Tony Orlando’s mother gave him some crucial advice early in his singing career: “Find a backup career,” she told him. “This is not something you can count on forever.”
The advice seems amusing, today, given Orlando’s 54-year career as the pop superstar behind “Knock Three Times” (1970) and “Tie a Yellow Ribbon ‘Round the Ole Oak Tree” (1973), and it seemed irrelevant to Orlando at the time. He’d just scored his first hit record, 1961’s “Halfway to Paradise,” written by the great Gerry Goffin and Carole King, and his follow-up, “Bless You,” rose even higher up the charts.
The singer born Michael Anthony Orlando Cassavitis spent his days in a recording studio with 30-piece orchestras. His mother once showed up to watch. “She thought I was making some little record,” recalls Orlando, 71, by phone from Las Vegas, where he has been a showroom star for years.
But Orlando’s mom — who’d been in a singing quartet with her sisters, was the granddaughter of a trumpet player and knew something about show business — turned out to be correct. In 1964, the Beatles made their first appearance in the U.S. and killed Orlando’s career. “Anybody cutting records in America, especially young teen singers like myself, who had this preteen or teen audience — we were history,” Orlando recalls.
He married in his late teens and found himself raising his wife’s child from a previous marriage. This time, his mother gave him the opposite advice. “Are you going to become Mr. Mom, or are you going to go out and get a job?” she asked him. “You’re not going to sit here ironing, are you?” Recalls Orlando: “She kind of shamed me and embarrassed me. That became a very important moment for me to make a very important decision.”
From there, Orlando scored a behind-the-scenes, $100-a-week desk job in music publishing. “I never went to high school, and here I am, having my own office, my own secretary,” he says. “Don’t know how to write a business letter and I can’t figure out how to open my own file cabinet, and I’ve never held a job before.” He had a good year, and Clive Davis, head of giant Columbia Records, invited Orlando to be the 23-year-old general manager of a publishing subsidiary called April-Blackwood Music.
By the late ’60s, Orlando had worked his way up to vice president of a larger publishing company, CBS Music, where he signed Barry Manilow and worked with James Taylor and the Grateful Dead, among others. He was doing just fine as a music executive, and Davis pretended not to notice when Orlando accepted a $3,000 advance and sang lead vocals on a song called “Candida” as a favor for two producer friends. If the record stiffed, Orlando didn’t want it to besmirch his reputation, so he used a pseudonym: Dawn.
But “Candida” was a No. 1 hit, and Orlando went back to the studio to record “Knock Three Times,” a funny novelty song about falling in love with the woman who lived in the apartment beneath him. Though “Knock” also became a hit, he hadn’t met the two distinctive singers who’d provided backup vocals, Telma Hopkins and Joyce Vincent. Both had appeared on numerous hits — Hopkins had been a Motown regular, notably on the Four Tops’ “Reach Out (I’ll Be There),” and Vincent nearly became a member of the Supremes. The two joined him to form Tony Orlando and Dawn.
The first two hits sold a total of 6 million copies, Orlando quit his desk job and the trio hit the road. With his shoulder-length hair, thick mustache and big-collared formalwear, Orlando grew into a sex symbol for those who favored easy-listening radio stations over rock ‘n’ roll. The trio became huge stars — one of the first multiracial groups to do so — landing their own CBS variety show on TV in the ’70s, performing regularly on Jerry Lewis’ Labor Day Telethon and becoming fixtures on the Vegas circuit.
Although Orlando no longer performs much with Dawn — Vincent (now Joyce Vincent Wilson) continues to headline concerts, and Hopkins is a prolific actress — he remains close with them. But he mostly performs his 135 annual shows solo, often in Vegas or Branson, Mo., his hometown for many years. Although Orlando hasn’t put out a new studio album in years, he plans to release a live collection this fall from New York’s defunct Bottom Line. “I’m a very fortunate guy,” he says. “I do what I love to do.”
The loquacious Orlando is stumped by only one question: Where’s the most unusual place you’ve ever performed “Tie a Yellow Ribbon”? He thinks for a long time, then recalls a rock quarry somewhere in the U.S. in the ’70s. “I remember driving up to the gig and seeing mounds of coal. In the middle of it, there was a symphony orchestra,” he says. “It was strangely marketed, and only 25 people were sitting in seats for 400 or 500 people. It had less people than my immediate family.
“I felt like I was singing in hell or something, because it was so stark,” he continues. “All I kept saying to myself was, ‘This is show business. This is what I wanted.'”
Steve Knopper is a freelancer.
When: 5 p.m. Sunday
Where: Arcada Theatre, 105 E. Main St., St. Charles
Tickets: $49-$99; 630-962-7000 or www.oshows.com
