how they’d gel in a club atmosphere. If a musician didn’t click, Sinatra would have them fired. Because he cared. Onstage, his band was tight and his delivery was flawless. He projected an undeniable charisma, too — an air of confidence, but not cockiness; charm, but not oily charm; warmth, but not sentimentality. As noted in Charles Pignone’s The Sinatra Treasures, “ . . . it wasn’t just the music they came for, it was the attitude, the character that Sinatra projected from the stage clear across the room.”
“How Did All These People Get in My Room?”
Sinatra at the Sands captures the music and the attitude. The first words out of his mouth are not the verse of a song, but a question: “How did all these people get in my room?” And indeed, the Copa lounge is his room. Then, the brassy “Come Fly with Me” from the Count Basie Orchestra, conducted by Quincy Jones (yes, that Quincy Jones, who produced Thriller among many other landmark albums), announces the album with authority. Throughout the album, Sinatra and the orchestra unfurl the songs with a thrilling interplay. Near the end of “Come Fly with Me,” Sinatra’s voice soars as he sings “Pack up and fly away” and holds the note over energetic horns with a drum adding a punchy counterpoint to the verse.
His “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” swings as he caresses each note. When he sings “You know you fool you never can win,” Sinatra sounds like he means it. His voice rises on each verse, soaring with emotion as he adopts a persona of a man coming to terms with his unrequited love, but still staying in the ring, trying.
His voice is in excellent form throughout. When, in the tender ballad, “The Shadow of Your Smile,” he sings the words, “So did I,” he holds the note for a few precious seconds until the word “I” bleeds into the next verse, “Now when I remember spring,” demonstrating the phrasing that made him famous.
Those moments don’t happen by accident. In the liner notes to Sinatra: Vegas, Quincy Jones remembered a conversation he and Sinatra had about the song line-up for his show:
Once, on a flight to Vegas, [Sinatra] asked, “Q, wouldn’t it be kooky if we added Johnny Mandel’s new song, ‘The Shadow of Your Smile,’ to the show?”
“No problem. Can you learn the lyrics by tomorrow?”
He gave me a look and began writing the words on a pad, over and over again. Eighteen pages. I dozed off. When I woke up he was still writing, force-feeding the subconscious.
Under Jones’s direction, the music of Sinatra at the Sands brims with energy. And Sinatra looks cool and elegant in a tux on the record sleeve, his lean profile bathed in a spotlight, Count Basie in the foreground, and a hint of Sinatra’s faithful audience in the background.
But no matter how cool he looks, Sinatra sings with a warmth and vulnerability that connects with everyone, as when he tenderly delivers the line, “I’ve got a crush on you, sweetie pie,” on “I’ve Got a Crush You.”
The Count Basie Orchestra slows down the pace and the volume to allow Sinatra’s tender vocal to show through, as it does when the child-like twinkle of the celesta keyboard dances alongside Sinatra’s aching interpretation of “The Shadow of Your Smile.”
By contrast, Sinatra’s fellow Rat Packer Dean Martin reveled in his coolness and had no room for warmth and tenderness. Onstage, Martin sang like he was at ease with himself, but either you were along for the ride, or you weren’t, and if you weren’t — well, that was your problem.
Sinatra at the Sands also explores rich textures of tone. One moment, the jaunty, sassy “Where or When,” horns a-blazing, holds sway; in the next, the album gives way to Frank, longtime sidekick and pianist Bill Miller, and the melancholy “Angel Eyes” so gracefully you don’t even notice the transition.
The liner notes for the album capture these moments with a bit of florid, but heartfelt writing:
Then Sinatra turns back and sings. It looks effortless, the way he lazily loops the mike cable through his relaxed hands. But his face shows what he’s singing. Eyes closed, head tilted, lips carefully phrasing and elocuting.
And then Sinatra runs through his best. The songs are Sinatra’s like “Come Fly,” and “Crush” and “Fly Me to the Moon.” Hip, up-tempo, wailing songs.
And then he’ll change the pace on the audience . . . Count Basie walks off-stage. A thin, grey-haired man, who looks as if he hides under mushrooms to avoid the sun’s rays, walks to the piano.
This is Bill Miller, Sinatra’s piano player. Sinatra turns to the audience and tells them he’s going to sing a saloon song, and silently you can almost hear the perfumed ladies think “Yeah” and the close-shaved, shiny-cheeked men think, “Yeah,” and the waiters stop on the doorways and think “Yeah.”
And with just a piano behind him, Sinatra turns actor. The man whose broads left him for some other guy and all the loot. And he sings — and acts — his “Angel Eyes” and his “One for My Baby.” And there is silence all about, for this audience is watching a man become that last lucked-out guy at the bar, the last one, with nowhere to go but sympathy city.
And, I’d add — you believe he’s the last lucked-out guy at the bar, not one of the most celebrated and powerful entertainers in the world.
The Emperor Has No Clothes
And now we come to the less-flattering, but important, part of Sinatra at the Sands: his stage patter. Sinatra is fine — commendable, actually — when he provides a little color commentary about a song. And his introduction to “One for My Baby (And One More for the Road),” when he invites the audience to assume the role of bartender, is intimate. But his attempts at comedy are not only clunky, but clumsy and tone-deaf, to put things charitably. At one point, he engages in a 12-minute monologue that sounds like your dad reeling off one-liners onstage at the local Elk’s Club variety show. (The segment is labeled “the Tea Break” on the album. It feels like a filibuster.) Sinatra makes eye-rolling, but affectionate wise-cracks about Dean Martin’s drinking. He makes inexcusably ugly remarks about Sammy Davis Jr. And yet, the audience chortles with every little joke he cracks, no matter how corny and outright cringeworthy he sounds. He wields a magnetic power over his fans, and he knows it. The audience at the Sands wants so badly to be part of his orbit that they will go along with the boring and tone-deaf monologue.
Unfortunately, Sinatra at the Sands is not an aberration. Sinatra’s sense of humor reflected a knuckle-dragging, Neanderthal sensibility that he shared with his fellow Rat Packers for years. In fact, those celebrated Summit shows from 1960 were marred by a crude racial insensitivity and misogyny that says more about the standards of white America than anything else. Much of what passed for Rat Pack humor — like Frank, Dean, and Sammy needling each other onstage — reflected horseplay that happened between the real-life friends on movie sets and in saunas. But the jokes are indefensible and inexcusable. It’s hard to see how anyone back then could have found it amusing to hear Frank say to Sammy, “Smile, Sam, so the audience can see you,” as he did during those Summit shows. Or Dean Martin lifting Sammy and saying, “I’d like to thank the NAACP for this award.”
But audiences ate it up. As James Kaplan wrote in Sinatra: The Chairman, “ . . . to the paying customers — say the Orville Dryers of Point Mogu, California — it was all new and profoundly startling. It was startling to see grown men in tuxedos — famous grown men in tuxedos — behaving this way, and no doubt the Dryers told their friends about it (whispering the naughty bits), and the legend began to grow.”
Davis himself would incur criticism for going along with the jokes, but did he have any choice? Sinatra held all the power in the relationship. And here is the downside to Sinatra’s power: when the emperor wore no clothes, who would tell him?
Ultimately, though, the artist in Frank prevails: when he sings, “It Was a Very Good Year,” Sinatra sounds alone, naked, and absolutely vulnerable, as he takes stock of his life and contemplates the days growing short and his life as vintage wine, pouring sweet and clear. The moment takes your breath away.
Sinatra’s Swan Song
Sinatra at the Sands was the first official live album released during his career. It sold well (achieving Gold Record status) and was generally critically well received. The AllMusic website would describe the album as “the definitive portrait of Frank Sinatra in the 1960s,” according the album 4.5 out of 5 stars.
Sinatra at the Sands would also turn out to be Sinatra’s swan song. As the album was released in the summer of 1966, Sinatra’s relationship with middle age was taking a turn for the worse. That same year. he recorded the uneven Strangers in the Night and That’s Life, both of which contained some great songs such as “Summer Wind,” but also some glaring misses, such as “Downtown” and “Winchester Cathedral,” both embarrassing efforts to appeal to contemporary tastes. He married then-21-year-old Mia Farrow and divorced her, cruelly, after two awkward years that made him look like he was a desperate cradle robber.
His glorious run at the Sands came to an ignoble end after Howard Hughes purchased the hotel in 1967. In a now-infamous incident that year, Sands manager Carl Cohen embarrassed Sinatra by cutting off his credit after Sinatra had run up a sizable debt. Before Howard Hughes took over the Sands, Sinatra’s gambling losses were forgotten, and his wins paid out. But Hughes didn’t play by those rules. Sinatra was so angry he generally acted like a child. He attempted to start a fire in the casino, tried to drive a golf cart through a glass window, and confronted Cohen in a drunken rage. Cohen delivered the ultimate insult: when Sinatra threw a chair at Cohen and threatened him, Cohen punched Sinatra square in the teeth.
Chastened, Sinatra went on to hook up with Caesar’s Palace. He still had some brilliant record albums on the horizon amid the artistic and commercial lapses. And he would never stop performing in Las Vegas. He returned many times to Caesar’s Palace and other venues. His shows remained popular, even as Elvis Presley muscled him to the side and ruled the Strip.
I’ve listened to many recordings of Sinatra post-Sinatra at the Sands. Even though his voice lost its punch over the years, he never lost his passion, and he always sang like he loved every single note. He never stopped being the man that Charles Champlin described in this anecdote from the Sinatra: Vegas liner notes:
I would occasionally visit Sinatra after a show in Vegas, when he was backstage mopping up. Once after he’d sung Cole Porter’s “I Concentrate on You,” I had the effrontery to say to him, “Frank, it must be really something to sing a great song like that and know that nobody in the world could do it better.” Sinatra replied simply: “That’s all there is. There’s nothing else.”
I don’t know what will happen to the mythology of Sinatra. Certain aspects of it — the unbridled power and the shameless pursuit of hedonism — have not aged well. But when you strip away the mythology, the music remains as strong and pure as ever. That’s all there is. There is nothing else.
