Close your eyes and listen with your heart as Frank D’Rone swings into “Joey, Joey, Joey” from the Frank Loesser musical “The Most Happy Fella.”
Leave your logical mind stowed in the College of DuPage parking lot. Lock it up tight and pretend it’s 1966 again. You’re in the lounge at the Sands in Las Vegas knocking back vodka stingers. It’s late. Sinatra’s wrecking crew is planted down front, digging this throat with the absolutely impeccable phrasing, and you’re feeling gone, man. You float on D’Rone’s liquid vocals.
This Wheaton chap D’Rone still has that effect on people 32 years later — young or old, it makes no difference.
Nearly 50 years have passed since he left Providence, R.I., a 17-year-old jazz guitar prodigy long on talent, loaded with nerve. D’Rone the silky singer with the 2 1/2-octave range. D’Rone the lyrical instrumentalist, who, according to local jazz violinist Johnny Frigo, “is magnificent when he accompanies himself. He’s the best combination I’ve ever heard. Frank’s not the best jazz guitarist, I can’t say that. But he’s so adept. His sense of rhythm, his syncopation. When he does `Joey, Joey,’ to hear him sing and play, I never get tired of it.”
Excuse Frigo the hyperbole.
He and D’Rone go back to the late 1950s, when they worked clubs together in a trio featuring the late Dick Marx on piano.
“I played Sunday and Monday nights at Mr. Kelly’s with Johnny and Dick Marx for three years,” D’Rone says. “I was on the road in Moline and disappointed with the gig when I called Johnny, and he said come to Chicago. I love Johnny Frigo.”
Probe a little deeper with D’Rone and you find a bon vivant who loved just about everyone he ever worked with or opened for, a true gent who flat-out refuses to rip anyone who might have been less than honorable with him. This is a guy who appeared 15 times on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” in the 1960s, when Johnny broadcast from New York with Skitch Henderson leading the band and Jack Douglas and Reiko anchoring the couch with Ed McMahon.
D’Rone made the rounds in those days. Merv Griffin, Joey Bishop, Dean Martin, Ed Sullivan, name the network variety or talk show and he was there, smooth as a double shot of Black Label over ice, in his fitted tux, offering up another pearl from the 20th Century American songbook of composers like the Gershwins, Harold Arlen, Cole Porter and Sammy Kahn and Jimmy Van Heusen.
“Frank D’Rone is an extremely agile singer and guitarist who’s never gotten his due,” says Chicago Tribune jazz critic Howard Reich. “He’s so nimble, so vocally controlled. He probably would have been more famous if he’d been around at a different time. I know Frank Sinatra was a great fan of D’Rone. When Sinatra played the Paramount Arts Centre in Aurora in August of 1993, he insisted on catching D’Rone’s show in the Director’s Lounge of the Hollywood Casino.”
There it is again, the Sinatra connection.
But there are two stories of how and when D’Rone met the Chairman of the Board.
D’Rone recalls an initial encounter around 1965 at the Hotel Fremont in Las Vegas, when Sinatra said, “Next year you’ll be at the Sands with me.” For years thereafter, Sinatra requested D’Rone in the lounge when he appeared at the Sands and later at Caesars Palace. So close were they, in fact, that Sinatra was the godfather for D’Rone’s oldest son, Christopher. (D’Rone, who is divorced, has two sons — Christopher, who works for Firestone, and David, a bartender in the hospitality industry.)
The other version of his first meeting with Sinatra?
Enrico Banducci, the legendary San Francisco impresario and owner of the hungry i nightclub, remembers Old Blue Eyes directing him to D’Rone in the late 1950s: “Sinatra told me, `Here’s a guy who phrases better than me. Go see him and hire him.’ I flew to Chicago and caught D’Rone at a little jazz club called Dante’s Inferno. I don’t remember where it was, but I hired him that night.” (D’Rone doesn’t dispute Banducci’s account. He admits it’s possible Sinatra saw him in the 1950s. As for the Banducci association, D’Rone went on to open for Lenny Bruce, Jonathon Winters, Bill Cosby and Mort Sahl at the hungry i.)
Sinatra appreciating D’Rone is not so unusual.
For more than 40 years, D’Rone has held an industry reputation as the saloon singer’s saloon singer. In other words, if you’re in town and D’Rone is playing Toulouse on the Park in Lincoln Park or Yvette’s Wintergarden on South Wacker Drive, you drop in and pay your respects. Ella Fitzgerald came to hear D’Rone. Dinah Washington couldn’t get enough. Nat “King” Cole showed up at Dante’s Inferno and, according to D’Rone, “took over the piano behind me without saying a word. I’m singing `(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66,’ and he walks over, sits down and starts playing. When I recorded my first album, Nat insisted on writing the liner notes.”
D’Rone made a dozen albums for labels like Mercury and the Chess jazz subsidiary Cadet. Banducci the promoter still wonders why his friend “didn’t make it bigger, didn’t hit a higher zenith.” D’Rone himself won’t point fingers, but certainly America’s cultural shift from jazz to rock ‘n’ roll during the late 1950s had an impact on his career. Of rock ‘n’ roll, D’Rone says only, “Some rock is palatable, but most is a lot of noise. Repetition, repetition, repetition, especially with heavy metal. And all that screaming. I need a good (melody) line, good (chord) changes and a strong lyric. Give me a Kahn and Van Heusen tune.”
D’Rone also is a jazz purist, preferring small ensembles with acoustic pianos and upright basses. The better to connect with your audience, to promote intimacy.
Think of the great male saloon singers and balladeers of the past 50 years and you come up with a handful: Sinatra, Como, Martin, Bennett, Torme, Cole. The true heavy hitters are few. A second tier of stylists might include Jerry Vale, Vic Damone, Andy Williams and Al Martino, and, indeed, one could argue for Jack Jones, Frankie Laine and Eddie Fisher.
The difference between those crooners and D’Rone?
Hit records. They reached a mass audience while D’Rone carried on in the lounges and prestige jazz clubs. His was a life on the road, opening for a Jackie Mason or a London Lee, remaining true to his passion for pop standards played with a jazzy precision.
So he lived a few years in Los Angeles, and spent time in Manhattan. Then Las Vegas, then Chicago. Then New York again. D’Rone didn’t settle in DuPage County until 1973, when a friend from Villa Park had him out for a visit. Homes first in Glen Ellyn then Wheaton followed, an unlikely base of operations for a lounge singer like D’Rone. (“I like coming home to the quiet,” he says. “It’s so peaceful here.”)
D’Rone never recorded Bob Dylan tunes, never did an album of Lennon and McCartney material, and the 600 jazz fans gathering this evening on the lawn outside COD’s Arts Center couldn’t be happier. Their guy takes the stage with his quartet promptly at 7 p.m., looking sharp in black dress slacks and a loose fitting band collar shirt. Immediately, he motions for stagehands to help him pin up the tent flaps and move instruments closer to the audience. (“I like to get the acoustic sound from the piano and bass out front where it belongs.”) He grimaces through the first few bars of “Without a Song,” unhappy with his sound system. This is the perfectionist at work, searching for a comfort level, a connection with his audience.
D’Rone singing without a guitar is a curious sight, his left hand taking independent flight, fingering imaginary notes on a fretboard that isn’t there as he works the microphone in and out, changing dynamics with each breath, bending notes in unabashed swing time.
Rosemary Lapinski made the drive from Glenview for this show. She points across the patio to her friend, Christine Hagemann, who can’t count the number of times she has seen D’Rone since an evening in 1979 when she caught his act at the long-defunct Peacock Lounge in North Riverside.
“Frank’s so good, he wouldn’t even have to sing,” Lapinski says. “If he only played guitar, that would be fine. I come to see Frank, and I meet all these people. I’ve made friends like Christine all over Chicago because of Frank.”
Hagemann adds, “I like the kind of songs he sings. Frank doesn’t go over the top. He gives you just enough. He’s one of the few decent jazz singers left. I believe that.”
Fans like Lapinski and Hagemann will no doubt be thrilled to learn that D’Rone has no intention of retiring, though he has scaled back his schedule to five or six dates a month and is concentrating more on corporate functions and private parties. He recently finished an extended Monday night engagement at Toulouse on the Park.
The band is rolling again as D’Rone slips through “Bluesette.” He’s focused on the music, seemingly unaware of two little girls beating a volleyball off the wall of the Arts Center not 25 feet away.
Is he bugged by the distraction?
“No, this show is an outside thing,” he says. “Whatever makes ’em happy is fine with me.”
You make ’em happy, Frank.
Now could you give us a little taste of “Summer Wind”?
Just a taste before you go?
