New podcast about SammyĀ and Dino!
http://www.youmustrememberthispodcast.com/episodes
Yesterday I listened to the brilliant first episode of the new season of You Must Remember This podcast, which is all about Sammy Davis Jnr and Dean Martin! It was fantastic, please listen. Hereās the blurb:
āThis season, we look at the movies, music and lives of Sammy Davis Jr and Dean Martin. Singers, actors, TV stars and nightclub performers, Davis and Martin became rich and famous selling versions of mid-20th-century hipness as the biggest stars in the Rat Pack who werenāt Frank Sinatra. The standard-setter for masculine cool in the second half of the twentieth century -- as well as a nexus where Hollywood power, political power and mafia power came together -- the Rat Pack feels uniquely uncool today. As its mystique recedes, itās the perfect time to begin to unpack its allure, and take a cold hard look at the art it produced.
But Sammy and Dino were both more than the Rat Pack, and examining their lives and careers in tandem reveals tons, about the evolution of racial attitudes from the beginning of the 20th century -- when Italians and Italian-Americans like Dean were widely considered to be non-white; about how Hollywood responded to, and influenced, changing ideas about masculinity and āthe manā from World War II to Vietnam and beyond; and above all, about the differences and similarities between mainstream capitalism and underground criminal economies, which is laid bare by the intersection of the music industry and the mafia.
Today, weāll talk about Sammy and Dinoās childhoods and early years as entertainers -- years which formed their talent, their stage personas, and taught them their first lessons in the racket that was, and is, the music business. Both grew up in marginalized communities where they learned an ethos of success based on hustle. Weāll track both Dean and Sammy to major coming-of-age moments in the middle of World War II. Coming up in industrial Ohio as both a card dealer and a nightclub singer, Dean learns how and why the house always wins. As a child, Sammy joins his fatherās touring dance act, and eventually becomes the main attraction -- before the war forces him to encounter racism at a level heād never experienced before.āā
