Early Years
Born Michael Anthony Orlando Cassavitis to a Greek father and a Puerto Rican mother, he spent his earliest years in Manhattan, New York's then-notorious Hell's Kitchen. In his teenage years, the family moved to Union City and later, Hasbrouck Heights in New Jersey.
Tony Orlando's musical career started with The Five Gents, a doo-wop group he formed. His first success came at the age of 16, when he recorded the hits "Bless You" and "Halfway To Paradise" in 1961. He also appeared at the Brooklyn Paramount Theater with DJ Murray the K. In 1969 he recorded with the studio group Wind and had a #28 hit that year with "Make Believe" which was released on producer Bo Gentry's Life Records.
In 1967, the Chicago local popular band, New Colony Six recorded an Orlando composition, "I'm Just Waiting (Anticipating For Her To Show Up" (which charted locally in Chicago). They probably found the song on a recorded demo.
Orlando became general manager at Columbia Records, and his career was focused on the corporate end of the music business, representing music publishers. In the late 1960s, he ran April-Blackwood Music, the publishing arm of CBS music.
Read more about this topic: Tony Orlando
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or years:
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The years when we are parenting teenagers are the high point, the crest when everything seems to be in bright colors and in ten-foot letters.”
—Jean Jacobs Speizer. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Collective, ch. 4 (1978)