Dec. 9, 1972: A songwriting priest -- John Radice
For the holiday season – an interlude featuring two men of the cloth, fraternal twins on a musical mission.
Dec. 9, 1972
His Folk-Tinged Music – ‘Surgical and Healing’
“I’M LIKE an
undercover agent,” Joe Radice is saying. It’s his 30th birthday and he’s
fearless, even of the possibilities of virus pneumonia in my living room.
“You know how someone on the inside can do things people on
the outside can’t?” Joe grins. “That’s the way I am with John.”
It’s a comparison John probably wouldn’t make, but it’s his
birthday too (Joe’s two minutes older, intense where John is gentle) and
besides, Joe delights in it and it stands.
And maybe he’s right. He can do things John can’t. You wouldn’t
imagine Joe there in his gold turtleneck sweater and all, doing veiled
manipulations. No more than you’d expect him to be an assistant to a Catholic
bishop.
But he is. “I’m a member of the Christian Brothers,” he
explains. “I work in
* * *
HE HAS TWO
radio shows as well. “One,” he says, “is a talk show which deals with young
people’s attitudes and the other is a music program which searches for answers
to life.” Plus he directs Share Enterprises, which promotes John’s music.
He does this, he declares, because he can’t sing a note.
John, on the other hand, is blessed with a smooth, appealing tenor and he
writes the notes he sings.
“My criteria is does it say what I need to say,” John
explains. “It’s based on a very basic principle of communication – that which
is most personal is most universal.
“If it’s an honest expression of what I feel, that’s what’s
important. If I did it in one note and that said all I wanted to say, that
would be fine music for me.”
Despite such ideals, John turns out some very likable music
– folk-tinged because he accompanies himself on acoustic guitar – and 10 of his
songs have been gathered up, given fuller arrangements and put down for
posterity.
The recording was done over a couple days at Act One Sound
Studios on
* * *
A TAPE of
the album plays as John tells how music has always been a prime factor in his
life, beginning with his youngest days on
“We were always a singing family,” he says. “Whenever we would
go out on a drive, Mom would sing …”
“And Dad would harmonize,” Joe puts in. “We were always
singing in the car. Picnics tuned out to be like Mitch Miller songfests. They’d
always invite people over who played instruments.”
Glee clubs and chorus groups in grade school,
* * *
“AFTER THE
group dwindled,” he says, “I began to use music in different talk programs as
well as liturgies. Eventually I got tired of using other people’s stuff and
started using my own.
“When I started writing my own music, I wasn’t interested in
timing or rhythm. I was interested in getting a point across. Anybody who ever
worked with me would have migraine headaches trying to make rhythmic sense out
of it.”
John still uses music to illustrate his talks to youth and
church and college groups, on radio programs, whatever. The songs he sees performing
two functions. One is surgical – cutting out old hurts – the other, healing.
“It’s a bad surgeon who goes in and operates on a person and
doesn’t follow up,” he says. “You sing a song that’ll excise feelings, but if
it isn’t followed up, what good does it do?”
The happy calypso jump of “God Don’t Make No Junk” fills the
room and when the spoken part in the middle comes up, John uses it as an
example:
* * *
“THE VERSES
talk of rejection (“Ever feel like you just didn’t belong?”) that’s surgical (“Didn’t
fit in anywhere”) that’s surgical (“I guess we’ve all felt that way at one time
or another”) that’s surgical (“Some never lose that feeling”) that’s surgical.
(“Some are a little more lucky than that”) that’s the
beginning of healing (“Like the little kid that one day discovers …”) and now
the healing starts (“God made me and God don’t make no junk …”).
“I got the idea from a priest friend of mine, Father Tom
Donohue, who used to have a city parish and now’s in
“I sang that song at a Senior League several weeks ago and
afterwards an old woman came up and said she liked it. She’d reached a point
where she felt she didn’t have any usefulness. But she realized from that song
that her usefulness is not decided by others, but by herself.
* * *
“THIS SONG
here, ‘Now Is a Moment Short-Lived and Can’t Last,’ shows how important the now
we’re involved in is.
“Now must be seen in the context of what happened yesterday
and the vision of tomorrow, but to be imprisoned in yesterday or tomorrow is to
miss the importance of the moment now. There’ll never be another moment like
it.”
“Then I Look at You” is based on a Ferginghetti poem. A
person meeting another person. Two learning to be one. “Willing to risk life
together,” John sings in an urgent whisper.
This, he says, is what he tries to do in his talks. Bring
people into contact, confrontation with each other. Kids and parents, husbands
and wives, strangers and strangers.
“This is what I’m about,” he explains. “Whenever possible I
discuss possibilities of a lifetime. Whatever allows us to be free with each
other, whatever allows us to discover the transcendence that gives meaning to
life – that’s the chance of a lifetime.”
* * *
THAT’S BEEN
his offer for three years now. He’s sought to take it further in the past year
by working more on his music and using the extra freedom of a leave of absence
granted by the Diocese of Buffalo.
And while he and Joe are confident they can work through
radio, TV and stereo as well as the parish, they’re not sure whether this idea
isn’t a little ahead of its time.
That’s why John wants people to judge his songs just as they
would any other songs on the radio. And why Joe stresses that reaffirmation of
common human values need not be dull or relegated to Sunday mornings.
“When I go in to give a program, it’s not to entertain,” John says. “When somebody asks me that, I tell them entertainment is the first thing that will happen, but beyond that we can say something to each other, share feelings with one another, love one another back to life.”
The box/sidebar
Encouragement Helps
The encouragement for John Radice’s album, “God Don’t Make No
Junk,” came from a burly
McDonough had been auctioneer at a Memorial Auditorium
auction to benefit Father Donohue’s former inner city parish. Hearing John’s
songs last fall, he urged recording, then helped set up the sessions and the
musicians to play on them.
* * *
GIVEN THE JOB
of sorting out John’s normally wayward rhythms and coming up with high-grade
arrangements were folk-commercial singers Don and Sherry Hackett, pianist Joe
Azzarella, bass guitarist Bobby Radle and drummer Al Rizzuto.
They did it in Don and Sherry’s
“We went to all hours of the night doing it,” John says. “It
was an intense week. The key to the success of the whole operation was Sherry.
She kept tensions down and kept everyone re-energized with coffee.”
* * *
FROM THE ALBUM a
jingle was to go out to radio stations here and in
The album is something of a milestone in
And there’s no sign that John hadn’t been singing to the
recording arrangements for months. Sherry Hackett’s sweet ethereal voice graces
two of the songs. Azzarella kicks out some fine jazzy piano to close “Look
Around” with a flourish. And “God Don’t Make No Junk” is tight and snappy.
* * *
REAL APPEAL,
however, is not the backings or the engineering. It’s the songs themselves. All
of them warm, three of them real grabbers – “God Don’t Make No Junk,” “Be Born
Again” and “Look Around.”
There are negotiations for distribution by a major record
company, which’ll make getting the record not only easier but also cheaper. But
for the present it’s $5 from John Radice’s Share Enterprises,
* * * * *
IN THE PHOTO:
John Radice. It’s the same photo that appears on the cover of his “God Don’t
Make No Junk” album.
* * * * *
FOOTNOTE:
“Radice was ordained a Catholic priest in 1968. He
subsequently left the clergy and has been married for more than 35 years. A
longtime resident of
He told Kwiatkowski: “Aside from my family, I have
never been as passionate about something as I have been about the ukulele. The
reason is that the ukulele offers anyone who wants to make music the
opportunity to do so without being able to read music. I can teach you to play
a song in five minutes.”
His priestly intentions are still sharp. After church
services were shut down by the pandemic in 2020, John hosted Zoom sessions to
share Liturgy that had been taped at his parish,
You can see John doing “God Don’t Make No Junk” on
YouTube, where he performs on a banjolele, a cousin to the ukulele that’s
bigger and louder, and gives some instruction on how to play it.
Brother Joe came back to Buffalo in the 1970s and
taught communications and freshman religion at St. Joseph’s Collegiate
Institute. He had a radio talk show, where he interviewed prominent political
and religious people, and was a tireless promoter of the school’s musicals.
In his eulogy for Brother Joe in 2016, his good friend
and former St. Joe’s principal Brother Dominic Gisondo noted that health
problems had put Joe in a nursing home in New Jersey in 2003, that he subsequently underwent
a kidney transplant and that he published a memoir, “Ticket to Heaven,” in
2009.
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