Lawsuit Accuses Curb’s Firm of Pirating Song : Music: Rights to a compact disc remix of Sammy Davis Jr.’s ‘Candy Man’ are at stake.

Who can take a sunrise, sprinkle it with dew, cover it in chocolate and a miracle or two? Sammy Davis Jr. had an answer for that.

But who can take an old recording of Davis singing “The Candy Man,” remix it with a miracle of modern technology and sell it on a new compact disc?

That’s apparently a question for the courts.

DCC Compact Classics Inc. of Northridge filed suit June 13 in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles against Curb Records of Burbank accusing the company of record piracy in releasing a version of the song on a compact disc called “Sammy Davis Jr./Greatest Songs.” DCC’s suit seeks more than $5 million in damages, plus court costs.

But understanding the case and the complex history of the recording is not easy.

Curb Records is owned by former Lt. Gov. Mike Curb. His attorney Joel R. Strote said Curb Records obtained rights to the recording from Polygram Records in New York. “Mr. Curb is a valid licensee of the rights to ‘Candy Man’ and that’s just a fact,” Strote said. He declined to comment further on the case.

Julie Griefer Swidler, an attorney for Polygram, declined to comment.

However, DCC President Marshall Blonstein said his company (formerly Dunhill Compact Classics) obtained rights to use the master version of the “Candy Man” recording directly from Davis, then remixed and released it on a compact disc in 1988 titled “Sammy Davis, Jr./Greatest Hits.”

Davis died in May of throat cancer at age 64. Barry A. Menes, an attorney for Davis’ Transamerican Entertainment Corp. said that Davis obtained the master to the “Candy Man” recording after a 1976 agreement between the singer and MGM Records. Polygram had acquired MGM Records in 1972.

Menes said he was in the process of looking for records of the agreement and hadn’t looked at the DCC suit closely.

The liner notes on the dueling companies’ compact discs don’t make the dispute any clearer. For example, DCC’s notes acknowledge that Mike Curb was one of two producers of the original recording of “Candy Man” that DCC later remixed for its compact disc. In fact, Curb was president of MGM Records for nearly four years until 1973.

At the same time, Curb’s liner notes acknowledge that someone named Steve Hoffman remixed the version of the song included on Curb Records’ release. Yet that’s the very same Steve Hoffman who did the remix for DCC, according to DCC’s suit. Indeed, Hoffman, according to the suit, is a DCC employee.

DCC specializes in taking records that were best sellers 15 to 20 years ago or more, using special equipment to remove the hissing and popping from the old masters, then releasing them on compact disc. Besides two Davis discs, DCC’s 72 titles include works by artists like Leon Russell and the late Harry Chapin.

But it’s tough to make a profit on the relatively small numbers of discs DCC sells: The company lost $151,609 on sales of $2.02 million in 1989.

In the ‘70s, Curb and his company produced records for Marie Osmond and Debby Boone, including Boone’s “You Light Up My Life.” Curb also produced a movie called “The Cycle Savages,” for which he was later criticized by his Democratic opponent for Lieutenant Governor in the 1986 election, Leo T. McCarthy.

As a Republican lieutenant governor under Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown from 1979 to 1983, Curb was known for trying to take advantage of his temporary powers while Brown was out of the state. He was defeated in his bid for the governor’s office in 1982, then ran again for the state’s No. 2 post four years later but lost to McCarthy.

For now it seems the dispute between the companies will have to be settled by a federal court judge who, strangely enough, had a minor encounter with Davis more than 35 years ago.

In a letter to the attorneys representing the companies, David W. Williams, senior judge in the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, said he’d once been retained to represent Davis after the 1954 highway accident that cost the entertainer his left eye. But a few days later, another attorney called and told Williams that Davis had hired him, replacing Williams.

“At this period of time,” Williams wrote in the letter, “Mr. Davis may have been in the early years of his career as an entertainer, but I was totally unaware of who he was, or that he was in show business.”