Frank’s way

Three years past the centennial of his birth, Ol’ Blue Eyes is back, this time with a three-disc collection titled Standing Room Only (Capitol/UMe). Compiling three previously unreleased concerts, it’s less a study in masterly showmanship, although it’s that too, than proof of how radically the culture that Frank Sinatra bestrode like a colossus has changed.

When he performed these shows—at the Sands in Las Vegas in 1966 and at Philadelphia and Dallas arenas in 1974 and 1987 respectively—his decades’ worth of hit records, acting credits, and headline-making off-stage controversies had cemented his status as a legend. No sooner would he book a Vegas run or announce a tour than the shows would sell out, sometimes literally overnight.

His brand of entertainment hadn’t been au courant since Elvis and the Beatles. But, popularitywise, Sinatra was in a class by himself.

How strange, therefore, to listen to him now and to realize that, were he still around, his jocular ’tween-song patter alone would have social-justice warriors demanding his scalp (or at least his toupee).

Patterwise, the Standing Room Only shows are relatively tame. By the time of the ’74 Philadelphia show, for instance, his nemesis, the gossip columnist Rona Barrett, was between gigs, depriving him, as he put it, of “10 minutes’ worth of material.” And you’d certainly never glean from his comments during the 1987 show that Kitty Kelley’s meticulously researched but unauthorized biography His Way had gotten so far under his skin that he’d sued to block its publication.

At the 1966 show, however, he was five months from the release of Assault on a Queen (in which he starred), six months from marrying Mia Farrow, and in a very good mood. Backed by Quincy Jones and the Count Basie Orchestra, Sinatra introduced his white pianist Bill Miller as someone whom he’d only “brought along to break up the color scheme,” facetiously announced plans to date the DeCastro Sisters to see whether they were really “three FBI guys,” and told jokes with punch lines that included racially loaded terms such as “Nava-Jew” and “Wop-aho.”

Such humor, of course, was not considered offensive at the time, and that’s the point: What used to pass for good-natured ribbing suitable for a Johnny Carson monologue or a Dean Martin Roast would now get Sinatra blackballed as an insensitive “hater.” If only as an unapologetically swaggering alpha male, Sinatra paved the way for Donald Trump—except that whereas Trump uses Twitter to settle scores, Sinatra sometimes settled his physically, and not always by proxy.

But what of Standing Room Only’s music? The ’66 Sands show finds Sinatra, then 50, in fine voice and moves briskly along, shoehorning 13 songs comprising old favorites (“Luck Be a Lady,” “Come Fly with Me”) and new (“It Was a Very Good Year,” “The September of My Years”) into 56 svelte minutes.

By ’74, however, his shows had acquired the feel of a victory lap, and critics had begun saying that his voice was gone. It wasn’t. But neither was it ideally suited to the intimacy-defying arenas that Sinatra’s popularity required him to play.

Still, one song benefited from such environments: “My Way.” According to his wife Barbara, it had long ceased to do anything for him. But he kept singing it anyway, quite heartily in fact, simply because his fans would have felt cheated if he hadn’t.

In so doing, he transformed an anthem of defiant braggadocio into a gesture of sweeping generosity. And, if only for four minutes, “My Way” became “Our Way.”