My Afternoon With Tony Bennett
And the question he asked that changed my life
Back when I was writing about music for magazines — before I became a professional musician, before the band I co-founded snowballed into a career that’s taken me places I never dreamed of — I spent an afternoon with Tony Bennett, in his apartment overlooking Central Park, interviewing him about his new record.
Reading that back, it sounds so cool and collected. To be clear: I was neither. Aggressively, chaotically neither -- a ball of pure adrenaline for days. This was Tony Bennett. I’d been listening to his music forever. When I was 8, I was so obsessed with the record he’d made with Count Basie that I named my pet owl (long story) Peepers, after “Jeepers Creepers.”
And I was going to get to talk to him. At his house. Where he lives.
And those were just This-is-Tony-Bennett nerves. What I didn’t know, when I settled in on one of the cream-colored couches in his living room and dug out my notes, was that our conversation would bring me face to face with something I’d barely admitted to myself: I didn’t want to just write about music. I wanted to play my own.
I got through my questions and then we just started shooting the breeze. His dog sat snoring softly in his lap the whole time. I hadn’t planned on it, but we were going so deep about songs and then life that I told him I’d been singing (mostly) in the shower since I was a little kid. And at a certain point he said:
“When are you going to start singing outside the shower?”
I had an endless list of reasons why people like me don’t become professional musicians, but deep down, I was terrified. How would one even do such a thing? Where do you begin?
But over the course of the next three hours, Tony Bennett flipped the script on me. He was better than any therapist I’d had before or since. He was so warm and generous with his advice and wisdom and cautionary tales. He was absolutely lit from within.
The stories he told! A favorite: working as a runner at a jazz club when he was a kid, he was sent by Billie Holiday — who dug cash out of her garter — to fetch her some gin. The ways he made me question my assumptions about becoming an artist (one favorite: “You don’t have to be perfect, you just have to be truthful. I’m still working at getting better.”) It was his approach to creating a life in music that helped me make the leap into creating my own.
I saw Tony Bennett perform live as many times as I could. The voice, sure -- but it was his connection to the audience that was as deep and powerful as he made it seem effortless. At one show, he was telling a story when a woman a few rows from the stage yelled out a request: “I Wanna Be Around!”
Beat. And he replied:
“So do I, sweetheart. So do I.”
xo
Elizabeth
p.s. Please join me, my band and special guests as we wish Tony Bennett a very happy 100th Birthday August 3 at Joe’s Pub.