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Wednesday, May 13, 1998 By Brian O'Neil
I'm a big fan of groundswells, but you don't see many in real life.
In the movies, they're everywhere. Take "Singin' in the Rain." Gene Kelly persuades Debbie Reynolds to sing behind the stage curtain so everyone in the audience will think this lip-synching blond dimwit with a voice like Myron Cope can sing. When Kelly, Donald O'Connor and a co-conspirator raise the curtain in midsong and reveal Reynolds as the real singer, she runs off and Kelly shouts for someone to stop her, and a GROUNDSWELL of laughter and applause from the audience marks Reynolds as a STAR!
That's Hollywood. This is Pittsburgh. So our groundswell ain't about an ingenue. It's about a middle-aged, blue-collar rock 'n' roller.
It started April Fool's Day when Ed Masley, our iconoclastic pop music critic, noted an upcoming concert at the Coca-Cola Star Lake Ampthitheatre for "Pittsburgh's All-Stars." The lineup includes bands fronted by Donnie Iris, B.E. Taylor, Joe Grushecky, Glenn Pavone and Billy Price, plus the Corbin Hanner Band. Taylor, Grushecky, Pavone, Price -- these men tore up The Decade, Oakland's legendary rock spot, in the Roaring '80s. But one name is conspicuously absent here.
"Where the hell is Norm Nardini?" Masley asked.
Yeah. You don't expect a venue named for a soft drink to be on the cutting edge, but when it holds the equivalent of a Pittsburgh rock old-timers night, it should at least know whose shoulders to tap.
"Of the era that they're talking about, Norm is the guy who stands out that should be there," said Steve Hansen, the 3WS disc jockey who spent many a beer-sodden night at The Decade in the early '80s.
"Norm was as big a star as any of the All-Stars. He always got the best-looking girls, too."
Joe Katrencik, who handles publicity for Star Lake, said there was no chance anyone would see Nardini in the June 6 concert, however. Didn't make the cut. Maybe next year.
That hard-line stance seems odd, given the letters the PG has run from Normanites since this concert was announced. Sure, it doesn't take many to get something like that going, but the passion of his fans is clear, and Nardini would fit on that bill as naturally as fries on a Primanti sandwich.
Nardini told me he was, at first, hurt by the slight, but he's used to being on the outside looking in. He never got much play on the powerhouse rock station, WDVE, when he might have; never got the notice his contemporaries did in the alternative weekly, In Pittsburgh.
"Most others play rock 'n' roll," he says. "I am rock 'n' roll. I am a true free spirit, an independent man. I don't fit in with the old guys. I don't fit in with the young guys."
At 47, he's never had a job outside of music, a fact he carries like a badge of honor.
There are times when his cockiness comes off as a wounded wail; when Bruce Springsteen played with Grushecky and the Houserockers at Nick's Fat City in 1995, Nardini, the warm-up act, announced himself as "the uncrowned king." But he says he can't pass up any chance for notice, as the light of publicity so rarely shines on him.
He's humbled by this recent attention, but says, "I don't ask for favors because it's not manly."
He'll continue to play his game his way. His usual Friday night gig at Excuses on the South Side goes eight hours: four acoustic, four electric. Nobody can match that. Nardini is to Pittsburgh rock what Cal Ripken is to baseball, the Iron Man, an All-Star.
Only Ripken doesn't need write-in votes.
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