| Joe Renzetti |
holt scienceIn 1976, I was 35; Jesse Cutler was a twenty-something. Jesse was a really good looking Italian boy from New York. The girls loved him. Jesse was a killer singer and wrote great songs, so much so that he landed a nice recording deal with United Artists to make an album. He chose me to arrange and produce it. I had just come off of arranging the strings for Barry Manilow’s hit song “Mandy.” With the great arrangements and Jesse’s voice—and a bunch of really great musicians—we made a wonderful album. The music was all engulfing. It consumed us. We lived ‘the life’ of show businesses, Jesse and I, and although neither of us fell into the usual traps, we had a ball. It was the life of dreams—we knew it, and savored it.Most young upstarts would sacrifice body parts for that experience, and many did. Jesse and I also flirted with the film biz. In 1978, I won an Oscar as the music producer/composer for the independent film The Buddy Holly Story. I brought Jesse in as the guitar player, and he peopled the band in the very last scene with many of his musical friends. So, there we were, Jessie and Joe. We spent some wonderful years together in La La Land. We lived it up. It was wonderful, and I hope that anyone reading this will have fun. It was a trip. It was show-business in the ‘70s, and it was a wild ride.
Joe Renzetti |
