CHUCK BOBROWSKI
Eddie Brigati, left, and David Brigati in 2016.
“I don’t need another award, just to have another award,” says Eddie Brigati — the Garfield native and Rascals co-founder who is already a member of The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and The Songwriters Hall of Fame — about his upcoming induction into The New Jersey Hall of Fame. The ceremony will take place Sept. 24 at the Dream Live theater at American Dream in East Rutherford.
The deeply philosophical rock star says that at this point in his life, “My main ambition is to inspire people to identify their own abilities, their own voices, their own perceptions, and the highest way to do it is our voice. And the highest voice is to sing and to express these feelings — beyond words. Different sounds and feelings. I try to inspire everybody to have that wonderful opportunity to express themselves.”
He has another major motivation, too, beyond inspiring people. He wants to honor his older brother, the late David Brigati, who will also be inducted into the Hall (as will the late Rascals drummer Dino Danelli). And not just have him mentioned, but “include him in the picture, up front.”
David Brigati, who died in March at the age of 85, was not an official Rascals member in the ’60s, but contributed to the band’s success as a singer and vocal arranger. He also worked with other groups, including Joey Dee & the Starliters, King Harvest (he sings on “Dancing in the Moonlight”) and The Average White Band. And Eddie says he contributed to some of the Rascals’ lyric-writing, as well, without being credited.
The cover of the David Brigati album, “Dave’s Faves.”
“It was just greed and jealousy that eliminated him — (he is) barely mentioned on the albums,” Eddie says. “Yet he did all those backgrounds. He orchestrated, you know. That’s our history.”
Eddie paid tribute to David earlier this year by helping to release an album, Dave’s Faves, that features previously unreleased songs that David recorded in the ’80s — mostly classic ballads such as “A Sunday Kind of Love,” “Your Precious Love” and “Blue Velvet” that Eddie describes as “two-minute operettas.”
The album “takes us back to the beginning — in the Bible phrase, in the beginning …’ — of what influenced us, and our lives, and it goes back to these a cappella songs. Had we not been identifying with rhythm and blues, the Black cultures, the Black harmonies, the church harmonies and philosophies, you would have never heard of Joey Dee. You would have never heard of The Rascals. Because we used those vibrations and accepted them.”
Dave’s Faves also includes the song “Starliter,” which Eddie co-wrote. David wasn’t just a member of Joey Dee & the Starliters but sang lead on their biggest hit, 1961’s “Peppermint Twist”; later, Eddie and future Rascals Felix Cavaliere and Gene Cornish performed in the group as well.
Though the Dave’s Faves album is very much in the style of the Starliters era, it was recorded at a time when stardom seemed very far away. “We were at the bottom in the ’80s,” says Eddie. “We were really dejected, rejected, and we were just surviving. My money was usurped. And I said to Dave, ‘Let’s just go in and record.’ … He said, ‘No, I’m going in.’ I said, ‘All right, and then I’ll come in and do backgrounds.’ And he said, ‘Nope. I’m gonna do those backgrounds.’ ”
COURTESY OF EDDIE BRIGATI
From left, Eddie Brigati, producer Joe Mardin and David Brigati in 2009.
Brigati quickly corrects himself. “He didn’t even say that. He just said no. And knowing my brother … I said, ‘Whatever, Dave.’ And I didn’t know how long it took (to record). It must have taken a couple of years. And it was our therapy. We didn’t have professional therapists. We didn’t go to a doctor. We didn’t know all this was available. We were just trying to survive.
“So that’s what that was, and I never knew he did those many songs. I never heard them all because I wasn’t invited to participate. It was OK. He’s my older brother. He tells me what he wants.
“I followed him as a teenager. I heard him sing all those songs as a kid. When I’m 10 years old, he’s already singing. And I’m watching him and all the kids are attracted to him and, you know, I didn’t know we were going to be famous. You never know.”
He remembers, back in Garfield, David saying, one day, ” ‘I’m gonna sing at school, at an assembly.’ And I’m going, ‘Him?’ He wasn’t extroverted at the time. He was, but he wasn’t in his full capacity. And just him singing … you know, behind the high school, and you could have attention. And then there was this thing: girls, too. There were girls involved? Money wasn’t even an issue. We had none. We didn’t do it for money.”
Cavaliere, who continues to perform under the Rascals name, will not be at the induction ceremony. Nor will Cornish, who remains affiliated with Cavaliere. Brigati says Cavaliere and Cornish were originally planning to be there, but a dispute arose over how David Brigati was acknowledged in the band’s Hall of Fame bio. He was originally left out, and Eddie insisted that that be corrected. Some lines were added, but Eddie objected to the way David was characterized in them.
The Rascals (from left, Felix Cavaliere, Eddie Brigati, Dino Danelli and Gene Cornish) in a vintage publicity photo.
Cavaliere and Cornish “refused to edit that,” Brigati says. “Their thing was to declare that if they didn’t have the final say-so, then they weren’t gonna come. And I think it’s all management. Because Felix is my brother, too. Gene is my brother, too. Dino is my brother, too. And it was like, they just said, ‘If it isn’t our way …’ They wanted that control, they wanted that dominance. And management usurps.”
At another point in the interview, Brigati attributed all of the band’s problems, over the years, to “poor management, bad management, and no management.”
The group, of course, had a remarkable string of hits in the ’60s, including “Good Lovin’,” “Groovin’,” “People Got to Be Free,” “How Can I Be Sure,” “I’ve Been Lonely Too Long” and “A Beautiful Morning.” (They were originally known as The Young Rascals, but shortened the name in 1968.) Though Cavaliere did most of the lead singing, he frequently wrote the songs with Brigati, and Brigati, Danelli and Cornish all had strong presences, both onstage and in the recording studio. No one faded into the background.
“If you look at the back of the first Rascals album,” says Brigati, “it says our rise was unique: that there was no leader. We were all leaders. It didn’t have that thing (of one person leading). It was, like, if you wish, communism without the gun.”
The original foursome dissolved by the early ’70s. And though they all remained active, sometimes working with each other in various configurations, they didn’t get back together, in earnest, until Stevie Van Zandt, who inducted them into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997 (watch speech below), and his wife Maureen Van Zandt co-produced a theatrical rock show, “The Rascals: Once Upon a Dream,” and they all performed in it.
(Stevie Van Zandt will handle the induction speech, again, when the Brigatis and Danelli enter The New Jersey Hall of Fame.)
COURTESY OF EDDIE BRIGATI
Eddie Brigati receives his Songwriters Hall of Fame award in 2009.
Named after the band’s 1968 album (on which David Brigati sang lead on the title track), “Once Upon a Dream” was presented on Broadway and in other venues in 2012 and 2013 (see clip below). Brigati describes it as “probably the finest production ever of Rascals. (Van Zandt) spared no expense. He was so enthusiastic and he was so affected by The Rascals. No one in our history put it together this extensively, and perfected it as he and Maureen did, and I’m endlessly grateful for them. And in the passing of my brother, I thank Steven for identifying us, trusting us. He gave us recognition at the time we needed it the most. And it happened before my brother’s ascension — we call it graduation.”
Brigati, who is now 80, spends a lot of time these days writing prose, and may put together a book.
“I put (on a piece of paper) a time and a date, and the address of the building I’m in,” he says. “And that opens up a channel, and I put the topic on the center of the page … and I try to end it up by the end of the page, and that could be two, three, five, paragraphs. And it kind of limits my jabbery — my incessant opinions. It’s just something that … you know, I believe I’m a poet, and my favorite artist was Bob Dylan. He spoke for us, our generation, and he was a bard. He is also a prose writer.”
Education was also a recurring theme in our interview. Eddie and his wife Susan serve on the artist advisory board of the music education organization, The Rockit Live Foundation. (Brigati also wrote a school anthem for the Northeast Elementary School in Montclair — where Susan was a longtime music teacher — and became involved in music programs there.)
MARK WEISS
Eddie Brigati with Steven Van Zandt at a 2018 Rockit Live Foundation gala at Two River Theater in Red Bank.
“Steve Van Zandt introduced me to Rockit Live,” he says. “Rockit Live is children 8 to 18, and Susan and I have been on the board for the last 10 years. These children gave me more than I got from my experience, my history. They’re gracious, they’re really attentive, they’re focused. All these things that we need to continue trusting and loving each other, I’m getting it from them.”
Brigati sums up everything surrounding the New Jersey Hall of Fame induction as “the emotional, fragile, vulnerable, overwhelming position I’m in.” And while he doesn’t sing in public much these days, he may sing “How Can I Be Sure” — the Top 10 1967 Rascals hit that he co-wrote and sang lead on — with the event’s house band.
“I can’t sing it in the same key,” Brigati says. “Right after I hang up from you, I’m going to try and sing it 15 times. And emotionally, I’m still ‘how can I be sure?’ in it. It’s full circle, but in the end of that song, in all the doubt and confusion of it, there’s a resolve.”
He quotes the song’s final line, “I’ll be sure with you.”
‘The only way I’m gonna be sure is with us,” he says. “You and me. Us. ‘I’ll be sure with you’ means ‘us.’ ”
Eddie Brigati, the late David Brigati and the late Dino Danelli will be among the inductees into The New Jersey Hall of Fame at a 7 p.m. Sept. 24 ceremony at Dream Live at American Dream in East Rutherford. Other inductees will include SZA, Lawrence Taylor and former Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, and Danny DeVito will host. Visit njhalloffame.org or ticketmaster.com.
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