In 1956, Vito Picone, a teenager in Staten Island, NY, started his own vocal group, The Elegants. By 1958, the group’s signature song, “Little Star,” rocketed up the Billboard charts to become the #1 song in the nation. Soon, Vito and The Elegants began touring the country with some of the greatest names in rock ’n roll history. Later on, Vito continued to display his talents as an actor, appearing in a number of well-regarded films and television shows.
Spotlight Central recently caught up with Vito Picone and talked with him about his musical childhood, his rise to fame with The Elegants, his career as a film and television actor, in addition to what he’s been up to these days.
You were born and raised in South Beach, Staten Island. Did you come from a musical family?
Actually, three quarters of my family played various instruments. The only one who played professionally — or I should say semi-professionally — was my father, who played guitar. He had his own trio and they even had a little radio show that they did for awhile.
When you were growing up, did you play any instruments?
When I was in public school in the fourth grade, the New York City Board of Education started a music program. They interviewed all the kids and asked us what instruments we’d like to play. I suggested that I’d like to play either guitar, saxophone, or drums.
Six weeks later, a truck came, and I saw the instrument box they handed me. I said, “What the heck is this? This doesn’t look like any of the instruments I requested!” and that’s because they handed me a trombone. When I asked why, I was told, “You’re the tallest kid in the class, so you’re tall enough to reach the last position on the slide.”
So I became a trombone player at my public school. Then I started taking private lessons and wound up being included in the Staten Island Musical Orchestra where we performed, marched in parades, and so forth.
After I graduated grammar school, for extra credits in high school, I took orchestra and I played trombone for all four years of high school, but after that, I never really touched it because rock and roll started to explode and I didn’t see any rock and roll trombonists!
[Laughs] Which is the perfect segue to our next question: What kind of music were you listening to at the time — on the radio or on recordings?
I started listening to rock ‘n roll in the very early days where you actually had to go looking for stations that were playing it — in fact, at the time, it wasn’t even called rock ‘n roll; it was called rhythm and blues. There was Pat the Cat and all those early DJs like Alan Freed and Dr. Jive, and I would listen to the music on their shows, and 99.9% — no, 100% — of the music they played was by Black artists.
And then I started buying some of the early records and that’s what I was really listening to as well. I didn’t like buying records by white artists because I couldn’t stand the white artists who were covering the Black artists’ material, you know? But as much as I despised what was happening, I actually wound up making a record doing rock ‘n roll when I was only 14 years old.
With The Crescents?
That’s right.
That was your first group. Can you tell us more about them?
[Laughs] Yes, that was my first group — it was the trombone section from my school! It was me, Carman Romano — who was an original Elegant — and a fellow by the name of Ronnie Jones. All three of us were trombone players, and we hooked up with a local girl who Carman was going out with named Pat Crocitto. Pat’s father owned Crocitto’s nightclub — which was the spot where anybody who was anybody in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s played. Since we needed a place to rehearse, we rehearsed at her father’s place. Also, Pat sounded a little like Frankie Lymon of The Teenagers with her high-pitched voice, so there were a lot of things that made sense about having her in the group.
And at this time — which was during my first year of high school — I wrote a couple of songs. I was only 14 years old. We wound up rehearsing them and in 1955, I think, we started knocking on doors and doing live auditions. We won a contest where the prize was a contract with a record label and we ended up recording for Club Records. The only artist that anybody would probably ever recognize from Club Records was Tony Middleton, from when he was with his group, The Willows.
Two of the songs you wrote at the time were “My Tears” and “Darling Come Back,” right?
Yes, I wrote them when I was bass vocalist for The Crescents.
Were they the first two songs you ever wrote?
Yes.
What was your inspiration for writing them?
Well, from listening to the other stuff on the radio, the format just seemed kind of simple to me, you know? I could see that there were two verses and a bridge, and then two more verses, and then the song would fade out and that was the end of it. It was simple to write poetry that way, too. All I had to do was create some kind of melody for it, and I did that in my head. The oddest thing is: I’ve probably got a thousand songs laying around the house in different drawers, etc., and I probably could go to any one of those songs I wrote 65 years ago and sing them exactly the way I wrote them without ever having written down a single musical note. I don’t know where that ability came from, but I look back now and think it was an unbelievable thing to be able to do that.
And after you and The Crescents got your recording contract, didn’t you start touring and performing primarily at Black venues?
Absolutely. There were no white venues at the time for that music. In your question, you referred to our series of shows as a “tour,” but to me [laughs], anything outside of my own neighborhood was a tour. We wound up doing things in Connecticut which, to my 14-year-old mind, was ten light years away from my home in Staten Island. We did the State Theatre in Hartford, CT, and the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem. And at the time, a young DJ by the name of Hal Jackson had a show and we appeared on his show; Hal Jackson went on to become one of the biggest DJs in NY history and, actually, just passed away at around 97 years of age.
And at these shows we worked with groups like The Five Satins, The Solitaires, The Willows, and The Nutmegs, and we were in our glory — I mean, we were with our idols! One minute we were listening to their records and, all of a sudden, we were traveling with them, you know?
After The Crescents disbanded, you continued singing and hanging out on the FDR Boardwalk in South Beach. Isn’t it true that there were a couple of other teenagers who hung out there too who became fairly well known in the music business?
Yes, Bobby Darin and Johnny Maestro. Bobby Darin lived in The Bronx, but his family had a summer bungalow in my neighborhood. My community of South Beach in Staten Island was a bungalow community; it was a summer resort. There was a beach there the length of the boardwalk, and the boardwalk was over a mile long. This thing was exactly like Coney Island — as a matter of fact, it might have even been a little bigger, because there were major hotels there. People would come from all over the country to go to this place. They had rides alongside the full length of the boardwalk. They had rollercoasters. They had carousels. They had games. They had eateries. They had dance halls. They had everything going on there.
But that was all knocked down around 1953 or 1954 when Robert Moses became the Commissioner of Parks in New York. And I don’t what the heck was on his mind, but they leveled everything and they put up all parking lots.
So that was the end of that, but it still was a haven where young people would go. Whereas you could go to any street corner anywhere in Brooklyn, Jersey, or New York and find 20 kids hanging out, on that boardwalk, you’d find 150 kids, and maybe more, sometimes. So it became this huge haven for teenagers.
In 1956 you started a group with some of those teenagers — Carman Romano, Artie Venosa, Jimmy Moschello, and Frankie Tardogno. How did you guys come together, and how did you come up with the name for your group?
When The Crescents broke up — and I was 14 years old at the time, so I can’t say exactly what happened there — but we found ourselves with no manager and no record company. At that point, Pat Crocitto decided she didn’t want to sing; she really wanted to quit. And Ronnie Jones, who was really close to Pat said that if Pat wasn’t interested, he wasn’t interested either.
But Carman and I decided we both wanted to continue, so we went back to the neighborhood and, in fact, we were on the FDR boardwalk when we ran into a couple of people. One was Artie Venosa. We asked Artie if he was interested in starting a group, and he was. We also asked him if he knew anybody else who might be interested. Artie said, “I know this one fellow who sings out of this other neighborhood on Staten Island, Jimmy Moschello, and I’ll bring him to a rehearsal and we’ll see if we like him.”
So now Carman and I had Artie and Jimmy, so we only needed one more person. I knew this other guy, Frankie Tardogno, who went to high school with me, and I knew he was singing with a group in his own neighborhood, and I asked him if he was interested in coming down to see us. He came down and that was it — we had the five of us — but now we needed a name.
We were all going to rehearse at Carman’s house and our plan was to come up with suggestions for names, put them in a box, and go from there. On the way to his house, there was a tavern on the corner which was owned by the father of another friend of mine, and in the window, there was a placard that said, “Schenley, the Whiskey of Elegance.” It was spelled “E-L-E-G-A-N-C-E,” and I liked the name, but I transposed it to “E-L-E-G-A-N-T-S” and popped it in the box. When we pulled the various names out of the box, we looked at them, and nobody really liked anything we saw, so we stuffed the whole box all over again and started going through all the names again. That’s when we unanimously voted on “The Elegants” and kept it.
It worked!
Not only did it work, but there was a funny anecdote connected with it and Dick Clark of American Bandstand, who— up until the time he passed away — would constantly tease me about it.
We did American Bandstand a few times. The first time we did it, after we performed our song, Dick Clark came over with his microphone and said, “Well, boys, I love the song and I love the group,” and he had us introduce ourselves. After that, he asked, “Where did you get the name, The Elegants?”
Now at the time, American Bandstand was a live show, Dr. Pepper was the sponsor, and the show was for teens. But when Dick Clark asked where we got the name for the group, I honestly answered that we got it from “Shenley, the Whiskey of Elegance.” As soon as I said that word, “Whiskey,” he yanked that microphone out of my face so fast — and he kept teasing me about it for years! He always said, “My God! When you hit me with that, I didn’t know where to go!” but that’s really where the name, The Elegants, came from.
When you guys were still only 16 or 17 years old, you and The Elegants got a record deal and, in 1958, recorded “Little Star,” which you and Artie Venosa wrote together. Where did you two get the idea for that song?
There’s a quote by me in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame about “Little Star” — in fact, there’s actually a display there — but in that quote, it says exactly what you’re asking me. We were rehearsing one night where we practiced until almost midnight. We were very tired and started to get a little ridiculous. As we were goofing around and getting silly, we started doing “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” and “Little Jack Horner,” and then we hit on “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. How I wonder what you are?” and all of a sudden, it seemed to have a certain ring to it. We were all exhausted and said, “Let’s go home,” but I said to Artie, who lived across the street, “Artie, come over to my house tomorrow and we’ll come up with an idea.” He came over to the house, we sat down, and in 20 minutes we wrote all the words to “Little Star.”
We went to rehearsal that night and I started ad-libbing all the “woah-woah-woahs,” and then we added the “rat-tat-tats” — we were major fans of The Heartbeats and we took the “rat-tat-tats” from their song, “A Thousand Miles Away” — so we added that into the mix.
We’re told that one of our favorite jazz guitarists played on the recording of “Little Star.”
Yes, Bucky Pizzarelli. Bucky was the guitar player on that record. He did what sounds like chime fills on the guitar.
Within a week of its release, “Little Star” sold 80,000 copies in NY. It rocketed to #1 in the United States, spending nearly six months on the Billboard Hot 100, and charted internationally, selling nearly 2 1/2 million copies? Were you at all surprised?
You know, we never even cared about that — we never even thought about it. We just knew that the record was on the radio and we were the kings of the neighborhood, and that’s all we really cared about!
But we did see that — now that we had a group and we were doing lots of church dances and functions, and entering various contests — we would win these different contests we would enter, and we knew the song had a lot to do with it. It was not only us and our talent — because there were other groups out there that were just as good as we were. So the song seemed to be the one thing that provided the added attraction that put us over the top.
So to that degree, yes, we were excited that we were popular in our neighborhoods, and we never gave it much thought about the song being as big as it was. But on one of the first jobs we had, they flew us out to Hawaii. We didn’t know it, but “Little Star” was the biggest-selling record in the history of the Hawaiian Islands. The day we arrived, they closed all the schools. They had all the kids come to the airport and they put them out on the tarmac. It was like The Beatles! There was no shoot where you’d go into the terminal — you just came down the ladder and walked right onto the tarmac where all of these kids were there screaming and yelling — and that’s when reality started to hit.
You know, years later, I had — and, in fact, still have — a booking agency called Headline Talent. Over the years, I booked a lot of entertainment, and at one particular time, I put together a concert package with The Association, The Cowsills, and The Lovin’ Spoonful. Backstage at the show, one of the singers of The Association came over to me — he was a Hawaiian kid.
You mean Larry Ramos?
Yeah — he passed away not long ago. But, at the time, he came over to me and said, “Vito, I can’t tell you what a pleasure it is to meet you! I’ve got to tell you something. The reason I’m in this business is because when I was in high school, they closed the school and sent us to the airport to meet the group that had the #1 record in the country at the time. As soon as I saw those girls screaming and carrying on, I knew at that moment that I wanted to be a singer!”
So you hear all that stuff. Micky Dolenz, one day, said that the first record he ever bought was “Little Star.” And Bruce Johnston of The Beach Boys said he learned how to play keyboard from “Little Star,” and both he and Mike Love said it was one of their favorite records.
Tony Orlando recently paid me a tremendous compliment. Back in the ’50s, he had a group called The Five Gents, but not long ago he told me, “When your record came out, I spent the next year just trying to imitate you.” And in his box set, Dion mentioned that I was one of his inspirations. Those kind of things make all of this worthwhile. I can honestly say that, to me, that’s more important than money or anything else.
You mentioned that The Elegants first starting touring in Hawaii, but you also continued to tour around the country. Wasn’t one of the artists you toured with Buddy Holly?
Yes, we were on tour with Buddy Holly for quite awhile.
What was it like working with him?
Well, Buddy was a little older than us, so there was a little bit of an age gap — I think he was around 23 or 24 and we were 17 or 18 years old. But I got to speak to him quite a bit about singing and so forth. And I was always mesmerized by him. Buddy could work a crowd probably better than most people I’ve seen, even to this day. He could just command an audience. I would just sit and watch him in the wings. He was unbelievable.
But the problem is — and I don’t know how many back-to-back hits Buddy had at a very young age — but he reached a point where he got tired of riding on the bus in a cramped seat with everybody else and he wanted to have his own transportation. At one point, he would follow our bus in a car with his people, but then it turned out to be a plane, and that was his downfall. That happened on the tour after ours. We did the Fall tour, and that was the Winter tour that went out. We went out to California with The Olympics, Bobby Freeman, and a few other artists, and Bobby Darin went down South with a couple of other acts, but Buddy and Dion went to the Midwest, and Dion obviously did not get on the plane — and everybody knows about what happened after that.
Just a few weeks ago, we interviewed Jimmy Clanton, who ended up filling in for Buddy Holly on that 1959 Winter Dance Party Tour. You toured with him, too, back then, didn’t you?
Yes, we toured with Jimmy Clanton. We also did ten days at the Brooklyn Fox with Jimmy Clanton doing the Alan Freed show, sure.
And you also worked with some others including The Everly Brothers, Chuck Berry, and Jerry Lee Lewis. Do you have any special memories performing with these musicians?
The Everly Brothers and The Elegants actually shared a suite together in Brooklyn for ten days when we were at the Brooklyn Fox Theater. The suite had a common area with bedrooms on either side. The Everly Brothers were staying on one side and we were on the other, but we would hang out in the common area before and after shows and everything.
You just mentioned that Dion was influenced by you and your music. We read somewhere that when you wrote the song, “Please Believe Me,” you were on a tour bus sitting right next to Dion?
Right, and you can actually hear the influence in the music. When you listen to “Please Believe Me,” you’ll hear “Runaround Sue” and “The Wanderer” in that song. When Dion left The Belmonts, he had a different style of singing and carried himself in a different way vocally, and a lot of that was my exact style of singing, which was all part of “Please Believe Me.”
And not only that, but The Belmonts — when Dion was still with them — got our arranger and used him on some of their records. The flip side of “Please Believe Me” is our song, “Goodnight,” and if you listen to that, you’ll hear “No One Knows” and “Where or When,” since those arrangements are similar to “Goodnight.”
So there are a lot of things like that, where you can go back and see the connections. But one nice thing about Dion is: he doesn’t pull any punches. He gives credit where credit is due, and that’s been very humbling for me, you know?
You said that, later on, you owned a talent booking agency, but we understand that, at one point, you also studied photography in New York?
I graduated from the Germain School of Photography in New York, and I even worked at the Port Authority in the photographic department for about a year or so. But I had an accident and sustained an eye injury, so I was laid up for awhile — and that, also, was the reason why the group went on without me for awhile. When I got out of the hospital, they had already broken up, so I ended up having a bit of a solo career where I went out and did five or six songs on my own.
At the time, I used various artists to back me up. I used a group called The Tremonts from The Bronx, who backed me up on four songs. And my cousin, Jimmy, had a group out of Staten Island called The Expressions, and I had them back me up on two songs including “Song From Moulin Rouge” which, to me, is one of my best vocals. The record company wanted me to do something like Bobby Darin where he broke the mold and started doing songs like “Beyond the Sea” and “Mack the Knife,” so they were looking for something like that for me. They came up with “Song from Moulin Rouge” and we did it on a lesser scale — without big orchestration — and I think, vocally, that was the probably best thing I’ve ever recorded.
The other side of the record was a song I wrote called “I Like to Run.” When I wrote it, I pictured it with the tempo of a song like “What I Say” by Ray Charles, but the arranger changed it to more of a rock tempo and it never really came out the way I wanted it to. But it was still a good song and my cousin Jimmy’s group backed me up on that, too.
And I did a few other things over the years, as well. I produced some records — two for The Mellow-Kings and two for The Royal Teens — and I also worked with Ron Dante. Ron’s real name is Carmine Granito. His family is from Staten Island. His father worked with Jimmy Moschello from my group; they were both pressers in a dress factory. And Ron’s father, Phil, asked Jimmy if he could teach Ron a couple of chords on the guitar. After that, Jimmy took Ron to one of our rehearsals and Ron’s interest really perked up as a result of our music. We ended up taking Ron to the Brooklyn Fox as our guest, and that was it — from that point on, he was mesmerized. After that, Ron started to do some jingles. He hooked up with Barry Manilow, and produced Barry Manilow’s hits, and did the vocal arrangements behind him, too. He also had his own hit records — “Sugar, Sugar” with The Archies and “Tracy” with The Cuff Links. And Ron just humbles us to death. Every time you talk to him, he’ll tell you that he’s in this business because of his relationship with The Elegants. When somebody reaches that level in the industry and still pays homage to those who sort of spearheaded what they’re doing, I don’t take that too lightly — his coming out and saying something like that makes me very, very proud.
In addition to your musical talents, you also went on to become an actor, appearing in movies like Goodfellas and Analyze This, and on TV on The Sopranos. In fact, the most recent film we saw you in was The Irishman. How have you enjoyed your career in movies and television?
You know, I never wanted to be actor. It was really a fluke — and I mainly did cameo roles. It all came about because I did a movie, years ago, called Joey. It was about a young kid whose father was a doo-wop singer and the kid was a rock guitar player. After the kid starts to lean a little toward the wrong side of town, his father tries to straighten him out. A little bit at a time, the kid starts playing guitar for his father and he and his father’s doo-wop group perform at Radio City, and all is well in the family after that.
But what happened was Martin Scorsese was watching that movie at, like, four in the morning on cable and he sent his casting people to contact me the next day and they asked me to appear in Goodfellas. Martin had a part for me — it was a pretty big part — but I had a beard. I had worn that beard for 20 years and Martin told me I would have to shave it off. I said, “I’m not shaving the beard off!” and he said, “You have to if you’re gonna be a wise guy ‘cuz wise guy’s don’t have facial hair!” And I just said, “I’m not interested.” I think it took him by surprise, somebody turning down a part in a Martin Scorsese movie.
So Martin asked his people to give me another part in the film as a bodyguard for a wise guy. And it turned out that this was a key part in the movie — it was a pivotal scene — so I got more attention from that split-second scene than had I accepted the original part. But it takes a long time to do movies. I mean, that scene took 13 hours to film. And there’s all this stuff going on and you’re just waiting and waiting and waiting and I really wasn’t much interested in that.
But I did a couple of calls here and there. I did a scene in Analyze This. And then I got a call from Scorsese’s people to see if I would teach Robert DeNiro and Joe Pesci how to speak Sicilian for a new movie he had coming out called The Irishman. On my resume, it said I speak Sicilian because, as a kid, I had lived with my grandparents who spoke Italian and I could speak Italian before I could even speak English. So they called me and, once I was there, Scorsese said, “You’re gonna be on the set anyway, so let me give you a part.” And he gave me a part where I run the restaurant for the mob boss out of Philadelphia.
And in the movie, your character’s name is Vito, too!
Yeah, they kept my name Vito again, just like they did in Goodfellas! I started to tell people I felt like Lassie — where you’d see the movie credits and at the end they’d say, “Vito played by Vito,” just like Lassie was always played by Lassie.
[Laughs] After six decades, you’re still performing with The Elegants. Do you still get that same feeling you always did when performing on stage?
Oh, absolutely! You know, this virus gave us all a little touch of reality. I mean, this is what’s gonna happen when we eventually retire. I don’t know if I’m gonna be able to handle it. I’m going out of my mind here. I mean, I open the refrigerator, the light comes on, and I do three songs. It’s insane.
But we just started rehearsing again two weeks ago, and I’m so happy. I look forward to these rehearsals just to get back to singing again. The past year or so has been a horrible situation, but the jobs are starting to come in again. We have a few events coming up, especially some outdoor shows that are gonna happen this year. The Fall looks like it’s starting to shape up a little, and next year looks like it’s gonna be strong again. We’ve got two cruises coming up — we’re going to be on the Malt Shop Memory Cruise in late-October/November, and then we’ve got Rocky’s Rockin’ Cruises, another cruise going out of Florida in February with Rocky and the Rollers, an excellent band out of Florida.
In 2018, we were there in the audience when you were given a Lifetime Achievement Award from the East Coast Music Hall of Fame. How satisfying was that for you?
It was satisfying because you’re getting appreciation for something you did. But that said, you were bypassed — and I’m not just talking about me. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame shot from the ’50s to the ’70s in 15 seconds and left out so many people. Every day on Facebook somebody will say, “Johnny Maestro should be in the Hall of Fame.” Of course! And so should 100 other people. And I really don’t believe Johnny’s gonna get in at this point because if you look at the people who are not in the Hall of Fame — some who are much much bigger in popularity and in terms of the amount of hit records they’ve had — it makes it almost impossible for Johnny to get in there. Connie Francis isn’t in there. Neil Sedaka isn’t in there. I could go on and on and on and give you 15 or 20 names of people who are not in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
That notwithstanding, we’ve seen you perform live, and you have so many fans! As we wrap up, is there anything you’d like to say to those folks, many of whom have been following you for decades now and have been so supportive of you and your music?
Well, you can never take that for granted, so I can’t thank them enough! I try to do that now on Facebook. On Facebook, I talk to people from all over the country and all over the world — people I would not be able to talk to if not for social media. Thanks to social media, I now know they’re out there. I’ve made friends in Germany, France, England, Spain, and Italy. These are people who are rabid Elegants fans, and I never knew they existed! Yet, here they are and some of them know so much about The Elegants they can tell me what I ate for breakfast 16 years ago. So I’m still in awe of that.
I made a statement years ago. It might sound repetitious if anyone’s heard me mention this before, but I always say the same thing: “I don’t have fans. I have friends.” And that’s the way I feel. I try to treat everybody like a friend, not a fan. You know, there are people who idolize certain artists and finally get an opportunity to rub shoulders with them for five seconds or ask for an autograph and they get snubbed. Never in a million years would I do that myself. It’s just not in me. Instead, I make it easy for myself. I don’t consider them fans and, instead, I make them friends, and that’s really worked for me.
To learn more about Vito Picone and The Elegants, please go to theelegants.net. For information on The Malt Shop Cruise, please go to maltshopcruise.com. For more on Rocky’s Rockin’ Cruises, please click rockysrockincruises.com.
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