March 3, 1973: Clint Holmes on the upswing

 

A glimpse of this homegrown hero as he was blasting off on his rocket ride to the big time. The best was yet to come and it was approaching at warp speed. 

March 3, 1973 

Blue Chip Star Comes Home for Visit 

ASK CLINT HOLMES about “Playground in My Mind” and he’ll tell you it’s not like what he usually does in his show. He may mention “Candy Man,” a rather appropriate comparison, and the good things that it did for Sammy Davis Jr.

          And “Playground” has sold like Inaugural souvenirs in and around Washington, D.C., where Clint has been building his career for about three years now – maybe 60,000 or 70,000 copies. It’s put him right on top of the town.

          Since it came out in July, the crowds have gotten bigger and the clubs he plays have gotten plusher. The big one, the ultimate, came right after New Year’s. The Shoreham Blue Room, the room Tony Bennett plays.

* * *

FIRST NIGHT THERE, Clint spies the critic from the Washington Star, who can make or break shows in the Blue Room. What he likes are ballads – he’ll put you down for the rowdy stuff – and that’s what Clint did that night.

          If things were good before the Blue Room, they got abundantly sensational while Clint was there. Six hundred people a night and the weekends – forget it.

          The newspaper put him on the cover of its Sunday magazine and at the end of his final Blue Room show, the crowd gave him a 10-minute ovation. The town was his, he’d done it.

          For an encore, the only thing to do was leave, go on tour – Detroit first, then Bermuda and six weeks in New Orleans. “We hit the PEAK in Washington,” Clint was saying last week.

* * *

HE WAS HOME – home for the first time in a year and a half, back in the brightly-decorated house in Farnham where he grew up, not far from Evangola State Park.

          Last time he was here, he scarcely had time to see relatives and old friends because he was working, playing six nights a week at Rusch’s Restaurant in Dunkirk. This time was different – a two-week break before Detroit and nothing to do.

          “There’s going to be 22 people here tonight,” Clint says. “I don’t know where they’re all going to fit.”

          His mother and wife Brenda take off for some last-minute shopping while Clint, who’s 26, talks about how he wasn’t born in Farnham at all, but in Bournemouth, England, where his father, a Black serving in the Army, met and married his mother, a blonde British opera singer.

          His mother was his first vocal coach. In Lake Shore High School he had a band and in 1964 went to Fredonia State as a trombone major.

* * *

“AT THE SAME TIME I was working clubs in Buffalo,” he says. “The Club Sheridan was one. I’d be getting home at 4, 5 a.m. and missing my 8, 9 and 10 o’clock classes. But I really wanted to sing.

          “When I first started, I was Andy Williams. Like my favorite singers were him, Tony Bennett and Johnny Mathis. That’s where I was directed musically.”

          By the end of the year, he was out of college and into the Army-Navy Music School in Norfolk, Va.

          “I was buggin’ ‘em to sing,” Clint says, “and then the commanding officer, his mother was coming and her name was Alfie and so they asked me to sing ‘Alfie.’

          “The captain cried, his mother cried and afterwards he called me in and said: ‘Holmes, how’d you like to stay here and be librarian.’ I traveled all around with him for eight months on guest performances. I didn’t spend much time in the library.”

* * *

AFTER THAT it was Army Chorus in Washington, two years of singing the same five songs. “‘Who Can I Turn To’ was one of the biggies,” he recalls, “and the ending was so corny I was almost embarrassed.”

          He began scouting around Washington when his hitch was up, looking to launch his career. He needed a band and he needed a good agent.

          First came guitarist Fred Karns, now Clint’s arranger and good friend, and Fred rounded up the rest of a quartet – bass, drum and keyboard. Then, of three prospective managers, he chose Bill (Ziggy) Zeigman.

          Ziggy was semi-retired, a former promoter fed up with show business, but Clint was his kind of singer, worth getting back into the rat race for. They signed a long-term contract and Ziggy got to work building a star.

          He started with the Judge’s Inn, … which Clint describes as “long and narrow, like a bowling alley.” The first night the band outnumbered the audience. Eight months later you had to pay to get in.

          Ziggy used those months to work up a new style for his singer. After closing, they’d pick the act apart over coffee at some all-night restaurant – Ziggy, Clint and Fred. People stopped comparing him to Johnny Mathis.

* * *

“I CHANGED 360 degrees,” Clint says. “From ballad singing, I went to material that was totally up. Boom, boom, crunch, crash. Ziggy made me do things that initially sounded like they’d be horrible, but they worked.

          “Like the first time he said: ‘I want you to start dancing,’ I said: ‘C’mon, I’m a singer, not a dancer.’ But Brenda happens to be an excellent dancer and she helped me learn. It evolved from dancing to moving. Now I don’t dance a lot, but I move and I enjoy it.

          “Another time Ziggy said: ‘After the show, go out and touch the women.’ And I told him: ‘Oh man, I’m married.’ Until I tried it a few times and it’s more like thanking them and them thanking me.

* * *

“THERE WERE THINGS like that I never would’ve thought of doing, that I thought were phony, but it turns out to be real. He really worked with me to make me come out of myself.”

          Clint took to studying with the voice teacher of another well-known Washingtonian – Roberta Flack – and fished for record offers. Producers listened to him, shook their heads and turned him down.

          “They said I was too good a singer,” he says. “They wanted me to slur my words and scream.”

          The first one who didn’t was Paul Vance, the man who wrote “Chances Are” for Johnny Mathis, now an independent producer in New York City.

* * *

CLINT WAS PLAYING the Bahamas and in walks Vance. For the second show, out comes the Mathis imitation and the man practically fell off his chair. “The next day,” Clint says, “he spent $155 on phone calls to my manager.”

          The recording was done in New York City last spring while the band was playing the discotheque Shepheard’s and eventually filling in a couple nights for Al Green at the Copacabana.

          “We decided to do a very commercial song,” Clint explains. “A lot of people in Washington were very disappointed. They said why don’t you do this or do that. But it looks like it mi-i-ight be a hit. It just got to Buffalo and somewhere else, Detroit.”

          Already he’s a valuable enough attraction to be too expensive for even the top night clubs in the Buffalo area. The only way Buffalo will get to see Clint Holmes is if he gets bigger and it’s a pretty sure bet he will.

          “I’ve been getting good vibes since the first of the year,” he says. “The Shoreham, that was more than I expected. The show got a review in Variety and it was a rave. They said I’m going to be ‘a blue chip star.’ I feel like it’s all going to explode now.” 

The box/sidebar: 

Brenda Learned About the Fans 

          For petite Brenda Holmes, the worst thing about being the wife of a budding blue chip star is keeping from saying just what she thinks, especially to those women who come up to Clint in between shows when she’s there.

          “She’s had to learn to be docile,” Clint says, “and she’s anything but docile. She’s very intelligent, but she’s had to bite her lip.”

* * *

CLINT AND BRENDA met in Norfolk, Va., while he was in the Army-Navy Music School and she was a drama major from Houston finishing up at Hampton Institute. He was helping a school group with singing and she was an adviser.

          They married and moved to Washington, where Brenda did graduate work at Catholic University. Later she had a TV show on Washington’s educational channel which won six Emmy Awards.

* * *

“SHE LEFT IT after a year and a half,” Clint says, “because we were never seeing each other. She’d be working all day and I’d be working all night.”

          When Clint goes off on his upcoming three-month tour, however, Brenda will stay in their Silver Springs, Md., apartment, getting ready for a new TV show.

          “She’ll only be the host on this one,” Clint says. “That way we’ll have a little more time together.”

* * * * *

IN THE PHOTOS: Clint. Both of them. 

* * * * *

FOOTNOTE: Before March 1973 was over, “Playground in My Mind” had jumped aboard the Billboard Hot 100. It topped out at No. 2 nationwide in June (behind Paul McCartney’s “My Love”), was certified Gold in July and spent 23 weeks on the charts.

          Although the pop world considers him a one-hit wonder, Clint has been a perennial attraction in casinos. In Las Vegas, the main showroom at Harrah’s was named after him. In Atlantic City, he was entertainer of the year three times.

          He also was the announcer/sidekick on “The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers” from 1986 to 1988 on Fox. He won a local Emmy for a TV talk show he hosted in New York City in 1991. Beginning in 1990, he served as host of the “Honda Campus All-Star Challenge” in the BET network.

Less successful was “Comfortable Shoes,” the musical he wrote about his early days. Debuting in 1996 with him in the lead role, it touched on an issue he didn’t bring up in our interview – the racism he faced as a kid. Also not mentioned was his sister, Gayle, a singer who for many years was a soloist with the U.S. Navy Band.

His marriage to Brenda ended in the mid 2000s. On Nov. 11, 2007, he was wed to Kelly Clinton, an actress, comedian and singer who had appeared with him and Sheena Easton in “Vegas Live” in 2003. The two of them  performed together in the Riviera Theatre in North Tonawanda in 2017.

He’s still on stage regularly in Vegas these days and if you’re in Boca Raton, Fla., July 8 to 10, you can catch his new Nat King Cole show, “Straighten Up and Fly Right,” at the Wick Theatre and Costume Museum. He’s with pianist Billy Stritch, who’s Liza Minnelli’s music director.

According to an article in the Las Vegas Review-Journal in 2014, Clint, his daughter, two sons and their families all live in Green Valley, outside Las Vegas. It also mentions that he was diagnosed with colon cancer 10 years earlier and caught it in time.

          Meanwhile, Buffalo got an annual visit from Clint for many years. He’s been a regular guest, and several times the host, on the Variety Club Telethon.

          During his Telethon visit in 1989, he gave a benefit concert at his alma mater, Lake Shore Central High School, to raise money to build a playground for the kids in Farnham. Helping to put together the band for that occasion was one of The Professors (see Feb. 17)  – Steve Willis.

P.S.: Had Wikipedia been around in 1973, I would have discovered back then that Paul Vance did not write “Chances Are” for Johnny Mathis. He did, however, write the lyrics for a lesser Mathis hit in 1963, “What Will Mary Say.” 

Vance also concocted some far more memorable songs, notably “Catch a Falling Star” for Perry Como and the No. 1 hit for Brian Hyland, “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini,” in 1960. He’s still alive and collecting royalty checks in Boca Raton. Look for him in one of the reserved seats at Clint’s Nat King Cole show.