Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania • Page 53

Tony unplugged? From page 2 'S about the gigolo and gigolette waking to find their eyes wet with tears on "The Boulevard of Broken Dreams," it's kind of hard to believe it's the first thing he ever recorded. And who but Tony Bennett could take a song.as schmaltzy as "For Once In My Life" and make it sound like a classic? Still, there are those who would dismiss his current popularity as yet another example of the slacker generation's love affair with camp, the same love affair that keeps Nickelodeon in business. Stewart, who actually asked Bennett for an autographed picture, doesn't see it that way at all. "There's not a whole lot of camp with him," he says, pointing out the difference betweenTony and Charo. "It's a cheese factor and he doesn't have that." is more the result of changing times than changing tunes.

"Tony Bennett; to me, is one of the great singers that we have," he says. "And his material now is close to what he's always been doing." Working at the main office of National Record Mart, John Ar-tale is well aware of the effect Bennett's hip new image has had on sales. The way he sees it, though, it doesn't matter why the kids are coming around, as long as they keep doing it. "I think he realizes that if he does see some young kid with a nose ring saying, 'Tony Bennett rules' or something silly like that, I think he understands that it's probably the only way to reach an audience like that," Artale says. "It's his last hurrah, you know, and he wants to see how many people he can reach.

Anyway they get there is fine, 'cause I think he's secure in the fact that he can actually deliver the goods." Dunn says the camp issue is a constant concern for Danny Bennett, the man who orchestrated his dad's meteoric rise to hipness. "He doesn't want to have Tony be some sort of campy fad where it's cool to hang around him and then he's back where he started a couple of years from now," she says. "Tony's told me himself that he doesn't want to change to pander to kids, and I think that's one of his strong suits." Even when he did the Unplugged tour with the Lcmonheads and Teenage Fanclub, she says, Bennett showed up in a suit and sang the same sort of stuff he's always done. "He didn't do anything to pander to the kids in the audience and they were all chanting To-nee, To-nee." Perhaps that's how he's managed to maintain the respect of his older, core audience. Local bandleader Al Dowe, who's been a Bennett fan for years, thinks the hype tonished.

"They heard an Ellington record or a Sinatra record," Bennett said, "and they said, i didn't know it sounded like Third, the low cost of producing CDs has prompted record companies to release a flood of great music by artists from Leonard Bernstein to the Abyssinian Church Choir to Count Basie. "Those are records they never heard before," Bennett said. Fourth, younger artists like Linda Ronstadt, Harry Connick Jr. and Natalie Cole have sold millions of albums of music from earlier eras. "So all this is kind of banging into one another," Bennett said, "and everybody's getting back to what I call normality." In addition to his singing career, Bennett also is an accomplished visual artist who goes by Anthony Benedetto, his given name.

He has just been invited to display a com-See page 22 Tony's reprise From page 2 Danny, 'Change my whole schedule. From now on I want to work for these Beyond Bennett's personal popularity, there has been an overall increase in appreciation of the Great American Songbook and classic composers like Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Cole Porter. Having studied popular music avidly throughout his career, Bennett speaks with authority when he cites four reasons for this trend: First, the people who grew up infatuated with the Beatles are now parents themselves and have gravitated back to family life and values. Second, the advent of the compact disc has provided clean, clear reproduction of the classic songs and youngJisteners have been as I "MMW HI "Rl 1 iMi mm mmm I KM I E. Wt 4toi- THE YEAR'S SEXIEST COMEDY "Two Thumbs Up! A wonderful romantic comedy!" sukrl l.hm (IRANI.

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