The Early Days: Music Everywhere

In the film My Cousin Vinny, Mona Lisa Vito, played by Marisa Tomei who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in the role, is placed on the witness stand by her boyfriend, Vincent Gambini. He is representing and defending his cousin in a murder case in the Deep South. Gambini asserts that Vito is an expert in automotive mechanics. When the prosecuting attorney presses her on her expertise, she acknowledges that “My father is a mechanic, his father was a mechanic, my mother’s father was a mechanic, my three brothers are mechanics,” and so on.

My entry into music was about as conservative as Mona Lisa Vito’s entry into mechanics. In a preserved audio cassette, my mother recorded me singing “You Just Keep Me Hanging On” by the Supremes at the age of three in a semi-professional studio. “Louder, louder!” she encouraged me in the background. There are photos and videos of me mock playing a toy guitar (though I never quite mastered that instrument later), surrounded by family. While this isn’t unique, there’s more.

My brother’s and sister’s bands rehearsed in the basement of our three tenement house almost every day as far back as I can remember. I could hear them and the vibrations from the first floor and even better when they let me observe in the basement practice room. Their bandmates were always nice to me. On rare occasions they let me sing along (and laughed when I got some of the lyrics wrong). The rock band culture permeated our home. Then my parents would accompany me to some of their live, packed nightclub performances. If this didn’t sell me on the profession, nothing would. My brother Thom had a special knack for firing up audiences, once leading an outdoor audience parade around a nightclub on New Year’s Eve. In one instance, a regularly nasty woman next door complained to my mother about my hippy brother’s long hair. “My son has beautiful hair!” she allegedly defended.

My sister, gifted with a fantastic voice that could (and can) literally cover Aretha Franklin to Barbara Streisand to Annie Lennox, took leading roles in her high school musicals, including Funny Girl, which I also absorbed in the audience. With her close relationship to the musical instructor, she arranged for me to sing “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” (out of tune) dressed in a mini Santa suit at the age of seven before her high school holiday assembly.

My parents, aunts, and uncles had a tradition of singing and harmonizing songs like the older folksy piece “I want to go to Chicago Town,” and “Lightning Express” by the Everly Brothers, both at home and even shamelessly and loudly in crowded restaurants. At family gatherings, after a brief hush or lull in conversation, my elder aunt Lea would reliably break into a decent solo rendition of Eddie Miller’s “Please Release Me (Let Me Go),” followed by polite family applause. As mentioned above, my brother and sister carried on the tradition in the next generation, even performing together in a later version of a band named “Feud” for some time. I remember the promotional photo of that band vividly.

Then there were the vinyl records and albums. I remember my late, oldest brother Paul playing single 45’s from his sizable collection, including Sam the Sham and the Pharoah’s Hey There Little Red Riding Hood and Snoopy vs. the Red Baron. My other brother, Richard, while self-effacing on his musical prowess, could also carry a vocal tune with pitch and vibrato, and harmonize. And I remember all the vinyl albums that my brother Thom and sister Gina played: The Beatles Abbey Road, Carol King’s Tapestry, Yes’s Fragile, and memorably, Queen’s News of the World, specifically with its album cover and “We Will Rock You” followed by “We Are the Champions” blowing my ten-year old mind. All of this with big posters of Chicago, Edgar Winter, and other rock artists adorning the four walls around us.

A used, slightly out of tune, upright piano was shifted to my bedroom around the time when I began taking piano lessons at seven. My brother and sister played some, and I would spend countless hours practicing for lessons, composing original ditties, and just noodling around, often attempting songs by ear that my brother and sister rehearsed in the basement. The nun who gave me piano lessons at my Catholic school allowed me to perform an annual original piece at the student recitals. She was cool, especially for a nun at the time.

At the age of thirteen, I became a roadie - equipment set up/break down assistant - for my sister’s duo, The French Connection (referencing French-Canadian roots of the two members, not the movie). This would get me closer to the behind-the-scenes perspective of nightclub performing. When I didn’t stay in nightclub dressing rooms or in the audience with my parents while they performed live, they would drop me off at home after we set the equipment up, and my father would wake me up and drive me back to the clubs around 1AM or so to break the equipment down. I was somewhat sloppy in wrapping the equipment cabling in a hurried and rough manner.

So while becoming a nightclub rock musician may sound like an edgy or fast lane endeavor, my entry was a very familiar and natural result of my early environment. I began working with my first “garage bands” in my freshman year of high school, had my first public performances in sophomore year, and was regularly performing professionally until 1-2AM by my junior year. This could be a tiring mixture: Returning to Massachusetts around 3-4 AM one night that year from a Hartford, CT job with The Works, I fell asleep at the wheel and crashed my Mercury Montego into a tree in the highway median. I thankfully have no memory of the incident, only of playing a Genesis cassette in my car shortly before. The jaws of life were used to extract me from the totaled car (my drummer’s bass drum was lodged in the back seat). My friend, the band’s light man, was in the passenger seat. He was treated and fortunately released with some wrist stitches. I spent a few weeks in the hospital with a broken elbow, cracked sternum, and collapsed lung. I performed with one arm (fortunately the left and less important one) in a sling for some time back with The Works and fully recovered to play for my senior high school assembly with a new band before finding part-time work, of course, in retail record and CD music stores.

No regrets. Music everywhere.