By Peter Goddard Toronto Star staff writer, September 1976
He has it all: The dark, sultry beauty of the man-child lover-boy, the stage sense of someone born to perform and the single-mindedness about his music that amounts to an obsession. But more than anything, Gino Vannelli has his own language. This is a language that operates in a non-verbal plane, a language in which reflex and gesture dictate meanings that words can only approximate.
It’s also a language that resists translation to any other medium. And this has created a perplexing situation for the 24-year-old Montreal singer, who is to play Massey Hall next Friday and Saturday. For he must try to create on record a sense of what he can do on stage. His fourth album, Gist Of The Gemini, recently released, is his latest attempt to do just that, after the only modest success of his People Gotta Move single and albums like Powerful People and Storm At Sunup. Recorded in London’s A.I.R. Studios by Geoff Emmerick (who received a Grammy for engineering Wings’ Band On The Run album), Gist Of The Gemini is Vannelli’s most ambitious and most sophisticated effort to date.
Yet it’s significant that the singer chose an engineer to help him and his brother Joe produce this album. An engineer, after all, would be less likely to tamper with the arrangements for Vannelli’s synthesizer and percussion group. Also, an engineer would have the technical skills to recreate on record some of the expressiveness of Vannelli’s stage appearances. For, as Vannelli explained on the phone earlier this week, making Gist Of The Gemini as perfect as he could became somthing of an obsession.
“There was incredible pressure”, he said softly. “A lot of people have been involved with my career. A lot of people have spent a lot of money, and I had to do something for them. “But the real pressure for me was the obsession I had to make it the way I felt was right – to write and bare my soul and to record this.”
The pressure. It came perilously close to breaking him. “Practice 12 hours a day, then trying to finish one song, one lyric, ” he said. “No real time to work. Touring all year. Not enough time. Not enough time.” He paused, the phone line seemed dead. “I can’t tell you how it’s been. All this work has been emotionally stifling, physically exhausting. I haven’t had enough time to get sick.” To add to his pressures, two of his band members, drummer Graham Lear and keyboard player Richard Baker, left him.
“My band was emotionally unhappy with me,” he explained. “I still don’t really know why. I really thought this album would not only help me but would help their own careers as well. But they were unenthusiastic. “Oh, I think they still maintained a respect for me as a musician. They just didn’t like me as a human being. They didn’t understand how much work I was doing. They didn’t understand the pressure I was under.
“But if I was hard on anyone, I was hard on my brother (Joe, who leads the band) and myself. It was the only way I could make the album as good as I think it is.” Gist Of The Gemini, Gino Vannelli. A&M; Records, SP 4596
