Music, Laughter, And Hard Liquor

Dean Martin was a bigger star than anybody, ever. Even Sinatra, who worshiped him. He got so rich that "money was just there, like smoke in the lungs" as Nick Tosches would put it in his fine biography. He was a superstar in a way we haven't seen since the passing of the Age of Entertainment. The only artist to have ever been at the top in TV, radio, movies, recordings, and live performance simultaneously. Yet he took none of it seriously, never broke into a sweat. He played the lush, but never lived it like he played it. That whole Rat Pack thing is anathema to the Woke Generation, who are too busy cringeing and groaning and judging and apologizing to share a table at The Sands, nibbling martinis and each others' ears and guffawing at the sheer outrageousness of his act. But we can get a hint of what that experience was like, in all its man-made fiber magnificence, from this recording, which has somehow survived as some kind of Rosetta Stone of Lounge.

Cody digs Dino!

Although it all sounds unrehearsed and freewheeling, his act changed only fractionally from night to night. Hundreds of nights. Millions of dollars. Note how it lasts an hour, almost to the second, as per his contract. This was business, the business of Show, and the hottest ticket in town. So if you can scrape one together, raise a frosted cocktail to Dino, the King of Kool.