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Sha Na Na to Solo Joy PARIS After someone observes that "lovers of song all over the world are asking, Whatever happened to Henry Gross?," his smile lights up the room as he considers the silliness of it. Gross has to admit that he has not been making much news lately. That may be about to change. One of the best - and most joyous - singer-composer-guitarists you might be lucky enough to hear this year, Gross just turned 50 and he was shouting it from the rooftops of Paris. Or rather from a small stage on the Canal St. Martin, where this month he performed two nights at the friendly, and in this case almost empty, Hotel du Nord. Fortunately "empty" is not a problem for Gross. If he's 80 and singing for 10 people anywhere, he's going to make sure those people go home having had a great evening. He's good at that: "That's my gift. I've seen performers be bitter on stage when they don't think their audience is big enough.
But if you take the trouble to come out and see me, I'll do something to make sure you go home happy. That's what I do, and that's what I'm going to do for the rest of my life." .Right now, he's "alive and well and pursuing my dreams writing and singing songs in lovely and creative Nashville." Maybe that's stretching it, but it's easy to park in front of his house, and it's easy for him and his wife, Marilyn, to open the door and let their four dogs and four cats out to run around their little acre. Having grown up in Brooklyn, Gross has become "a big fan of easy." ."You can't take life too seriously," he says. "When you check out of here, life will go on without you. If you're happy with your life, life is good. It can be as simple as that." It's always good to be reminded. After five years dealing with serious illness in his family, he has learned something about the nature of "serious." There had not been enough living under his belt when he first became a star, at 18, which he defines as "the age where they still pay you," as a founding member of the doo-wop revival group Sha Na Na. When he played the Woodstock Festival with Sha Na Na, he found himself hanging out with Jimi Hendrix and Jerry Garcia. Sha Na Na turned out to be the surprise hit of the festival, and then he couldn't believe how much money he was making for singing rock and roll, which he would be happy to do for free.
A few years later, while 40,000 people applauded for an encore, he passed out drunk behind an amplifier on stage in the Kansas City Royals stadium after opening up for the country group Kansas. He shared stadium stages with the Doobie Brothers and the Beach Boys. And there were a few hit songs - "Big Guitar" was recorded by Cyndi Lauper, Mary Travers, Judy Collins and the Blackhawks. He played guitar with the legendary and doomed singer-songwriter Jim Croce. Carl Wilson of the Beach Boys became a friend - Gross's song about the passing of Wilson's Irish Setter "Shannon" sold more than a million copies. SOMEWHERE along the way, he became too good a businessman for his own good. It got to the point where he was making music for the business rather than the other way around. Panicked about paying the rent, he only wrote songs so he would have something to sell. That's hindsight. Now he knows that "you can't just do music on weekends. You have to live and breathe music." He thinks he has never played and sang better than he does now.
Earlier this year he released his own post-Beatles CD "I'm Hearing Things" on his own Web site, www.henrygross.com. The site sells about 10 copies a day on line. That's fine; he's in no hurry, he can see later about serious distribution. Maybe a big label will pick it up, and anyway he said what he had to say, and if that means only 10 customers a day for the moment, "so be it." He recorded it "because I like these kinds of records and nobody makes them any more. I made it for myself." The easiness of Nashville has its limitations: "It's music by numbers down there. Hallmark card-type lyrics: 'Dear Grandma, I love you.'" He makes a sour face. You might, in that case, ask what he is still doing there. He's thinking of moving to London, that's what. There are good friends in London, he has been working there. Either way, coming back to live performance is not easy. Clubs move, names change; Vinnie's Club is now Alfonso's and the new owners never heard of him. They don't appreciate his beautiful high tenor voice, his five octave range, his unusually rich chordal sense on the guitar; or his rich sense of humor for that matter: "Nobody else was using all of those chords anyway, so I just picked them up and used them myself."
Now that he's on the road on his own again, he calls himself a "vagabondo." "I show up places, nobody knows who I am, and they go home saying 'How come I never heard of him? This guy should be playing arenas.'" Perhaps he should, but he knows he's competing with 20-year olds, and he doesn't think a 20-year-old girl would want his poster on her wall. "That's all right," he said, as in his positive-thinking song "Lucky Me." "I like it like that." Somewhere along the line he "lost track" of how many albums he has made ("can't be less than 15"). A mutual friend gave his latest, Beatle-heavy CD to the former Beatle George Harrison, who listened to it and said "There's no question who his influences were." And he didn't mean the Byrd or the Beach Boy parts. Gross takes that as a compliment. He has nothing against being derivative. It's what you add yourself that counts. Anyway, none of that stuff matters: "What matters," he says, "is to make music that matters to people." |
