March 10, 1973: Frank Mayo goes solo
In 1973, everyone knew him as Frank Mayo. These days he’s Sonny.
March 10, 1973
Now He’s a Soloist, Singing Ballads, Pop Tunes
IT’S FRANK MAYO’S weekly moving day and he’s contemplating it with no great joy as he
lunches on a baloney and cheese sandwich in the breakfast nook of his
second-floor flat across from a
Back in the old days it used to be worse. The rock group he
was in had a
Now Frank’s a solo performer, singing ballads and peppy Top
40 tunes, playing guitar and lately electric piano. The arrangement agrees with
him, he’ll tell you later on, but it also means he has to tote his equipment
around by himself.
* * *
“MY WIFE IS
out shopping with the big car,” he groans, “so I’m going to have to try to get
all that stuff into the Volkswagen. No, she couldn’t take it, she doesn’t drive
standard shift.
“Maybe if I take out the back seat,” he muses. “There’s so
much rust on that car I’m afraid I’ll hit a bump and the battery will fall
out.”
The move is from the Pied Piper on
There’s time to kill before the Pied Piper opens, so Frank
pulls a bottle of Italian wine out of the refrigerator and tells how Hurricane
Agnes made a solo artist out of him.
“I was in a group called Fresh Heir and we were tryin’ to
get into the typical Vegas thing, you know, tuxedos, putting on a show, but we
were really loose. We did a gig at the Three Coins and bombed. A nut flew off my
guitar and landed in some lady’s drink. It was terrible.
* * *
“THEN I WENT OFF for National Guard summer camp and when it was over I was activated
for the floods. We were supposed to go into Eduardo’s when I got back but they
decided to stop using groups and started hiring single acts. We hadn’t played
in a month because I was away and that finished u.”
But Frank didn’t give up. He went back to Eduardo’s, told
them he was a soloist and auditioned.
“I had my guitar and borrowed a drummer’s hi-hat cymbal to
work with my foot,” he says. “All you could hear was that hi-hat crashing
through the PA. It was awful. The next day I went out and bought one of those
electronic drummers.”
Eduardo’s hired him nevertheless for their
Frank’s blonde wife Chris pops in with a load of laundry
and groceries, stashes them away in a flash and goes out again to visit her
mother before starting the evening shift at New York Telephone, where she’s a
supervisor.
“I call her Gusto,” Frank says as the VW lurches toward the
Pied Piper. “She moves like a gust of wind. I guess you could say we were high
school sweethearts.”
* * *
“WE BOTH WENT
to Cardinal O’Hara and one night I was at a dance there and she came over to me
on a ladies’ choice. I looked up at her and saw those big blue eyes and that
was it. We went together five years before we got married.”
The minute Frank parks beside the Pied Piper, owner Dick
LaClaire roars up. “You’ll never fit all your stuff in that VW,” he grins at
Frank. “Why don’t you use mine?”
That, friends, is a joke. You couldn’t squeeze a keg of
beer into the back of Dick’s Corvette.
“I’ve only been here three weeks,” Frank says as he packs
up his microphones, “but the crowds have been really good. Friday night all
they wanted to do was dance. I think I played only two ballads.”
* * *
BALLADS WERE
almost Frank’s downfall last autumn. An avid Gordon Lightfoot fan (he sounds
enough like Lightfoot to be his double), he filled his sets with the Canadian
songwriter’s slow and tender ballads. And it seemed to work.
“People were coming up and giving me all these
compliments,” Frank says as he struggles to fit the electric piano into the
car. “They’d say I did Lightfoot better than Lightfoot.
“But what I really needed was criticism. Finally a friend
came up and told me I was playing too many slow songs. He was right. When
people go out they don’t want to sit around, they like to hear something lively.”
Frank has dropped a lot of his Lightfoot load, though
there’s one song, “Beautiful,” that he’d like to record. He’d thought of
recording locally last month, but now wants to hold off until he can get a
session in
“Recording’s like a fantasy,” he says as he steers toward
* * *
“RIGHT NOW I’m
happy working alone. You don’t have the ego conflicts you have with groups and
it’s a lot easier to learn new songs. I’ve written more songs too since I’ve
been on my own.
“My songs seldom have a happy note. I’m a very moody
writer. And I’m very much into lyrics – I must have umpteen thousand lyrics
sitting at home. What I need is to meet someone with some melodies.”
Frank pulls into the parking lot of the
“Say, man,” Max says as they shake hands, “you gotta be kidding me. Did you really get all your equipment into that little Bug?”
The box/sidebar:
What Started Mayo in Music?
It took Frank Mayo a while to get used to the idea of being
a solo performer. He missed the harmonies. He missed the sound of bass and
drums (“I dig a lotta bottom,” he says). He missed having other people on stage
to share the blame when an audience got hostile.
“Last summer I thought, gee, it sure sounds empty to me,
but now I’m getting used to it,” he remarks. “I added the piano and I’m going
to start using harmonica, but I’m not going to get ridiculous about it.”
* * *
WHAT STARTED
him in music was the weekly program his school used to have when he was in
eighth grade. One week one of his friends got up and did some songs on guitar.
“I figured that was what I wanted to do too,” he says. “My
first guitar was one my uncle had. It had a crack down the back so big you
could see through it.”
He was in bands throughout high school and listened to a
lot of blues, especially B. B. King. His local favorite was Raven and he’d
sneak off to see them whenever he had a free evening.
When he transferred to
* * *
“WE WERE
there 11 months and we had some great times,” he says. “Then I graduated and
went into the National Guard and spent the summer of 1971 in
Back in
At 23, Frank’s aware that his musical career may have
limitations. That’s why he’s studying at Columbia School of Broadcasting with
an eye toward getting a part-time job as a disc jockey.
“I want to develop radio as a sideline,” he says. “After
all, I don’t expect to be doing what I’m doing now forever.”
* * * * *
FOOTNOTE: Music turned out to be Frank’s sideline. For
nearly 30 years, as Frank Mayo, he was a professor of speech and theater arts
at
On stage, he’s Sonny Mayo. And he’s kept on
songwriting. He generated a dozen albums between “So Far So Good,” released in
He also plays regularly, often for benefit shows,
either as a solo performer or with his trio, The Lowdown, doing folk, blues and
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