Frank Critelli, Streetlife Serenader

Why Billy Joel?

It was the first question I asked local singer-songwriter Frank Critelli as we sat down to talk about the tribute show, ​“A Toast to Billy Joel,” which he put together for the Cygnus Radio Sunday Buzz happening this weekend at Cafe Nine.

“I didn’t invent the tribute show, but I thought it would be interesting to do tributes to artists with stigmas, artists that people love to hate. We did Phil Collins back in 2016, and we had a good time with that one. Now we’re doing Billy Joel, and there’s a list of people we could do after this.’

What did he mean by artists with stigmas?

“It’s somebody that maybe is the punchline to some jokes these days, or somebody that people love to make fun of or talk down about, like the Bee Gees or the Eagles or John Denver,” he said. Despite the stigma, he had a great response to this show, as he did with the Phil Collins one, from performers wanting to participate.

“There are many closet Billy Joel fans,” he said with a big smile.

Critelli is definitively not an artist with a stigma attached to him. In the 25-plus years he has been on the Connecticut music scene, he has become one of its most beloved members and organizers, especially in New Haven. Currently the host of the weekly Sunday Buzz series at Cafe Nine as well as cohost of The Local Bands Show on WPLR and Cygnus Radio, Critelli can also be found singing and playing guitar just about anywhere at any time, whether it be on a dimly lit stage on a Friday night or on a sunny sidewalk on a Saturday morning. Not unlike Mr. Joel, he has a seemingly endless amount of both songs and stories. But the two have even more in common than that.

“I grew up in Levittown, N.Y.,” said Critelli. ​“I know the house where Billy Joel grew up, and I hung out at the West Village Green all the time. He’s royalty where I come from.”

Critelli started playing music in high school. ​“My friend Tim McConnell had a band and I used to go watch them play, and they were doing some sort of variety show at the high school and the bass player couldn’t go, so I said, ​‘I can play the bass.’”

Could he play?

“No, but I had watched them enough,” he answered with a smile. ​“So I played the bass and that was my first onstage experience. I guess I’ve just been attracted to it ever since. Maybe I was just attracted to it first.

“I remember being in middle school and riding my bike to a used record store in the next town over and picking up records. I remember one specifically that I picked up because it had a trash can on the cover. The trash can was spitting, and I just thought it was interesting. The album was Mona Bone Jakon by Cat Stevens. That was among my first introductions to acoustic music. This was just one guy. It wasn’t the Beatles or the Stones. It wasn’t a team sport. It was an individual sport, and since I didn’t have a team and I’ve always felt like a lone traveler upon the earth to a certain extent, I guess in my own music I’ve wanted to explore that.”

Though Critelli has written and played songs with other people, he has always returned to the solo thing, ​“because that’s just what I do,” he said.

He recalled when his songwriting began. ​“The first song I ever wrote, I was five years old,” he said. ​“I used to sing it to myself. It was called ​‘I Love The Monkees.’ They had their TV show and I watched them all the time.

“See, now that’s a band that outlived their stigma,” he pointed out. ​“They had a huge stigma: ​‘the Pre-Fab Four, you don’t even play your own instruments, blah blah blah,’ but now, see? Bands with stigmas: gotta love ​‘em,” he added with a laugh.

Critelli continued writing poems and songs while in college in North Adams, Mass.

“I feel like I wrote my first real songs — ones that I still play sometimes — there,” he said. From North Adams he moved to Somerville, Mass., and thought he would try something new.

“I saw people that were playing in the subways and on the streets. I decided that I would try playing in the subway, and I remember the very first time was at Davis Square. I set up in the back and, tell you the truth, I didn’t even put a case out for tips. I just sat in the back and for half an hour I just sat there and sang songs just to see if I could do it in public in front of a bunch of strangers.

“I had performed twice on campus at North Adams but that was in front of friends. This was a whole different sort of thing and for me the first time was sort of like gearing up to jump into cold water. It was almost like a frightful exhilaration, to play in a train station where there were strangers. I did it that first time and then after that I did it all the time.”

He also began to frequent open mics in the area.

“In Cambridge there was an open mic every night of the week, so I did all of them. I remember Sunday nights there was a great scene at Catch a Rising Star — which was a comedy club in Harvard Square — and Sunday nights at 10 o’clock they had after-hours acoustic music. I would play in a subway someplace and I would always go over there at night and all the songwriters were there. Wednesday night was Naked City in Allston I think, and that was a cool one too, because they had a feature act for like 30 minutes. I remember the featured act would be like Dar Williams and Ellis Paul and Vance Gilbert and people like that. Tracy Chapman just came out of that a few years before that, so there was a bunch of people doing a bunch of stuff there, and it was a really cool place to be young and hearing music and running around.”

Critelli came to Connecticut in 1992, attending grad school at Quinnipiac College. He taught high school English until 2016, but was still writing and performing.

“My first gig was at Christopher Martin’s. I had released two cassette tapes when I was living in Somerville and I was looking for places to play here. I saw somebody playing there the first week I was living here, and I gave the lady there my cassette. She booked me for a Friday night, and boom, that was it.”

But it was not the best experience. ​“It sucked,” said Critelli. ​“It was the worst. I felt bad taking their money. I was the wrong guy for the room. So then I went away and licked my wounds for a while.”

He didn’t stay away for long.

“Then there was band I had known about when I lived in Massachusetts playing at the Daily Cafe, so I walked in and it was a game changer. All of a sudden everything was gonna be fine. I asked Steve Shapiro, ​‘who is opening up for Quay and O’Conor?’ And he said, ​‘nobody.’ So I handed him my cassette and said, ​‘can I open for Quay and O’Conor?’ And he said, ​‘sure, who are you, and who are they?”’ Critelli added with a smile.

“And that was it,” he continued. ​“I got the gig, and then I started booking a series there not too long after that. Once that happened I started playing all around and as an opening act for others. Same thing happened at Toad’s Place. Somebody that I had run into during the whole Cambridge thing was David Wilcox. He was playing Toad’s and I saw it in the New Haven Advocate so I got on my bike and rode there. I went upstairs to the ticket booth and I said, ​‘hey, who’s opening for David Wilcox?’ And they asked around and said, ​‘nobody.’ So boom, I threw them my cassette and a paper with my info and I said, ​‘I’d like to open for David Wilcox.’ And they said, ​‘oh, ok,’ and I went home and there was a message on my machine saying I got it by the time I got there.”

“After performing a couple of times it seemed like a real natural thing, and it felt nice. It felt good. Music’s good.”

Critelli has made good friends doing it as well. He has played in bands throughout his career in addition to playing solo, including the band 404 in the mid- and late ​‘90s.

​“I play with a couple of full bands now, but they’re just called ​‘Frank Critelli’ because I write the songs and I book the gigs,” he said. ​“I try to surround myself with musicians that are better than me and I think I’m successful at that in the bands that I play in. They’re still my songs. It’s just enhanced.

“There are currently two different incarnations of the Frank Critelli Band which I still play with, depending on the gig. Like when I play the Daffodil Festival in Meriden, I play that with Jim Stavris and Mark Mirando always. Every now and then someone can’t make it and you have to mix it up. Dick Neal plays with me all the time. Ricky Suarez plays with me all the time.”

Critelli also has an affinity for putting shows together and getting people to play at them.

“Every scene needs organizers and there are plenty of them out there booking series and doing shows and providing opportunities for musicians to play and be themselves and do what they do, and those are good things,” he said. ​“I’m like that lone traveler who craves community sometimes, and if it’s scheduled community then I know what time its starts and ends because I put the start and end times to it, and it’s great. I can put a bunch of people in the room that I like to see. It’s nice when everyone sort of gets together and says, ​‘oh yeah, remember when we did this and we did that?’ and you’re doing the same thing I’m doing, and were in a club together even though we never said it was a club.”

“When you write alone; that’s the best, isn’t it,” he added, ​“because you can do whatever you want. We all do that. All those people in that same room create by themselves and then they come in to share those creations, and it’s a cool thing. You get to hear a bunch of music and play a little too.”

Critelli spoke lovingly about the New Haven music scene he has been a part of for so long.

“It’s always been great. There have always been great bands and great music being created right here in New Haven and hey, that might be true with everywhere. I was thinking, in the past couple of years I’ve been playing the farmers’ markets, and all of a sudden I thought, ​‘fuck, there are a lot of farms in CT, but now it’s only because I’m running in those circles that I realize how much is going on.’ I figure you can find a New Haven just about anywhere. I mean, there are maybe places where it is thinner or something like that, but New Haven has had a big fat giant beautiful juicy music scene forever, long before we got here and it will be here long after we leave.”

Speaking of farmers’ markets, Critelli can be found many Saturday mornings with his guitar at the CitySeed indoor and outdoor markets in Wooster Square.

“When you’re playing out on the street — Chris Bousquet used to call it ​‘music without a net’ — it’s really sort of anything goes,” he said. ​“If you’re onstage there’s an invisible line that nobody crosses and if they do they get their drunken asses thrown out, but on the street anyone can come up to you for any reason. There is no space. They come right on in, and I kind of like that sometimes. It’s on the fly, and you’re making it up as you go along. Playing for four hours in a row, you’re playing every song you know and a few you didn’t know you knew, for everyone, even kids. What’s more pure and innocent and beautiful than youth? They don’t know what’s going on in the world, the sadness and pain there is, all they know is, ​‘hey look, oh wow, we’re at the farmers’ market, we’re gonna eat good today. I got a cookie, and there’s a guy there playing music.’ I still love playing street music, and kids are cool.”

Critelli cherishes his role as cohost of The Local Bands Show along with Rick Allison, which is broadcast on WPLR on Sunday nights and rebroadcast on CygnusRadio.com on Monday afternoons. He took over the spot in the wake of his dear friend James Velvet’s passing in 2015.

“Literally James is over my shoulder. I sit in his chair and my notebook rests on his music stand. He is a constant presence for me and I realize…” he hesitated and teared up before continuing, ​“a certain weight of responsibility to honor what he started.”

“Really, it’s Rick Allison’s show,” he continued. ​“He runs all the controls. He drives the bus and I’m the kid running down the street trying to catch up,” he added, smiling and laughing again.

Critelli has been hosting the Sunday Buzz shows at Cafe Nine since their inception in March 2016, and books some of them too.

“After Billy Joel I was thinking we might do John Denver,” he said, but he wasn’t sure yet. He will be performing ​“Captain Jack” at this weekend’s show (and in full disclosure, this reporter will be cohosting and performing as well). He also has his own music to record and release in the year ahead, his last releases being the single ​“The Ghost in My House” as well as an EP called The Riverbend Demos, both in 2018.

“The goal is to release two singles with two different backing bands,” said Critelli. ​“One is called ​‘A Song for Everyone,’ which I’ve been playing a bit around, and that would be with Jim and Mark. Another one would be an older song that never got recorded but that Rick heard a bootleg of and told me to record, so I reworked it a bit and I’m gonna do that one, which is called ​‘The Ultimate Outlaw’ with Richie Suarez. The goal is to record them and release them maybe with a B side that’s a cover or something.”

And as far as live shows go, Critelli had a plan for those going into this year as well.

“My experiment for 2019 was to not ask for any gigs. So far I think I’ve kept fairly true to that. I may have asked for one or thrown my hat in a ring once. So far it’s okay. I have gigs booked into October.”

And he is still writing, all the time.

“People used to say doing really folky shows you have to talk in between songs, and so I’ve always done that, telling stories in between the songs about the songs. Then I realized, ​‘well, maybe I can write some of these down.’ I’ve noticed sometimes people flirt with other mediums. I’ve always been jealous of artists. I can’t draw, but I can tell stories, so maybe I can write a few of them down on paper. I’m using bartending as a social experiment” — Critelli is currently also a bartender at Cafe Nine — ​“with observing people and writing stores about them that have maybe a couple of toes in the water of truth, but are mostly imagination or exaggeration.”

I asked him if he was still writing poems, as he has been prone to reciting some of his originals in between songs in addition to or in place of his storytelling.

“Yeah, sometimes,” he said. ​“If I’m writing something else and I write the words out, it just looks like a poem. I’m like, ​‘oh, okay, that’s a poem, maybe.’”

I told him that more than once I’ve heard a person ask ​“if you write a paragraph this certain way, with certain line breaks, is this a poem?”

“Beats me,” he said, smiling again. ​“I don’t know. It’s a question, a poetic question. Maybe that counts.”

A Toast to Billy Joel begins at 2 p.m. this Sunday at Cafe Nine. Please go to the club’s website for further details. For more information about Frank Critelli’s future performances, visit his Facebook page or Bandcamp page,