Ol' Blue Eyes is back — and My Way is having things his way.

Frank Sinatra, a close-to-70 superstar, appears April 22 at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo.

The fare: Frank and a full-course French dinner. The tab: 150,000 yen. At current exchange rates, that comes to a rounded-off $580.

I talked to an old friend, long close to show business here, and she said this was all-tine usury for a first-class pop star, surpassing even the top-heavy tariffs on James Brown, Tom Jones, Lira Minnelli and Marlene Dietrich.

"Come Fly With Me ..."

Not at those prices, papa.

They don't pay people in my malnourished trade that kind of cash and even if they did, it would stay stubbornly wedged in my wallet.

Oh, I'll allow that I'd walk out pleasantly stuffed, well lilted on fine wine and memorably entertained by an Old Master who performs the way Gene Kelly danced and Sugar Ray Robinson used to box, with vitality and yet almost indolent ease.

But after the indigestion and hangover fled, what would I have? My economy-class friends, far from being impressed by that souvenir stub, would treat me like the rube who bought the San Francisco Civic Center.

They, like I, would have reflected hard on what all those Georges would have bought.

A look into my favorite dream book, the 1985 Exchange Service Catalog, is full of appealing alternatives — solid things you can buy and hold.

For exactly $580, there is a rolltop desk of heirloom quality, made by the masters of hand-tooled mahogany in the Philippines.

Take $10 off that pile and you cover the cost of a German gold necklace by Arthur Bossert — 14 karats and 26.5 grams of gold weight.

That dinner-show tab would buy two Omega quartz watches, three Dutch wall clocks, four sets of Edinburgh crystal, six European tapestries, seven English crossbows, nine Thai temple lions, 10 quarter-liter beer tankards and a Canon camera body with cash left over for a wide-angle lens.

Before this sounds like an out-of-season Christmas carol, I'll stop — but not without adding that the final thumbs-down on a night at the Imperial came in a videotape catalog, where I found that a freely spent $580 would buy 12 vintage classics like "Bedtime for Bonzo" and "Gunga Din."

Besides, I'd probably order the wrong wine with the Chateaubriand — and the penalty for that is no-refund expulsion.

Why those Maxim's-sized prices on a few old songs and many encores? Well, seems as how Sinatra wanted an upfront guarantee of $1.5 million, to cover the supper songs and three concerts at the massive Hall of Martial Arts. Top price there is a karate chop to the budget — $96 — and other seats scale down to a civilized $20.

Ok, so I don't expect a big shot of Sinatra's proven caliber to work cheap.

BUT A FEW DAYS before Frank, there will be Bruce Springsteen, holding forth at the National Gymnasium in Tokyo. He's a long way from elder-statesman status and easy on his adoring fans — top seats $20, lesser ones $11.50. (Tickets went on sale March 3 at 10 a.m. — and in two hours four ticket agencies in downtown Tokyo were sold out. But, the sponsors say, the concerts haven't been sold out. Then where are the remaining tickets? They can't say.)

I can remember the time Count Basie came to town and saw too many numerals on his playbill, making a basso profundo demand that prices be trimmed so the office-girl and student class could get in.

They were.

I gladly parted with $15 to hear great sounds from one of the greats.

As for the Imperial, I'll see you outside — habitually destitute and culturally deprived.