This story first appeared in the May issue of Boston Baseball
There
was more to it than “Little Red Scooter.”
While
it once appeared that Tony Conigliaro would take his place along alongside
Foxx, Williams and Yaz in the pantheon of Boston sluggers, for a brief period
of time it seemed as likely he’d be on Billboard’s “Hot 100” as in the
Baseball Hall of Fame.
At
the end of the 1964 season, his rookie year, Conigliaro, only nineteen and never particularly shy, jumped on stage with the
band at the Escape Lounge, a Hopkinton nightclub, and started to sing. A rep
from Mercury Records heard him, and before long former Boston DJ turned
promotor Ed Penney partnered up with the budding young heartthrob. Just before
Christmas, swinging Tony C was singing in a recording studio in New York.
Penney
was serious and didn’t skimp. Over the course of two days, Tony C, backed by
session musicians, cut four songs. The two A-sides, baseball-themed “Playing
the Field” and “Little Red Scooter,” were penned by Ernie Campagna, an East
Boston native who later went on to a long career as an executive in the
recording industry. Only nineteen himself, Campagna was already the musical
director of WMEX. He’d been enamored with music since he
inherited his grandmother’s piano, which had to be hoisted into a third-floor window
of the family’s East Boston triple-decker. Penney had already Selected, “Little
Red Scooter,” a song Campagna wrote while in high school. But Campagna also
knew Tony C as a ballplayer. He had played Pony League baseball against
Conigliaro and remembers him arriving for a game behind the wheel of a white
convertible. Tony’s father was in the car too, but Campagna recalls “He was
already Tony C,” a kid who already had a “man body,” handsome, charismatic and
already ticketed for the big leagues. When he learned Penney was recording Tony
C, in just a few days he wrote the baseball pun-filled tune “Playing the Field”
which he refers to today, jokingly, as “My Rhapsody in Blue.” Due to his role
at WMEX, however, Campagna wrote under the pseudonym, “Ernie Camp.”
Tony
C’s burgeoning music career was no joke and Penney pulled out all the stops for
the session, making use of some of the industry’s top talent. Producer Al Kasha
was a veteran Brill Building songwriter/producer who later won Academy Awards
for co-writing the themes to the films The Poseidon Adventure (“The
Morning After”) and The Towering Inferno (“We May
Never Love Like this Again”). The arranger was another well respected figure,
Charlie Calello, the bassist for The Four Seasons. Calello eventually worked on
over 100 Billboard chart records,
including Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline.” And the B-Sides on those first two
releases were no less impressive. “Why Don’t They Understand” penned by Joe
Henderson and Jack Fishman, had been a hit in 1957 for George Hamilton IV, and
“I Can’t Get Over You,” was credited to Edna Lewis and Ernest Salters – she
also wrote the Connie Francis hit “Lipstick on my Collar.”
Penney
thought the recording industry was eager for “a real All-American boy.” Penney
found contemporary rock and roll “sickening,” saying of Tony C that “unlike so
many Rock ‘n Roll singers, he isn’t a bad singer,” adding that even “The
Beatles look mild now. There are the Zombies, the Detergents and lately The
Pretty Things and the Fairies.” Kasha compared Tony’s voice to Ricky Nelson’s
and predicted “Why Don’t They Understand,” might sell 100,000 copies.
Penney
and Tony C created their own label “Penn Tone” and a short time later released
“Playing the Field” in the Boston market. The girls went ga-ga, and within six
weeks it sold upwards of 15,000 copies, earning far more than the cost of the
session and pressings.
Those
numbers got the attention of RCA records. The Beatles had invaded and every record
label in the country was looking for young talent. Tony C had it all, and they
signed him a four-year contract with a $25,000 guarantee, greater than his
$17,500 salary with the Red Sox, big money at a time when rookies were lucky to
earn $5,000 and the major league average was only about $15,000. The contract was
structured so that Tony C’s musical responsibilities were confined to the time
period between the World Series and spring training, because, as Tony explained
“You never know what can happen in baseball.” Those words, sadly, would prove
prophetic.
For
a while, it looked as if RCA had cashed in. In 1966 “Little Red Scooter” was
another local hit and Tony C headed back to the studio to cut a third single.
The A-side, “When You Take More Than You Give,” was written by one-time teen
crooner Jimmy Curtiss, who later penned both the cult classic "Psychedelic
Situation," and King Harvest’s 1973 hit “Dancing in the Moonlight.” The
B-side, “I Was There,” was no throwaway. Written by Brill Building legends
Gerry Goffin and Carole King, it was also recorded by Lenny Welch, Paul Anka
and Johnny Mathis.
But
musical tastes were changing, and soon all the shaggy-haired groups Penney
found “sickening,” were selling way more records than guys who crooned like Tony
C. Despite appearing on The Merv Griffin Show and Johnny
Carson’s The Tonight Show, the record
flopped outside the Boston market and RCA cut Tony C loose.
It
was back to baseball – mostly. Tony C had led the AL in home runs with 32 in
1965 and became the youngest hitter ever to hit one hundred home runs. He cut
one more record before the 1967 season, backed by The All-Night Workers, a
Syracuse University garage band that had recently relocated to Boston. But
before they did, in 1965, they had recorded a song written by Lou Reed and John
Cale, later of the Velvet Underground (Reed had attended Syracuse University
and friends with the band). The song, “Why Don’t You Smile,” allegedly featured
Cale on guitar.
“Limited Man,” the A-side, was written
by Bill Carr, who also co-wrote the Monkees’ “Hold On Girl,” and Joan Meltzer,
who later became a pioneering female DJ. The B-side featured Carr’s “Please
Play Our Song.”
The
45 was released just as the “Impossible Dream” was coming into focus, only a
few weeks before the August beaning that changed Tony C’s life, and reached
number one locally. But after the beaning, sales of “Limited Man,” which
included the haunting line “I don’t wanna life my life as limited man,” fell
flat – after the beaning, Tony C was a “limited man,” his baseball career at
risk. As Tony C sat out the 1968 season he briefly tried to restart his musical
career, appearing on Merv Griffin again with The All-Night Workers, covering
The Rascal’s “I Ain't Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore.”
By
then, clean-cut swinging Tony C was an anomaly in the music world. He returned
to the Red Sox, was traded to California, retired in 1971, made a brief
comeback with the Red Sox in 1975 and then, after recurring vision issues,
retired from baseball for good. He cut one final demo, by Ellison Chase and
Bill Haberman, (who among other sings also penned Ram Jam’s “Black Betty”),
“Poetry” backed by the instrumental “Midnight in Boston.” But Tony C’s time on
stage was nearing the end. Hits of any kind were no longer in his future.
After
becoming a San Francisco sportscaster, Tony C’s heart was still in Boston. He
returned in 1982 to audition as a Red Sox broadcaster only to suffer a heart
attack that put him into a coma and resulted in brain damage. Two more previously
recorded songs were released privately under the direction of Dionne Warwick
for a 1983 fundraiser at Symphony Hall. Both were written by Michael Gately,
who recorded two albums himself, and Robert John, who later wrote and recorded
“The Lion Sleeps Tonight” and in 1979 scored a number one hit with “Sad Eyes.”
One was a cover of the Whispers’ “You Fill My Life with Music,” the other “We
Can Make the World A Whole Lot Brighter,” previously recorded by television’s
“The Brady Bunch.”
By
then, swinging, singing Tony C’s world had grown dim. He passed away in 1990.
