Home
Writing Samples
Résumé
|
Writing Samples: La Voce
|
|
Dick Contino -- Still the Master Musician
By Erin O'Donnell
La Voce newspaper, Las Vegas, NV, May 2004
Twice a week in Las Vegas, a blues and zydeco band fronted by an Italian-American accordionist plays at a pair of Irish pubs. A cultural crossover like that might boggle the mind anyplace else, but not in seen-it-all Las Vegas.
But what may surprise in these weeknight crowds is that the man who gets up to jam with the Pete Contino Band most nights is the bandleader's father -- and a legend in his own right.
He's Dick Contino, likely the only accordionist ever to draw flocks of delirious female fans a la Sinatra and Elvis. Discovered on a talent show in 1947 and made into a star by the applause meter, he's the original "American Idol", a cultural ancestor to Clay Aiken.
He went on to serenade audiences with his "stomach Steinway" everywhere from Las Vegas lounges to Leningrad to Italian festas around the country. He's an erstwhile B-movie cult figure, reinvented as the haunted hero of two novellas by "L.A. Confidential" author James Ellroy.
And despite his eventual honorable service in Korea, his name was forever linked in the minds of some Americans with the image of a draft dodger.
Contino has packed several lifetimes into one, and yet he's still searching. Not for fame or fortune -- he's had his taste of both and knows they're fleeting -- but for enlightenment.
"My quest has never been to be an accordion great, per se," Contino says. "I'd rather be someone who understands me, understands people."
Contino looks years younger than his true age of 74. His tanned, slightly craggy and warm face is topped by a shock of white hair, and he still travels several times a year, performing coast to coast. His ardor for living gives him an ageless glow that no Botox needle could ever replicate. He's soft-spoken, but not timid, his voice strong with conviction.
"As long as I'm in good health, I'd just as soon travel and work," he says. "It keeps you alive, you know?"
More spiritual than religious, Contino has developed a philosophical, even Zen-like outlook on life which he says has kept him grounded through nearly six decades in show business, and through his effort to clear his name of the Army scandal.
"I was born and raised Catholic, but with all due respect, it left me with a great deal of hunger and unanswered questions," he says over a lunch of soup and salad at Capozzoli's restaurant on Maryland Parkway, speaking often of his quest to understand the human condition.
"The thing that gave me motivation in my youth to take up the accordion was not so much my love for the accordion or for music, but when I was in school, I was an innate nerd" who was afraid to talk to people. "If a pretty girl walked up and said 'Hello,' I'd freak. I wouldn't know what to say, so I'd go home and I'd take up the accordion and ... express my feelings through that.
"I found I really loved people all my life, and I wanted to understand this kinship in greater measure. And so that was my motivation to take up music, because I found that when I could perform, I could still communicate."
As a teenager growing up in Fresno, Calif., Contino was urged by his father, a Sicilian immigrant who owned a butcher shop, to pursue the arts instead of athletics. He did both for a while but eventually took his father's advice.
"He said, as time goes by, you get older, and you'll be old in your 30s (as an athlete). He said, the arts, it's like wine. ... You take care of your mind and body, time works for you. If you don't, like wine, you'll turn to vinegar."
His talent on the accordion quickly got him noticed around his hometown. In 1947, a scout for the Horace Heidt "Youth Opportunity" radio program came to Fresno, in search of amateur performers who would compete for weekly cash prizes en route to a $5,000 grand prize. Like "American Idol," the contestants relied on audience approval to advance (although this was back in the day when votes were registered by applause meter, not cell phones). The handsome, charismatic young man who made the girls swoon with his passionate playing came away with the top prize a year later.
Heidt took his young talent on tour, and the fuse of Contino's fame ignited further. Five hundred fan clubs sprung up across the country. Before he was 20, he had a record contract and a movie contract. Ed Sullivan made him the headliner of a tour to the Soviet Union. In 1950, he played Las Vegas for the first time at the original El Rancho.
"I came out of the gate by about 15 lengths, you know?" he says.
And yet Contino says even then, he realized the buzz wouldn't last. He worked to keep his ego in check, and viewed his stage persona as a role to play, not an identity to inhabit.
"I don't feel like I ever became the character. I feel like I've always enjoyed the character," he says.
He worked to stay rooted in reality while enjoying the role of teen idol. Playing to capacity crowds of two or three thousand, "I could hear all these sounds, but you know what I used to do? After the last show, in those days they used to have a light in the center of the stage, I loved to walk out there and listen to the silence, the exact opposite, and I thought, which is the real?"
Many of the fans who turn out to see him today were those same screaming bobby-soxers, Contino says. "When they were teenagers going crazy ... I could laugh at a lot of the things they were doing. I laughed with it and enjoyed it."
But in 1951, war brought a sobering end to Contino's wild ride in the form of a draft notice. Korea beckoned, but he balked, fleeing the Army processing center in a panic. He was officially AWOL.
"My reasons weren't political, nor were they religious, although some wanted to believe that. Nor were they (about) a young man who didn't wanna, quote, 'Serve his country,'" Contino says, with those three words falling wearily from his lips. In pre-Vietnam America, no one believed that a such a hearty young man could be paralyzed by fear.
"Back then, people weren't as aware as we are today of the intensity of different phobic situations, anxiety attacks of every nature," he says. "They didn't recognize shades of gray. You were either sane or insane, you knew what you were doing or weren't doing, and you dodged the draft."
Contino faced the music. He did 6 months prison time for desertion, paid a $10,000 fine, and eventually did serve in Korea -- 16 months, with an honorable discharge as a staff sergeant, followed by six years in the reserves. "And yet I was still being called a draft dodger. But see, that too gave me the motivation to want to understand people."
He spent several years on the defensive about the draft dustup, wanting people to hear the whole story, wanting to be forgiven. Then, he had two revelations.
Now playing smaller rooms than in his heady heyday, Contino closed his sets with a song called "Walk a Mile in My Shoes," a not-so-subtle plea to his critics. Onstage one night in Reno, he abruptly stopped and addressed the audience. "It occurs to me that I have to walk a mile in your shoes to understand why you're thinking the way you're thinking," he said.
"So that was my first big revelation. You know what the second one was? They looked at me and wondered what the hell I was saying. ... (I learned) when you try to convince somebody of something and they're not ready to understand it, it doesn't make sense. So that was an even greater revelation."
The experience taught Contino not to waste time arguing, but to focus on being secure in his sense of himself. That introspection comes through again and again as he laces his conversation equally with references to karma and to Christ. He has an easy command of Bible verses, but he employs them to underline philosophy rather than theology.
"I don't think you're punished for your sins," he says, "you're punished by your sins."
With Korea behind him, Contino kept working, getting in front of an audience to communicate with them. He married actress Leigh Snowden in 1956 and set about raising a family; in addition to son Pete, the couple also had two daughters, Deirdre and Mary. He starred in a handful of B movies in 1959 and 1960, pictures like "Daddy-O" and "The Big Night". He was still playing gigs, too, many of them in Las Vegas, which led him to relocate here in the 1970s.
Contino has witnessed the evolution of Las Vegas' entertainment scene from the Land of Lounge to today's budget-busting productions and headliners. Although his music has fallen from fashion, and he doubts many hotel entertainment would even know his name, he takes it in stride. To compare the city to a woman, he says, "She's very fickle. She very seldom falls in love. She usually wants to get laid on any given weekend and say 'I'll see you later,' to put it very crudely."
Even so, all three of the Contino children inherited their father's love of music. Pete started as his father's drummer, just so they could travel together, and backed him up for 15 years before taking up the squeezebox himself. Both daughters sing, and Mary, as Miss Nevada, was first runner-up in the 1977 Miss USA competition. Contino did his best to encourage them, but never pressure.
"When Deirdre was singing here in Vegas -- they used to have a lot of showcases back then -- it could be 2 o'clock in the morning they'd put her on," he says. "I'd just go there to give her support.
"Like with Pete, I'll go in for the first set just to give him support. ... I want to give them the support my parents gave me, whether they're playing Carnegie Hall or the Irish pub at the Rampart."
In 1982, Contino lost his wife to cancer. Several years later, during one of his outings to see his daughter Mary perform at the old Aladdin, he met cocktail waitress Tonia Cannavino, and the spark of love reignited.
"She walked up to the table, and that was the end of the ballgame," he says with a warm chuckle at the memory. Tonia was on the verge of getting a divorce, and so Contino says they waited until that process was finished before embarking on their own relationship. Today, Tonia is a Realtor, and the couple has been together 14 years.
The bonds of family life have always been strong with Contino, who grew up in a large, extended Italian family. His mother had five brothers and five sisters; "I've got two brothers and a sister is all -- I say 'is all,' today it's a large family."
Even when disputes erupted between relatives, he says, feuds never divided the family. "I can remember in my youth where my uncle and my dad, the two brothers, they sometimes wouldn't talk to each other for two years. But they'd tell us kids to still get along with our cousins."
Although his father was an immigrant, Contino only learned to speak Italian -- "enough to get by" -- from his grandmother. "Mostly they spoke Italian when they didn't want the kids to understand." But he recalls get-togethers with Italian-speaking relatives, caught up in their energy and joy even when he couldn't follow every word. "When they have a good time, you don't have to worry about understanding the language at all, you know. It's an attitude."
Proud of his heritage and a fixture on the festa circuit, Contino loves belonging to such a colorful, talented culture.
"If (Italians) have a fault, and I'm sure they do, it would be mostly the fault of jealousy," he says.
"On the positive side of that trait is what gives you a unique sense of competition, on the good side of it. There's the desire to want to do better, to want to better yourself. On the negative side, there's 'If you can't do better, then eliminate the competition.'"
Contino acknowledges that he's rubbed shoulder with underworld figures who put that principle into practice, especially when his fame was at its peak, but he kept his own nose clean. Still, there was a mystique about Dick Contino that sparked the imagination of crime novelist James "Dog" Ellroy in the early 1990s.
In his short-story and essay collection "Crime Wave," Ellroy tells how he kept bumping up against Contino in his memories and pop culture. He finally tracked Contino down, got his blessing to fictionalize his story, and knocked out "Dick Contino's Blues" and "Hollywood Shakedown", which appeared in GQ magazine. Like almost all Ellroy protagonists, he's portrayed as a larger-than-life, flawed anti-hero who battles rogue cops and commits murder.
The stories brought Contino a new wave of interest from Ellroy fans, who devour his mesh of fact and fiction that always leave them contemplating the delicious mystery of which bits are true. Neither Contino -- one of the writer's few living subjects -- nor Ellroy are telling.
But the sparkle in Contino's eye tells you not to believe everything you read. After he'd read Ellroy's work, he told his quasi-biographer, "I'd like to meet that guy one day." If only to try on a new character for a while.
|
|