COMMENTARY : For Nonbelievers, Some Frank Praise for a Living Legend

Frank Sinatra. The Man. The Myth. The Spaghetti Sauce.

Tonight, 75-year-old Frank Sinatra brings his “Diamond Jubilee” tour to the Sports Arena for a show that includes Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme. It’s the sort of event that attracts a lot of attention, and almost no one dares pooh-pooh the significance of what might be the man’s last performance in our city.

However, at the announcement of this show a couple months ago, an associate put me on the spot by demanding a justification of all the fuss. “I’ve heard him sing a million times,” he protested, “and I think I’ve genuinely tried to understand why he’s considered so special. But I come away every time wondering, ‘What’s the big deal?’ ”

To appreciate Sinatra, I told him, the first thing baby boomers like us have to do is overcome generational bias. We can still believe that Chuck Berry and Elvis sparked a revolution, and that the Beatles represent the epochal musical force of this half-century.

But to ignore all that predated rock ‘n’ roll is to deprive oneself of some transcendent musical moments and to lose a true perspective regarding more contemporary sounds. In listening to vintage Sinatra cast his spell on a song, I concluded, one is enjoying a master of nuance, and the rewards are as great as any in music.

It was a fairly satisfactory response, I thought later. But the question nagged me. The directness of this challenge forced me to more closely examine my own feelings about Sinatra, and I had to confess that they had their deepest roots in ethnic identification.

As a third-generation Italian-American growing up in white-bread San Diego, I learned at an early age what Sinatra meant to my nationality. As in the movie “Avalon,” relatives frequently gathered at our house during the ‘50s because we were the first family in our neighborhood to have a television. There were hilarious fights over what we would watch, but everyone agreed on one thing: When Sinatra was on, everything else stopped. Our devoutly Catholic family watched him more reverently than they did Bishop Fulton Sheen.

Sure, we puffed up when the other Italian men of song came on the screen--Julius La Rosa, Dean Martin, Perry Como, Al Martino, Vic Damone, Frankie Laine, Tony Bennett--but they were just good singers who set their lives aside for a few minutes to entertain us. Sinatra brought his life with him, and that made him three-dimensional.

The Sinatra persona filled the TV screen. His facial expressions, his carriage, and the tone and cadence of his voice radiated confidence, talent, charisma, a flinty urbanity, street savvy, substance, chutzpah, and a faint whiff of danger that distanced him from his show-biz peers (Italian or non-) and very obviously commanded their deference and fealty.

Sinatra’s proud bearing reflected the determination that saw an entire people through the painful transformations from Ellis Island hopefuls to hard-working American citizens and then to leadership in science, education, finance, government and the arts. When he peered out through that tube, he seemed to be looking right at us, the extended Italian-American family of millions, as if to say in that gentrified Joisey-ese, “I did it, baby, and there’s plenty of room on my coattails.”

Although he belongs to all peoples and ages, I’ve never been able to separate Sinatra the ethnic folk-hero from the famous entertainer known to everyone else. But I knew I had to in order to re-evaluate the man more objectively. It helped that at the time of my conversation with the nonbeliever, I was immersing myself in the three voluminous Sinatra retrospectives that were released on compact disc just in time for Christmas.

Hearing Ol’ Blue Eyes rein the roiling bombast of a big-band arrangement, or wring the pathos from a ballad by Jimmy Van Heusen, Sammy Cahn, or Jule Styne, or knead the starched creases of Porter and Gershwin, one couldn’t avoid the conclusion that Sinatra rendered the definitive versions of many of these classic tunes.

Especially while listening to the compilation “The Capitol Years, 1953-1963,” I realized that Sinatra made a lot of the recordings we’ve come to associate with the Golden Age of post-war, post-big-band vocals--tune after tune of the stuff snapping fingers and lumped-throats are made of. Perhaps not coincidentally, the Capitol set just might contain the greatest collection of standards ever compiled.

Sinatra might be one of the most controversial characters in show-biz history, but these CD retrospectives demonstrate that his image is only part of the equation. Of at least equal importance is the effect his voice has on the listener. It’s simply one of the most unique instruments ever recorded, a voice capable of spanning the timbre spectrum--from reverberant, lowing tones to rich mid-range gloss to brassy high notes--in a single line.

In his prime, which, arguably, lasted from the 1930s well into the ‘70s, Sinatra approached a song as though its notes and words were merely an advance sketch, and shaped it until in its final form it either blistered with the bravado of a undenied ambition or resonated with the memories of a tumultuous, often painful life. The effect on the receptive listener was immediate and lasting.

But there’s also something behind the voice, a smoldering intensity that strips the opaque veneer from a song, exposing its heart, giving its lyric the communicability of direct speech while preserving the integrity of the melody that carries it. Few singers in history have been able to do this consistently, certainly not without very obvious effort. For Sinatra, the effort has always been transparent, his manipulative, idiosyncratic phrasing an unforced marriage of working-class bluntness and an innate, elegant musicality.

If until recent years Sinatra has felt compelled to perpetuate his tough-guy image in public--and I refer to the fistfights, the shadowy characters, the partying and womanizing, the reports of churlish behavior and cruelty--one can speculate that the only viable outlet for his humanity, the only place where he could let his guard down without jeopardizing his manly reputation, was the recording studio. Alone at the microphone, the hard guy and the melancholy romantic could coalesce to create affecting art from the simple materials of popular song.

A hundred years from now, when there’s no one left who remembers the living Sinatra, when the political stuff, the alleged Mafia stuff, the hard-living, high-profile stuff has been relegated to the pages of entertainment history, people will be able to play Sinatra recordings and marvel at his prowess.

They will be listening to the one vocalist who, more than any other, altered the nature of popular song by giving the singer a much greater role in the creative process.

And that , baby, is the big deal.