Review/Copyright 1978, 2006 by Jim O’Donnell
Now get into some of this, friends, because it comes from a guy whose ears are still ringing, whose eyes are still popping, and whose hands are still applause-beat red from the magic moments of seeing a dream come true.
The dream was years old and like this: kid from Jersey City dreams of playing rock ‘n’ roll guitar in headliner group in New York City.
The moments are minutes old and like this: Frank Infante (“Frank Freak” to friends and fans alike), of Logan Avenue, Jersey City, plays rhythm guitar for wall-to-wall ovations at the New York Palladium with a gold-record band called Blondie.
The day and date were May 4. You won't be reading this until a week or so after the fact, but that's OK. Dream stories, news bulletins from the heart, are always timeless.
To the time itself, minutes back, Frank Freak Infante was like this: he was a lean, mean coil wound to high tension from rounding places like Japan and England and Vienna and the Mike Douglas Show over the past several months as if they were so many bases on a Little League baseball diamond.
A bright, gold, electric guitar was the mainspring of that coil. And Infante hit that spring.
He hit it with hands that knew this was it, this was the pinnacle, this was the place, this was New York. He hit it with hands that became a whirring pair of fleshy blurs.
Most of the night, the hands simply did their manic job: they helped along, filled out, wrapped up and otherwise contributed to the big, bouncy sound that is Blondie. And people who paid $8.50 and $7.50 for their seats kept jumping out of them.
But then there were other moments, moments when the hands did more than their job. You might say that, most of the night, Frank Freak Infante played it sort of lurking laidback: thin, almost emaciated, cheekbones about ready to tear through the skin under his eyes, he stalked about, stage left, like something Edgar Allan Poe would dream up in a graveyard on a stormy night.
But then would come those moments, those few times during the night when he would cut loose from the song the group was doing and rip up on his instrument. The coil would roll and twist and loop: it was blazing guitar work sometimes.
Thin as he was (any thinner and you wouldn't have been able to see him, from any angle, when he stood behind his microphone stand), his musical presence was big.
It was big enough to eat up the rows of overhead spotlights he had hungered for so long; big enough to occasionally swarm over that rock palace; big enough to give dramatic substance to the aura of dare that so permeates his being.
It lent something definite to the show, gave it more of an impact. Blondie started three years ago in New York, doing the Bowery; now the group had returned to its hometown, doing the bows.
In between, last summer to be exact, Frank Infante of Jersey City joined. He is one of the group's six musicians and is credited with playing rhythm guitar on Blondie's second album, Plastic Letters.
|
With the dream of playing New York under his belt, or, more accurately, under his guitar strap, his next dream, the next trick, is to one day start and run a band playing a lot of his own music—and make it as big as Blondie has.
Fact is, Blondie has been good for Frank Infante—in terms of music, money, experience, exposure, contacts, whatever—and, in turn, Frank Infante has been good for Blondie.
But it's still not basically his production, his trip, his number. What he wants eventually is to make it big with something all his own—every dreamer's ultimate dream.
But, for now, one dream at a time. I keep thinking back, dreamily, of course, to each time one of those spotlights—red or blue or white or yellow—would pinpoint Frank Infante out of the night, out of oblivion.
Each time I watched him under the spotlight, ripping up, I watched hard to brand the sight on my memory.
Each time, it was a moment for Frank, for Jersey City, for his family and friends, for dreamers . . . and for me.
It's like this. Years ago, back when Frank Freak was playing high school dances and I was fetching coffee and copy for busy newsroom reporters, Frank and I used to dream a lot of the future.
He dreamt of playing rock 'n' roll and playing it in New York City; I dreamt of writing a book about rock ‘n’ roll and having it published in New York City.
When we weren't chipping away at our respective little dreams, we often talked them out to each other. Except for work, there is nothing like talking, and having someone listen, really listen, to make an impossible dream seem possible.
I got lucky first, three years ago. A Madison Avenue publisher took a manuscript of mine on rock music. Frank Infante was one of the first to tell me I did all right.
Well, now Frank has had some luck and you know why I'm writing this piece here right away: I want to be one of the first, Frank, to say, "Nice going."
***
CD: Blondie, Parallel Lines. Capitol, 2001.
Book: Debbie Harry, Chris Stein and Victor Bockris, Making Tracks: The Rise of Blondie. DaCapo Press, 1998.
Websites: http://www.blondie.net,
http://www.rip-her-to-shreds.com http://www.rockandrolljournal.com
|
