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The first singer I ever met was Ral Donner. Well, Ronnie Rice.
Maybe you've heard of neither.
As a teenager in Chicago I became friends with Ronnie Rice, who had had several local hits. At Xmas time, 1964, he took me to Ral Donner's house on the north/west side, near Devon and Harlem. I was awed; Donner had been the first singer to successfully cover Elvis with his 1961 version of "Girl Of My Best Friend." But Donner's career never again reached that height, despite some brilliant follow-ups. (His "I Got Burned," on Reprise, is a masterpiece.) By this time he was living with his mother in a rundown house whose walls were covered with pictures of Elvis. Donner had a Cadillac up on blocks in the driveway; he said he'd had a Corvette, but the insurance payments were too high. I thought, "Sure, a big rock & roll star can't afford car insurance." In fact, Donner was envious of Rice, who was on the radio at that time, albeit on a Clearasil commercial. I remember that he thought that the Beatles' "Can't Buy Me Love" was the worst song he ever heard, and that he was recording a song called "Poison Ivy Leaguer" (not the same as the Elvis song of the same period!) against the "collegiate" people who were ruining rock & roll.
I never said to a word to him. I was all shook up.
Donner provided the Elvis voiceovers in the mock-documentary "This Is Elvis." He died in 1984. Rice became lead singer of the New Colony Six, and is now a very popular Chicago oldies singer.
No, I met other singers before him. I went to a record store in Old Orchard in Skokie Illinois on a rainy cold Saturday afternoon in the fall of 1962 and was face to face with Peter Paul & Mary. To say I was terrified is an understatement. It was a small store, nobody else was there, and I did not know what to do. Introduce myself? Maybe they were waiting for someone and would laugh at me. Ask them to sing something? They weren't holding guitars. Buy their album and ask them to autograph it? I already had their album and I'd be damned if I was buying another one. (This brings to mind musicians complaining about sometimes signing other people's albums at in-store appearances. That is perfectly logical, if the person already has your album at home. Ray Campi had Hank Williams sign an Ernest Tubb songbook because that's what 15-year-old Campi was carrying at the time.)
I snuck up to the counter and bought Bobby Darin Sings Ray Charles and ran out.
No, in fact, the first singer I met was a crew-cut geek about 20 from Kentucky who had just moved into my friend's aunt's rooming house in Chicago. He played us a 'track' from a recording studio and showed us how he was going to sing with it. The music went da-da-da-da-da-da and he sang over it, then there was an equal period of silence, then another da-da-da-da-da-da and silence, a guitar break, and a final repetition.
It was 1960. I was 14 and here I was with an actual singer, someone who was making a record, yet I couldn't resist offering advice.
"Shouldn't you sing in the silent parts and let the da-da-da-da-da-das answer you?" He looked stunned: humiliated. He asked us to leave. I don't know if he ever made the record because the next week he hanged himself in that room.
Of course I was not laughing about it, then or now, but in the annals of a future field of endeavor, this was a seminal moment: I gave someone a bad review and they killed themself.
It's something today's rock crits can only dream of.
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