`Frank Sinatra was the model and envy of rockers from the beginning," Rolling Stone once suggested. Maybe so. However, from the outset Sinatra himself detested rock, rather delicately describing it as "a rancid, evil-smelling aphrodisiac aimed at degenerates and delinquents". This was slightly absurd, coming from a man who failed in his own efforts to have hits with R'n'B derived tunes like Bim Bam Baby and Two Hearts, Two Kisses, which has gone into the history books as one of the first rock 'n' roll recordings by a mainstream artist.
Sinatra's castle was rocked in the mid 1950s, with the arrival of rock 'n' roll, however, largely because the power base in the music industry moved from a predominately Jewish and Italian setting, in his home town of New York, to Southern cities like Memphis and New Orleans.
The real irony is that Frankie might never have fully matured as an artist, were it not for "rancidsmelling" rock 'n' roll. Indeed, it was his determination to appeal to both sides of the increasingly polarised record-buying public in 1956 which resulted in Songs For Swinging Lovers, an album designed, to a degree, for teenage dance parties and which now stands, alongside Presley's debut the same year, as one of the first great pop albums of the rock era. It is also the kind of "concept" album the Beatles would be credited with inventing more than a decade later.
Sinatra took as much from rock culture as he gave. During a time when "rebels", with or without a cause, were beginning to cruise into the public consciousness, he obviously felt liberated enough to finally unleash his Pal Joey persona, complete with snap-brim hat, The Lady Is A Tramp mindset and even a new vernacular, which included words such as "broad", "gasser " and "bird".
All of this clearly influenced the way far more men (and not just Italian-American men) would perceive themselves for decades to come and the reprehensibly sexist and reductive way they would perceive women. In Come Fly With Me, when the "swinging" Sinatra sang about wanting to beat some woman's "bird" all the way to Acapulco Bay, tuned-in fans knew damn well that the word was a Rat-Pack synonym for vagina. Given that rock always had more to do with attitude than music, his positively Dionysian I'm-gonna-ride-'till-I-die philosophy must also be seen as a reaction against psychic fears that festered in the shadow of the Hbomb. Indeed, Sinatra's 1954 recording of I'm Going To Live Till I Die perfectly captures this sense of cosmic defiance. It is also a crystallisation of the life-affirming force at the soul of most Sinatra songs. So does even his interpretation of the Goethe/Tchaikovsky text, None But The Lonely Heart, recorded in 1959, which concludes with what is probably the most terrifyingly resonant reading of the word "sadness" ever recorded. If one moment in pop culture could be said to signify the sound of a man sighing as he stares into the Godless abyss or into what social historians have since come to describe as "The Age of Anxiety", this is it.
If, however, you want to soar with a sound that sums up the sense of global emancipation that defined the 1960s, it's there in Sinatra's gleeful vocal on Without A Song, recorded at the beginning of that decade. Despite being written out of nearly all tediously orthodox rock histories, Frank Sinatra was central to the 1960s. Freeze-frame on a few images. One: Sinatra performing High Hopes at an election rally for John F. Kennedy, in 1960. Two: Sinatra serenading astronauts with Fly Me To The Moon, as they race to take that "giant step for mankind" in 1969. Three: a seismograph containing a million cultural reference points in between. As part of his almost-yearly television specials during the late 1960s and albums like A Man Alone, Frank Sinatra also introduced to middle America, and beyond, the songs of "a new, imaginative" generation of postDylan composers such as Joni Mitchell, Jim Webb and Rod McKuen. Not that he always got it right. Sinatra's smart-ass reading of Mrs Robinson is as much a hymn to self-aggrandisement as the abysmal My Way. But when Frankie nailed a white blues tune like That's Life, even black brothers like Wilson Pickett - who later recorded the song - had to concede that he was still one of the "hippest" dudes around and one of those rare "honky cats" who always credited a black musician like Billie Holiday as a primary influence.
In turn, singers from Dory Previn to Elvis Costello - who chose Only The Lonely as his "favourite album of all time" have come out about the influence Sinatra has had on them. And it is at this core level that his voice will continue to connect.
