Rant #2,758: Crying

David Blatt died the other day, and with his passing, one of the great voices in popular music was stilled for good.
 
Blatt was popularly known as Jay Black, and he was the lead singer of Jay and the Americans, one of the most popular pop/rock groups of the 1960s, with hit after hit attesting to not only the greatness of the music that the act produced, but also the greatness of Black’s voice.
 
What a lot of people don’t realize is that decades before David Lee Roth was replaced as lead vocalist of Van Halen by Sammy Hagar and with little lapse in hits or popularity, the same thing happened to Jay and the Americans.
 
Jay Traynor was the original voice of Jay and the Americans, and they had scored the act’s first hit with him as lead singer on “She Cried.”
 
For whatever reason, Traynor left the act just as it was reaching wide popularity, and the band needed a quick fix as its new lead singer, and Blatt was it.
 
He took the stage name “Jay Black” to blend right into the Jay and the Americans moniker, and truly, he became not only THE voice of the group through its bevy of hit singles, but one of the great voices of all time in the pop/rock realm.
 
Whether taking Broadway standards like “Some Enchanted Evening” to new heights as a pop/rock song or reaching even higher levels of popularity with songs like “Cara Mia,” Jay and the Americans became among the most popular acts in America during the 1960s, but it wasn’t without controversy.
 
They redid “Only in America” as a straight ahead pop rocker, but changed the words from the original Drifters’ version, which got into social injustice issues which would not have flown on Top 40 radio during this period.
 
And then there was Black, who became quite a character in his own right.
 
Leaving the group in the early 1970s, Black became a huge draw on the oldies circuit, but after being a steadfast “American” during his time as the group’s lead singer, he went in a completely different direction as a solo/oldies performer.
 
Yes, he did sing the hits—and there were many of them, including a song he absolutely hated and called the act’s “bubblegum song,” “Let’s Lock the Door (And Throw Away the Key)," but he added some new, let’s say, umm … well, if you weren’t prepared for his stage act, you might have to hold your hands over your ears when he first opened his mouth, not to sing, but to talk, at his solo concerts beginning in the late 1970s and 1980s turned into something more than just musical concerts.
 
Black became something of an X-rated performer during those years, using profanity and whatever else he could find to knock the audience on its socks.

And his popularity soared.
 
He became sort of the resident singer at Westbury Music Fair on Long Island, a venue near his home and one that had a variety of performers take to its revolving stage, but probably none more so than Black.
 
He never apologized for his move to X-rate fare, but he used to say before he started his concerts that he apologized to children in the audience, who he acknowledged were brought there by their unwitting parents to hear an “oldies” concert, but got the “oldies-plus,” for what was to come.
 
And come it did, inn a road-fire way, through dozens of sold-out concerts at the venue. When a Jay Black concert was advertised there, not only was his name used--"Jay Black and the Americans"--but he was also advertised as "The Voice."
 
Black could still sing well into the 1980s and early 1990s, so mixed in with the adult humor were the hits that you came to hear.
 
But there was a lot of other stuff going on that permeated his concerts and his life, and he became quite controversial for many of his actions.
 
He had become a friend of mobster John Gotti, and went on the record as supporting him through his numerous trials for racketeering and for other nefarious things he supposedly did and that put him in jail.
 
He was so close with Gotti that he even appeared in the gallery in his trials, and at least one time, this impacted his concerts.
 
I was at one of the many concerts I saw of Black when I was writing show business stuff for a local periodical on Long Island.
 
During one concert, Black did his usual schtick for the first half of the show, and then there was an intermission.
 
He came back alone to the microphone, and said, “Someone just called in here and said that he had planted a bomb in this place because of my friendship with John Gotti, and we all have to leave.”
 
People began to laugh, thinking that this was part of his act, and when he saw that few were leaving, he said, “This is true I am not lying to you. We all have to leave NOW!”
 
No bomb was ever found, and it might have been the only bomb that Black ever laid at Westbury.
 
He continued to perform concerts into the 1990s, but his personal life had become a well-publicized mess.
 
He went through several divorces, he lost the right to use the “Jay and the Americans” moniker for a spell, and he also lost the right to use the “Jay Black” name for a period, even selling the “Jay” of the name to the original act, which had gone back on the road as an oldies act, to stave off personal bankruptcy.
 
In later years, his performances became fewer and farther between, and the rumor was that Black was suffering from dementia.
 
He died the other day of a combination of pneumonia and dementia at 80 years of age.
 
I will remember Black for his candor about himself, his many fantastic live shows that he put on at Westbury Music Fair, and especially for his voice, which was sort of a mix of an operatic voice meets Roy Orbison, if you can even imagine that.
 
It was such a unique voice for the pop/rock realm, but he made it work, and he always gave Orbison kudos as one of his musical mentors, and then would burst into “Crying,” and you knew that he wasn’t just name dropping here.
 
Yes, Jay Black was a unique talent, potty mouth and all, and he will be missed.