Elway May Have Easier Job Than Neville at Super Bowl : National anthem: Denver’s quarterback just has to face the 49ers, while the Lousiana singer has to take on ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’

If you believe the football experts, this Sunday’s Super Bowl game is going to be as one-sided as a compact disc.

But no matter what happens on the field between the vaunted San Francisco 49ers and the disparaged Denver Broncos, Super Bowl XXIV is a game worth tuning in right from the start. It’s at the start--before the opening kickoff, in fact--that the real contest will take place.

We’re not talking heads versus tails, John Elway versus Joe Montana, or tastes great versus less filling. We’re talking about Aaron Neville, the sweet, winged prince of Louisiana soul, against that fire-breathing, bomb-belching dragon of patriotic bluster and musical terror, “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

The national anthem is a wily old gorgon. Its lumbering gait and tonsil-straining melody, spawned not on these shores but in 18th-Century England, have turned some of the sturdiest throats to stone. Even a singer with the strength of breath and breadth of range to grasp and hold firmly during its melodic jumps is likely to be undone when confronted by the terrible, Sphinx-like riddle of the anthem’s penultimate line: Just how many notes are there in “banner yet wave,” anyway?

Neville, a native son of New Orleans where the game is being played, is worthy of the challenge. Fans of New Orleans’ finest band, the Neville Brothers, have known for many years that his voice is the sort to inspire comparisons to birds, angels and other creatures with a sublime affinity for beautiful song.

Linda Ronstadt’s fans more recently have discovered the same thing, thanks to Neville’s appearance singing duets with Ronstadt on her latest album, “Cry Like a Rainstorm, Howl Like the Wind.” There is something dancing and flute-like in Neville’s tone and phrasing, something ethereal and yet incisive. It’s quite possible that there isn’t a better voice in pop music.

But can he conquer “The Star-Spangled Banner?”

There is only one way to do that, and that is to transform it. The singer who complies with the anthem’s ungainly shape is lost: Even perfect technique cannot redeem such a leaden melody.

As for the lyric, a straightforward reading with expected phrasings and emphases can’t hope to infuse vigor into a battle tale told in the indirect, self-consciously lofty diction of the early 19th Century.

Soul singers do the “Banner” best, and that’s what gives Neville a fighting chance. The soul-gospel singing tradition is built on taking the plain, familiar, perhaps cliched sentiments of religious belief or romantic ardor and making them sound fresh and spontaneous with a passion that twists, extends, and improvises upon the song as written.

Jimi Hendrix’s famous solo guitar version of “Star-Spangled Banner” at Woodstock is in this transforming tradition. With his graphic bomb bursts of feedback clangor, Hendrix turned the anthem into an ironic, tortured commentary on the Vietnam War.

A sweeter, but still transforming, approach worked for Smokey Robinson a few years ago before a World Series game at Fenway Park in Boston.

The Motown star began the anthem conventionally enough, but before the bombs and rockets could start flying, he had veered into a loving rendition of “America the Beautiful”--a song that some critics of “The Star-Spangled Banner” have suggested would make a better American anthem for our time.

When Francis Scott Key wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner” on the back of a letter one war-torn dawn 176 years ago, the lyric was as vivid as history in the making. Key wrote as an eyewitness to the British bombardment of Baltimore’s Fort McHenry, at a moment in the War of 1812 when the young American republic appeared to be in grave danger (the British already had burned Washington).

Today, though, the gravest dangers facing America aren’t bursting bombs and glaring rockets launched by a superior power, but the internal threats of a smudged environment and increasing race and class stratification. “America the Beautiful” is a lovely song that achieves continental sweep in a few brief verses while focusing on enduring values that transcend any single historical moment.

Its main verse begins by extolling the beauty of the land, and ends with a prayer for brotherhood. The purpose of a national anthem should be to keep national values in the forefront of citizens’ minds. “America the Beautiful” would be a simple yet vibrant and eloquent alternative to the difficult, archaic anthem we have now.

In the meantime, make Aaron Neville a slight favorite on Sunday to break through the formidable defenses of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and run for musical daylight.

SPEAKING OF SPORTS (as Howard Cosell used to say), the local rock band National People’s Gang has been subsidizing its musical activities lately by keeping a shrewd eye on the pro football betting odds.

According to singer Chad Jasmine, NPG amassed $4,000 a few weekends ago with successful bets on two National Football League playoff games.

“We were able to shoot our video because of Cleveland beating the spread against Buffalo and the Rams beating the spread against the Giants,” said Jasmine, who does the betting along with the band’s manager, Sam Lanni.

Those bets continued a winning streak that Jasmine says also helped the band make a payment on the motor home it uses for touring.

Is Jasmine worried that the luck could run out, leaving NPG in the same predicament as the desperate Las Vegas gambling addict in one of the band’s own songs (“Love Button,” which appears on the current NPG album, “Orange”)?

“That’s about blackjack,” Jasmine said. “Blackjack is a different story. We bet what we can afford (on football). We’re not going to sink the ship because of gambling.”

“Gettin’ Close to God” is the video that will be coming out next month, courtesy of NPG and its friends in the NFL. The track also will be released as a single, Jasmine said, with live versions of previously unreleased songs on the flip side. NPG, which finished a four-month national tour in December, will head off again on a three-month tour of the United States and Canada starting Feb. 15, Jasmine said.

As for the Super Bowl, Lanni picks San Francisco, while Jasmine is considering playing it safe by not betting at all.