There were times at the beginning when Mark Randisi felt like an impostor, and not just because he was singing Frank Sinatra.
It was Andrea Bocelli who set him straight — and if you think Bocelli’s operatic voice is powerful, imagine the impact of his two simple words on a guy trying to energize a dream.
Randisi, of Royal Oak, died Tuesday, Feb. 10, at 71. He’d been hospitalized last year with heart issues, and the supposition is that’s what took him.
He was an industrial painter for the first part of his working life, and then fate handed him a lottery ticket and he had the sense and nerve to cash it. He went from tavern karaoke nights to some of Michigan’s elite stages, including the Detroit Opera House, where he and Bocelli both sang at a charity event some 25 years ago.
“What do you do?” Bocelli asked him.
“I’m a painter,” Randisi said.
Bocelli couldn’t see him, but he knew what he’d heard. The great Italian tenor slung an arm around Randisi’s shoulder and told him, “Keep singing.”
That’s what he did, with style and just enough swagger and an eternal sense of wonder.
Sometimes he sang in tiny lounges and sometimes he fronted big bands. He was a Sinatra interpreter, he’d tell you, not an impersonator, but he used Sinatra’s arrangements and sounded so much like him it was startling.
He followed his passion, a lesson to us all. He never stopped being grateful, another lesson.
“If you’re happy, that’s the goal in life,” said Simone Vitale, 76, whose band backed Randisi at more weddings, galas and Italian festivals than he can count. “Mark Randisi did something he loved, and that’s the bottom line.”
He’s sure Randisi would agree, even if the music stopped a few beats too soon.
Colorful, and cautious, beginnings
Randisi was dapper before he was Frank, but he had a job to do. He painted strip malls for his dad’s company, and sometimes he’d take his turn on karaoke nights wearing spattered carpenter pants.
The first time he dared to sing in public was at a long-gone restaurant and bar called Petker’s Place in Rochester Hills in 1991. He was terrified, but quickly addicted, making the karaoke rounds with a buddy who did Elvis.
There’s no shortage of Presleys, but Randisi was unique, increasingly polished, and lucky. His tapes fell into a succession of good hands, and before long a cassette wound up in the dashboard of restaurateur Joe Vicari on his drive home.
In short order, Randisi had a devoted following at the former Machus Red Fox in Bloomfield Township, now Andiamo Italia.
“The best is yet to come,” he’d sing, and it was.
Road trip full of memories
Jennifer Christiansen was one of Randisi’s closest friends, and sometimes she was his Nancy.
They played a party at the Detroit Athletic Club in December, one of a handful of shared stages in the last few months of the year, and she sang Frank’s daughter’s part in “Something Stupid.”
She tried to step aside a bit after that, she said, to give the stage to the headliner, but he wouldn’t hear of it.
“Let’s split it up,” Randisi said. “Let’s have some fun.”
Christiansen, 56, of Huntington Woods, was speaking from her car Wednesday, headed toward two weeks of performances in Naples, Florida. Randisi had told her he might fly in to catch a few of her shows, and then Tuesday she got word that the curtain had come down.
“We were each other’s therapists,” she said. They would convene at Mt. Chalet in Royal Oak after separate gigs, comparing notes and telling stories, and she said it’s strange to think how young and how different they were in those early days.
“We were both shy at one time. We grew a backbone together,” she said.
Randisi remained the more reserved of the two when he wasn’t holding a microphone.
He could flirt from the stage, but not off it; divorced in the 1990s, he never came close to an encore. He always dressed with care, she said, but never preened. He carried himself with grace, and she never heard him swear.
The more she thought about him, Christiansen said, the more tempted she was to turn around and come home, but she knew that wouldn’t happen.
“If Mark was here,” she realized, “he’d tell me, ‘Don’t you dare.’ ”
It’s like Bocelli said: if you’re fortunate enough to get the chance, keep singing.
Reach Neal Rubin at NARubin@freepress.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Detroit’s Sinatra dies, leaving behind a lesson for all: Keep singing
Reporting by Neal Rubin, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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