June 15, 1974: Gabriel Farago

 

Meet a relentless charmer from Hungary by way of Gowanda, where his father was a shrink at the Psychiatric Center. 

June 15, 1974

Gabriel Steps into the Mecca of Country Music 

GABRIEL FARAGO’S mother shushes the dog. Gabriel’s out in the sun, she says in her lilting Hungarian accent. She’ll call him. A country music station plays softly from the kitchen.

          He emerges from the back of the new house just outside Gowanda taller and somehow thinner than I recall him from the last time we met eight years ago in Dunkirk.

          It was me and three others in a just-born rock band buying our first amp from Gabriel, who was playing the Top 40 of the day and old rock in the CYO down the street with a band he called Gabriel & The Angels.

          Gabriel’s the sort of person you don’t forget. Not just for his shaggy amiability and that self-assurance that he was born to be in the spotlight, but also for his bouts with the unpredictability of fate.

          “Remember this old Chet Atkins,” he’s saying. “I loaned it to some kid and he lost the cover to the bold that adjusts the neck. I bought it in New York City in 1964. The original George Harrison guitar.”

          His mother brings cake and coffee with whipped cream to make it Viennese. She’s become a big country music fan, he says, since she’s been listening for his record on WWOL.

          “David R. Snow really likes it. They play it maybe five times a day,” he says, digging up a week-old WWOL top records sheet.

          There it is among the extras – the old Beatles’ “Rubber Soul” tune, “I’ve Just Seen a Face” by Gabriel on Kriszta Records.

          “My little girl’s named Kriszta,” he says. “I named the label after her.”

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IT SOUNDS just like a country record should – deep, hard-luck vocals a bit like Johnny Cash and a first-rate Nashville studio band that kicks into high gear when Gabriel goes: “All right, Mr. Banjo.”

          He took his first step into country music last fall, partly because of his growing admiration for the songs of Kris Kristofferson and Mac Davis. And partly because he had some songs and figured Nashville would be the easiest place to get someone to hear them.

          “I had a car and I asked my father, ‘Dad, is it worth $400 to you? I need the money to go to Nashville.’ So with my piano player, Eddie Califano Jr., don’t forget the junior, I set forth for the mecca of country music.

          “I called Scotty Moore, Elvis’ old guitarist, whom I heard had an independent record company. I played him a tape and he liked the material and the voice and he said he could record me right away.

          “He rounded up some backup musicians: D. J. Fontana, Elvis’ old drummer, Pete Drake on steel guitar – we recorded at Pete’s place – and Vic Jordan on banjo. He was just on ‘Hee-Haw’ a couple months ago.

          “It was definitely a big favor. We did six songs. Those guys really kick it.”

          Before that, Gabriel had been struggling for more than a year trying to make a comeback after dropping music for a while to go to college and teach.

          What inspired him to get back into music was seeing Cody Marshall & The Circle of Friends, a tight commercial show band, at Rusch’s in Dunkirk early in 1972.

          He did a couple of guest shots in Las Vegas and had an offer to stay at a club in Salt Lake City, but being married at the time decided to return home.

          No such offers met him when he got back. For a while he lived off the money he got from selling his gun collection (“That bear on the living room floor,” he says, “I shot it up in Maine.”)

          And playing horn for a show band on the Showboat, having been a brass major – a tuba major in fact – when he started college in Fredonia.

* * *

“I ALMOST starved,” he says. “And I’m thin anyway. Thin isn’t the word. Skinny. I guess I don’t relax enough. Plus if I do two meals a day, it seems like a lot.

          “Last October was a big turning point for me, when I started getting into country music. I’ve always had a latent interest, but I’d never been exposed to the hard-core sod-stomping eee-ahh stuff before.”

          His songs have a whimsy that has country written all over them. Like the demo tape he made in Buffalo of his hip rewrite of “The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” with pianist Jimmy Calire boogie-woogieing for all he’s worth in the background.

          “I really like country rock and rockabilly,” he says. “I think the mid ‘50s was the greatest time for popular music. There was something magnetic about it. I’ve always been attracted to that sort of music.”

          Since I don’t have to work the next day, I hitch a ride to Gabriel’s gig that night at the Brandywine, a newly-remodeled club on the Conewango Street extension that’s one of the three places in Warren, Pa., you can dance.

* * *

“IT’S AN off-night, Thursday, and Gabriel’s band does a perfunctory warm-up – Ed Califano on electric piano, Jim Ritacco on guitar and sax and Mike LiVecchi on drums – but when Gabriel steps on stage things come together for a fun night of old rock ‘n roll (there’s a big Elvis medley) and recent country hits.

          Gabriel’s new booking agent, a Corpus Christi Texan named Clay Warner, is there. He’s lined up a few jobs already, like the one tonight and next Wednesday, Friday and Saturday at the Shamrock on Route 17 in Wellsville.

          Gabriel, meanwhile, will be on WWOL’s Musci Appreciation Day programming July 14.

* * *

“YOU KNOW what I’d like to do,” he’s saying in the four-wheel-drive truck on the way home, “take some of the old gypsy songs and translate them into English. Do country music and Hungarian gypsy music. I feel a strong spirit of Hungarian culture in myself and I’d like to combine the Hungarian and the American musically.

          “Aside from pop or country music, though, the biggest honor I got came the other day when I sang the Hungarian national anthem when Cardinal Mindszenty was in Dunkirk.

          “I must say I enjoyed that more than seeing Elvis. I had a chance to talk to him a couple minutes. He’s got such a piercing look. I felt such a surge of energy, of really faith, spilling over just holding onto his hands.

          “Say, why don’t you come in and have a piece of cake before you hit the road home,” he says as we pull into the driveway. “My mother’ll be hurt if you don’t take some.”

* * * * *

IN THE PHOTO: Gabriel Farago in a publicity photo.

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FOOTNOTE: Gabriel went back to Nashville and hooked up with one of the master producers, Howard Bradley. He cracked the country charts in 1981 with a song called “I Think I Could Love You Better than He Did” and toured with Emmylou Harris and Lee Greenwood. More singles followed. Although he didn’t become a household name, he became a producer himself and picked up enough wisdom along the way to write a book, “Secrets to Success in Country Music.” He gives seminars on the subject.

He also found religion. In 2006, he became a Pentecostal minister. “I loved the Pentecostals,” he told the Southern Utah News in 2014, “but I missed the fullness of the Sacraments of Mother Church.” So in 2012 he was ordained in the Catholic Charismatic Church. He’s the “Honky Tonk Priest.” While his phone still has a Nashville 615 area code, the home of his Father Gabriel Ministries is down by Lake Pontchartrain in Mandeville, La., directly across the causeway from New Orleans.

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FURTHER NOTE: All of these transcripts of old feature articles about the Buffalo music scene can be found in a somewhat more legible and searchable form on my Blogspot site: https://www.blogger.com/blog/posts/4731437129543258237.