POP MUSIC REVIEW : Sinatra Still Chairman of the Board : His career can be measured in decades. The Long Beach concert showed his sound withstands the test of time.

He’s still the king of the hill, the top of the heap. From the first notes of his sold-out concert Sunday at the Long Beach Arena, Frank Sinatra put any possible doubts to rest.

Like his career, Sinatra’s songs can be measured not in years but in decades. Several times he alluded to the quality of the works he performed by Arlen, Gershwin, Cole Porter and their ilk. “For me,” he said, “there ain’t no other kind of music.”

Maybe it’s true that they just don’t write songs like that anymore. But it’s also true that they don’t write songs like “Mack the Knife” anymore, which is just as well. The bottom line is that these are old-shoe songs; the shoes fit comfortably and they have not worn thin.

The Sinatra sound continues to resist the ravages of the years. Crediting his arrangers as always (mainly Don Costa and Nelson Riddle), he cruised convincingly and effortlessly as ever through “For Once in My Life” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” elicited mid-chorus applause during “New York, New York,” chose “Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out to Dry” as his “saloon song,” drank a toast to his liquor company sponsor, and cracked a couple of new jokes (“Did you know that Saddam spelled backward is Mad-Ass?”).

The only changes in his routines are the slight alterations he tends to make in the lyrics, usually to good effect, though there was one exception: changing “My heart stood still” to “My heart it stood still” spoiled the flow of that line.

Sign of the times: There was a murmur of boos when he lit up a cigarette before “My Way.” (His reaction: “You can go outside if you don’t like smoke.”)

He closed with “America,” for which the crowd stood and sang along. Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme then joined him for what could have been a succinct and pleasant finale, but the medley of unrelated songs far outlived its welcome. Estimable as they are, they can’t follow a Sinatra set even when he’s sharing a stage with them.

In their own opening act, Lawrence and Gorme offered, singly or jointly, material of much the same vintage as Sinatra’s. Lawrence was strongest in “I’ve Got to Be Me,” Gorme in “If He Walked Into My Life.” They wound up with a medley of big-band hits that relied heavily on Glenn Miller novelties, relieved by the seldom-heard lyrics of “Stompin’ at the Savoy” and “Don’t Be That Way.”

Because they also mine the classic-pop vein, Lawrence and Gorme were logical choices to launch the show, but it was no problem for the Chairman of the Board to take the evening and wrap it in his very hip pocket. He makes us all feel young, leaving no doubt that for him there are still songs to be sung, bells to be rung, a wonderful fling to be flung.