TipsLittle Anthony, Dion, Lou Christie play Long Island

Here's a chance to see two hall of famers who can still belt one out along with another star who can still hit the high note.

Little Anthony and the Imperials have been performing for more than 50 years. Starting as doo-wop singers on Brooklyn street corners, the group, led by Anthony Gourdine, produced some of the biggest hits of the 1950s and '60s, including "Tears on My Pillow" and "Goin' Out of My Head." Little Anthony and the Imperials will perform Friday at Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center. Tickets are $65-$95. Call 631-288-1500 or visit whbpac.org. The group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this month and is also a member of the Long Island Music Hall of Fame.

While Little Anthony was singing in Brooklyn, Dion was crooning in the Bronx. Dion's 1950s hits include "The Wanderer" and "Runaround Sue." He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989. Dion performs at Capital One Bank Theatre at Westbury April 19. Also on the bill is Lou Christie, whose falsetto powered hits include "Lightning Strikes" and "Two Faces Have I."

Tickets are $51.50-61.50. Call 877-598-8694 or visit LiveNation.com.

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With five decades to look back on, Little Anthony and the Imperials are still moving forward

When a musical group celebrates its 50th anniversary, the typical expectation is that by then it is living on memories and will now fade quietly into history.

Many groups that began in the 1950s have taken that path, while a few others are barely hanging on, doing gigs one step above weddings. Nothing could be farther from that scenario than contemporary reality for Little Anthony and the Imperials, for whom April 2009 may be the best month ever.

The legendary group will be on stage at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center on Friday, April 17, no doubt still on a high from last week, when they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The show in Westhampton Beach begins at 8 p.m., and “it will be one of our first appearances as Hall of Fame members,” Jerome Anthony Gourdine said proudly. Other inductees at the ceremony last Saturday, which was broadcast live on the Fuse cable network, were Bobby Womack, Run DMC, Jeff Beck and Metallica.

Jerome Anthony Gourdine is, of course, Little Anthony, a sobriquet given to him by Alan Freed, who is often credited as being the first disc jockey to champion rock and roll. Mr. Gourdine insisted that he has no interest in resting on his laurels as leader of one of the best groups to come out of the popular rhythm and blues explosion of the Eisenhower decade.

“I swear, I am having more fun at 68 than I did at 28,” he said in an interview last week. “Now I know how George Burns felt in his 80s when he said he was having the time of his life. I remember Moms Mabley saying to me, ‘Honey, these sure are the good old days.’”

A band called the Chesters that formed in 1957 consisted of Mr. Gourdine, Clarence Collins, Tracy Lord, Nathaniel Rodgers, and Ronald Ross. “We were just 17-year-old kids from the neighborhood happy to sing together under the streetlights in Brooklyn,” recalled Mr. Gourdine, who emerged as the lead singer. “We didn’t really have ambitions or know much about the world. I mean, we thought New Jersey was the West Coast. We were a bunch of snotty-nosed kids. But we wanted to have fun and we loved music and we couldn’t stop singing.”

They did a few recordings for Apollo Records that did not attract much notice. But everything changed the following year when Ernest Wright replaced Ross and the five friends changed their name to the Imperials. The group was signed by End Records which issued their first single, a tune of teenage sorrow titled “Tears On My Pillow.” The 1958 release was an immediate hit and is considered an early rock classic.

It was fortunate enough that Little Anthony and the Imperials had a big hit so soon, but even better was the fact that success didn’t ruin a rookie group. “Yes, we were very, very fortunate in that we all had moms and dads, that none of us had single parents who had so many of their own struggles and challenges that they couldn’t help us with ours,” Mr. Gourdine recalled.

“Our parents were big influences on us and we respected them. We did make mistakes, but we had great people to fall back on. We had people in our lives who taught us about class and style and helped us stay grounded, and we could concentrate on creating and performing music we loved.”

During the next three years, more hits followed, including “Two Kinds of People” and “Shimmy, Shimmy, Ko Ko Bop.” But even though the members of the Imperials felt fairly grounded and proud of the music they were putting out, they experienced what many creative groups do over time: the coming and going of artists wanting to try something new.

The first to do it was Mr. Gourdine, who left in 1961. Lord and Rodgers left and were replaced by Sammy Strain and George Kerr, and when the latter left he was replaced by Kenny Seymour. After two years of attempting to make Little Anthony a successful solo act, Mr. Gourdine was back, replacing Seymour.

There would be other changes, but beginning in 1963 the Imperials embarked on a long period of popular and critical success. Their hits included “I’m On the Outside (Looking In),” “Goin’ Out of My Head,” “Hurt So Bad,” and “I Miss You So.” They even did the title song of the James Bond movie “You Only Live Twice.”

They appeared on dozens of television programs ranging from the variety shows hosted by Ed Sullivan, Perry Como, and Merv Griffin to “Hullabaloo” and, of course, Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand.” Very early in his career, Bruce Springsteen was an opening act when the Imperials played in the New York-New Jersey area.

While the Imperials don’t have the album sales today that they enjoyed in the 1960s and ’70s, the group never fell out of fashion. They kept working, performing as an individual act or as part of tours of R&B and doo-wop groups. Beginning this year, though, the group is steering clear of the doo-wop tag and focusing exclusively on its rhythm and blues repertoire.

“That is who we really are,” Mr. Gourdine said. “We came out of the era of the black singing groups. Somehow, we got that doo-wop label and we were never comfortable with it, though we respect and enjoy doo-wop music. We don’t see ourselves as hardcore blues artists but as R&B contemporaries. For as long as we can, that is what we want to focus on. We’re sort of going back to our roots and reclaiming our original identity.”

A distinction that Little Anthony and the Imperials have which is of some importance to concert-goers is that in Mr. Gourdine and Collins and Wright the group has a majority of its original members on board, which can also be said by a few other groups that formed in the ’50s, such as the Dells and the Spinners, who performed last year at WHBPAC. It is not a distinction shared by such peers as the Drifters, Platters, and Coasters.

That made the Hall of Fame induction especially sweet for Mr. Gourdine and his two longtime friends. And it sure doesn’t hurt to be introduced as a Hall of Fame member, which is pretty select company.

“You can look at it as a crowning achievement, and we do in the sense that we are now bona fide, USA-approved legends,” Mr. Gourdine said with a laugh. “We have been accepted into a very exclusive club that includes greats like Elvis Presley and Smokey Robinson and B.B. King. Our body of work has been recognized and we feel joyful about that because it hasn’t been an easy task to keep at it for over 50 years.”

A possible downside to phrases like “crowning achievement” is the implication that maybe it is time to get off the road and sit back and listen to music instead of performing it. The same goes for awards, and Little Anthony and the Imperials have collected quite a few in recent years, including the Rhythm and Blues Foundation’s Pioneer Award and inductions in the Vocal Group Hall of Fame and Long Island Music Hall of Fame.

“It’s funny how some performers as they get older tend to count themselves out before the audiences do,” lamented Mr. Gourdine. “I never have felt that way. Our philosophy is never quit, let’s take it to the end.”

But Mr. Gourdine said that a big reason for the group to still keep doing what they’re doing is the response and even age of the audience. “After every show we like to meet the people and sign records, and it’s been amazing to us how many of them are in their 20s and 30s and they know our music,” Mr. Gourdine said. “They say, ‘Now we understand what mom and pop have been talking about all these years.’”

He pointed out that the phone keeps ringing. A CD released last summer, “You’ll Never Know,” has sold well. Last Friday, they played the famous Agora Ballroom in Cleveland, and the night after the Hall of Fame induction they sang the national anthem at the Cleveland Cavaliers game, which was broadcast nationally on ESPN. After Little Anthony and the Imperials performed on the David Letterman show last August, there were more than a million hits on the group’s You Tube site.

Mr. Gourdine characterized the renewed interest in his group this way: “Being rediscovered,” he said, “is a wonderful thing.”

Christian Music News Source

Little Anthony overjoyed to join Rock Hall

Not long ago, Little Anthony Gourdine took a trip to Cleveland, down to the chilly banks of Lake Erie and into a giant glass pyramid whose every wall and corner honors the founders, pioneers and innovators of rock 'n' roll.

"I was walking around like I was on a high, just to see all these people, what they said about this one, and that one — all the great ones," says Gourdine.

This weekend, after a long, long time waiting, Gourdine will be there, too.

Little Anthony and the Imperials, who gave us some of pop music's most beautifully melodramatic songs — Hurt So Bad, Going Out of My Head and Tears on My Pillow, which Rolling Stone once called "as excruciatingly painful a plea of unrequited teen passion as has even been waxed" — will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on Saturday.

"I'm their peer now," he says, as if he can't believe it. "I'm on their level. What that means to me, about what I do? It just really knocks me down."

Last year, Gourdine and the Imperials — Clarence Collins, Ernest Wright Jr. and Harold Jenkins — celebrated their 50th anniversary with a new album called You'll Never Know, an appearance on The Late Show With David Letterman and a renewed dedication to proving that they're more than a moldy oldies act.

The group's most classic members — Gourdine, Collins, Wright, Tracy Lord, Glouster "Nat" Rogers and Sammy Strain — are being inducted. (Jenkins, the group's longtime choreographer, joined in 1972, and it's worth noting that unlike many classic groups still touring, the Imperials' current lineup bears a majority of original members.)

Artists are eligible for induction 25 years after the release of their first single, which means The Imperials have technically been waiting since 1983, three years before the Hall's first ceremony. But Gourdine's not the least bit bitter about it.

"Man, that blew me off the planet!" he says of finding out that the Imperials had finally made the list. "I was just a kid from Brooklyn, a little black kid off the street. It's not like we never got an award — I got a lot. But this is where your peers tell you that you're the best at what you do."

Smokey Robinson, whose Miracles were one of Little Anthony and the Imperials' descendants in the pantheon of flawless vocal harmonies, will induct the group, but Gourdine says that he's so excited, "The local butcher could come out and (induct) us and I'd be OK with that."

As enthused as the singer, born Jerome Anthony Gourdine in Brooklyn in 1941, is about his induction, he's concerned that many, maybe even those inducting him, don't get something vital about the group.

"I like to start out by setting something straight," he explains. "We've been doing this for a long time. That's the reason we've survived for 50 years. We've never allowed anyone to define us."

The definition he's talking about, the one that's stuck with them ever since the young singer joined a group called The Chesters in 1957, which changed its name to the Imperials a year later, is the word "doo-wop."

It's a limiting label, one that forever ranks the group in a quaint time capsule rather than as a still-talented, still-vital musical entity, he says.

Label 'disconcerting'

"We came out of a certain era, as young kids, and our body of work is definitely from a period of time that is defined as doo-wop, but that's one of the most disconcerting things in my life," Gourdine says. "We are an R&B contemporary group — we always have been, we always will be. I'm putting that down."

But he doesn't blame his contemporaries who wear the doo-wop mantle — "They just wanna eat. They wanna make sure they make a living, so they accept that moniker. But (that limits) the ability to progress and to do what we need to do. (Labels) hold us back from that. If you get stale, you get bitter."

There is, of course, the matter of the presence of Little Anthony and the Imperials on several doo-wop tours — in fact, their most recent South Florida appearance was in March for Richard Nader's Doo-Wop Reunion Show. So ... what's that about not being a doo-wop group?

"Some at the doo-wop show may say 'Then how come they're here?'" Gourdine admits. "They're paying us a lot of money, for goodness sake! But we're moving in another direction. We can't go on those shows anymore, even though they pay us a lot of money."

Back in the beginning, Gourdine says, the group saw themselves "as rock 'n' rollers," who signed with End Records in 1958 and quickly scored a hit with Tears on My Pillow. Fans immediately took note of Gourdine's sobbing tenor, which the singer says was the result of a tonsillectomy that lowered the former boy soprano's voice to a smooth falsetto.

"I couldn't (hit soprano notes) as easily as I did before. I didn't understand the technical things. ... Finally someone said 'You're a tenor now.' I said 'Does that mean I got a high voice?' I had to learn to accept it," he says.

Delivery to match words

That tenor became, of course, more than a burden to accept — it became the trademark of the singer that was eventually dubbed "Little Anthony" by DJ and rock promoter Alan Freed. After following Tears up with the hits Two Kinds of People and Shimmy Shimmy Ko Ko Bop, Gourdine left to pursue a solo career, but returned in 1963, for an astonishing run of hits.

Most of those were written by Teddy Rendazzo, a former member of the group the Three Chuckles, whom the Imperials had known in the scene. Rendazzo had "a heck of a voice, an Italian Vic Damone sort of voice," but thought Gourdine's anguished delivery was a better vehicle for the kind of tortured melodramatic feelings he wanted to commit to music — specifically his own.

"I became Teddy's voice," Gourdine says. "Look at the pattern — I'm on the Outside (Looking In), Going Out of My Head, Hurt So Bad, Take Me Back. Each one was about one woman, who he was having, obviously, a rocky love affair with. He used (the music) to state his pain. I was able to interpret it in my voice, and get exactly what he was trying to say — which was torment."

Gourdine may not have written the words to Hurt So Bad, but every night he sings it, the emotions become his own.

"Nancy Wilson did it, and it was the same thing. It affected her that way. Linda Ronstadt heard it that way, too. We understand it," he says. "Sometimes, I'll be singing it — and I've done that song many, many times — and I never know what emotions are gonna come out on any given night. It never gets old. That feeling is as old as man, as old as people — 'It hurts me. I hurt. I'm hurt. Somebody hurt me, see, and it's so bad.' "

Gourdine's way of musically, and elegantly, channeling that hurt was apparent in that episode of The Late Show last summer. When musical director Paul Shaffer approached the group, they were reluctant to do an old hit, preferring something from the new album and not be presented as a nostalgia act. But Shaffer had a counter offer.

"He said, 'I sold this to David Letterman, that I wanted to do something better, with 47 musicians, big, the way you recorded it,' " he remembers. "And that was one of the greatest things that happened to us."

Instead of cementing the group as a one-note act from yesteryear, Gourdine says it "made his job easier" by showing them as masters of their craft, still in their performance prime. They weren't hamming their way through this — the Imperials were serious.

"It's a lot of work and a lot of dedication," Gourdine says. "We are artists. That's why we've survived for 50 years. And we will give the best show anyone's possibly seen."

THE REST

OF THE BEST

Other inductees this year:

Run-D.M.C.: Groundbreaking rap group that crossed cultural barriers with mainstream hits and a collaboration with Aerosmith on Walk This Way.

Jeff Beck: The guitarists' guitarist, known for his inventive work with both the Yardbirds and the Jeff Beck Group.

Bobby Womack: Soulful singer, songwriter, guitarist. Best known for hits like Across 110th Street and It's All Over Now.

Metallica: The band that signfied heavy metal in the '80s — and beyond.

EARLY INFLUENCES:

Country singer Wanda Jackson, left

SIDEMEN:

Elvis Presley's bassist Bill Black and drummer D.J. Fontana

Muscle Shoals session man and songwriter extraordinaire Spooner Oldham, left (The Dark End of the Street, Cry Like a Baby)
More on palmbeachpost.com

Christian Music News Source

Rock Hall Inductees Little Anthony and the Imperials in concert on April 2nd, 2009

“Little” Anthony Gourdine and the rest of The Imperials will be inducted as part of the current class of inductees that will be making their way into the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame (rockhall.com) on April 4th, 2009. During their time in the industry, Little Anthony and The Imperials (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Anthony_&_The_Imperials) were wellon their way to becoming a Hall-of-Fame inductee in 1958, when End Records put out their first single, the double-sided hit “Tears On My Pillow/Two People in the World”. From there, the group had other songs that helped them gain a following. Little Anthony and the Imperials have released many albums, from the “We Are The Imperials” album in 1959, to the recently released album, “You’ll Never Know” (amazon.com/Youll-Never-Little-Anthony-Imperials/dp/B001FBSMXK).


Before being inducted into the Hall of Fame, Anthony Gourdine had the distinction of being a guest at the Rock Hall when he was the guest speaker during Black History in February of 2009.


Little Anthony and The Imperials en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Anthony_&_The_Imperials will be inducted on April 4th, 2009. However, if you are not able to see the band be inducted when the inductions take place here in Cleveland, the band will be spending a little time in Cleveland as Little Anthony & The Imperials will be taking to the stage at The Agora on April 2nd, 2009. If you were a fan of the group, or want to be part of history, as the musician gets ready to be inducted, this would be the perfect time to check out Little Anthony & The Imperials up close and personal.


The group will be in concert in support of their newest release entitled “You’ll Never Know”.
For more information on Little Anthony and the Imperials, go to their website at littleanthonyandtheimperials.com. You can also find the group on MySpace at myspace.com/littleanthonyandtheimperials.


The Inductions for the Rock And Roll hall of Fame will be taking place on April 4th, 2009 at Public Hall. If you are not able to see the event live in person, the Rock Hall will be having a viewing party at which the people in attendance will be able to see the event as it happens. There will also be a chance to win tickets to see the event live in person.

Christian Music News Source

Little Anthony & the Imperials headline Richard Nader's Doo-Wop Reunion X

When Little Anthony & the Imperials join the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame next month, it won't be strictly for achievements in doo-wop - the layered singing style that arose in the 1950s with vocal workouts such as the Penguins' Earth Angel and the Monotones' Book of Love.

The formal announcement of the Imperials' induction refers to "a rhythm and blues/soul/doo-wop vocal group from New York."

Listing doo-wop last suits frontman Anthony Gourdine just fine. "We're an r&b group. We're not a doo-wop group," the high-singing Gourdine, 69, said in a recent interview.

Why the distinction? Gourdine is, after all, playing one of Florida promoter Richard Nader's "Doo-Wop Reunion" shows tonight with several golden-throated oldies of the genre, among them Kenny Vance & the Planotones (Looking for an Echo), the Dubs (Could This Be Magic) and Gene Chandler (Duke of Earl).

But Gourdine considers "doo-wop" a pigeonhole, if not an epithet - a term coined in hindsight to describe songs of the '50s and '60s that used harmony and phonetic horseplay (see Manfred Mann's Do Wah Diddy Diddy). In the process, Gourdine said, doo-wop became a "broad brush" covering vocal r&b groups such as the Moonglows (Sincerely) and the Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You). He called the classification misleading and, worse, "an affront to the memory of some of the finest musicians in the world."

"It's my obligation to speak up for them," he said.

And for himself. Gourdine said only one of his songs is correctly termed doo-wop: Shimmy, Shimmy, Ko-Ko-Bop - "a novelty," in his words.

Whatever one calls it - the slow-dance classic Tears on My Pillow, the lavish soul of Hurt So Bad - the group's music is enjoying a revival. Gourdine, original bandmates Clarence Collins and Ernest Wright, and newest member Harold Jenkins performed with a 47-piece orchestra in August on The Late Show With David Letterman. Last month, Gourdine was on CBS's Sunday Morning.

The Imperials' Hall of Fame turn comes on April 4 alongside Jeff Beck, Metallica, Run-DMC and Bobby Womack - a salute by peers that Gourdine is enjoying without reservation.

Sean Piccoli can be reached at spiccoli@SunSentinel.com or 954-356-4832. He blogs at SunSentinel.com/thebeat.

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