David Farrell, Canadian Musician Magazine
August, 1979
Standing in the lobby of the Harbour Castle Hilton, he looks like a Florentine bon mot and not far different from that symbol women swoon over on stage. The tightly cut pants, knee high boots and feminine blouse left all too open to expose that tightly curled mass of masculine hair. The peacock composer that the Toronto Sun would chide in its review headline as ‘Mucho Macho … But Not Mucho More’.
Nonetheless, Gino Vannelli is nobody’s servant or slave these days and all matters pertaining to his career are dealt with in utmost seriousness. After 14 years of courting a career in music, it is finally beginning to pay off in dividends and entourage daily grows larger around him, for better or for worse. Today he is quietly stewing over a remark made by the Raes, his opening act in Montreal, who claim their sound was sabotaged at the Forum. “They had equal time for a sound check and we let them use all our equipment including our board,” he counters to a couple of reporters after the damage has already been stated in print.
Twice nominated for a Grammy and recently co-winner of a Juno for excellence in production on the Brother To Brother album, the 27 year-old singer claims many varied influences in his music and remarks that pigeon-holing him into any one style is an unreasonable simplification. Musical osmosis has been a way of life for him since the age of three when he heard his father singing at a dance club in Montreal. Russ Vannelli was, in his time, a local legend who fronted a big band and was once asked to join the Maynard Ferguson band. He declined in favor of settling down with his family, opening up a hair salon and staying home to listen to “the great music” by Coltrane, Bird, Kenton and, later, Brubeck. It was in this environment that brothers Ross, Gino and Joe grew up, at the same time absorbing the Latin and R & B elements that reigned supreme in the city in the late ’50s and ’60s. Early recordings bought by Gino include “Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag” and “In The Midnight Hour” and whilst Joe was toodling around on the piano at home, Gino got to fooling about with a set of second hand drums his parents bought for him. At the tender age of 15 he signed a record contract with RCA, a rather fruitless entanglement that only realized one single, oddly enough under the name Van Elli.
Quickly realizing that RCA had bigger fry to fret over on the label, a meeting was called and release was obtained. Of course the decision was first made over the customary Italian family dinner table where pasta and polemics mixed as freely as the water and the wine. Asked once if these discussions took place while the traditional Italian dishes were being served or after the dishes were cleared? Gino jested “after they were broken.” It was at this point that Gino and Joe decided to try out their musical charm in New York and seek out interest from other record labels. As the story goes, their arrival was the cause of some considerable interest but each query was accompanied by demands on them that neither was willing to acquiesce to and so they returned again to Montreal a little poorer but a great deal wiser.
“That didn’t work out,” recalls the sultry singer who was once billed as Hunk Of The Month by Sixteen magazine. So next came a series of club dates around the city to earn money needed for equipment to set up a basement studio and prepare a demo tape to go out to Los Angeles with. They formed a group called Good Friends and in the course of playing, were booked into Dominic’s where they came to meet Pasquale, a hairdresser of some renown and a close friend of the Vannelli family. As Russ Vannelli and Pasquale both tell the story today, Pasquale was in the club having a drink, saw Gino on stage, then noticed Russ and put two and two together. So taken aback by Gino’s dynamism on stage, he told the parents that someday he intended to do something for them. Meantime, the brothers were socking back performance money and purchased a Sony four-track machine and a primitive synthesizer machine with foot pedals and when they weren’t playing on stage they were in the family rec room rehearsing new material and preparing a demonstration tape. “Basically what we would be doing is setting down a drum track, which was me, then Joey would add some organ, bass pedals and a bit of oscillation and then I would add the vocal at the end. That’s more or less how we came to construct the Crazy Life album.
Initially, they had wanted to use guitar for a demo tape but everytime they approached someone to help out, the subject of money was raised “and frankly we just couldn’t afford any extra expenses, so we started using synthesizer instead. I guess it was the root of evolution.”
Drumming had come naturally to the singer, but it was an early Gene Krupa film that nurtured his desire to sit behind a set of skins to begin with. He joined his first band when he was 12, an aggregation called the Cobras, and then, a year later, Joe and Gino formed their own band, The Jacksonville Five, who played soul music, then the hippest thing for a white band to play. Influences cited include King Curtis, James Brown, and the Bar-Kays. There was also five years of drum lessons and a short stint at the conservatory studying theory, but mostly a lot of slugging it out alone and fooling around with ideas until they jelled.
But back in the basement, circa 1972, expectations were on the rise as the two brothers worked on the material with the four-track machine capturing ideas and sessions for posterity’s sake. Meantime Pasquale was looking for a way to make good on his promise when one evening he was pulling into his usual parking spot at Dominic’s and all of a sudden a limousine carrying Trini Lopez, his Italian arms, and a politician raced for the same spot. Pasquale flew into a mock rage, honking his horn and shouting in Italian, French and English all at the same time. His words were to the effect “If you don’t move this black mother ….”
So the story goes, Pasquale got his parking spot and befriended Trini, telling him about the Vannelli act. The outcome of all this was Trini came out to see the brothers, liked their stuff and told them to look him up if they were ever in Los Angeles. That was all they needed to hear. Six demo tapes later, they were en-route with Pasquale, high in hopes and low in cash. Luckily for them, the record contract with Trini Lopez’ people did not happen for them, but Pasquale hustled feverishly down there and finally got through to Herb Alpert at A&M;: “I tell him back in 1972, ‘Gino’s value to music is what Michelangelo was to art’ and when Gino’s album turn platinum he send me one with inscription – ‘you knew it all the time’.”
Soul Brothers: Seven years and six albums later and things have changed considerably for the family. “There were time when it seemed everything was against us,” remembers Gino with a grin visible on his face today. “When I told A&M; about the War Suite they said that people didn’t want to hear about war, that America had just recovered from Vietnam, but I turned to them and said ‘Look, I have to do it’.”
The motivation behind the extended piece came to him on a sabbatical in Oregon. “I was about 100 miles from nowhere in a cabin and I had this beautiful Yamaha piano in the living room. Every morning I would get up and be amazed at the beauty of my surroundings and then one day I was tinkering with some musical ideas and it dawned on me that there was a lack of appreciation for the natural beauty that I was surrounded by, that it was not always going to be there unless we came to grips with this appreciation. I didn’t want to just write another ecology song and I had already composed the music for the Prelude and Battle Cry.
It suddenly occurred to me that they could be tied together. In a way it is a sort of Shakespearean approach that says it’s not so much a matter of fighting for what one believes in, but more a case of protecting what one has already fought for. It’s not about war, it’s about the lack of love for what we have protected (over the years).”
Following The Gist Of The Gemini, which contained the War Suite, came the Vannelli brothers’ tribute to Gershwin, A Pauper In Paradise. Perhaps the most complex of his recordings yet, the album was recorded in London with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra with charts done by Don Sebesky.
“We worked together with a small tape recorder: I played the parts I wanted on keyboards and told him where the first movement would begin and end, told him where there should be strings and brass and then he took those ideas and put them down on a chart. We did this in the U.S. then he met me in England. The orchestra was in the studio and we started that morning.
At first I was amazed to hear one of my pieces with 99 musicians, then the reality of the situation got to me and I became a madman running back and forth from the concert hall calling for changes and revisions in the charts. Ultimately I think we got most of it straightened away and that the co-venture made for a very successful piece.”
Both the Gist Of The Gemini and A Pauper In Paradise were, to some degree, experimental works for the singer-composer. Next came the seven months in seclusion, ironing out management problems, pausing to evaluate his career and music and creating time to listen and edit a collection of performance tapes that will be used eventually in a live album situation. The album that was to follow this hiatus was, of course, Brother To Brother and it marked a return to his earlier recordings: the Latin rhythms, simple stories, natural melodies. But it also saw the Vannelli brothers finally add guitar to their battery of electronic instruments.
When the Vannelli brothers first started out, they had to come to arrange material for keyboards and found they really didn’t need to supplement the sound with guitars. Then it became a problem of just how to introduce a guitar, especially when touring and playing older material that used synthesizers in lead parts. By the time the Brother To Brother album came to be released, both Gino and Joe felt comfortable with arrangements for guitar and the decision was made to hire on guitarist Carlos Rios for the sessions. Buoyed by the success of younger brother Ross Vannelli’s songs, I Just Wanna Stop, a North American tour was booked shortly before the new year and rehearsals with the new band began in earnest.
Pasquale figures the recent tour cost somewhere in the region of $750,000 to keep on the road, a convoy that included 41 people on payroll and utilized 4 semi-trailers to haul equipment, lights and the suspended sound system. According to Gino, stage equipment alone included 17 synthesizers, an Oberheim and the guitar, bass and drums. Keyboard gear included four electric pianos, two Rhodes, a Yamaha and Wurlitzer and four polyphonic synthesizers.
The next step in the evolution of the Vannelli brothers is to complete work on a film project that was shot while they were touring, to sell the documentary and then “Who knows where to next,” Gino says throwing his hands in the air. A couple of hours from now and the whole entourage will be somewhere in the U.S. playing before another crowd and hopefully garnering slightly better concert reviews than they did in Toronto. But then these are small points of concern for Pasquale who is still pulling the strings these days. After all, not everyone can see a Michelangelo and recognize it for what it is. He did and he was right, at least in Herb Alpert’s ears he was.
