Hi friends!
Today you're going to be reading an interview I did with Mr. Vincent Ialenti, an even bigger Perry Como fan than I am, as much as it hurts me to say that!
In addition to this interview, I've added a memoir Mr. Ialenti wrote quite a long time ago about his appreciation for Perry Como.
I hope you enjoy reading both the interview and the memoir!
Until next time friends, this is your 50s music fanatic, Steven B. - signing off
Interview
How did you become a Perry Como fan?
Being born in 1947, television just came to the greater Boston area. The legend is my grandmother had one of the first TVs in Quincy, Massachusetts. So, television was always a part of my life. In the early 50s, the Perry Como show was on the air. Of course, my grandmother, being an Italian immigrant would watch that [his show.] The whole family would watch it because there were only two channels in Boston until 1953, so we didn't have an awful lot to pick from.
I always watched Perry Como. I can remember as a kid lip synching to “Papa Loves Mumbo.” It was good music. It was fun. Maybe some of the first 45 [records] I ever bought were Perry Como songs. And then Rock N Roll comes along, you go to high school, you go to college, and Perry Como is like old people's music.
Around 1972, there was a department store going out of business, and they had their albums at reduced prices, and I bought a Perry Como greatest hits album 2 volume set. I said, “Wow, this is really good,” so I started collecting Perry Como music.
Probably by 1978 or so, I probably had every single album Perry had ever released, plus some of the obscure stuff, like he had 45 record sets, which was kind of unusual. And he also had 78 LP volumes too, where you only get like six to eight songs double sided. You would never listen to those because the sound quality wasn't as good as a 1970s LP. So, I started listening to Perry Como, I tried to get all my friends to listen to Perry Como, and at the time I was probably 40-45.
We watched him [Perry Como] throughout the 60s when it was on with great regularity every week, and by 1970 to 73, he stopped that, and he started doing the annual Christmas specials which were really big events where he would travel the world. He did one in Israel, and South Africa, Hawaii, San Antonio, Texas, Williamsburg - I'm just thinking of the ones that come to mind off of the top of my head. And they’d have all the stars of the day like, The Carpenters. I remember in San Antonio, he had George Strait, the country artist who was very popular at that time. So, Perry Would schmooze and sing along with the younger generation. And then of course, it always ended with “Ave Maria.”
Tell me about the time that you actually had the opportunity to meet Mr. Como and tell me about the phone call that he made to you.
On Perry Como’s 75th birthday … I decided to have an excuse to have a party. We had his albums posted around the room, and we had maybe 40 people there. It was kind of a fun excuse to have a party, and I'm playing Perry Como music and people are going, “Oh no, Perry Como!”
On Perry's 80th birthday … we had a party, and I created an invitation, which I think is quite clever … where I included 40 of the 137 Billboard chart songs by Perry Como, like “Hot Diggity” “It's Impossible” to believe that Perry Como is turning 80. And I had them all footnoted and so forth with the year and so forth I thought it was quite clever.
(An image of the invitation on the left)
I sent it to all my friends. And we had a big party, and someone came to the party, and they bought a big piece of poster board, and they had everybody sign it - a message to Perry. In those days, there were panoramic cameras that you could take a picture of a large group. They took a picture and they said, “You send this to Perry.” I said, “I'm tired of going to the post office, mailing things to Perry Como, Jupiter, Florida.” So, the woman's boyfriend said, “I'll do it.” I gave him four bucks to send it and we mailed it to Jupiter, Florida.
About two weeks later, I was working in the yard, I was all dirty. I came into the house, and my son … he came to the door, and I was down in the basement [he said] “Phone call for you.” … I thought it was another friend. I said, “I'll call him back.” Then my wife came [and said] “It's Perry Como.” Perry called to thank me. He got the invitation. He thanked me for it. He thought it was quite clever. We talked for about five minutes. We just talked in generalities and so forth.
[I said] “I'm a big fan.” [He said] “Thank you,” you know, that sort of stuff.
When it was over, I said, “Wow! would Madonna call you? Would Frank Sinatra call you to thank you for something?” But Perry was such a decent human being.
Moving forward a few years, when Perry Como was doing tours, he went to the Worcester Centrum where I saw him do his Christmas show. And then he was in the Lowell auditorium, doing a Christmas show and I bought tickets. I bought them as soon as they went on sale. In the meantime, one of the janitors where I work came into my office and he's talking to me and he said, “I met Smokey Robinson yesterday.” I looked at the 65-year-old fellow - I said, “John, you wouldn't know Smokey Robinson if you tripped over him. … However, his kids were kind of caretakers for a press agent of the 1930s and 1940s. In those days, there was no internet. If you wanted to know where George Clooney was this weekend, you would call a press agent and he would steer you that he's visiting Malibu this weekend or wherever it might be. And he said, “My kids know everybody.” I said, “Yeah?” I said, “I got tickets to see Perry Como. Can you get me into see Perry Como after the show?” [He said] “Oh, okay. I'll try.” So, about six weeks later, I remember picking up my son in preschool … the phone rang, and this voice was very harsh and raspy. [The voice said] “Dr. Ialenti?”
“Yes?”
“This is Vine Phoenix.”
She was Mr. Blackwell's secretary. She was 92, and I think Blackwell was 90.
She said, “I met your father last week.” I said, “You did?” My father had passed in 1982, but I played along. … But she made arrangements through Mickey Glass, who was Perry's manager, that I could go after the show and meet Perry. “Wow, really?” I was kind of skeptical.
We had our seats, and we were in the front row. I went to the stage door where they had directed me, and I said, “Mickey glass said I can come in.” And the guy said, “yeah, yeah. Come after the show.” So, I thought, “Okay. That's positive.”
After the show, we went up to the stage door. And I said, “Mickey glass put us on the list.” He said, “Okay, check [mark] - saw my name. I said, “Can my wife come?” He said, “Yes.” And so, we both went in.
Now, we were in a line, or a little room with maybe 20 people - the Mayor of Lowell and maybe the head of the city council, and so forth. We waited about 25 minutes, and they checked our names again to make sure we were on the list, and then down came Perry from a set of stairs, wearing a blue tracksuit.
Perry went to everybody and said “Hello.” I tried to remind him that I had sent him that invitation, and he's 82 years old. He, at this time, he had just done like a two-hour show. Last thing in the world he wants to do is schmooze with the Mayor of Lowell or even one of his biggest fans, but nevertheless we did exchange some pleasantries, and I had my picture taken with him. So, I had two brushes with Perry. The phone call, and then actually meeting him and shaking his hand.
What would you say are some of the things you admire the most about Perry Como?
Well, from day one, people always said he's the nicest guy in the world. I attended the unveiling of his statue in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania in 1999. They had a whole bunch of events. The night before the unveiling they had kind of a musical celebration in the square where the statue is, and there was a performer there who had grown up in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania. His name was Jimmy Chapel, and he worked in Vegas. He was a lounge singer in Vegas. He didn't become as famous as the other Canonsburg native, Bobby Vinton who went on to have lots and lots of hits, but Chapel was talking in between numbers and so forth, and he said, “I work a lot with Don Rickles” [a very famous comedian of the mid-to-late 20th century] “and one day I asked Rickles, ‘who wouldn't you make fun of?’ and Chapel said,
without even blinking, he said, “Perry Como. You couldn't say a bad thing about him.”
(On the right, a piece of the granite from the Perry Como Statue that Vin game to me!)
He [Perry Como] wasn't a hot personality like the early performers like a Milton Berle or a Sid Caesar, Ernie Kovacs, who were over the top and the medium of television kind of embraced that, but television also embraced Perry Como’s, low key performance, his seeming enjoyment to be on TV.
Perry Como was just a decent human being. He was married to the same woman, I think, for 62 years until she passed. And he was very loyal to his family, his friends, he did a lot of charity work. A lot of celebrities do charity work, but Perry really spent a lot of time especially with Duke Children's Hospital in North Carolina. [He] is a good person to emulate. Just a successful Italian American boy who came from nowhere and made it to the top and stayed there for 60 years.
I'd like you to name three of your favorite Perry Como songs and tell me why.
He had a song, “The Best of Times.” … It's just such a great song with a great message. These are the best of times, so let's embrace them and move forward. And I think that's a message that I like to think of.
I also like, “No Place Like Home for the Holidays,” because that says a lot. … That song always warms my heart when I hear it.
I love his 1953 version of “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.” How many times have we heard Gene Autry and everybody else who's ever recorded a Christmas album do that? But in that he does such a nice job. And his voice goes down to a lower register - *proceeds to sing the ending of Perry’s version of the song.*
It just warms my heart when I hear that.
Tell me what it's like to be a Como fan in an era when music has changed so dramatically from his day?
Anything after 2000 kind of blurs together for me. My wife listens to the popular music of the day when we're in the car. They all sound alike. The auto tune – [Artists like] Taylor Swift, they kind of speak it [the lyrics.] I like songs with tunes. Perry Como had tunes. You could hum them. Dean Martin - most of his performances had tunes. If Justin Bieber has a song, there might be one line you could take away from it, but the rest is just monotone stuff.
I can really appreciate the tunes - the big orchestrations. And I was thinking how lucky we were that Perry recorded in the era when sound recording was fairly good. And throughout the 50s he got into the stereo era. So, those songs are going to sound as good now as they will in the future.
Is there anything else you would like to say to my readers?
Everybody keep listening to Perry Como! You'll find that the more you listen, the more you'll learn to appreciate what a fine artist he was, how good his songs were, and how much of a pleasure you can get from listening to Perry Como.
Read Mr. Ialenti’s memoir about Perry Como here – it was written many, many moons ago!
Perry, TV, Music and Me – By Vincent Ialenti
The family legend always was that my grandmother bought one of the first TV sets in Quincy, MA in 1947, the same year that the new medium and I were introduced to the US. My parents and I lived in a small apartment upstairs in my grandparent’s house. So Grandma’s TV was always my TV.
The home was just a few feet up the long driveway from Risio’s Italian Bread Bakery operated by my grandfather and uncle and staffed by my aunt, mother, grandmother, and father when he was off-duty from the fire department. It was one of those old-time operations that was open 353 days a year, 12 to 14 hours a day. Now the implications of growing up in that environment certainly have molded my approach to work and life, but that’s a story for another time.
I remember spending a lot of time in front of the TV waiting for my parents to finish up at the bakery. It was a great baby-sitter and companion while everyone was working. Sure, I recall fondly my Howdy Doody, Ding Dong School, Hopalong Cassidy, and Range Ryder experiences as a young viewer, but I find no traces of their influences on me today other than my love for the TV medium and nostalgia.
Around 1975, the Grants Department Store chain was going out of business and I was poking through the record department to see what I could pick up on sale. By this time, I already owned a couple thousand albums, 100s of 45s, and probably spent more time in my undergrad and grad school days working at the college radio station than I did studying. I had grown up with rock and roll, had been to concerts of the Rolling Stones, Beatles, Beach Boys, Supremes, Four Tops, Janis, James Brown, Cream, and most of the popular big acts of my era. I wasn’t sure why at the time, but that day I bought a two record greatest hits album This is Perry Como.
That began my renewal and recognition of the dormant love that I had for pre-rock and roll music. Rock had made me forget the 15 minute Mills Brothers, Eddie Fisher, and Perry Como shows that aired two to three time per week on TV during the early fifties and all of the music that I listened to on the radio for my first 8 years of my before-rock and roll life. I remembered the “soundies”, the precursors of music videos that popular artists recorded in the 40s for movie jukeboxes. The 3 to 4 minute performances by big bands and vocal stars were perfect to fill in the gaps between programs in the early days of television. Suddenly, I was lip-synching and singing along to Perry’s Papa Loves Mambo again as I can remember doing when I was seven.
To my immigrant Italian grandparents, a successful Italian boy with all the traits of a good family man like Perry Como was held in as high esteem as the Pope. In the days of the one TV household, we did not miss Perry through the years of his Wednesday Kraft Music Hall hour broadcasts or his Saturday show years. But it wasn’t so bad. I thought I was watching the variety show because Perry usually booked one or two of the emerging rock artists and tried to update his own repertoire, and even had a few hits bordering on the rock genre himself. I was amazed that my love for Perry Como had remained dormant during my rock and roll adolescence.
I began buying every Perry Como, Eddie Fisher and Mills Brothers that I could find. Through music collectors magazines and a few lucky finds at flea markets, I was able to collect every album that the artists recorded. Some of my friends thought I had gone off the deep end; they knew that there was only going to be one kind of music playing in my house and car. I even induced several of them to go as far as Atlantic City with me to see Perry perform.
In 1987 I convinced my wife to host a Perry Como 75th Birthday Party. We even sent an invitation to Perry, but his office notified us that he had a previous engagement at a golf tournament. I had two VCRs set up with old Perry TV broadcasts going simultaneously. I think everyone had fun with the theme, but few people seem to like Perry Como as much as I do.
My usual reaction is to say “not again” when the Rotary and Lions Clubs ask me to speak. But, I bet the Perry Como is 75 Trivia Competition that I delivered to them complete with an illustrated Perry “blue book” was on the most unique presentations that they had had for awhile. I even packed up all the competition materials and pictures from the birthday party and sent them to Perry, but he never responded.
On February 23, 1997, when my wife and I met our four-day-old son at the adoption agency in Florida, I made certain that the first music that he ever heard with his new parents was Perry Como’s. I had to return back to Massachusetts in a week, and by law my wife and son had to remain in Florida for three months until the adoption was finalized. Fortunately, my son had his custom recorded Perry Como lullaby tape to listen to everyday with messages from his long-distance dad in-between songs.
Five years later, my wife had recuperated from her embarrassment of hosting the last birthday party, and we held an 85th celebration for Perry. This time I did not even bother to invite the ingrate. However, If I do say so myself, I created a rather clever invitation using 40 titles of Perry’s 132 chart hits in the copy. One of the attendees who I had dragged to see Perry’s Christmas Concert in Worcester, created a 24” by 36” birthday card and all of the 45 partygoers wrote a note in it. I later attached the invitation and a panoramic picture of the partiers all holding Perry albums. I even got the card’s creator to mail it, because I was tired of getting strange looks at the post office sending oversized packages to “Perry Como, Jupiter, FL.”
On a Saturday afternoon two weeks after the 80th birthday party, I was changing my work clothes in the basement after mowing the lawn when I heard the phone ring upstairs. A few seconds later my son shouted down to me that the call was for me. I told him that I was changing and to tell Mom that I would call whoever was on the phone back in a few minutes. The next thing I recall was my wife yelling “Get up here now, it’s Perry Como.” Needless to say, I will always remember the day when Perry called to say thanks for the card, and that he was really impressed with the invitation. Would Madonna call to thank a fan, or Sinatra, or Mick Jagger? I don’t think so. A few years after the call, I actually got to meet Perry and have my photograph taken with him after his Christmas concert in Lowell, MA. That was another great thrill.
As he turns 12, my son runs the other way when I play Perry music. But I am sure that all those nights that he listened to repeating cassettes of Perry Como while he slept, will help him to realize some day that the Hootie, Beastie Boys and Bare Naked Ladies music that he likes now is good, but so is Perry Como. Hopefully he will always remember his dear old dad when he plays the music, and maybe he will even play it for his children.
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