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Lightning Forever. . . .

In 2016, my friend B treated me to a Southwest adventure. We flew to Phoenix, visited family before we drove to Sedona and on to New Mexico.  After seeing friends and family in Albuquerque, we parked ourselves in Santa Fe, where we planned to stay before taking the High Road to Taos winding up with family in Los Alamos.  The trip was gorgeous in many ways, but a definite highlight was meeting Rock’n’Rolll legend Lou Christie.

Lou had been on our flight from NY to Albuquerque, and we had noticed him.  How could we not?  What an icon of pop culture he had been for most of both our lives. Lou Christie wrote and sang the musical score for almost every event of my adolescence.  We were impressed, but we didn’t bother him.  Until we saw him in Santa Fe.

He walked into the lobby of La Fonda Hotel as we roamed through looking for a public restroom.  I could not resist.  Neither could B.  I don’t remember exactly what we said to him or why he engaged with us, but when we left the hotel, I had his personal phone number and an invitation to call him about an interview for my “get Read” column in the Columbia School of the Arts publication Catch and Release.

Now that Lou is gone, I thought I would re-share that interview. . . .

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If I were a photographer, and the shutter had just closed, I would be confident that I had just grabbed the money shot.

“Lou,” I ask toward the end of our three-hour interview, “what have been the major forks in your life?  The professional ones, the places where you could have gone one way, but you chose to go another. . . ?”

 “Oh, wow,” he muses. I love that question!” 

We’ve been talking long enough for me to truly understand why he likes it so much, why he is so visibly moved. Lou Christie has been doing what he’s doing most of his life, and what he’s been doing is reinventing himself, reconfiguring the formulae that take him and his melodious voice onward and upward.

We were seated among colorful iconography on orange furniture in the cozy, New Mexico-inspired sitting room he has built atop what used to be the roof of a 1940s tenement building in Hell’s Kitchen, in midtown Manhattan, where he has lived since the early 1970s.  He bought his apartment when it went coop, and the landlord was selling dirt cheap; knowing exactly what he wanted and being ever in control of his destiny, he simultaneously bought the air rights so that he could add his a second story of his own design, connected to the first by a picturesque spiral staircase, lit by a skylight and a sliding glass door that leads to the patio with a view of lower Manhattan and the Hudson River. 

Despite the low price, the decision to purchase the place took some deliberation.  Hell’s Kitchen was among the least desirable neighborhoods at the time, a rough area dominated by the Westies, a deadly alliance between the Italian and Irish mobs,  and by Puerto Rican and Anglo youth gangs.  The ones immortalized in West Side Story.  But Lou Christie recognized an opportunity to get in on the first wave of gentrification, and by the 1980s, the Javitz Center was underway, the Westies were disempowered, and the kids were back in school.  He had bought himself a haven.  Now, he has transformed a perfect example of simple, utilitarian working-class architecture into a Southwestern style country dasha, a brilliant transformation.

And the perfect metaphor for the life and times of Lou Christie.  

When Lou moved into Hell’s Kitchen, his star had begun to rise in earnest.  Thanks to New York radio stations and American Bandstand, Christie’s had become the voice of its generation.  The insistent falsetto, half pleading, half scolding, all simply celebrating the fact that it could get that high, played on all the hit radio stations.  WABC’s hitmaker Bruce “Cousin Brucie” Morrow,  was a fan, as was WNBC’s gravel-throated Robert Weston “Wolfman Jack” Smith.  “If those guys liked you, you were in.”   

“I was a fifteen-year-old farm boy from Glenwillard – yes, it’s a real place, less than twenty miles out into the boondocks in the environs of Pittsburgh, PA” –  when I realized I wanted to sing, just sing. I wasn’t Lou Christi in those days.”

Lou was born Lugee Giovanni Sacco,  a name reconfigured from the longer Sicilian Saccosso at Ellis Island, and he always loved to sing.  And to color outside the lines.

“My father, who had been schooled to become a priest or a doctor, was my first role model: he chose a path less traveled and became a steel mill worker. Then he came home every evening to farm our 100-acre property.  Both my parents were musicians, and instead of spending evenings watching television together, we usually got together over music-making.

Lou was the second of six children, having trailed his sister Amy into the world by 18 months; when Lou was nearly fourteen, his parents solved a marital crisis by having four more kids: Maree, Marcie, Shauna and Peter.   “We all had to chip in then,” he says, smiling slyly.

 “We never knew any different; we just took care of one another, helped mom take care of the house and dad take care of the farm. But we were always singing.  I don’t remember ever NOT singing.”  From the beginning, Lou was the family lead singer, and his sisters and brother naturally provided the backup. 

“See? Now, there’s the first fork.  I knew I wanted to be a singer.  But I had to make some choices.  Am I better off going into Classical?  My teacher thought I should do that.  Or should I find great standards to sing?  But wait, should I write my own stuff?  I had a great range – I sang the lowest bass in my school choir and the highest tenor with equal ease.”   

He also had a counter tenor range, the ability to sing the really high notes. 

“SI kept asking myself, what voice should I choose?”

His falsetto won and forged a path to classic rock ‘n’ roll.

 “I didn’t want to be a choir boy.  My father was a great bread winner, all day long he was a slave in the steel mill, and then he came home and farmed his land. I was a happy kid, but I didn’t want to be like him.  Not me.  I wanted the levis, the painted jeans, the purple shirts all the way.  I just knew this was it, and I knew instinctively how important it was to remain master of my own career.

“I was so focused.  You know.  I gave up a lot, like my teen years, but I got exactly what I wanted because I went after it.  You know that book The Secret? They must have been following my life . . . because that’s what I did.  I concentrated my efforts on getting what I wanted,  and I made it happen every time.”

Lou got wind that there signed up for lessons with “a guy in Pittsburgh, who recorded local artists.”  After a single session, the producer sent Lou home to make a demo tape.  “He told me my voice was already good enough.”

“What you really need,” the teacher said, “Is a backup group.”

Lou grins at the memory.

“’Oh,’ I said to him. ‘I got my group.’  We’ve got a sound you’ve probably never heard.  Kinda like three mice.  Because I sing high, and I have another guy, and he sings up here too, and a girl. . . so then he said, ‘ Okay.  Go put something together, make me a demo tape, and let me hear what you got.’ ”

When Lou brought the demo back to the studio, the producer was impressed enough to put Lou’s group on the vocal backgrounds for a song called Ronnie Come Back, by a girl called Marcy Jo, on the Robbie Records label.  Everyone loved the sound of the background, and the record was a big hit, climbing the national charts and reaching the top 20. Lou and his mice never got paid.

“Then we did a follow up with Marcy called When Gary Went in the Navy, and four more, and they were all hits though they never paid us.  Heck, I was still in school. I couldn’t even drive yet.” 

After a few more non-paying hits with Marcy Jo, Lou chose a new path and set his standards by creating Lugee and the Lions.  “I was Lugee, and my sisters and the same group of little kids that were always around me sang as the Lions.”  Lou’s dad drove the group all over Pittsburgh, where they sang for weddings, mall openings, parades and the like, and eventually the positive attention brought him Twyla Herbert.  And thus he reached yet another fork in his road.

“I could see right away. . . that woman was pure genius.  When she proposed working together, I still had to question myself. . . .

“There I was at another fork.  This woman was special. She was twenty years older than me, had a degree in classical music, was a classical pianist, didn’t know a doo-wop from a dust mop.  But she was brilliant.  Just brilliant.  And I could see we could be good together, really good!”

He chose to give collaboration a go, and together, Christie and Herbert wrote The Gypsy Cried, in the style of Valli’s Sherry – it took them all of fifteen minutes – and, he said the experience was surreal, something like what he imagined it would be like to be on an acid trip though he had no experience with drugs.  “There was something about our chord patterns.  They were more classical or more international, made the music more interesting instead of the standard 4 chord progressions, the usual wha wha wha. . . “   The song established a musical partnership spanned the next 47 years, until Twyla Herbert’s death in 2009. 

“I never wanted to make a record that sounded like anyone else. My voice had this falsetto, these octaves to work with, and I didn’t want to record anything that wasn’t uniquely mine.”

By 1966, when Lou and Twyla wrote Lightning Strikes, which shot almost immediately to #1 on the European and American billboard charts, Lou knew beyond doubting he had made the right choice both in going into the business of creating songs with Twyla Herbert and in sticking to his falsetto.  The only choice he didn’t like for a long time, until he got accustomed to it, was the recording company’s choice of his name. 

“I just wanted to be Lugee!”

But the bosses dubbed him Lou Christie.  And Lou Christie soared to fame and fortune.

He never took his good luck for granted. 

Still, the path was never smooth.

“Even good managers can be really dumb. I know because I had one. . . . Bob Marcucci tried to sway me from my path, and I had to fight tooth and nail to stay the course.” 

Marcucci told Lou that he would have to grow up, lose the falsetto, sing more standard arrangements of old songs.  But Lou tried it Marcucci’s way just once.

“I went to my gig in Framingham, outside Boston, and I sang all the standards, all the classics. ”  It was a disaster.  Fans hissed and booed, screaming for “Lightening Strikes.”

“It made sense to me. I mean, can you see  me doin’ Ol’ Man River? I’m boring myself just thinking about it.”

Lou left the songs in a dumpster and vowed to listen only to his own advice.  He toured extensively, singing the hits, getting his audience to its feet in adulation, singing along.  He knew what worked. His easy style on stage coupled with his obvious natural delight in being there sold him. 

Lou stops and thinks for a moment.  When he speaks, he is back in the present.

“Now I’m sayin’ to myself, I’m 72, and I’m sayin’ ‘See? It still works.  I’m still here.’” 

That was 2016.  Lou’s concerts were never less than packed.  His life was never perfect.  He had married, divorced, raised two children, lost one to a tragic accident, and he had persisted in touring and sharing the joy of his presence with family, friends, and, most of all with fans.

Like his myriad fans, I am left with the memory of a warm, witty man with a singular mission.

“Once upon a time,” Lous said to me just before we ended our interview, “I only wanted to share the good side, the fun side because I don’t believe you can make a career out of talking about all the bad things in life.  But maybe it’s time to start mentioning it.  Everyone thinks I’ve had a flawless life.  Part of the reason is I project that kind of forward thinking, and I’m a peaceful person. I have never wanted to get stuck in my anger or my bitterness. 

“But you know, I am still so naïve  There are a lot of people out there who live on bitter – more of an addiction than any wine or beer or shot or pill.  I don’t want to be one of them. 

“Maybe I will write that book.”

Stories in my book: Mom. . .

In the summer of 1953, my father rented a small 17th Century farmhouse in the Berkshire foothills outside Deerfield, MA. We had no running water, no central heating, little electricity, but we had plenty of solace and a henhouse full of needy fowl, the care of which was entirely mom’s responsibility. She was at the time pregnant with her third child and thoroughly unprepared for the life Dad expected her to embrace.

The child of prosperous parents, mom had led a life of privilege. Even after they were forced to flee their beloved home in Europe to escape the Nazis, the family continued to live comfortably, and Mom certainly never learned how to clean a coop after a fox raid or how to keep her hands clean and soft when daily egg gathering was required. She endured. But she was never truly happy except when she was playing the cello she brought with her into exile. After the cello broke, and her life was consumed by children and chores, she was never quite happy. But she endured.

From her, I learned endurance. But I also learned that endurance is not really enough for a life. We need more.

Mom’s youth was sweetened by books and music.

Pub Date 2024!!

Hard to believe, I know. But here I am, age 77, and I have FINALLY achieved a solo publication. Writing was my avocation for so much of my life that it is hard to believe I have arrived to a place where it is my vocation!! I am not fond of promoting myself or touting my work, but having written the book, having put it out in the world, I am now in the business of being an author with a book to sell. I will be posting excerpts and insights here on my blog. So stay tuned!!

Back to the Future with Jenna Rose

Back to the Future with Jenna Rose

American adolescence is hard. At times brutal.  Especially for girls. So many lessons need to be learned.  So many Rubicons need crossing.  It’s something most not-yet-women suffer through universally.  Adolescence is at the root of Joni Iraci’s swiftly-moving novel Reinventing Jenna Rose.

Iraci’s novel drew me in and sucked me back to my own youth.

I was 18 when I became a self-sustaining New Yorker.  I suppose I should have been frightened, but I had a grandmother who gave me a place to live, who trusted me to be on my own.  I had all the freedom I could handle to seek myself out.  That was a long time ago, and today, in the world of over-protected teens, it is hard to imagine a 15-year-old whose parents have left her to her own devices.  Which is the case with Jenna Rose, the intrepid heroine of the circuitous story  Iraci weaves.

At open, Jenna Rose’s Dad has disappeared, and Mom, self-consumed and bitter, is AWOL.  Jenna Rose has been ordered to stay where she is, alone in her California house, with all the trappings of wealth but no comfort.  She is the victim of benign neglect, a prisoner of meaningless abundance.  Worst of all, the girl has no idea who she is or what her roots might possibly be. She desperately needs to throw caution to the wind, to take off, to liberate herself and find a life.

Enter a long-lost grandmother in New York City, the ghosted mother of Jenna Rose’s mom.  Jenna Rose decides that the only way to liberate herself, to reconcile the many questions that muddy her past, to forge any kind of a future, she must find the old woman.  Which is how she lands in New York, fabled source of self-identification, in the early days of the 21st Century.   

The vagaries of adolescence are universally resonant, and Reinventing Jenna Rose reverberates with the elements that make Catcher in the Rye, The Goldfinch, and others timeless.  Jenna Rose faces obstacles no less haunting than Holden Caulfield’s and no less daunting than Theo Decker’s.  Yet her journey is entirely her own, unique picaresque adventure. 

The presence of Jenna Rose’s grandmother and a quirkily empathetic neighbor her own age plus a devoted white German Shepherd bolster Jenna Rose’s quest for Self-Actualization.  With some help from a friendly therapist and reinforcement from her new-found community, she faces and resolves long-buried personal trauma, travels to obscured corners of her own and her family’s pasts, plumbs the depths of her pain, and eventually emerges as a truly three-dimensional woman.

Groping through the multiple shadows cast in Reinventing Jenna Rose, I found myself once again grateful for my grandmother’s indulgences.  Like Jenna Rose’s grandmother, mine never told me what to do or think or feel. She shared wisdom, and I was astute enough to take it.  Most of it. 

The grandmother’s wisdom gives the book another dimension. This is not just another young adult novel. This is a book is that that can be appreciated by people of all ages.  Now that I am older than my grandmother was when I moved to New York, I see myself in the old woman, and I hope that some day my granddaughters will likewise avail themselves of my love and experience.  I want them to appreciate the rich layers of pain, sorrow, joy and peace that make a well-crafted life, a life that might fit into a well-crafted novel like Reinventing Jenna Rose.

Travels with Grandma – Customers Beware

Until this summer, I believed that Small Business deserved my true allegiance. 

I was raised to believe in American small business. My father often declared that America would be nothing without them. “We owe them our allegiance,” he would say.

In the days before my parents had so many children that we began to resemble the shoe-dwelling nursery rhyme family, my dad worked for medical suppliers, big businesses with deep pockets.  They supported his travels and provided generous expense accounts. He could, in those days, afford the finer establishments along his various routes, but he chose instead to support the small business owners wherever we went.  We stayed in family-operated motels in Maine, a cabin on the Navajo reservation in New Mexico, an aging couple’s dilapidated cottage in Far Rockaway.  In those days, he made good money, but he felt stifled.

When he was nearly fifty, seeking to free himself from the shackles of the corporate bosses, Dad bought a small toy distribution company and became the middleman between toy manufacturers and the very small businesses that dotted the landscape of upstate New York. He traveled incessantly then, and he preferred to stay in boarding houses, to tolerate subpar accommodations rather than patronize the area’s successful hotels and motels. It was, he insisted, his responsibility to support his colleagues’ efforts to survive.

“I would rather pay too much for an everyday Joe’s honest efforts than support the corporations that want us all out of the way.”

I believed him.  And I believed, too, in supporting small, independent business owners.  Dad struggled mightily to maintain an income sufficient to support his family, and he was proud to be in control of his destiny, to own his share in his America.

In his memory, when I travel, I often choose small, local establishments over the mega-corp concerns that dominate the industry.  For the most part, I have been happy with that choice. I have found moms and pops to be friendly, accommodating, and eager to meet my needs or to suggest alternatives. I have been proud to contribute to their longevity, to help ensure that America will always be a place where small businesses can thrive among the giants.

Unfortunately, that was then. Now I am disabused of my fervent devotion to the self-sustaining tourism businesses.  After a few encounters with properties that were understaffed and badly maintained despite exorbitant prices; after being told that the bad conditions are the result of the fact that “no one wants to work,” which makes me even more skeptical about the high prices, I am done.  The final blow happened this past month in a place I expected perfection, where instead I encountered not just disappointment and disenchantment but also fraud and chicanery.  I have been cheated by the Sea View Motel in Ogunquit, ME.

I have family visiting from abroad for the summer, and we decided to take a long-overdue vacation in the beautiful northeast.  We had a lovely stay in a small hybrid corporate-and-local establishment in the Adirondacks, about which I will write anon, and then we thought to spend two days in Maine, a state where I have endless memories of delightful family time spent in family-owned hotels that my father chose.  We found the Sea View online and – much to our own chagrin – booked our room through Hotels.com.

In the photos online, the Seaview looks sumptuous.  Large, clean rooms beckon, and the lovely blue water of a large pool sparkle from the electronic page.  The comments – which I only later realized were from pre-Covid days – were positive, and the price was reasonable, commensurate with the other properties in the area.

When we arrived, we were immediately disappointed and had a bad feeling about the place.  The structure was rundown, and the stairways looked steep.  We asked the clerk if we could look at a room before we checked in.  He gave us a key to a room on the top floor, and we went up.

The ascent was painful.  Steep, rickety stairs are not inviting to a septuagenarian such as I and intimidating to one with hip problems as is my travel companion.  But we persevered. As we crossed the deck of the second story, I tripped on one of the many loose floorboards and fell. I was unhurt, but I must admit that I was further frightened.

The minute we opened the door of the room, we knew we could not stay there.  The furniture and accessories, including the bed and bedding, looked as though they had not been replaced since the ‘60s, and we were enveloped in a musty smell tinged by urine and bleach.  The bathroom was not clean, and it was equipped with no safety elements. The bathtub was slick, and there was not one place for anyone to grab onto to prevent a fall.  Around the bed were signs of looming critters.  We hightailed it out of there without checking in.

We returned to the clerk, who was entirely without curiosity when we told him we were displeased.  He offered us no alternative.  I admit that we had just driven a great distance, and I was not in a particularly articulate state, but when I gathered my wits and tried to explain to him why we could not stay there, he was dismissive then downright rude.  We left without checking in and went to a chain motel up the street.

In the chain motel, for the same price the Sea View demanded for its abominable accommodations, we got a clean, spacious room with brand-new beds – more comfortable than any I have ever slept in – with clean, new furnishings and a full breakfast. 

We appealed to hotels.com for help. We had very naively believed that booking through a monster from overseas would protect us from the kind of treatment the Sea View was giving us.  But Hotels.com abrogated responsibility, telling us that the manager had to approve a refund. They have no power over the establishment’s owners. They did, however,  contact the manager, who lied to them by saying we had stayed there.  Hotels.com, in the person of someone chatting to us from deep in South Asia, that we should reach out to the manager of the motel and instruct them to contact Hotels.com. I made several attempts by email and by phone to reach the motel management.  No one ever responded. 

For absolutely NOTHING, during high season when they most probably rebooked both nights, the motel charged the full fee of nearly $300 per night.  If that is not theft, I don’t know what is.

Sea View has ruined my faith in small business.  If I can go to a Hilton property and for less money than a run-down, unsafe, unsanitary room costs in a place like the Sea View, why would I waste my money trying to help a management that clearly has no interest in helping me?  I would have gladly accepted their charging me for as much as one night for the trouble of making a reservation and having it canceled.  But to charge another $300 for a night that was canceled well in advance is unacceptable.

How can small businesses hope to survive if they are not held to a higher standard of behavior?  If they are free do defraud their customers, to ignore their needs, then they will have to endure bad reviews.  Like this one.

I can’t help but think that the change in our national attitude toward theft and fraud bears at least part of the blame. In a country where thieves can brazenly walk out of CVS carrying hundreds of dollars without prosecution, in a country that seeks to elect a charlatan and a cheater to the highest office in the land, in a country where all bars of justice and morality have been lowered to the ground, anyone can scam others with impunity.

The Sea View Motel is not alone.  They have simply joined a growing army of double-dealing swindlers who will gladly bilk the working stiffs among us out of what they claim as their share of what is rightfully ours.

I wonder if my father would be willing to stay in a Marriott today.  He would have hated the owners of the Sea View.  He would have called them duplicitous cowards. Which is what they are.