Lou La Pietra
"Master Bassist" Lou La Pietra Interview
Facebook.com/RattlinRocks
Interview by Roger Zee (12/07/19)
Roger Zee: Who inspired you to pick up the guitar and bass?
Lou La Pietra Probably my aunt Vera. Twelve years older than me, she grew up in the Sixties and always had the coolest records. We came from a first generation Italian American household that all lived in the Bronx in two attached, three-family homes with a backdrop of Enrico Caruso and other traditional Italian music. As a five-year-old, I loved going next door to hang with my seventeen-year-old aunt who listened to all this cool Rock and Roll -- The Beach Boys, The Beatles, Elvis Presley, and Fats Domino. Fast forward to a few years later when I entered sixth grade. Singer-songwriter Kenny Rogers advertised a product on TV called the “quick pickin’ fun strummin’ home guitar course.” My classmate, Carlo Fragnito, the lead guitarist in my current band Rattlin’, saw the same commercial and we both managed to convince our parents to buy it for us. In addition, after a lot of begging, my Dad bought me a very low-quality, Stella harmony acoustic guitar from Lennox Loans Pawn Shop on Fordham road in the Bronx.
Roger Zee: We both rehearsed with bands in the Music Building in Manhattan in the early Eighties. Talk about your experience there.
Lou La Pietra: Wow! The music building! What a time to dream for every musician in New York City! So many fun memories there. Eight floors of rehearsal rooms in varying sizes on eighth Avenue between 37th and 38th Street. Back then, if I remember correctly, it held all original acts trying to make it. Madonna rehearsed there as well as Cyndi Lauper with her band Blue Angel.
We named our band "Forger," as in someone who works with iron and metal, and played progressive Metal with a hint of Eighties Glam. We started out as a five piece with two guitars, bass, drums, and lead vocal. By the time the band moved into the music building, we had slimmed down to a four piece, just like Rattlin'. Me on guitar, Angelo Trapenasso on bass, Phil Gaetano on vocals, and Nelson Oh, currently the house photographer at The Iridium, on drums. I remember the place as exceptionally hot in the summer. We could not afford air-conditioning so we rehearsed in our underwear -- ahh sweet youth! We made friends with a band who had come up from Chattanooga, TN. They lived in their rehearsal studio even though prohibited and I remember always wondering where they showered! I’ll never forget the name of that band -- "Musical Moose."
Forger worked all the Manhattan clubs -- Great Gildersleeves, Electric Circus, Peppermint Lounge and so many others. Although we developed a small following, we mostly played our unique brand of Rock to strangers. I still know every single one of those songs -- probably since I wrote the majority of them! Those memories will never leave me. Great times, man! Strangely enough, while my band rehearsed there in 1982, I applied to the NYPD. Shortly after swearing in as a police academy recruit in 1983, I left the group.
Roger Zee: How did you come to play bass with FDR Drive?
Lou La Pietra: I played guitar steadily in different cover and original bands until 1984 when my dear friend Tom Londrey asked me to fill in on bass as a last minute replacement at an Italian music festival in Astoria, Queens. This happened even although A) I never played bass; B) I didn't know a single Italian song that they would play; and C) I was terrified because they were expecting 1000 people! Somehow I got through it which led to my playing bass in different wedding bands for the next fifteen years. Pperforming a huge variety of music ranging from Italian Pop, traditional ethnic songs to standards and whatever else they threw at us forced me to become a real bass player, as opposed to a guitarist playing bass. Two very dear friends of mine, Neal Francese and Tom Londrey, both from our old Bronx neighborhood in the Belmont section, started FDR drive around 2006. FDR was, and still is, a great band playing mostly funk, R&B, Hip-hop and Disco. We worked together for many years working all sorts of gigs, parties, weddings, you name it. The FDR band turned me on to some great bass players like Louis Johnson, James Jamerson, Lee Sklar and gave me a whole new respect for the instrument.
Roger Zee: How did Rattlin' come together?
Lou La Pietra: Interestingly, Rattlin’ came out of a very different five piece band called Rattlin Hum, primarily a U2 tribute group which also covered bands like The Fray and Elton John. Rattlin’s drummer Johnny G and the lead singer Gary Troy came from there. Anyway, around 2007, someone told me they needed a bass player. I auditioned and they offered me the gig. Back then, the band's keyboard player, Frank Squillante, taught music to both my kids, Michael and Nicole, at Ardsley Middle School. Around 2008, the original guitarist, Louis Mottola, left the band. I reached out to my “quick pickin fun strummin" grammar school class mate, Carlo Fragnito, to see if he wanted to join. He did! Rattlin Hum lasted for a couple of years until it dissolved around 2013. In 2016 we formed Rattlin’, a very different band concentrating on high energy, guitar oriented rock. We like to kid around and say that this band has a lot more “rattle” than “hum” which is why we shortened the name to “Rattlin’”
Roger Zee: Tell me about your favorite and/or most unusual gig.
Lou La Pietra: In High School, Carlo and I played in a band called “Deuce” named after the recently released "Kiss Alive." We got invited to play a sweet sixteen party in the basement of a high-rise apartment building in the Pelham Bay section of the Bronx. Our singer at the time, John Savaugi (R.I.P.), made his own fire blowing apparatus. He would take rubbing alcohol, light it on fire, and blow it through a homemade aluminum foil cone. This resulted in his blowing the flames right into the sprinkler system which utterly ruined the girl party. After which the girl’s father told us to pack our gear and get out! Ah the memories-. We got a lot of laughs from that one! But hey, Rush's Neal Peart once said, “Adventures suck while you’re having them!”
Roger Zee: What advice do you give young musicians?
Lou La Pietra: Play the music you love because if you love it, you’ll keep practicing it. And if you keep practicing it, you’ll get better and better. Don’t listen to anyone who says you have to play a specific way or style. Play what feels good to you and you will evolve into the musician you should be.
Roger Zee: How do you see the future of the music business?
Lou La Pietra: The future of the music business seems to lie in live performance. Nobody buys albums anymore. For a while, people downloaded music for $.99 a song on iTunes. But even that's gone the way of the dinosaur. Now people stream music either paid or free. You can pretty much listen to whatever you want whenever you want. So I don’t think folks will spend money on music except for going to see someone live in concert. As far as the local music scene goes, it appears that we keep holding on to a bygone era. From the Fifties to the early Nineties, “going out” meant seeing live bands play big, packed clubs. No more. The huge rooms with giant crowds and large PAs have fallen by the wayside. Frankly, it feels like the current generation doesn’t have the attention span to actually sit and watch a live act play an entire set. If you listen to DJs in clubs or even smaller bars, most of their mixes involve mash-ups. Rarely do they play a song all the way through. I think that people today live for instant gratification as in "what’s next." Live bands, to the extent that they want to survive, have to evolve and address that. As working musicians, we need to meet the challenge of keeping it interesting. We can’t just look back. If we do, we may miss what’s right up ahead.
©2019 Roger Zee