The Summit: In Concert (1999)

Every frazzled parent has pulled the car over and threatened: ''Kids should be seen and not heard.'' Aside from the fact that it's a damn effective disciplinary ploy, it could also double as a caveat for any retro hepcat looking to relive the Rat Pack's ring-a-ding-ding heyday with The Summit: In Concert. After all, what were Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr. but grown men playing rambunctious kids in the backseat of the '60s? Of course, their particular state of arrested development included topped-off highballs and punchlines as blue as anything Redd Foxx delivered.

When the dark knights of Camelot convened at the Villa Venice, outside of Chicago, in November 1962, to make a little hey-hey, it too was an experience to be seen and not necessarily heard. In other words, this booze-drenched time capsule (the inaugural release from the Sinatra family's Artanis label) is only half of the Rat Pack experience...and not due to the absence of Joey Bishop. Dino opens the show with the debauched charm of an insurance salesman coming off a three-day bender, turning the standard ''When You're Smiling'' into ''When You're Drinking.'' Sinatra, who could bend a note with the ease of a circus strongman, hams his way through ''Chicago'' before segueing into a sultry ''When Your Lover Has Gone.'' And before the trio closes with some locker-room high jinks, Davis croons a wrenching rendition of ''What Kind of Fool Am I.'' Sadly, the quicksilver footwork that made him a nightclub Nureyev is absent.

Still, you have to hail from Squaresville not to dig The Summit's lo-fi clinking of glasses and metallic flicking of Zippos in the crowd. By the time the giddy applause fades, however, you can't help but get that depressed feeling that you kind of had to be there. B

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