November 4, 1977 feature: Tom Calandra

 

A longtime Buffalo rocker finds a new direction.

Nov. 4, 1977 

Tom Calandra: Ace Jingle Writer 

          The college football pep song has turned pro. No longer does a winning big-league team have to settle for mere spoken or written praise. Its prowess can be sung to the rooftops, courtesy of a perky little ditty composed and recorded in a place where gridiron glory has scarcely shined for the past couple autumns.

          A recent morning found the man who gave Pittsburgh Steelers fans “Half a Ton of Trouble” and laid “Knockin’ on that Super Bowl Door” on followers of the Los Angeles Rams is down in the basement studio of his North Buffalo home. He’d been putting the finishing touches on a number that urges parents to get their children immunized.

          He’s Tom Calandra, a familiar figure in the local music scene since he was a teenager in the early ‘60s. First as bass player for the Raven, a virtuoso rock and R&B band that issued one album on Columbia before it shattered under the weight of its own talent. Then as a singing, piano-plunking, comic commentator on the news for WKBW radio. As usual, he’s wearing his cap.

          “Welcome to Buffalo’s creative music center” is his greeting. We descend into a cellar laced with the framework of partitions-to-come. Turn right at the washer and dryer and straight ahead to the end that’s finished – a control room and studio.

          He wants to close in another booth for horns and put another vocal booth over by the stairs. Next to the furnace, which will get its own cubicle, are the beginnings of an office.

          “It’s not the Electric Lady,” he concedes, “but it gets the job done. The idea is to have a place where people can creatively get together. As it is, people like Gary (Mallaber, a Raven bandmate who’s now drummer for the Steve Miller Band) have to go to the West Coast to make it. The way I see it, why can’t we get these people before they leave and do it here?

          “We’ve been using local people on the football songs and there’s 28 teams in the NFL. The guy who owns the Rams owns Warner Bros., so who knows? We’re going to make this the Nashville of the North and the L.A. of the East. There’s a lot of talent around here. They’re like diamonds in the rough.”

          Calandra’s first shot at the majors coincided with the Buffalo Sabres’ best shot at the National Hockey League championship. The bouncy “We’re Gonna Win That Cup” became the heartbeat of the city until the fatal moments of the 1975 finals against the Philadelphia Flyers. Such is the power of song.

          It also served to introduce vocalist Donna McDaniel, who has gone on to become a hometown star. Calandra had worked with her in a garage studio in the late ‘60s.

          “She was 14,” he says, “and she came in with her mother. I ran into her again years later when she was with a group. I was looking for the extra thing the song needed and Donna gave it that. She kind of made the whole thing magic.”

          The record of the cup song sold 17,000 copies – not bad for a tune recorded in the basement – and encouraged Calandra to go after more sports themes. He wrote about the Sabres’ French Connection line. The old ‘50s “Don’t Let Go” became “Sabres Show.” He offered a few others to NBC and was delighted to hear some of them during season coverage.

          These days Calandra compositions are cropping up all over. The primary outlet is Dan Neaverth’s morning show on WKBW. Calandra’s up at 8 to listen and maybe conjure a clever number for the next day. Sometimes he hits the piano and phones one in on the spot.

          He doesn’t stop there. KB’s “Buffalo Is a Friendly Place” tune? He revised the old version. WBEN morning man Jeff Kaye, who started Calandra writing commentaries when Kaye was program director at KB, suggested the Braves basketball team might be going places this year. The intrepid writer responded with “The New Improved Buffalo Braves.” His assessment: “You know they’re going to be dynamite …”

          With his subscription to Football News stacked on his piano bench, he’s got football songs in five cities. Donna McDaniel does one about the Dallas Cowboys. There’s one more finished for Houston, Calandra adds, “but they’re not doing so hot. With sports songs, you’ve gotta go with the winners.”

          He’s hit all the major sports expect tennis and couple of the stadiums as well. He has a boogie-woogie anthem to the Orange Bowl. A breezy number for the California Angels opens with a tribute to their giant flashing scoreboard (“There’s a place with a great big A …”). For good measure, he did one about pitcher Frank Tanana. Imagine the rhymes on that one.

          His songbook isn’t all sports pages, though. He keeps up on current affairs, checks in regularly on radio news at the top of the hour and spins his own editorials.

          “I’m a lot politer than I used to be,” he prefaces his run through a series of this year’s efforts, which cover everything from diplomatic relations with Cuba to the departure of Farrah Fawcett-Majors from “Charlie’s Angels.”

          “They’re more fun than being real serious,” he explains. “I think people will accept them more, since they’re not so heavy. I do these in the clubs too – I play one-nighters here and there, parties, stuff like that – and it’s amazing how people are familiar with a lot of them.”

          His singing commentaries on the times have spread to other cities. Radio stations play them in Washington, D.C. (he’s been adopted by WMAL’s afternoon team of Bill Trumbull and Chris Core); Hartford, Conn.; Miama, Oklahoma City, Los Angeles and New York (WNEW-AM). His song about giving the District of Columbia seats in Congress raised a flurry of comment in the Capitol. So did the one about the Concorde SST.

          “Danny (Neaverth) kinda experiments them for me,” he says. “If they work, I send them out.”

          Calandra composes commercial jingles in much the same way he does sports tunes – with a group of people around the studio, bouncing ideas off one another. Among those helping out are other radio men like C. J. McCoy and John Jarrett, who work WKBW weekends, and WGR’s Shane, who is organizing a band to play 15 songs he and Calandra wrote together.

          Where the commentaries are Calandra solo on piano, the other tunes are sketched in with basic three-piece band backing and vocal overdubs.

          “We have a four-track recorder here,” he says, “but you can ping-pong, take on three tracks, mix to one and then start all over again.”

          He plays the immunization song. It has a simple, wholesome, folk-rock feel. The double-tracked voice belongs to another former Raven bandmate, Tony Galla.

          Some projects Calandra takes on for the sheer fun of them – like the theme song WKBW’s Beverly sings to open her all-night show. Others he hopes will assist careers. Like Tony Galla’s. Galla sings the Rams song. Or former Buffalonian Kenny Sullivan, who comes up from New York to record his new compositions in Calandra’s studio.

          “There are more creative people here than anywhere in the country,” Calandra asserts, an observation with which his cousin and backer, realtor Frank Ricchiazzi, totally agrees. Calandra considers his prospects as optimistically as a coach unbeaten in spring training. “We could do it all,” he says, “right here.”

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IN THE PHOTO: Tom Calandra in his studio in 1977.

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FOOTNOTE: Beginning in the 1980s, Tom Calandra did it all from a bigger and better studio on the first floor of his new home in a duplex on Delaware Avenue, next door to what was then the North Park Branch Library. By then, he was calling his operation the Buffalo College of Musical Knowledge and had a record label, BCMK, to go with it. Countless fledgling artists got their first tastes of serious studio work with Tom and BCMK released the first compilation album of original songs by Buffalo rock musicians in the early 1980s. He also put them on TV with “33 West,” the first show dedicated to broadcasting local music videos. His musical commentaries were aired on 200 radio stations across the nation and, at the time of his death in 1998, he was under consideration for a George Foster Peabody Award and a Pulitzer Prize. He was twice inducted into the Buffalo Music Hall of Fame – first by himself in 1998 and then with Raven in 2009.