When he was first trying to make it on his own, Frank Sinatra Jr. wanted to do it his way. Not about to follow in the footsteps of his father — one of the top vocalists of the 20th century — he wanted to compose film scores.
That didn’t quite work out, and at 68, he’s doing it Dad’s way, performing “Frank Sinatra Jr. Sings Sinatra” at Town Hall on Monday. Fronting an eight-piece band, the younger Sinatra will be singing many of his father’s signature numbers, including “Strangers in the Night,” “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” and, of course, “New York, New York.”
The younger Sinatra dropped out of college at 19 when he was offered the chance to go on the road with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, the big band his father had sung with decades earlier. Ol’ Blue Eyes didn’t say a word about it to his kid.
“He never mentioned it to me,” Sinatra says. “His attitude was that when I became a young man it was time for me to start my own destiny. I have to applaud him for that, by the way.”
Sinatra’s relationship with his famous father remained distant. “He was doing his thing and traveling, and I was doing my thing and traveling,” Sinatra says. “We rarely saw each other.”
So he was flabbergasted when, in 1988, late in his father’s career, the Chairman of the Board asked him to be his musical director.
“He had learned that I was often conducting my own shows,” he explains. “He was very excited about that, like I was Eugene Ormandy or something. So one day he asked me to conduct for him. I was sitting with some friends at the time, and after they revived me with smelling salts, I asked him why. He said, ‘I can’t get any of these people to understand what I’m trying to do.’ And this was kind of a compliment.”
Although he wound up working for his father, who died in 1998, for nearly seven years, it wasn’t without tension.
“Oh, yes,” he says, laughing (although it wasn’t so funny back then). “If I wasn’t doing the job he wanted me to do, there were tensions, all right.”
It was a difficult task, and not only because he was working for his strong-willed father, who was nearing 80.
“He was unsure many times,” Sinatra says of his dad. “This is the ultimate fate for all of us, you know? It was nothing I was surprised about, considering [his age] at that point. We were trying as hard as possible to surmount the insurmountable — age — and most of the time could pull it off.”
Along with a physical resemblance to his father that he can’t hide, Sinatra has a vocal resemblance he’ll allow to come out on some songs.
“It depends on the material. Sometimes I sound like him, sometimes not,” he says. “There are certain tunes we do that are so familiar to the audience that to perform them without making them sound like Frank Sinatra would be wrong.”
Even after all these years, he’s still not quite sure about whether audiences merely come to see his shows out of fondness for his dad.
“I don’t know if they’ve transferred their affection to me,” he says. “Sometimes it’s there. But it’s the exception, not the rule.”
“There has been good and bad through the years,” he reflects. “My career will be 50 years long in just a few weeks, and it’s been . . . interesting.”
And, for the record, the son of Francis Albert Sinatra is named Franklin Wayne Sinatra. “I’m not really a junior,” he says, but “everybody seemed to feel it was much more convenient.”
Tickets are $55 for Monday’s 8 p.m. show at Town Hall, 123 W. 43rd St.; the-townhall-nyc.org.