When Scotty Met Charlie Part 2

In 2005, Scott Hansen conducted an extensive interview with former Dream Theater vocalist Charlie Dominici. In issue 2 of New Voice, we featured the section of their conversation relating to Charlie’s time in DT. The following is in effect the prequel to the events charted in the previous interview segment. Here, Scott talks to Charlie about his formative years and his early musical career from the late 1960s to the early 1980s.

SH: Starting from the beginning, why don’t you tell us about where you were born, when you were born, you’re growing up and everything that goes with it. It would be nice to get an idea of what Charlie Dominici is all about.

CD: Well, the cat’s kinda out of the bag because Rich Wilson {contributor to Classic Rock magazine and author of the Dream Theater biography) got it out of me... that I was born in 1951 – Oh my God! Did I just say that?!?! 1951!

SH: What’s your exact birth date?

CD: June 16th, 1951. And up until this day, when people would ask me when I was born, I would say “June 16th” and when they would say “What year?” I would say “Every year!” It really wasn’t my idea when I was in the band to hide my age. The manager Derek suggested I tweak my birthday to 1962. I mean, I didn’t care – I didn’t care about much back then, so I certainly didn’t care about people knowing how old I was. But there was a considerable age difference, so they were trying to smooth it out so that the ages were a little closer together.

SH: Well, as it is, Jordan is only 4 years younger than you.

CD: (jokingly) Oh ya had to tell me that he’s younger than me! Can’t they get somebody older than me?!? There is nobody older than me! (laughs) So anyway, I was born in Brooklyn – east New York – a very bad area now. It’s so bad that you can’t even drive through there – if you drive through there, you won’t have any hubcaps by the time you get to the other end of town. On Glenmore Ave. by Pitkin and Hendrix. If you go there now, you could probably get some real good crack and heroin and stuff like that right on the street corner. A real bad neighborhood. But when I lived there, when I was young, it was all Jewish and Italian families – one was saying “Eat! Eat!” and the other was saying “Munch! Munch!” but it was all the same thing.

Anyway, I guess when my dad got back from the service, he got a job and large loan for a brand new house – the loan for the house was $3000 and he had to get a 30-year mortgage. And he built this Cape Cod style house along the line of Cape Cod houses in Long Island. That was the big thing for Brooklyn families – to get a house in Long Island. I’m sure a lot of those families moved to much better houses in Long Island than we did – we kinda had the low-end Cape Cod style house – those little cake box looking houses – the little square thing with a living room, a kitchen, a dining room, a bathroom, a couple bedrooms and a basement. And they later built the top up and made bedrooms up there as the family grew. But that’s where we moved to when I was 1. I grew up in Long Island. We were in the first town in Long Island as you come out of the Queens area.

SH: How did you get involved in music? Where did you first discover your love for music?

CD: As I was growing up, there were some bands and music that affected me. But even before all that, some people in my family play guitar. My dad played guitar. My Uncle Johnny was the star of the family. And Uncle Johnny was the guitar player. Uncle Johnny if he played guitar today onstage, would get booed off the stage because he sucked! But to us, (he) was awesome. He and my Uncle Pete lived upstate, so we used to go to Saugerties New York, which is right by Woodstock. I remember being really young – 5 years old – going upstate. One thing that stands out in my mind was my dad, my uncle Johnny and my uncle Pete playing guitars, and playing all these old songs. Old stuff like the Mills Brothers songs – stuff from the 40’s that nobody reading this interview is gonna know! (laughs) My mom was a big influence. She was a singer. She used to sing Tony Bennett songs and she was a very good vocalist. When she was 16, one of her uncles who had connections to famous people in the music business asked my grandfather (her dad) if he could take her to the studio. And my grandfather, being the stubborn old guinea that he was said *in grumpy old man voice* “get outta here! She’s gonna stay home and do the dishes. I’ll give ya yer music right here, ya cruller head!” (laughs) He used to call everybody “cruller head” – in case you don’t know what a cruller is, it’s a kind of doughnut. So my mom was stifled, and she had a lot of emotional problems because of that. But she was an artist – she was a singer. When she sang, you knew she had art in her. So she used to sing to me when I was a baby. I don’t think she sang to my brothers or my sister when they were babies. But anyway, her singing taught me some kind of musical theory at that young age. It put it in my head and I understood music theory in concept, in feeling, in understanding without words. So as I got to be an old man of about 10 or 11 years old, I started to pick up the guitar because of Uncle Johnny and Uncle Pete. So I started off by playing stuff like Memphis Tennessee and progressing to stuff like Hotrod Lincoln with all the fast fingering – those are my roots. So after going through all the musical styles that I did later, when I came to meet with Dream Theater, it clicked, because all that progressive “note-y” music was in my head from before. As I got a little older, playing the guitar, BAM! All of the sudden there came the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show. And the big thing was who was the big band and who was going to last the longest – the Beatles or the Dave Clark 5? My roots were heavily affected by the Beatles and the British invasion.

So if someone were to ask me “what was really your biggest influence?” I’d have to say Geraldine Dominici, my mom, singing Tony Bennett songs to me. Of course I got into the psychedelic era – I had Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, and Jim Morrison – we were in the 60’s. And you know what they say about the 60’s – “If you can remember the 60’s, you weren’t there!” and I don’t remember the 60’s! (laughs) I stayed acoustic for a long time like free-wheelin’ Bob Dylan. My older brother used to be up in his room, bagging up the pound of weed that he had that he’d sell to his friends. I used to pretend that he had a phone call so he’d come down, and I’d sneak upstairs and steal a handful. And he’d be listening to a lot of Dylan. My brother was an artist – he was a painter and he had a buddy that was a poet, but they were wild men. They were wild men, beat-you-up kinda guys. My brother’s nickname was “Spook.”

SH: What was his real name?

CD: Mike. To me his real name was Spook. And I became Spook Jr. and my younger brother became Spook III. My little brother is actually Kane Daily and he is a bluesman. He has a website – kanedaily.com – check him out.

So I stayed with the acoustic stuff because that’s really my roots; listening to Dylan. I was really impressed by the poetry of the lyric(s) and the depth of the music. It was almost like the guitar and all that stuff and the voice didn’t matter. I was really into that stuff when I was that age. I was into Allen Ginsberg and Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice and a lot of different radical political poetry. And it was the days of the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Timothy Leary... we did a lot of that stuff. I don’t recommend that ‘you’ people do that stuff – it’s not good. You might wind up like me.

So that was an era that I was mainly playing a lot of acoustic and Bob Dylan, knew all of his lyrics, all of his songs and to this day I can still recite Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream which is about 20 verses. That part of my life was mainly acoustic guitar and writing on acoustic, and that’s when I met this guy Billy, of Billy and Charles. We wrote a bunch of stuff and recorded an album, had a record deal – we actually had a major label deal – a subsidiary of a big company called Commonwealth United. And the two guys that signed us were Charlie Koppelman and Don Rubin. Koppelman owns SBK Records and he was also the president of Sony Records.

We actually had some cats play (on the record) that were really good. Jerry Jemmott, the bass player, who played on a lot of Aretha Franklin’s hits, his nickname was Fingers. Jerry ‘Fingers’ Jemmott and another famous bass player – I can’t think of his name right now, a couple of drummers – we didn’t have a lot of drums on that album.

The album didn’t get released – it was a breach of contract situation. We asked that if we let them out of the breach of contract they would let us re-record the album the way we wanted to and they said ‘Yeah, OK’. So we went to Cherie Park, Louisiana, and recorded this rocking album and we came back and they said “Well, we agreed to let you record but we didn’t say you could release it so we’re releasing the original one” which made us sound like Simon & Garfunkel. So, that came out and that was when I said “You know what? I hate this. I hate the music business. I quit!” I split with Billy, I split with my girlfriend, I fired my manager, I bought my first car which was a Volkswagen Bug that had a big American flag painted on the side, I had a fringe jacket like David Crosby, I had long hair and I drove the VW Bug with the flag to California – from Woodstock – with this crazy friend of mine and her dog; dropped her off in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and made the rest of the trip myself. That was my first trip to California, that was ’71 – something like that. I still wasn’t really playing electric guitar or playing anything heavier than that Woodstock-Dylan band kind of thing. I kind of kicked around California – nothing to really say about California – and I went back east to Woodstock, and that was when I bought my ‘57 Strat. I told Rich Wilson that I’d gotten this gig because I’d played acoustic for so long I was pretty nimble with my left hand and I was pretty good at finger-picking and picking techniques. It was something that developed into me playing the electric with the Strat. I also was hanging out with good friends in (the band) Orleans. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard Orleans but they had the song *Charlie sings it* “Still the one I want to talk to...” – it was a big hit. Anyway, they were very Stratocaster-oriented, cool double guitars, very Allman Brothers-ish.

SH: Kind of like jam band stuff?

CD: No, they were pretty well written stuff and it was a little progressive... progressive for its time. Not the progressive we know as progressive music. Some of the roots of where progressive music came out of, what people don’t realize, comes from some of the bands that came out of the I-IV-V {referring to chords) rock ‘n roll and started getting a little bit more complex... and that’s how bands like Yes and those bands came out later in the 70’s. But some of these other bands I’m talking about back in the early 70’s were going in that direction but they were the hybrids, they were the fore-fathers. And they were probably the guys that the bands like Yes and the later bands were listening to because they were young then.

I actually got a gig with a band in Woodstock but quickly got fired. I wasn’t really able to hold the gig because... I got the gig because of my potential. I didn’t have the ability, it was all potential and the guy was pretty cool; his name was Otis Smith. The band was called Otis and the Elevators. (sniggers) I was so proud to be in a rock band that everybody knew in Woodstock, but I wasn’t really cutting it and Otis said to me one day “You know Charlie, you’re going to be really good someday. You’ve got a lot of talent, but I need somebody who can really cut it now.” And I was like “That’s cool,” and it really inspired me to practice and play. Like some guys would have given up like I felt the first time I heard John Petrucci (laughter), which made me just want to ask him if he wanted to buy some guitars. But I got more into it and from there I played in a lot of bar bands. I was in this band with a guy named Mike Young in Woodstock called Live Wire and we used to play at all the dives up in the mountains there – all these little bars where you start playing at three o’clock in the morning. We used to come out at seven or eight o’clock in the morning asking “Where’s my coffin?” (laughter) like Dracula. “The sunlight! It burns, it burns!” What a wild life that was. And that developed me, playing in those bar bands, into a position where I was learning to really get my voice a little bit more, playing with these bands where I had to sing all these different styles. They were cover bands. They wouldn’t hire you – you couldn’t make a living if you played original music. So we had to play the covers and we basically did the stuff that people were listening to, depending on the year it was.

You have a photo of me with that band Thick as Thieves – that was a disco band when disco didn’t exist. In fact, that band broke up before we even had a chance to learn the songs that the Bee Gees did in that stupid movie! We were doing that stuff way before; it was called ‘black soul dance music’. Then I was in some bands that got a little bit more ‘rock’ and a bit more hard-edged. One of them was the Easy Street Band – playing things like Journey and Kansas. Kansas is a pretty progressive band but I didn’t really have my real introduction to progressive music until I got into Majesty. When I was in this band ‘Easy Street’ we got turned into Frankie and the Knockouts. The Easy Street Band was me and the three other guys: Tom, Claude and Skinny. I was playing guitar and singing lead, Claude played drums, Skinny played bass, he’s the guy in some of the photos who plays with Ace Frehley and Frampton and he played the bass on ‘Dancing in the Street’ with Mick Jagger and David Bowie. He was in the original Frankie and the Knockouts but he quit to go with Frehley or Frampton, one or the other. We then got the bass player that was actually on the first album, Lee Fox, and later Tico Torres [Bon Jovi’s drummer) joined on drums because Claude got booted out. Tico Torres was in the band when I was on the road with them. We then did the first album with Frankie and the Knockouts – I was playing some good rock guitar – and they needed a guy who could play second guitar and sing all the high parts so they took us as a whole band. Billy and Frankie took our four-piece band and the six of us became Frankie and the Knockouts. We did all the demos together, we co-wrote some stuff [of course Frankie put his name on everything and he got sued for some of that stuff... I hope I don’t get sued for saying this!] (laughter) I didn’t go on the first tour because I didn’t like that fact that I got paid per-diem type money for recording triple tracked vocals on the whole album and then when the album came out it was no longer Frankie and the Knockouts it was Frankie... [with the Knockouts]. On the album it said that I did additional background vocals when I sang triple tracked on all the songs, not to mention co-wrote all the guitar parts. I was not allowed to play on the album but Billy played all my parts. I thought it was a flattering compliment that he used all the parts that I created, that I played live with the band. He wouldn’t let me play them but thought they were good enough to play note for note himself so the bottom line is I was pissed and I quit the band. And they went on the road without me and I was like “Yeah, alright, good. See how well you do without me singing all those high parts!” And sure enough when they did the second album, they were really interested in me having me go, so I went on tour for the second album. The first album I did with them I didn’t go on tour. The second album I didn’t record, I went on tour. It was really weird! While we were on tour it was Tico on drums this time and Tico was very funny because the whole time we didn’t know he was auditioning for Bon Jovi.

SH: So this is right in the early 80’s then?

CD: Yeah, this is early 80’s. He auditioned for Bon Jovi and got that gig. The Frankie and the Knockouts thing kind of petered out, I left while we were on the road. I was getting very discouraged with that music and I was also getting pretty wild on the road. I was literally Keith Moon! I was tearing apart hotel rooms, leaving the rooms and shutting off the light. Like I was telling Rich Wilson that’s one of my favourite scenes in Quadrophenia when the guy goes in the room when everybody’s slow dancing and he puts on The Who – My Generation and everyone starts dancing wild and he leaves the room and shuts off the light. (laughter) That was me. I was that guy! I would go into a room where everybody was normal, make everybody get crazy and then leave and shut the light. And we would tear apart hotel rooms and throw beds out of the window and the whole rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle.