“Mercy, Mercy, Mercy!” Spotlight on The Buckinghams’ Carl Giammarese

By Spotlight Central. Photos by Love Imagery

The Buckinghams are an American pop band from Chicago, Illinois. Formed in 1966, within a single year, the band had gone on to become recognized as “The Most Listened To Band In America” by Billboard magazine charting five Top 40 hits. After over a half century, the group still continues to delight audiences around the country.

With the recent suspension of live concerts, Spotlight Central decided to chat with Buckinghams’ founding member Carl Giammarese — a talented singer, songwriter, instrumentalist, and music producer — in an effort to learn more about his life and history with The Buckinghams, and to find out what he’s he’s been up to lately in a time when sheltering in place and social distancing has become the new norm.

Spotlight Central: Hi Carl, how are you?

Carl Giammarese: I’m doing fine; how about you?

Spotlight Central: We’re hanging in there! Today, we want to talk about what you’ve been up to these days, but we thought we’d start out by finding out a bit more about you and your musical background. Is that ok?

Carl Giammarese: Sure.

Spotlight Central: Do you come from a musical family?

Carl Giammarese: Well, my dad was a singer before World War II who performed around Chicago with several different bands. He had a great voice in the Perry Como vocal style of the time. He was a crooner — I’d guess you’d say he was a tenor-baritone.

When the war broke out, he went into the service and was shipped overseas. He was in the Army Air Force, but was injured driving a truckload of bombs. He ended up in the hospital after breaking his leg when his truck crashed, and he was singing to the nurses in the hospital when one of them said, “You should try out for Special Services and entertain the troops.”

So my dad did that and he started performing with a band called The Continentals. Then, he was picked up by The Glenn Miller Orchestra and he traveled all around England and France entertaining the troops; I’ve even got pictures of him singing at the Stage Door Canteen, which is in London. He made some recordings, too, when he was in England — they’re kind of scratchy now — but I can tell you he was a very natural singer; more so than me. I took some lessons back in the day and I worked with a singing coach a long time ago, but my dad just did everything the right way, so how he used his voice was really very natural.

Anyway, Glenn Miller said to him, “Hey, at the end of the war, come see me in New York,” but, of course, Glenn Miller went missing during the war and never did come back. My dad finally got back to the States but he got away from music — he had to go to work to raise his family — so he never went any further with his music, but I inherited some of his talent, that’s for sure.

Spotlight Central: When you were growing up, what kind of music did you listen to?

Carl Giammarese: When I was young, I listened to various types of music. The first band I ever played in was a group called The Centuries. My cousin Jerry started the group when I was maybe 15 years old. All we had was an old set of drums and one Silvertone amplifier that three of us plugged into. Because we didn’t have a PA system with microphones, we couldn’t do any songs with vocals, so we’d play parties doing only instrumentals.

The first song I ever learned how to play on the guitar was “Walk Don’t Run” by The Ventures, and I played some of their other songs too like “Pipeline” and “Out Of Limits” — they were all instrumentals. These days, I listen to them out of curiosity but, you know, they were pretty darn good recordings the way they were made back in the day. And The Surfari’s “Wipe Out” was another one I learned; for some reason, [laughs] every time we’d play that song at a party, a fight would break out!

Now, at that point in my life, we didn’t want anything to do with our parents’ music. Their music, which was the music of the big band era — Glenn Miller and Perry Como, as I mentioned, and Sinatra and a lot of the crooners — we weren’t really embracing; we were pretty far removed from it. So it’s kind of funny now that I will connect with members of some of the new young bands around today and they embrace the music of The Buckinghams! I think they can relate to it because we were a five-piece rock band and they’re still doing a lot of that same thing today. They seem to be lot more connected to the music of the ’60s and ’70s than we were with our parents’ big band music, but over the years, I’ve come to appreciate that kind of kind of thing, too.

Spotlight Central: As a founding member of The Buckinghams, your group became one of most listened-to groups in the country in 1967 with an entire series of Top 40 hits. We know of so many budding young musicians who would have loved to have a #1 record in their lifetimes, and you guys were able to achieve that with “Kind of a Drag.” What was it like for you to have the #1 song in the nation, especially at such a young age?

Carl Giammarese: It was just phenomenal — it elicited a lot of different emotions — and it was a little scary, too. All of a sudden, after playing locally around Chicago — and also nearby in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Indiana — we were thrown out into the national spotlight. What helped us a little bit was that we were five guys in a band, so that made it a little easier. It was all very exciting, but a little intimidating, too.

You have to understand that when “Kind of a Drag” hit the charts, I was a senior in high school. I was the youngest in the band, and the last one still in school. I went from being an “A” student for three years to barely getting through that last year, trying to keep up. The guys would pick me up — like on a Friday night — and we’d pile into a van and lay on top of our equipment and drive out to places as far as Aberdeen, South Dakota, and then come back. So just trying to keep up with school and the band was a challenge; in fact, I was prepared to just drop out of high school in my senior year and finish later, because I didn’t want to pass up the opportunity of having a #1 record and being a part of a national group, but, yeah, it was pretty crazy — I was a young guy of just 17 or 18 when that song took off.

Spotlight Central: And you’ve had so many hits with The Buckinghams which you still perform today, and they still hold up so beautifully. Do you have a favorite Buckinghams recording that you like to listen to and, perhaps, a favorite song that you like to perform live as well?

Carl Giammarese: Well, the favorite I like to listen to — the one I feel that, when I hear it, we really accomplished something special was “Don’t You Care,” because it was a giant step forward. I don’t want to take anything away from “Kind of a Drag,” because it was great — that record really had a lot of punch to the way it sounded, and it was a great song that Jim Holvey wrote. We recorded that song at Chess Studios in Chicago on South Michigan Avenue which was famous for a lot of blues artists who had recorded there — Muddy Waters, Little Walter, and even Chuck Berry and The Stones recorded there — and we had the opportunity to go into that studio and work with the great Ron Malo, who engineered a lot of hit records back in the day.

But after “Kind of a Drag,” our record deal was up with USA Records, which was a Chicago-based label. You can imagine that when you have the #1 record in the country and you don’t have a record deal, you can pretty much call the shots and sign with anyone. Well, we found a new manager in Jim Guercio and we signed with Columbia Records, and you can really hear the difference in the quality of the recording on “Don’t You Care” from “Kind of a Drag,” because all of a sudden we were in New York recording at Columbia Studios and we were recording on 16-track machines, and so our music just took a giant step forward. Plus Jim Guercio produced us and he was really a good producer — as many people know, he went on to produce the band Chicago.

So “Don’t You Care” is my favorite song to listen to, but my favorite Buckingham song to perform live is “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy.” The reason it’s my favorite is because I love the response from our audiences when they start singing along and, also, it’s got a certain energy which is different from our other songs. Really, it’s a song that any decent band can perform, because if you can cover the vocals, it’s not that hard to play — it’s more about getting the feel — so it’s just a great song that’s made to be performed live, and that’s why it’s my favorite.

Spotlight Central: After The Buckinghams broke up in the early ’70s, you worked with the duo, Tufano and Giammarese, but after that, you performed on a number of jingles. Can you tell us about some of the commercials you recorded?

Carl Giammarese: Well, between 1976 and 1982, I sang on about 300 commercials, and most of them were national campaigns. Chicago was a jingle town, and many of the big ad agencies were here, so the studios were really buzzing — there were about five or six that were producing commercials and I’d go from one studio to the next. I initially got into it because of Bonnie Herman, the “queen of jingles” — who was a good friend of mine — and her husband, Tom Radtke, who was a drummer. Bonnie had a beautiful voice and she sang on everything; she was just phenomenal.

I was trying to figure out what to do with my life after Tufano and Giammarese broke up, and The Buckinghams hadn’t played since 1970, so Bonnie and Tom helped me connect with some of the jingle producers around Chicago. I put a tape together and shopped it around to them; they started calling me and, pretty soon, I was working regularly. I did all the United Airlines commercials, both TV and radio — you know [sings] “Fly the friendly skies” — and I sang a lot of McDonalds campaigns — you know [sings] “Big Mac, Filet of Fish, Quarter Pounder, French fries, sundaes, and apple pies/You deserve a break today at McDonalds.” I also did RC Cola and beer commercials, and one of the first jingles I ever did was for Lava soap, which I don’t think is even in business any more.

So doing that was a big part of my life. And it kind of overlapped with me getting The Buckinghams back together, which was back in 1980. I was doing the jingles because, for a singer, it was pretty lucrative. You’d go in and do a session for an hour and you’d get paid for it — but after becoming a SAG-AFTRA member, you’d also get residuals and you could make thousands of dollars on a single commercial. So it was a great time for me — I met a lot of great people and a lot of talented singers and got a chance to work with them — just at the time The Buckinghams were getting back together.

Spotlight Central: And since getting The Buckinghams back together, you guys have been going strong for over a half-century. Unfortunately, however, we currently find ourselves in a situation where people can’t go to see the band in concert, but you’ve still found a way to connect with your fans with your “Live From the Basement” series of streaming videos. Can you tell us a little more about how that came to be?

Carl Giammarese: Well, the last time The Buckinghams all played together was on February 29th at the BergenPAC in New Jersey; that was the last show we did with the entire band. And then on March 5, we played in the Chicago area at the Genesee Theatre; our bassist Nick Fortuna, our guitarist Dave Zane, and I did an “unplugged” show. We did our songs with just two acoustic guitars, bass, and vocals on the same stage as the group America.

But after that, our concerts — the ones scheduled for March, April, May, etc. — started to get postponed. I was sitting around not knowing when we were going to play again and my publicist, Dawn Lee Wakefield, said, “You’ve gotta do some songs and connect with the fans!” and I was thinking, “How am I going to do that? I don’t have the equipment here. All I’ve got is my iPhone — what’s that gonna be like? Pretty crude!”

But what convinced me to give it a try was I went looking on YouTube where I found the great Paul Simon playing “Slip Slidin’ Away.” It looked like he was in an empty basement playing into his iPhone. The quality wasn’t that great — it didn’t sound that good, and the lighting was pretty bad — but I said to myself, “If the great Paul Simon can do it, why can’t I?,” and so I gave it a try.

Initially, I did “Don’t You Care.” Dawn put it up on YouTube and Facebook and the response was so overwhelming it inspired me to keep going — and, by this point, I think I’ve done about eight or nine songs already.

Spotlight Central: Oh, yeah! We’ve seen all of them and we were especially impressed with your version of The Beatles’ “Blackbird” — especially in terms of your guitar skills; that’s not the easiest song to play — and we really enjoyed your original composition, “Oh, Lord Make Me More Like You,” a video which you put out on Easter Sunday.

Carl Giammarese: Thanks! As I explain on the video, that was something I wrote in about a half hour, and a few Christian artists have even picked up on it and recorded it.

Spotlight Central: Is there any chance you could give us a sneak peak of some of the songs you’re thinking about using?

Carl Giammarese: Well, I’m thinking about doing a song I wrote called “Music Everywhere.” It was a semi-hit for our duo, Tufano and Giammarese, back in 1973 which got to about #63 on the national charts. I might do “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” too, and I might even do a little reminiscing and go back to some of those instrumental songs I used to play as a young musician back in the day.

Spotlight Central: Which brings us full circle, I guess! It’s been great talking to you, Carl; is there anything you’d like to add?

Carl Giammarese: Well, just that this situation we’re facing is very serious and one we’ve never faced in our lifetime. On behalf of myself and The Buckinghams, our thoughts and prayers go out to everybody — not just to our fans — but to the entire world. We’re all suffering in terms of what’s happening to businesses and jobs, but I just think this social distancing and sheltering in place is the right thing to do because we don’t want this to come back with a roar and get even worse.

I’m a big supporter of what the governors and the mayors in various states and cities are doing, and in my community where I live, we just finished hanging blue ribbons on all the posts in support of all the health care workers and doctors and nurses. They are saints, and I can’t say enough about their contributions. We all want to get on with our lives, and in order to do so, we’ve got to be positive. This will pass, and will get back to normal again. I guarantee it!

To learn more about Carl Giammarese and The Buckinghams, please go to thebuckinghams.com. To see Carl Giammarese’s “Live from the Basement” series of videos, please click on www.facebook.com/pg/CarlGiammarese.