Word: lemongello
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...familiar-looking young crooner appears on a softly back-lighted stage. While he pumps a microphone and purrs out a ballad, viewers begin to wonder: Como's kid brother maybe? An Italian Goulet? Then on comes the voiceover, hailing the "mood rock" sound of that nationwide heartthrob, Peter Lemongello...
Peter who? Lemongello, 29, is a bland-voiced but relentlessly enterprising tenor from Islip, Long Island. For years he struggled to build a career-through such gimmicks as sending out little boxes of lemon Jell-O to deejays and record-company executives to remind them, should the occasion arise, how to pronounce his name. Now Lemongello and some home-town backers have forcefully raised the momentous question: Can an independent singer hit the big time by marketing himself like so much, well, JellO...
...Lemongello decided that his eight-year struggle to become a nationwide singing idol was hopeless. Too bad, because he certainly looked the part, with his long brown Prince Valiant locks, rosebud lips and gray-green almond-shaped eyes. He had also had all the prescribed early breaks. He had been "discovered" on the Tonight Show four times, sung with Don Rickles in Reno and Vegas, played the Copa, Jimmy's and the Rainbow Room in Manhattan, signed a $7,500 contract with Epic Records and toured the top spas on the Borscht Belt...
...while he was bombing in show business, Lemongello was succeeding in a lot of other fields. In Islip, he turned an egg-selling job into a distributorship, using the profits to invest in some gas stations, which he then swapped for a chain of coin-operated laundries. He was moving into land speculation and home building when he told the local Islip banker who was financing his housing deals about his moribund career as a crooner. The banker gave him an idea: If he could sell eggs and laundries and houses, why not himself...
...Lemongello and his banker chum formed a corporation and invested $32,000 in a one-shot showcase performance at the Westbury Music Fair, a theater near Islip, aimed at attracting other partners. They found six, among them the owner of a Long Island Midas Muffler franchise and an Islip doctor. The six put up $390,000, and Lemongello worked out a plan to hit the New York metropolitan-area market, as he puts it, "like a slow-release time bomb." He cut a two-record album, Love 76, then in January activated his bomb: a 13-week, $187,000 campaign...