Speaking of Gino Vannelli, which we were a few days ago, his Web site is a trip. There is a lengthy biography, I assume written by Gino himself, that includes the following passage: "In the midst of such a heady maelstrom, a handful of artists such as Gino Vannelli and Steely Dan [!] opted to buck all the trends, writing and producing sophisticated jazz-inflected pop."
[!!!]
But let's not speak ill of the man. It turns out that at Boston Celtics games, when the boys in green are closing in on another victory, the scoreboard at the Fleet Center shows a video from "American Bandstand" with a bunch of uber-70s teens dancing to disco (I've seen it accompanied by both the Bee Gees' "You Should Be Dancin'" and KC and the Sunshine Band's "Shake Your Booty"). The biggest cheers erupt when a bearded gentleman in a skintight Gino Vannelli T-shirt (a souvenir from Gino's Gist of the Gemini tour) comes on the screen.
Although Vannelli seemed rather skeptical at first (and openly wondered whether the Celtics were stealing his intellectual property in making knockoffs of the Gemini shirt), he's now taken to selling the shirts himself, and donating a cut to the Boston Celtics Shamrock Foundation, which does something for kids.
Good on you, Gino. Here's the ersatz Gino in action:
1 comment:
Interesting article on this a few weeks ago in the Wall Street Journal--they tracked down the ersatz Gino, who unfortunately, is dead.
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