A Conversation with Franke Previte – 10.1.10

Mike Ragogna: Franke, we’re so glad to have you here at solar powered KRUU-FM, which is based in Fairfield, Iowa. I hear you have a little Fairfield story,?

Franke Previte: I definitely have a Fairfield story. I was back in high school, where I sang and sang. But I wasn’t really a book guy, so college was a far-fetched thought for me. Then, a person from Fairfield’s Parsons College came to my house to tell me about the college and what they do. I’m looking out the window and they say, “Son, we’re talking to you. What do you want to do with your life?” So, I said, “Well, I want to be a singer,” and they said, “Well, you had better talk to your parents because they’re about to waste a lot of money.” My parents said to me, “You go to college, and you can be whatever you want to be.” So, I found myself in Fairlfield, Iowa, for two years, before I transferred to Delaware. It was a very interesting time because I was, at that time, in a doo-wop band. It was ’66 or so, and I was more of a greaser. I’m in Iowa, and there are a lot of different cultures out there than how I looked. So, it took a meshing period before I realized, “You know what? I’ve got to cut my hair a little differently, and I’ve got to wear my clothes a little differently.” But it was a good experience because I got a chance to put a band together out there, and I was a member of the Sigma Pi organization. College is a learning experience about coming of age or a young man trying to find his legs, you know?

MR: Nice. Let’s jump a little forward to the time before your group Franke & The Knockouts.

FP: Well, I was in a band called Bull Angus in the ’70s on Mercury Records. We toured with Rod Stewart, Deep Purple and Fleetwood Mac. We would do the Madison Square Garden of every town with Rod. Then, we did this Pocono Mountain Festival in Pennsylvania, where there were four hundred thousand people. That was about two years after Woodstock in like ’71. So, getting those kind of gigs and being able to do your own music–now, you have realize that my hair was like the worlds largest afro; it was from one shoulder to the other shoulder. I remember because Tico Torres, the drummer from Bon Jovi who ended up being in the Knockouts, said to me, “The first time I saw you was back in ’71 at Madison Square Garden. I remember it because I’m a drummer, so I kept on trying to see the drummer, but your head was so big with your hair, I couldn’t see the drummer.” Back in the days of heavy metal, everybody came out of that with shrapnel wounds, you know?

MR: (laughs) So, then the Millennium Records deal happens.

FP: Well, Millennium came about because after Bull Angus. I was on Buddha Records for about a year or two. That’s where Tony Camillo, who did Gladys Knight’s “Midnight Train To Georgia,” produced me. They were trying to make me into an r&b singer because I could croon.

MR: Were you called Franke Previte at the time?

FP: Yes, I was. So, there I am living in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in an apartment that my parents gave me because they had an apartment house, and I was selling cars out of my driveway for about three years to get enough money to pay for my voice lessons. I met this guy named Burt Padell through a close friend named Kenny Friedson, and Burt Padell did something in three weeks that I couldn’t do in three years–he hooked me up with Jimmy Ienner, the president of Millennium Records. When he heard my voice, there was like a connection between he and I because Jimmy used to sing in this group called The Earls, who had that song, “Remember Then.” I don’t know if you remember that song, but it was a very popular song with The Earls.

MR: Can’t remember at this moment, how does it go again?

FP: (singing) Re-me-me-re-me-me-member…

MR & FP: (singing) Re-me-me-re-me-me-member (laughs).

FP: Jimmy was the bass, the “remember” guy, you know?

MR: Nice.

FP: Then, Jimmy also did “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” he did the bass in that. He had this a capella, ’60s thing about him, and he obviously connected with my voice because he heard some of that doo-wop still in my voice. Our first song came out, a song named “Sweetheart,” and Jimmy actually warned me not to release that song because he said I was a much heavier rock band than that song, and he thought it would pigeon hole me as a much lighter band. I said, “Well, that’s your call.” He actually signed us for a song called “She’s A Runner.” He loved that song, and that was his pick for the single. I believe it was Betancourt over at RCA who said, “No, no, we’re going to release ‘Sweetheart.'” It went to number nine, “You’re My Girl” went to number fifteen or so, and then from the second album, “Without You” was another Top Fifteen hit. So, we became that kind of sound, Franke & The Knockouts.

MR: There were a lot of bands that came after like Tommy Tutone, and you can see where they might have been influenced by you.

FP: Well, I’d like to think so, but there were a lot of really good singers–Silver Condor which Joseph Cerisano sang with, and he actually became a close friend. I was in a cover band called The Oxford Watch Band and we were on Capitol Records, but we did some cover stuff, and the other singer in the band was Bennie Grammatico. He would say to me, “My brother loves your voice, he comes to hear you sing all the time, and he was wondering if you would come to one of his gigs.” I said, “Bennie, we’re busy all the time. How am I going to go to one of his gigs?” Well, the first time I heard him, he was the lead singer in Foreigner, and his name was Gramm–Lou Gramm, better known as Lou Grammatico. So, there were a lot of great singers out there, and probably all of us were emulating Paul Rodgers. He was the guy, you know?

MR: So, we had Franke & The Knockouts with its run of chart hits that included “Sweetheart” and some FM classics. I remember WNEW played Franke & The Knockouts often.

FP: They were. Back in the day, you could put out a single and then have an AOR–album oriented rock–track. So, we had “Comeback, “Never Had It Better,” and all these other AOR, heavier FM kind of tracks. You were able to have this split personality as a band and have two formats. We were lucky enough back then when WNEW and all those stations embraced us. We were coming down to The Bottom Line doing live shows down there, and they would record us. The bad new is that it was like nine in the morning, and you shouldn’t be singing at nine in the morning. But the good news is that any publicity and any time you could get on the radio with the power of New York radio, you did it.

MR: What a magnificent machine that was.

FP: Yes, yes.

MR: Everybody has their stations, but New York really had nothing but monster stations everywhere on that dial.

FP: They did, and it’s a tribute to where music was at during a time when you could have several huge stations in the same format playing rock and roll. I don’t think it was as inhibited back then. To me, what happened is that the download thing got so heavy and the record companies started freaking out that they weren’t making as much money that they didn’t have the money to experiment with new groups. I think maybe some of that rubbed off on radio where they thought they only ought to play a certain kind of song. It restricted the growth of the artists.

MR: Also, radio became so heavily formatted to a specific sound. Music became functional as opposed to something you would truly listen to.

FP: Absolutely.

MR: In your timeline, you are associating with Jimmy Ienner, and Jimmy Ienner is associating with a certain Eric Carmen.

FP: Yes.

MR: So, Jimmy did the solo records, but didn’t he also do The Raspberries?

FP: He did a Raspberries album as well. They had a strong connection, and Jimmy produced The Raspberries as well as Eric Carmen. Jimmy was so well versed in so many different genres. He was a guy that could connect the dots and make it all work, he’s a master at that. He has a great ear, so there were other groups like Chilliwack on his label. He could hear the hit. He also produced Three Dog Night, and I think he also did a Blood, Sweat & Tears record.

MR: His name was all over the place.

FP: He did a John Lennon record as well, so the guy is an icon.

MR: Now, it was through the relationships that you had built with Jimmy Ienner and that whole stable of musicians that you gained a lot of recognition as an artist and songwriter. But there was also a certain movie that came out in the ’80s–I believe it was called Dirty Dancing…

FP: I think you’re right. That’s an interesting story in itself because back in ’85 Jimmy decided to shut his label down. So, I’m like, “You shut your label down, we just finished our third record, what’s the deal?” He said, “Well, you know what? I wanted to get a new deal going with RCA, and they just don’t want to give me what I want to promote my artists, so I’m shutting down.” So, for the next two years, here I am back at the wheel trying to write songs and trying to get a record deal. I have all these songs on my demo reel, and I’m sending them out to labels only to hear, “No, you’ve got nothing.” It just so happened that one of those songs that I “got nothing” on happened to be “Hungry Eyes.” So, when Jimmy Called me and said, “I’ve got this little movie called Dirty Dancing and I want you to write a song. There have been one-hundred and forty-six songs submitted, you’ve got two weeks, we need a song.”

My answer to Jimmy was, “Jimmy, I don’t have time. I’m trying to get a record deal.” And his answer to me was, “Make time. This is going to change your life.” I started laughing and said, “You already did that one time, man. It wasn’t cool.” So, he goes, “No, no, trust me. I’ve got a good feeling about this movie.” So, John DeNicola was the guy I was working, and I said, “Alright, I’ll try to come up with something.” Then he says, “Here’s the bad news–it’s got to be seven minutes long for the last scene.” Now, they film out of sequence, so they filmed the last scene first. I don’t know if a lot of people know that. So, I said, “John, let’s do this–let’s start the song with the chorus up front in half time, and let’s down beat the verse in double time. This way, at least we get the chorus in right away and we have a shot that people will hear the chorus right way.” John sent me a track, I played it over the phone to Jimmy, Jimmy liked the track and said, “Make a song.” So, I’m in the car on the Garden State Parkway in the state of New Jersey, Exit 140, and I have this cassette in the dashboard playing the music. I have to jam when I write lyrics, so usually, phonetic sounds come out of me. I’m sitting there going, “…time of my life…” and I’m scribbling “time of my life” on an envelope. I didn’t really know anything about this movie–Jimmy gave me like five minutes of what it was about–the man upstairs really wrote this song because the lyrics fit that movie to a “t.” It blows my mind when I think about it.

MR: Wonder what song you’re talking about…

FP: When I saw Patrick Swayze at the Academy Awards he said to me, “I need to talk to you about this song. Who sang it?” I said, “Well, I sang it with Rachele Cappelli, she’s an artist on Atlantic Records. Why?” He went, “We didn’t have the song. We were getting ready to record to a Lionel Richie track, and it was a good song, but it wasn’t our song. When the tape came in, there were four songs on it, and yours was the last song. So we filmed that day to your demo, and at the end of the day, we looked at each other and went, ‘oh my God, what did we just do? This movie could be really cool now.'” He said, “We took a camaraderie for each other as actors in the film that we never had before that song.” So, I know how much it meant to Dirty Dancing, but even more so, how much it meant to Patrick.

MR: Oh my God, what a great story. Did you guys have a relationship after that point?

FP: Yeah we did. He had called me up, and we got together when he was doing a charity for heart disease for women. He called me up and said, “Would you come down and help me, and hang out?” So, I did, and we spent the day together. The guy that you see, and these fans embraced, is really the guy. It’s no BS, he was really just Patrick. He was down to Earth, he was open, there was no fake facade going on, and when you get to know somebody on the other side of the industry and you find that they are genuine, which is not always the case, you embrace that person, and you remember them. You say, “You know what? That was a good guy.” I’m glad I had the chance to meet him and be in his life for a minute.

MR: Nice. What about Eric Carmen? So, Eric Carmen has a huge hit with your song too.

FP: Well, he did “Hungry Eyes.”

MR: Of course. So, he has a huge hit with the record.

FP: Well, Jimmy had mentioned when I sent it in, “Do you have any other songs?” I sent in “Hungry Eyes,” and he said, “Why don’t you sing ‘Hungry Eyes’?” So, I went to the Power Station, Larry Alexander was going to engineer, and I got all these players. Then, I got this call from Emile Ardolino, who was the director of the film, and he said, “Hey, could you come down? There’s another scene we might want to put some music to.” So, I went in, and I’m sitting there watching the film, and he goes, “Oh, by the way, what’s the bpm for ‘Hungry Eyes’ because they’re having a hard time locking it to the demo.” Now, bpm, in case you don’t know what that means, is beats per minute. When a song has a beat per minute, they can then lock it in and sync it into their film, but they need to know the bpm. So, they filmed to the demo, but now they had to know the bpm to re-record this so it would lock in to them dancing. I said, “Geez, I didn’t record it yet. I’m recording it on Monday,” and Emile said, “Oh, you didn’t know? Eric Carmen is in Cleveland, and he’s recording the song.” I said, “Oh, it would have been nice if somebody had told me that.”

In the end of it, Eric was having a little bit of a problem, not with singing the song, but what had happened was people in the film were getting “demo-itis.” They were so used to hearing my voice, and they were calling him up saying, “Can you sound more like Franke did on this?” and “Can you do what Franke did over here?” Rightfully so, I would have gotten ticked off, and he was getting ticked off and said, “I don’t want to do this anymore.” So, Jimmy called me back and said, “Listen, I’m going out to Cleveland. If I can’t get him to sing it, would you again consider singing it?” I said, “Absolutely.” And we know the end of that story because Eric had a big hit.

MR: Wow. Congratulations and condolences are both in order.

FP: At the end of the day, he did a great job.

MR: And “(I’ve Had) The Time Of My Life,” another wow.

FP: Just having Bill Medley sing one of your songs, to me, was like forget about it, you know? He’s a Righteous Brother, and I think Bill and Jennifer did an awesome, awesome job singing the song. Again though, my tenor voice and his baritone voice were so different that I think the film people were in a little shock wondering where that tenor voice went. But they got used to it, and I’m sure the world, not knowing my version, got used to it really fast because there are forty-eight million people that bought that record. That’s a heavy number.

MR: Any more behind the scenes stories?

FP: Here’s a story that you should know–Vestron Pictures and RCA Records were the two conglomerates that were putting this movie out. First of all, Vestron didn’t really think too much about the movie. They were going put it out, wait a week, and have it go right to video, but RCA liked the songs and decided they were going to put out “…Time Of My Life,” and they were going to put it out AC (Adult Contemporary). So, the song comes out–it’s number thirty-four with a bullet, and RCA is like, “Okay, where’s the movie?” “Oh, we forgot to tell you,” Vestron said, “We moved it back a couple of months,” to which RCA said, “Well, take your little movie and shove it.” What happened was the movie came out, “…Time Of My Life” now is thirty-four with an anchor, it fell of the AC charts, and the people that went to see the movie, within the first week of the movie’s release, three-hundred thousand records were back ordered. Before RCA could get the single back out, a million records were back ordered, and the phenomenon of Dirty Dancing is really about the fans. The fans made this happen, not the machine. I think if you take one of the pieces out of the puzzle–you take Patrick out, you take Jennifer or the movie out or you take the song away, you don’t have the phenomenon. I think the chemistry of those things hit a chord and it created a fan base. There is a club of women who have seen the movie a thousand times, it’s called The Thousand Club.

MR: Oh my God.

FP: Can you believe it? The fan base is over the top. Lions Gate has a website for it. We’re on it with this new demo that we’re putting out, and there’s 4.5 million fans that still go to that website and find out what’s going on.

MR: Now, what about that demo?

FP: The demo, being so important to the movie, when they did the keepsake edition about two months ago, they came back to me–Kenny Ortega, Eleanor Bergstein, and everybody–and said, “Geez, everybody is talking about this demo and how important this demo was to this movie.” I said, “Yeah, Patrick told me the same thing.” I said, “I’ve got to find a way to connect this demo and the DVD.” So, I started researching and found out that Lisa Swayze had a foundation at Stanford University where Patrick was treated for pancreatic cancer. So, I called and talked to Erik Rausch, who runs their Pancreatic Cancer Fund, and I told him there had to be something I could do to help raise money. And it clicked–the lightbulb went off and I went, “Demos.” So, I took “…Time Of My Life,” “Hungry Eyes,” and a song called “Someone Like You” that is in the stage play. If you’ve gone to the stage play, you’ve heard it. But if you haven’t, it’ll be a fresh piece of music to you, and it’s a really great song. Then, Michael Lloyd, the original producer of “…Time Of My Life” said, “You know what? I want to help. Let me remix the demo for you.” So, that’s the four-song package. We’ve set up a fund with the Pancreatic Cancer Fund, we’re raising money in Patrick’s name, and I think with a fan base of forty-eight million, even if we get one percent to come and purchase this, we’ve put a dent in this disease. What a heroic guy Patrick was to live through this and still work. This guy was incredible, and I reach out to the fans, I’m pleading with you, let’s get rid of this disease because somebody this young and this talented shouldn’t have died on us.

MR: And he put such a brave face on while fighting the disease.

FP: He did.

MR: It’s great that you’re able to do something like this for your old friend.

FP: Thank you. It’s still good music. I just got off the air with Cousin Brucie. He played such a cool role in the movie, and he’s such an iconic voice. I started telling him a similar story, and he went, “Well, wait a minute, I’ve got to play this thing.” He ripped the CD open, played “…Time Of My Life,” and he came back on and said, “Oh my God, this doesn’t sound like a demo, it sounds like a record.” Well, after the amount of records I’ve made, you can make a pretty good demo. So, it sounds pretty good for being made twenty-three years ago.

MR: Franke, you’re involved with something very special that’s going to be auctioned off on eBay, aren’t you?

FP: Yeah, I was talking to my publicist, and he said, “You know, there’s a place in Virginia where they filmed the movie, but there’s actually two sites. There’s another one just outside of Asheville, North Carolina–that’s where they filmed a lot of the bungalow scenes with the big stone building in the background. That’s Mountain Lake.” So, we got a hold of Buzz who is the manager of the resort, and he said to me, “I have a charity for pancreatic cancer as well that we’re doing for Patrick.” I said, “Well, we could maybe do something together. Let me handwrite the lyrics, but you’ve got to give me some really good letterhead with a picture of the resort on it and Patrick and Jennifer.” So, he came up with a piece of art, it just looks awesome. I wrote the lyrics on it, framed it, and I put it in a picture of myself with the Academy Award. It goes on eBay, and we are auctioning it off for pancreatic cancer. Half of it goes to my charity and the other half goes to Buzz’s charity for pancreatic cancer. I did this one other time for a children’s cultural center,which was a much smaller event than what we’re doing now, and it brought in some really nice money–close to ten-thousand dollars. So, if we get near that figure, one-hundred percent is going to pancreatic cancer funds. I think, when somebody sees it and they’re a true fan that has the bucks, it would be a wonderful thing to put on your wall.

MR: Beautiful. I’m putting in a bid today.

FP: Actually, I’m heading down to Asheville because there’s a big Dirty Dancing festival. I’m one of the speakers, and we’re selling our CD, t-shirts, and we’re trying to raise money. We want to knock out this disease, and we want to let people know that Patrick lives.

MR: Beautifully said. What a mensch. You were always one of my favorite people during my label run, you know that?

FP: Well, thank you. Thank you so much. It’s been a lot of years.

MR: And here I am in your old college town which I think is pretty funny.

FP: Oh, that’s wild. When they said, “Fairfield, Iowa,” I almost fell of the chair.

MR: One last question. What advice do you have for new artists that are coming into the field right now?

FP: A new artist is obviously in a new era of the record industry, and it’s probably harder now than ever before to get a record deal. So, I would say it’s all about the song. Write a great song, get it on YouTube or Facebook, get the song heard, and generate a fan base. As soon as you can get some kind of a fan base where a record label can see selling twenty-thousand copies, they might give you some seed money to go in and do some work. It’s so hard now with all the download stuff and pirating that record labels are so shy of giving out spec money for new artists. So, you almost have to create your own little label and create your own buzz so they don’t have to do so much work. Then, if the song is strong enough, it will get heard. The truth of that is “…Time Of My Life” because it had nothing but the fans.

Transcribed by Ryan Gaffney

 

(transcribed by Ryan Gaffney)