Although he's a showbiz lifer, Billy Vera is cut from a wholly different
cloth than his peers. If an artist is measured by their devotion to
their craft, Harlem to Hollywood may be the purest treatise on the
subject ever produced. All the better, it's also an astounding story.
Born into a white, suburban family, Vera fell for black music as a child
and started down a winding performer's path that would buoy him the rest
of his life. In the sixties, Vera paid his bills by songwriting (for
other artists) through the day and playing mobbed up clubs at night. By
1967, as Newark burned on the other side of the Hudson, he and gospel
singer Judy Clay, the first interracial duet to perform at the Apollo,
tore the house down with a little ditty he wrote for himself: Storybook
Children a commercial hit produced by Atlantic Records. Through the
seventies, popular taste shifted drastically. As blue-eyed soul went out
of fashion, Vera, like many other musicians, found himself scrounging
for survival gigs, but one crucial difference set him apart: he
abstained from the drugs and drink that fueled - and eventually
claimed - so many of his contemporaries. As that decade sputtered to a
close, a woman by the name of Dolly Parton recorded Vera's I Really Got
the Feeling and hit number one on the charts. Riding the tide of this
unexpected attention, Vera hightailed it to Los Angeles, formed a new
band, Billy and the Beaters, and charted twice before the close of 1981
with songs from their eponymous album recorded live at the Roxy. Five
years later, one of these minor hits, At This Moment was featured in
several episodes of NBC's Family Ties. The song rocketed up the charts
and a 42-year-old Vera found himself with his very own number one
single. Nine visits to Carson and an American Bandstand appearance
later, Vera tasted many other flavors of success: acting both on- and
off-camera, producing records, and reissuing his own work. Today, with a
star on the Hollywood Walk and Fame and a Grammy in tow, he's finally
prepared to share his journey (did we mention that he's also a
photographer and music historian who documented every step of career?).
To sit down with Billy Vera is to take a personalized tour through
nearly fifty years of entertainment history. Won't you come along for
the ride?
