🏖3️⃣Style and Tenor: Jack Black, The Association, The Murderer...and Me

THIS IS PART 3️⃣ OF THE EXCLUSIVE "SUMMER HOT-SOME ARE CHILL" PAID SERIES! THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT, AND...ENJOY!

AUSTIN, TX—This story revolves around singers. In about 2012, I discovered karaoke. I had just entered retirement, and singing, virtually nightly, was not only fun, but gave me something to do, even though it was at night, from about 9-midnight.

I’ve been singing most of my life:

🏖1️⃣I Was a Teenage Lead Singer! The Early '70s Brimstone Saga (with Approximate Setlist)

I didn’t/don’t drink, so my time in a couple different Austin karaoke bars was spent singing and chatting with old and (mostly) new friends. One of those friends videoed me one night in December 2013:

For the first time, FRONT ROW & BACKSTAGE, a video of me singing. That’s a prop cigarette, and I’ve lost about 20 pounds since then (he hastens to add):

Another of those new karaoke friends, Danny, invited me to join the Capital City Men’s Chorus at the end of 2015 or so. Not so much the actual Chorus, but as 1/4 of a break-out group for an upcoming Cabaret performance in February 2016. They needed a tenor part for a quartet medley of Association songs (“Cherish,” “Everything That Touches You,” and a couple others).

Unfortunately, my favorite Association song, “Along Comes Mary” wasn’t included in our medley arrangement:

Inside Tracks #9: Tandyn Almer "Along Comes Mary" + The Association, R. Stevie Moore, Manhattan Transfer, 24-7 Spyz

Danny had become well familiar with my vocal range during many nights of singing karaoke. I sang lots of Sinatra (well within my range’s sweet spot), as well as high-pitched rockers like Sting (I could sing things like “If I Ever Lose My Faith in You” and Police’s “Synchronicity II” without the KJ adjusting the pitch⬇)!

No strings attached to Danny’s invite….if I wanted, I could just be a “ringer” brought in to sing the tough-to-find tenor part of the foursome just for the Cabaret. I didn’t have to join the Chorus if I didn’t want to, but I enjoyed it, and I ended up staying until the pandemic shut things down, Spring of ‘20.

We spent several weeks rehearsing the medley. Not only was I flattered to be asked, but The Association has always been one of my favorite harmony groups of the ‘60s (joining, of course, The Beatles, Beach Boys, and really, any British Invasion group)!

That’s me, far left, in the video; also in the quartet is the baritone convicted of murder (and now serving out a life sentence in a Texas penitentiary), whose life and crime were the subject of a major motion picture starring Jack Black four years before: