Cyndi Lauper Stars in Blue Angel

The band, not the movie, in a 1980 show

Reader Dave Marin was nice enough to post a 1982 Newsday concert review I wrote about Public Image Ltd. (aka PIL) on Twitter, where there are still enough people to gather in a huddle about such topics. Martin Atkins of PIL was one of them. Hello Martin! I wrote here about a 1986 interview with John Lydon about PiL’s ALBUM.

Johnny Rotten Signs the Autographs

I was looking around the archives and came across early review worth noting: a 1980 performance by a local band called Blue Angel, the first public go-around of a Queens' girl with the umistakable regional accent, Cyndi Lauper. It is an accent that made Flushing native Fran Drescher sound Boston Brahmin.

I was tuned into Lauper early: My friend Katie was a friend of Cyndi and we partied for a moment back then. Their album was good, the band was excellent on stage, and Lauper was unaffected in her role of an Ozone Park Betty Boop. She had a powerhouse voice that no stage or studio could yet hold.

I interviewed Cyndi a few times in her solo stardom, and we spent some time talking about doing a book together. I really wanted to do a book with some star in those days; it seemed to be the only way to get to the next level of the writing racket, even with a secure union job at Newsday. We did not belong to the New York City Newspaper Guild. Our union leaders were smart enough to have us in the same union as the pressmen and the truck drivers. As I understood it, we were Teamsters. That felt cool.

But Cyndi was managed at the time by a now long ago ex-boyfriend who managed as well as most boyfriends who decide to become managers, which is not very well at all. I spent an afternoon talking about the book with Cyndi at their chic Soho home. The "book" the manager had in mind was a low-pay flat fee to write the bio for the program on Lauper's next tour. In 1984, I wrote my first book, or “bookette,” as I like to call it: “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Boy George and Culture Club.” It was put together by a book packager, for Ballantine Books. I got the assignment around Memorial Day 1984 with a due date of Labor Day that year. I wrote a big chunk of it in a house rented for a week in Fenwick Island, Del. It was more than cut-and-paste, though there was plenty of that. I interviewed Boy George’s makeup artist, his hairdresser, even his milliner. Formally, a milliner is a woman’s hat maker, while “hatter” is a man’s. The idea of Boy George was to render these distinctions ridiculous, which is what I liked about him.

Blue Angel performed at My Father's Place in Roslyn, L.I., my home away from home (it was actually quite close to my home at the time). The review originally appeared in Newsday November 15, 1980.

THE YEARS from 1958 through 1963 — between the time Elvis Presley went into the Army, and the rise of the Beatles — has been the most slighted era of rock. Almost every other phase has been revived, recycled or expanded upon. But the period that was once wrongly synonymous with the first "death of rock" rumblings has until now been ignored or overlooked.

But now there's a feature film, The Idolmaker, that deals with that pop zone, and, if you can believe it, the Peppermint Lounge will be reopening soon in the same sleazy midtown locale that was the home of the era's consuming dance fad, the Twist. More important, there is a group called Blue Angel, which fondly revitalizes the music of that time with an effortless contemporary touch.

The group, whose lead singer, Cyndi Lauper, and two other members originally hailed from Queens, performed an appealing set at My Father's Place in Roslyn Thursday night that was taped for eventual broadcast on WLIR-FM. The band — John Turi (keyboard and sax), Lee Brovitz (bass), Johnny Morelli (drums) and Arthur Neilson (guitar) played with an easy-going swing that was both proficient and natural. Perhaps it helped that Turi once toured with local 1950s idols Johnny Maestro and the Crests, while Morelli is a former member of Tuff Darts, one of the first and best 1950s-rooted punk bands. The band was loyal to the roots of their music without indulging in contrived revivalism.

The focus of the band is Lauper, the flamboyant blonde lead singer. On stage her relentless hip-swinging and earnest singing brought to mind a number of combinations. With her ponytail, tight pants and tank top, she could have been one of "The 'K' Girls", one of disc jockey Murray the K's troupe of sloe-eyed Rockettes that used to be part of his repertory company for 1960s concerts at the Brooklyn Fox theater.

At another point, she seemed like a cross between Shelly Fabares and Charo. That connection was reinforced by Lauper's T-shirt emblazoned with the title of Fabares' 1962 hit, "Johnny Angel." At other times, singing a version of the torchy Gene Pitney 1964 tune "I'm Gonna Be Strong," Lauper looked like a teen exploitation movie version of Marlene Dietrich. Blue Angel indeed, with Frankie Avalon in the Emil Jannings role.

Most of the band's songs written by Lauper and Turi show a wry affection for the music of the cusp between the 1950s and 1960s. Even the contemporary touches fit their point of view perfectly, so that the reggae beat of "Just The Other Day" had as much to do with Bobby Vee as it did with Bob Marley. The band's encore of Presley's "All Shook Up" seemed slightly out of place; something like the Royal Teens' “Short Shorts” might have been more in keeping with the band's attitude, so accurately spelled out earlier in the set with an exquisite version of Connie Francis' "Lipstick on Your Collar.”

© Wayne Robins, 1980, 2022, administered by Rock's Back Pages.