Frank Sinatra, Jr. Reveals His Father's Grounded Side, Pays Tribute to His Legacy With 'Best of the Best'

Frank Sinatra, Jr. was born into one of America's most musical households. While his father and older sister Nancy both enjoyed vibrant careers, Sinatra, Jr. spent his youth studying conducting and composition, familiarizing himself with jazz and big band orchestration. Sinatra spent much of his later career as his father's musical director in the 1990s. Recently, the singer and conductor helmed the career-spanning retrospective 'The Best of the Best,' the most comprehensive collection of Frank Sinatra's music to hit shelves yet. Frank Sinatra, Jr. called into Spinner's offices to discuss the upcoming release of the box set as well as his father's enduring legacy.

What was the process of putting out this new collection of your father's music?

It was actually something that we were kind of putting off for a long, long time because every famous artist has a greatest hits album. There is a saying that once you put out the greatest hits album, it's all over -- nobody will buy the other albums anymore. As it happens, according to what the people in this industry are claiming, we have just about come to the end of the compact-disc world, so it was time now to do this once and for all.

Frank Sinatra's career, beginning in his mid-30s, took a new turn. He spent the rest of his career with two entities: One was Capitol Records and the other was Reprise Records, which was his own company when he founded it. This is the first time that there has been a compilation of the hit songs from both of those record labels covering a period of 40 years, from about 1953 to about 1993.

I believe one of the reasons I was approached to create these liner notes was because of the fact that I was present, at least peripherally, almost from the very beginning. When those first recordings were made in the early 1950s I was a little boy, and when the later recordings were made, down towards the end of the package, I was Frank Sinatra's music director.
You have a successful musical career in your own right. Do you find it difficult to achieve any sort of individuality in such a musical family as yours?

Well, first of all, I have to correct you -- I am not that successful. About the only thing that can be said for me is that I continue to work.

That's a success in today's industry.

Perhaps you're right. But never having had a hit movie, never having had a hit television program and never having had a hit record, in this day and age and in this industry, that kind of puts you in a lower status.

Did you find it difficult to forge your own identity?

Well, there's no question about that. But the fact is I was able to create something along those lines until 1998 at which point Frank Sinatra's death caused people to turn to me to go on making his music, which is what I've been doing ever since. It's been almost 14 years now.

Is there anything about your father that you feel people might not realize?

Sinatra always had both feet on the ground. He never believed, or allowed himself to believe, any of the fame that surrounded him. He never took the adulation seriously. He never lost touch with the reality of life around him and he began to make the distinction as to who he could reach out to, who he could confide in, who he could trust, who he could believe in. This is the difference between his handling his massive fame and this legendary stardom, as opposed to a Marilyn Monroe, or a Michael Jackson or an Elvis Presley. They were tragic figures in the sense that they didn't have their feet on the ground and they died that way. Isn't that interesting, that all three of those people died alone? Yes, well, not Sinatra. He never lost the concept of the reality of life. That is something I believe that people should know. And I believe that is the reason why he lived to be 82-and-a-half-years old, too.


What was the process of you becoming the conductor for your father's orchestra?

I began to conduct, first at rehearsals in my own show. I would show up for rehearsals somewhere and we didn't have anybody to conduct, so I would end up conducting my own music at the rehearsal. One day, something very interesting happened, and that was that Sinatra came in and he saw me conducting my own show in a little Las Vegas lounge. This was about 25 years ago. Here I was throwing down beats and he said, "Oh my god, the kid conducts." As far as he was concerned, I was Eugene Ormandy. I mean, this is ridiculous. Here I was just doing things because, in the room that I worked in, we literally didn't have room on the stage for a conductor, so I ended up throwing down beats. One day, he called me up and said, "I want you to conduct for me."

After my friends had revived me with the smelling salts, I said, "You want me to conduct for you?" and he said, "I can't get any of these guys today to understand what it is I'm trying to do. Maybe if my show were conducted by another singer, another singer might understand what a singer is trying to do." I got to thinking about that and I'll tell you, you never see that. You never go to a concert and see a singer on the stage and find that the orchestra is being conducted by another singer. That's unheard of. He felt I would be correct because I had been doing what he had been doing and that I would understand what the intricacies are of singing. As it turned out, it worked.

When you were doing this compilation, did you have any trouble with the masters?

Oh, no. Other than the one that just remixed, which will be out in 2012, the masters were very carefully and protectively preserved. On this [upcoming] album, we didn't have that luxury. The original source material had degraded considerably. In 1963, he made an album with a symphony orchestra, the only one he ever did that was completely made with a symphony. It was a wonderful album, 'Concert Sinatra.'

The album at the time was not recorded in a record studio on a tape recorder, it was recorded on a motion-picture scoring stage at a movie studio on magnetic film, the way they scored movies in those days. Unfortunately, when the master recording was finished, the master recording on what they called magna stripe, on the film, was not stored correctly and we had the devil's own good time recently trying to get some sound out of it to make it work again, which we finally have done. That was long and arduous to the point that certain members of the audio professional community are actually talking about making a documentary about the restoration of this record album. It was quite a job.