Best Rat Pack CD(s)?
 

Looking for Sinatra/Martin/Davis Jr. CDs. The "Live at the Sands" collection looks pretty good so far.

just because you watched Ocean's 11, doesn't make you a part of the Rat Pack.

I'm gonna be a crooner!

Are you looking for a disc with all three of them on it? If so, I believe that there's only a handful of them out there.

Live at the Sands is excellent. Great song selection and plenty of un-PC humor.

The only other one that I've seen (aside from the comp of studio recordings released to capitalize on the Ocean's 11 remake) is a two disc import that I got from Best Buy for about $15. It's called Ratpack: From Vegas to St. Louis (I believe it was in the Sinatra section). The first disc (the Vegas show) was recorded a day or two before the Live at the Sands disc and for the most part has pretty much the same songs and stage banter (only part of their shows were ad libbed). The second disc (the St. Louis show) is with Count Basie's band and hosted by Johnny Carson. A lot of the songs are different from the just mentioned shows, as well some of the humor. All in all, it's not a bad set for the price.

There was a two CD set which was available a few years back which had the Pack doing a show at Sam Giancana's (the mobster) Villa Venice near Chicago. They were not paid for the show as it was a favor for Giancana's help in getting JFK more union votes. They played for two or three evenings and Sinatra had planned to release the show on his Reprise label but never got around to it. This release was a bootleg and eventually had to be pulled from store shelves due to legal action by the Sinatra camp. A truncated version of one of these shows has been released by the Sinatra girls on the Artanis label. Also, for a good Frank only disc, you must get Live at the Sands.

Swing When You're Winning - Robbie Williams

very Rat Pack-esque.


It's good to see excellent crooner music is still being made.

Is this disc also called "The Summit" or is that something different? I had the Summit a couple years ago and it was one of those 14k gold discs that sold for like 30$ and supposedly the cd was coated in gold for better sound. Either way, your description of Live at the Sands sounds a lot like this disc.

According to the All Music Guide, The Summit was recorded live in Chicago at the Villa Venice. Although, from what I've read, the shows were hardly ad-libbed and spontaneous, so the two discs are probably quite similiar.

See my post above. Live at the Sands is just Frank. He's got a 10 minute monologue on there which is different from what you'll hear on Summit. Summit is the truncated version of the two-disc bootlegs. Also, for a nice companion piece to Live at the Sands, there's a Count Basie release which contains his band-only performance before Frank came out (they backed Frank for his performance).