It’s a beautiful day. I can’t stop myself from smiling. Welcome to a breath of fresh air with Sandy Kaye.
Cause it’s a beautiful day. A breath of fresh air. Beautiful day.
Or maybe any day that you’re gone away. It’s a beautiful day. Hello, my friends.
How are you today? I hope your answer’s just terrific. If you were around in the 60s, you’re sure to remember this week’s special guest. He was the original voice of the Chicago-based pop group, The Buckinghams.
Formed in 1966, The Buckinghams went on to become one of the top-selling acts of 67. They dissolved in 1970, but reformed in 1980. And today, you can still find them performing on the touring circuit.
I’m really excited today to introduce you to vocalist Dennis Tufano, who, as you’re about to hear, has also worked with Elton John’s lyricist, Bernie Taupin, and the late Olivia Newton-John, amongst a whole lot of others. Thank you. Nice to meet you, Sandy.
You’ve come a long way, haven’t you, since you first started out? Yeah, I’ve been trying to find out who I was supposed to insult to get out of the business, but I can’t. I love what I do, and I’ve always found a way to get my creative self out there, no matter what happened. If the music came down, I tried something else, I did this, I did that.
So I’m kind of driven by my own creative juice. Your dad was a singer, so you obviously grew up around music from a very early age. Yeah, I grew up, and it was very subtle.
My father never related on me about music. I just knew that he played, and he would come home from work. He wasn’t in a band anymore.
He was in a small little trio for a while. But then he had to go to work to raise the family. He’d come home from work and play the saxophone all the time.
So I just fell in love with saxophone and hearing all these standards. Plus, he had a collection of 70 ARPM records. And he never said, you know, what do you think, Dennis? What do you like this? You like this? You know, he would just let me go.
Out of high school, I had a job as a graphic artist. And the second year into that job, the band started happening. So I had to go home and ask my mom and dad.
I said, look, I want to try this music thing. We’re getting pretty good feedback. I know it’s a long shot, but we’d like to do it.
And they said, okay, go do it, but don’t come back if it doesn’t work and say, why did you let me do that? That was the only restriction he had on me. The band you’re talking about there is the Pulsations, right? Pulsations, correct, yes. Soon to be the Buckinghams, yes.
So tell me about what the scene was like. You grew up in Chicago, and it was a huge music scene in the day. Can you describe the atmosphere a little bit for us? Well, Chicago in the 60s was very electric.
The amount of bands that started coming up out of Chicago were amazing. There was at least six or seven local bands that were recording and getting charted records. Chicago before that was always jazz and blues.
And so when we were going out and researching our music, we saw a lot of blues players, Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy. But yeah, we had a lot of influence as far as horn bands and the blues. The scene in Chicago just exploded.
There was music everywhere, I believe, in those days. There were clubs, high school dances, Battle of the Band contests going on everywhere. Yeah, we were working constantly, working constantly.
There was like weekends, weeknights, VFW halls, dances, mostly dances, roller rinks. We played in roller rinks and high school gyms and things like that. There was always something to do, which is why I wanted to quit my day job because I thought I was making more money on the weekends.
And instead of talking to my boss, I could talk to the young girls that were screaming at the front of the stage. So it worked out pretty good. It was one of those things where you have to take the chance.
And all of us did in Chicago. We’ve had a couple of reunions of all eight or nine bands that actually charted back in the day. We were fortunate.
We moved on to Columbia Records and stuff like that, and we got more of a national kind of a following than the other bands did. A couple of them had their one-hit wonders or two hits. We were the ones that kind of popped out, and we wished to go see everybody.
The group Chicago, parts of them were in a band called The Missing Links, and we used to go see them play all the time. We thought they were the greatest musicians in the world, and it took them like 14 years or something to make it. And they were great, as everybody knows now.
We were going from shows in the suburbs, and the drummer and I would jump in his car and drive back downtown Chicago to Rush Street and go check out all the music that was being played on Rush Street. And it was a combination of blues, jazz, and pop. And it seemed like Jackie Wilson live at the Whiskey in Chicago and things like that.
Lonely teardrops Vibe you’ll never drop Lonely teardrops Come home, come home Just say you will, say you will Say you will, say you will Say you will My heart is crying, crying There was a whole lot of inspiration there, a whole lot. So on which bands did the Pulsations model themselves? Well, we were big fans of the Beatles, of course. You know, that was always an influence at that time.
And they really changed the sound and the direction of music. Actually, it was the British Invasion that affected a lot of us. I mean, the sounds that were coming out of England were much different than the American sounds.
And so the Hollies, we were big fanboys of the Hollies. Any of the groups that had great harmonies was our thing. So we were definitely influenced by that.
Then our roots come up underneath it, which is R&B and blues and just regular tunes that became what they call pop music then. So it was quite a fascinating time. You know, when we were the Pulsations, we needed a name that sounded busy.
You know, Pulsations, we were the Pulsations. And that worked for us for a long time. And then we did a battle of the bands for a TV show called WGN-TV.
It was called All Time Hits. And they had Broadway singers, all kinds of different kinds of genre on the show, and we were the pop band thing. We would play whatever was happening that week.
So we won this battle of the bands for 13 shows. And in rehearsals one day, they came up to us and said, look, would you consider changing your name to sound more English because of the British Invasion? This was 1965. So we said, well, we’ll consider it.
You know, we’re just a local band, so the name isn’t going to change too badly. And the next day we came back to rehearsal, and one of the security guards, who was a young guy, suspiciously long hair for the 65, and he said, here, I wrote down some names for you. I heard what they asked you yesterday.
And as we went down the list, there were some fantastic names on it. And the Buckinghams jumped out because it was simple, one word, and there’s a fountain in Chicago’s Grand Park at the lake. It’s a landmark called Buckingham Fountain.
So we said, well, there it is, Buckinghams. We keep our jobs by changing our name to sound more English, but we also have a name that relates to Chicago. That worked, and we became the Buckinghams, and that was cool.
So we didn’t have to pretend we were English or anything. It certainly worked for you, didn’t it? Because between 1966 and 68, you charted with five huge hits, which was just mind-blowing. I mean, I don’t think anybody else was doing that at the time, were they? No, we were, what is it, Billboard magazine in 1967 said we were the most listened to band in America because Columbia Records just kept releasing single after single after single.
We even asked them to slow down, you know, because we were on the road most of the time, you know, at least 200 and something days a year we were on the road. And we said, could you slow down and stretch it out a little bit because it’s nice to have a record to go out and play behind. But they did it all at once, yeah.
I mean, it was great to have. The first one of those five was kind of a drag, and that one actually knocked the Monkees off the number one spot, didn’t it? The Monkees and the Stones, yeah. The Stones were number two, and the Monkees were number one.
Yeah, kind of a drag was strange. It was the first original song that was given to us by James Holvey, the writer. He had heard us at a concert we did in Chicago and said, I might have some songs that my band can’t do, but they might be suitable for what you guys have.
I said, great. So we got this kind of a drag song, and we worked it up, and we recorded it, and it came out really good. You know, we went, wow, something about this song is interesting.
And the record company hated the record. They just said, no, it’s not fast enough. It’s not this.
They had all these negative things to say. We went, you know, we play this live, and people stop dancing and watch us while we play this song, and that’s got to mean something, you know. They didn’t release it.
So a year later, our contract was up, and they had no more sides to release, so they had to release kind of a drag, and they released us from the contract. So the record was out there. We had no record company.
They didn’t promote it, but because we had some regional hits on radio, on local radio stations, this record came out through the pipeline, and DJs played it. And by February of 67, it was number one with a bullet. It was like three months later, boom, the thing exploded.
Since we had no label anymore, we moved to Columbia Records. We had a good deal there, and we started making more hits. It was a nice little move.
The thing when we were talking about the British Invasion influence, I worked with Peter Noone a lot, and Peter came up to me one day, and he said, you know, he says, you guys were pretty clever. And I said, what do you mean? He says, well, he says, the British Invasion, you know, most American bands couldn’t get a record played. It was almost all English music.
And he says, but you called yourselves the Buckingham, so people thought you were English, and they played your record too. And I said, well, that wasn’t our plan, but I’ll remember it next time. It worked out pretty well.
So all of those hits you were having, of course, this was before the singer-songwriter era, wasn’t it? You were being handed songs to record by songwriters. Right, right. And yeah, well, Jim Holvey, as soon as he heard his song on the radio, kind of a drag, he called us and said, I’ve got another song for you.
And so he ended up writing four of our hits. It’s kind of strange, because the songs transfer very well to my mature life. I go out there and sing these songs, and it’s not like I’m singing young kid songs.
It’s the stories in his songs about heartbreak and I still love you and all that were throughout all four songs. And I was able to relate to that, even as an older man. I went, my God, this is, I could actually sing these songs feeling like who I am.
And it really pays off, because I think the audience feels the same way, because they’re all my age, if not a little bit younger, you know? Can’t you see? Why don’t you tell me? It’s better telling lies. That was great. The songwriting, we had lots of people send us music.
When Once Kind of a Drag came out, of course, a lot of them sounded like kind of a drag. But he gave us this song called Don’t You Care. And Don’t You Care was a step up from Kind of a Drag, same writer.
And it just kept moving that way. And then it was Hey Baby, they’re playing our song. And then Susan, which was the last one, all those songs that he wrote were about Susan.
They’re about the same girl. And it was nice for us, because we knew who she was. She was a waitress and a go-go dancer on Rush Street in Chicago.
And that’s how he knew her, because his band, The Mob, played all the clubs and everything. And they were a great show band. They were one of the first horn bands we heard.
As a matter of fact, I had lunch with him not too long ago. He was kind of lamenting. He said, yeah, I’m so glad that you guys had all that success and everything, and we were able to do that together.
He said, but I wish that my relationship would have been longer with Susan, because, you know, I really loved her. Looks like I’m the place that you want. Let that go, I said.
She gave you four hit records that lasted almost 60 years. I said, so that’s better than a relationship. Don’t worry.
So he bought me lunch, which was good.
This is a breath of fresh air with Sandy Kaye. It’s a beautiful day. Having all those hits at such a tender age, how did that change you as a person? I’ll tell you, the first year and a half of having success, I was like an observer.
The things happening around us were totally different than anything I ever experienced before. The amount of audience members, the rush of the business, of the music business, and the speed at which we were put out there and taken off the stage and put back on the stage, the first thing just made me step back a bit. And we were pretty much numb, I think, the first year because we just worked so much that we couldn’t believe it.
But then it started to be more like we’d come home after a year and a half of being on the road and some of our friends would say, well, you guys have changed. And I said, no, no, no, we haven’t changed. You’ve changed because you think we changed.
We’re the same people that went out there and did this. Right now we’re just tired because we were on the road too long. Oh, baby, she made out a… But she got something much greater than gold Now she got so much soul I said she got the kind of lovin’ Kissin’ and a huggin’ Sure is better Glad that I’m a fella And I know that she likes me on my feet Cause she likes me on my feet Actually, as a whole band, we were pretty, I would say, humbled.
I think we didn’t have too much of an ego going into it and we didn’t use any of that to impress. We just were there. I always felt like, here we are.
What do you want? How did you get on with the rest of the guys? I mean, living in each other’s pockets like that, closer than a family, must have been quite testing at times. Oh, yeah, sometimes. Because each guy goes through his own growing up during that period too.
So sometimes a couple of the guys would get out of hand or something and you’d get into a little bit of a tiff. But for the most part, we were a really good band together. When we broke up in 1970, it wasn’t because of any hard feelings between us.
It was the business. Hey, baby, the plan I saw The one we used to hear when we used to get along Hey, baby, the plan I saw Let’s get back together, that’s where we belong It’s the one with the pretty melody It’s the one that made you fall in love with me It made us feel so gooey We fell in love just like in the movie We got ripped off. Like in 1970 when we broke up, we had to disband because all our money had been taken and the record company dropped us because of part of the rip-off thing.
And all things came to an end. And everybody says, well, how come you guys broke up? You hated each other? No, we loved each other. We just got ripped.
So we just had to stop the band because most of our money was going to litigation. Who ripped you off? Management? Management, yeah. James Gershio.
He produced four of our hits. And yet at the end of all that, he seemed to have another agenda going on and he just turned on us. Right after Susan, the recording Susan, he turned on us because we sued him because our money was gone.
So when he found out that we sued him, he started making things trouble. He told Clive Davis that we were heroin addicts and we were pretty far from being heroin addicts. And we even talked to Clive Davis after we sued James and Clive already had a deal with him.
And Clive said, well, what’s this heroin problem you guys have? And that’s when we knew that it was our manager that was doing this, you know? And so yeah, we had a rough time at the end there because we should have had another 10 years, I think, together working on things because the last two albums we had were mostly our writing and we did a couple of good records. We recovered from that. I had to take like a year off just to get my head together really because that was shocking to have somebody that was working with you to all of a sudden steal your money.
But that’s not our own story. That’s difficult. Yeah, it is common, but it’s the ultimate betrayal, isn’t it? Oh yeah, it was horrible, especially because he was from Chicago also.
But he went on to produce Chicago, the band Chicago, because he knew them for a long time too. So he was ending our careers and picking up theirs. And a year and a half into that, they fired him also because their money was missing.
So he was using the bands to get his own agenda going. And he’s still around. He’s still doing things.
Those were his big music flings. I think he’s a cattle baron now, I think. Dennis, when you said to me it was particularly disappointing because he was from Chicago, what is that? Is there something unique, something special about people from Chicago, some kinship that bonds people from Chicago? Tell me about that.
Yeah, there is a Chicago kind of bonding but also we were from the same neighborhoods. We didn’t live that far apart. And in the neighborhoods, you knew everybody and you talked to everybody and people looked out for everybody.
And this guy left the neighborhoods earlier than we did and was actually a bass player on the Dick Clark Convocator Stars. He was like the house band for that. But then we hooked up with him later and that’s when he produced our records and everything.
But we had no idea that he had a hidden agenda because we were making hit records. Why would somebody stop doing that? I can imagine how messed up you all would have been as a result of that. I mean, you said yourself you had to take a year off.
Yeah. We had to reorder our brains because we were pushed over the edge. We were erased.
Well, did you come across like a summer’s cry? People always used to say, well, whatever happened to you guys? There’s no way to get back, really. It was what he did really ended our force going forward, you know? So I think being surrounded by a good family and good friends that the aftermath of that was good because they taught me to not eat it up. They taught me to just let it go and move on.
And that was enough for me to think and start writing songs and doing stuff like that. So then the guitar player and myself, Carl Gimorici, we started writing together and they started sounding pretty good. We had a good harmony together and everything and we decided, well, let’s see what we could do.
So we actually went out as ex-rockers, as they called us, and we were doing kind of folk music in a sense, you know, just vocals and acoustic. And sometimes they wouldn’t let us play in the clubs because they said, well, your music sounds like folk music, but your singing sounds like rock. So we learned really quick then that we were still rockers and that, you know, our voices were not just folk singer voices.
So then we tried to get a deal. Our drummer from the Buckinghams became our manager because he believed in what we were doing. And we got turned down by every major label.
We did a demo with three songs on it and we got turned down. And so he was upset about that and he said, wait a second, I just read an article about this guy, Lou Adler. He’s on Ode Records.
He produces Carole King. I’m going, whoa, that’s a custom label. We got turned down by all the other ones.
What’s this guy going to do to us, you know? But he sent them the demo anyway. Lou called us back, flew us out for a live audition. He liked the demos.
We recorded all of our songs in the audition. The next day he says, I want to, not only want to sign you to the label, but I want to produce your first album. So that was our step forward.
That was like, you know, it’s right around the corner and there it was. We had no idea that we would be accepted by him. She was a girl in a million, my friend.
I should have known she would win in the end. I’m a loser. And I’m not what I appear to be.
It was great working with him. He produced our first album. It’s a really good album.
Carole King played piano on it and we had a great time. And then something happened to my partner, Carl, and the second album, he just quit. He just said he couldn’t play music anymore.
So that kind of took the icing off the cake, really, because now we had a contract for two more albums and my partner just kind of flipped on us. So it took about another year, a year and a half, to convince me to trust him again. And then what we did was we finished the two albums contractually.
About 40% of the records were good. The rest of it was kind of forced because it was, you know, we had to do the albums or, and I didn’t trust him anymore. Once we finished, we just parted ways because he never once told us why he quit, never once apologized or anything like that.
And make some sounds from the things I know The simple things I’m needing Like seeing the morning light Watching the sun go down One summer night Gonna climb the mountain top And watch the stars Glittering and shining Right across the sky Passing through four million faces Near and far The simple things I’m needing Like seeing the morning light Watching the sun go down One summer night Won’t let you settle down Can’t keep your feet on the ground Take your time Ease your mind Don’t fall behind Living You still don’t know to this day what happened to him? No. Well, I know what happened to him now. He’s become the lead singer of the Buckinghams.
And it’s very strange. It’s a very odd kind of thing. We broke up in 1970.
Carl and I did the, our albums in the mid-70s. And at the end of that, I decided that I couldn’t make a living in music anymore. It was getting difficult to survive.
And so I went to acting. And I started to act and do voice acting and do TV and do some commercials and do theater and everything. And I was having a ball.
That’s when I decided I’ve got to go off on my own now. I can’t rely on partners anymore. I can’t do that anymore and stuff.
So I started doing that. And then in 1981, we had a reunion for a radio station in Chicago. So we got together, the three of us.
The drummer had passed away. Our keyboard player, Marty Greb, was now on the road with Leon Russell. And so we couldn’t get him, but the three of us got together with a couple more musicians.
And we did this reunion at this thing called the Chicago Fest. And nobody had seen us perform for 11 years. So what happened was is that they kept adding shows because people kept standing room only, standing room only.
And they kept, so they said, hey, we could do this again. And I said, nah, no, I don’t think we could do it again. I said, we did it.
And we’re not the same people anymore. We’re not even the same band. I said, I can’t do that.
So they were a little upset, thinking that I would become the singer again. But like a year later, they ended up going through all kinds of different people. And he ended up being the lead singer.
And he doesn’t sound like the Buckingham Records. They don’t sound like the Buckingham Records. They just don’t sound like them.
Now, I work all the time as a solo now. And every backup band that I play with learns the record. When I perform, I’m freaked out on stage sometimes because it sounds just like the records.
And I’ve seen videos of them and they don’t do that. So again, I made a good decision. And what was great about that too, is that one night, it was like 80, 81, end of 81, beginning of 82.
I get a call from Tom Scott, who was a great sax jazz player. And Tom and I were label mates on old records. We did demos together.
I sang on his albums. And so we became tight friends. Well, he called me one night and he said, Dennis, you know that there was a tour I told you about with Olivia Newton-John.
He says, it’s three months long. He says, and I hate to call you so late at night. He says, but we’ve got a guy singer, but he can’t sing duets with her.
And she wants to do a couple of songs as duets. And he says, and I know you’ve been acting. He says, so I have a feeling that you probably know how to put music and acting together and do this.
So would you come down and audition tomorrow? I said, sure. You know, he’s a good friend. Yeah.
And I said, Olivia, great. Well, I had no idea Olivia was going to be there. And so I arrived early in the morning, I got there and I walk into the room with all the guys and, hey, how you doing? How you doing? All of a sudden the door opens and Olivia walks in and she thanks me for coming in to audition.
And the song was Suddenly, the Cliff Richards duet that she did. It’s a pretty hot love song, really. It’s, you know, two people that really, really are connected.
And I figured I had to go for it. I was totally freaked that it was Olivia I was singing with. And we did the song.
I’m ready to take all my chances with you. I was sweaty by the end of it, boy, I’ll tell you. But she was so great.
Such a beautiful, beautiful energy she had. And she said, that was just great. You’re on the tour and I want you to also do you’re the one that I want from Greece, OK? And boom, that was it.
So now I was on the Olivia Newton-John tour and got to kiss her at the end of that song three months in a row.
This is a breath of fresh air with Sandy Kaye. It’s a beautiful day. It was one of the highlights in my singing career, really, to actually be up there on the stage with Olivia, singing with her.
I got chills, they’re multiplying. And I’m losing control. Cause the power’s multiplying.
It’s electrifying. You better shape up. Cause I need a man.
And my heart is about you. You better shape up. You better understand.
To my heart I must be true. There’s little for me to do. You’re the one I need.
You’re the one I need. Just come back for me for a minute to when you were with Carl as a duo. You never found out why he quit after the first album.
To this day you still don’t know. No, no. He’s never, and I wasn’t going to ask him ever, because I wanted him to step forward, because that would like rebuild the bridge that was burnt.
Yeah. But he hasn’t said a word. He’s never apologized for it.
He’s never, when we did go back and record, he didn’t say, man, I’m sorry I did that. I don’t know what happened to me. He just didn’t, like it never happened.
At the time you were going out as Tufano and Jim Morrisey, right? You didn’t actually have a name for your duo. That was who you were. That was the name, yeah.
Well, that’s what I thought. That’s probably why we didn’t make it big, because nobody could pronounce the name fast enough. I know that you did do a whole lot of touring in support of at least that first album, and one of the tours you did was with Cheech and Chong, right? Yes.
What was that like? Well, they were on old records also. It was crazy. It was crazy because we were an acoustic act.
So we had two acoustic guitars, our voices, a bass, and congas. So we would start the show, and we couldn’t hear, because everybody in the audience was doing the Cheech and Chong act. And they were all going, hey, where’s Dave, man? And they kept doing the act.
And of course, they were like, come on, bring out Cheech and Chong. And so we had some problems, and I had to say things like, could you just be quiet so we know we started the song? And Tommy was a prankster, so Tommy Chong was always like messing with us about that. But after the first two shows, the next seven or so that we did, we got encores.
He used to call Lou Adler up, and he’d say, Lou, Dennis is bumming out our crowds. He’s telling them to shut up. Lou Adler said, don’t worry about it.
How did you come to start writing with Tom Scott and composing that theme song for the TV series Family Ties? Well, yeah, I didn’t compose that song. You sang it. Yeah.
I was in rehearsals for the Olivia tour when Tom came to me, because Tom was the MD on that show. So he said, Dennis, let’s just go over across Paramount Studios here, because I got this theme song for this TV show that’s not out yet called Family Ties. And he said, I think you’d be perfect singing it.
And it came out great. For the first 13 episodes, they played our theme song. I bet we’ve been together for a million years.
And I bet we’ll be together for a million more. It’s like I started breathing on the night we kissed. When I can’t remember what I ever did before.
What would we do, baby, without us? What would we do, baby, without us? And there ain’t no nothing we can’t love each other through. What would we do, baby, without us? Sha-la-la-la. Then Johnny Mathis heard the song and really liked it and said, I would like to do that as a single.
He recorded it with Patty Austin. And they never released it as a single. But they put his version on the show after the first 13.
So that was another lemon that you slip on. Again, I just rolled with it. I’ve learned that that’s not all there is.
You could move on to other stuff. Life has really taught you that. Yes, yes.
I never thought of myself as a total optimist. But I embrace it now. It’s the best way to go.
You say, I forgive you, because I will not forget. Thank you. Goodbye.
That’s it. That’s what I do now a lot. But yes, it’s all worked out good.
I mean, what happened, too, in the middle years there when I was acting and not doing anything else but acting, that gave me a thrill, too. So I took the chance to go study and learn and work and do theater and all that. And it worked.
Tell me about meeting Bernie Taupin. Oh, Bernie was great. It’s so funny.
It was like Lou Adler owned a club, a private club. You know the Roxy Theater on Sunset Boulevard? Kind of a popular club that everybody played at. Well, Lou owned that.
And he owned this little private club on top of it called On the Rocks. He gave me free tickets to get in the club whenever I wanted. So I used to go up there and sit there and have a beer and stuff.
So I was up there sitting at the bar. And this girl I knew from Chicago walked in with Bernie Taupin. And then I’m going, holy Christ, that’s Bernie Taupin.
And she says, oh, Dennis. She says, I want you to meet my friend Bernie. And this is Dennis.
He’s from Chicago. He’s a singer, blah, blah, blah. And that was about it.
And he left with her. And about a month later, I was back up there. And he came in.
And he sat down next to me at the bar. We were talking a little bit. And he said, what do you do during the day? I said, I’m an actor.
And I’m also a singer. I do session work and different things like that. He said, well, you know, I’m thinking of doing an album on my own.
And I want to come up with some different kind of music. And I don’t want to use a celebrity writer, because that just looks like I’m copping out. Do you have anything I can listen to? And I said, sure.
And I gave him some of my Tom Scott demos. And he called me back. And he said, come on over.
He says, I like your music. And I went over there. And he gave me one song called The Whores of Paris, beautiful song.
And I worked on it for a couple of weeks. And it was a long song. It was a lot of lyrics.
So I was like a little bit daunted by that. But I came back to him. And I said, look, let me play you what I already have.
He sat down right in front of me on the floor and listened to me play the song for him. Gigi liked a book on Jackie O Though I knew she had some trouble with the words It never showed She’d never drop her guard Under pressure she preferred like all her girls Worked the bars To be a lady you find the sex Not your traditional elegance But a parry match In cheap expense But the tough and tardy waiting came The fat commute is full of cheap champagne Belgian tourists feel no pain When Gigi takes their wallets Expends their bodies Keeps the change Sentiment don’t touch the whores of Paris Just the years and lines of age Buries them in unwrought graves Old and spent and never seen By epitaphs and written caves The winter waits, the devil takes Home to Paris, home to Haiti I finished the song and he looks up at me and he goes, that’s it. So he gets up, gets a folder and pulls out like nine more songs.
And we start going through them and talking about which style he wanted to do them in. Rock and roll or jazzy or whatever he wanted. Because we mixed it up on the album.
And so we began that project and it came out good. I mean, it was a good record. And then we worked again years later in the 90s and Farm Dogs.
That was like a put together band with a couple of great people from Rod Stewart’s band, actually. We did a rootsy kind of album all done at his ranch. It was a great experience.
I mean, he wouldn’t give us the lyrics until the day that we were going to write the music. So it was like it was very fresh. Very, very cool.
Oh, yeah. Farm dogs were barking one March morning As I staggered home from a wet weekend My old green parka smelled like a barnyard I slept on the road then Me and my friends Me and my friends Fourteen and fifteen years behind us Fresh country kids ape in a trend A hobo religion and some doers white label Thought we was pistols Me and my friends Me and my friends Woo! There was a great album called Last Stand in Open Country. That’s right.
A very strange way, though, not to give you the lyrics until the day of. Until. That really worked well for the whole album.
Because there’s a lot of the beauty on that album is the spontaneity that happened. Where somebody would stumble on the chord that would just change the room. And we would just keep going.
Your career is at that stage so diverse. You are making music again. You’re with a group of actors performing in lots of movies and TV shows.
You made a documentary. The creativity certainly hadn’t dried up. So life was pretty good.
In 2008, you did a rock concert with The Cryin’ Shames. You appeared with Marty Greb in Manila in the Philippines. Yeah, the Philippines with Marty and I. Because Marty and I were the only ones that weren’t back in the Buckinghams.
Then we did a really great concert. It was a benefit for Marty because Marty got very, very ill. And we had Danny Serafin, the drummer from Chicago, play because our drummer was gone.
And we just had just a great array of people playing. Everybody really came on really strong to help. Talking about that creativity thing, like I said earlier, I’m driven by that juice.
I wish I could take credit for being the one who wants to go forward. But no, something will just come into me and go, no, this is juice here. Go do this.
Once I commit to that, I go for it. And it just makes me feel good. I got the best job in the world.
When I finish my job, people are smiling. Are you still doing that one-man tribute show to Bobby Darin these days? Yes, I do. I do it in between the other shows, the rock and roll shows.
It’s a complete Bobby Darin show. I call it I Remember Darin. The songbook is just beautiful.
Has such teeth, dear And it shows them pearly white Just a jackknife Has old Maggie Heath, baby And it keeps it out of sight You know when that shark bites With its teeth, baby Scarlet billows start to spring Fancy gloves, though, wears old Maggie Heath, baby So there’s never, never a trace of red For a singer, it’s the most diverse thing I’ve ever done. It’s got so many different kinds of genres in it, from standards to folk to blues to pop. Some of the songs like Mack the Knife, things like that, they’re fun to listen to, but boy, they’re a blast to sing.
And I actually got the blessing from some of the people, the Bobby Darin Foundation. And they invited me to come to Vegas and play with them. And I got the blessing from the fans and from the archivist and from the two players.
It was T.K. Kelman, his guitar player, and Billy Mack, the bass player, that played with Darin for the last seven years of his life. What enamours you most about Bobby Darin’s music? The authenticity that he brought to every song that he did. He brought a style that was just his.
Every night I hope and pray A dream lover will come my way A girl to hold in my arms And know the magic of her charms Cause I want a girl to call my own I want a dream lover So I don’t have to dream alone Dream lover, where are you With a love oh so true I love doing that show because of that. I mean, I just disappear. As soon as I walk on stage, I’m gone.
Just such a beautiful trip. Dennis, where can people see you doing your stuff these days? Well, I’m out there doing my 60s show. I do like five or six Bobby Darin songs.
It kind of works really well, which is nice for me. Does the resurgence of popularity of the 60s stuff surprise you? Yeah, actually, because, I mean, we weren’t doing it until the 80s. It came back in the 80s, which is why the other guys wanted to start the band.
So now, all of a sudden, I’m being extracted out of my Bobby Darin show and put on 60s multi-act shows. Dennis, I’ll let you go. You’ve been so super generous with your time today.
I love the lessons that you’re teaching everybody in terms of when you get lemons, make lemonade, right? Right. It’s not an easy process, but it’s the best. It leaves you feeling very light and good again.
I try all the time. Beautiful day You’ve been listening to A Breath of Fresh Air with Sandy Kaye. Beautiful day I bet you’re going away It’s a beautiful day