It’s not just music that keeps Gino Vannelli busy

By Jerry Fink (contact)

Monday, Sept. 21, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Publicity Photo

Vannelli

Gino Vannelli stopped by Las Vegas Hilton last week to prepare for this week’s concert and caught Cheap Trick’s “Sgt. Pepper Live!”

He spotted an old friend, longtime Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick — at the sound board.

“All I could do was call his name,” Vannelli says. “We touched hands and that was it. That was the first time we had seen each other since 1976.”

That’s when Emerick co-produced Vannelli’s “The Gist of the Gemini” album.

“We go way back,” says Vannelli, 57, who lives half the year in Holland and half in Portland, Ore.

On Sunday Vannelli will play his old hits such as “I Just Wanna Stop” and “Living Inside Myself” as well as music from his new album, “A Good Thing.” The CD comes with a book of poetry — Vannelli’s first collection.

He recently talked to the Sun about his poetry and other things:

Have you always written poetry?

In a sense. I decided most of the songs in this album started off as poetry, so I just left some of them as poems and put them in a book. I wanted to make this an extra-personal package. Personal ideas mean nothing unless you share the ideas with someone else.

Would you agree that poets have a greater insight into life, more grasp of truths?

Reality or truth is a bit transient. The poets during the Industrial Revolution were critical of that, but it was a necessary part of our evolvement. Modern poets, a minority, protested vehemently against the U.S. so-called intervention in Vietnam and it became fashionable to be anti-American in the ’60s and ’70s. They went from mysticism to anti-Americanism. You have to be careful.

I think it’s time the poets find something new to whine about. It’s more than just the lingo. Shakespeare, he gets into the very nature of human beings, stays out of the temple of politics — touches upon it but he gets into the very core of how we think. That’s what I try to do with this poetry, to stay out of the temple of politics and of what you think is right or what you’re indignant about because what you’re indignant about today, 50 years from now you can say it’s a good thing, so those things are interchangeable. What seems to be the running things of human nature, that’s what I try to approach, and of course not try to preach or try to act like an oracle but to immerse myself in it and find any objectivity that I can.

Are you inspired you to do more?

Of course. What does a writer or poet or musician do? He listens. He churns it like a concrete mixer inside him and it comes out through his filters, whatever mechanism he’s endowed with. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s not good.

What inspires you poetically? Relationships? Politics?

Everything. I’ve often thought about the whole orthodoxy, the implication of Adam and Eve, the whole parable of eating the forbidden fruit. I, with my tongue in cheek, say it is better to blame beauty for that. He was just attracted to her. If her face hung like a hound, he would not have touched her. So I blame beauty.

Do you have another album in the works?

I’m almost done with a new one, “Best Of, Above and Beyond.” It’s coming out in Europe first, as a Christmas package. I took my best songs and rerecorded them in a way that I couldn’t do it 30 years ago because I didn’t have the technology to do it. Finally, 30 years later, I’ve captured the intensity I wanted to catch.

Any other projects?

I have 12 concerts to do in Europe in December, then I go back to Europe in March, then do a Canadian tour in June. At the same time I’m working on a novel and a libretto. And a cookbook.

What kind of novel?

I’m always fascinated by Medieval times, especially the pivotal times of the Reformation. I love pivotal times, when people learn to let go of the old and embrace the new. Society is at odds with itself. What is considered traditional becomes old-fashioned and what is considered radical soon becomes traditional. All those kinds of things, those tiered levels. It’s a fictional novel based in the 16th century, around the time of the Reformation. It takes place on this island nation that doesn’t take to Reformation very quickly — and the Reformation isn’t all that holy. It’s about a little person — a dwarf — who unsuspectedly changes the course of the nation. I’ve outlined the first 10 chapters but then I realized at one point that to finish it I have to drop everything else. It’s so much work, takes so much focus. It needs time and dedication and focus. Everything else will have to play second fiddle, so for now I have to put it on the back burner.

The opera?

It’s called “The Trials of Don Juan.” It takes place in 18th-century Seville. Don Juan is basically condemned to some kind of Dante-esque hell and he keeps trying to alter the course of destiny. As a ghost he tries to tempt his younger self not to make the same errors and in doing so induces the probabilities toward his manifest destiny more so.