A Fine, Fine Day

The Zoo Crew has got the needle down on a real story-song for the Zoo Freaks, and it is Tony Carey cutting loose with "A Fine, Fine Day," the opener from his 1984 album Some Tough City. This one does not fool around with neon flash. It rolls in like a cousin who has been gone a long time, fedora in his hand, twenty dollars pulled out of the hatband, and a taxi meter running toward Central Park. Carey wrote it, sang it, and played nearly every note on the record except the drums, the guitar solos, and a couple of saxophone breaks. The single spent fifteen weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, peaked at number 22, and parked itself at number one on the mainstream rock chart. That is the biggest hit he ever put his own name on, and the Zoo Freaks still lean in when Uncle Sonny blows back into town.

Carey has told interviewers the whole thing started as a made-up tale, not a page out of his diary. He does not have an Uncle Sonny, and nobody in his family did a long stretch behind bars. What he did have, growing up, was a front-row seat on rough company. He hung around gangsters when he was young, and a lot of his friends were bikers, Hells Angels among them. Rock and roll, he has said with a laugh, brings its own crop of crooks. Out of that he built a character who did hard time, hid some money, and came home with people still looking for it. He has compared the feel of the lyric to John Steinbeck, and he has said Hemingway might have written a scene like it. The song is not autobiography. It is invented people with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Years later he was still getting mail from men who had just walked out of prison, one of them writing that he had done fourteen years for manslaughter and was listening to the record. That is a strange kind of fan letter, and it tells you the story landed on somebody real.

The record company nearly killed the thing before the Zoo Freaks ever heard it. Carey has said the label did not care for the lyric. They liked the sauce of the track and wanted the title switched to something along the lines of "In the Heat of the Night." They also wanted the bridge carved out so the single would fit a shorter radio slot. He would not do it. That bridge is the meat of the story, the part that tells you what Uncle Sonny was really walking back into, and Carey has always been a lyric man before he is a three-minute-single man. He turned the cut demo down flat. The upshot was a trade, the way baseball clubs swap a player. David Geffen's company sent him over to Irving Azoff at MCA, and Some Tough City came out on that label in 1984, recorded over in West Germany with producer Peter Hauke. The B-side of the single was "Say It's All Over." He has said he still does not regret keeping the long version. A bigger chart number was not worth gutting the tale.

The video was not his idea either. MCA handed it to Storm Thorgerson, the same man behind the sleeve art for Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here. Carey has said that, unlike a lot of his other clips, this one worked, because the director understood what the song was about. The album cover is a cold memory he has never shaken. He is out there in a leather jacket that was not warm enough, holding the shot Uncle Sonny, and he has said he will never forget how freezing that shoot was. He was not in on the script. The pictures came from Thorgerson's shop. On the radio side, the follow-up single "The First Day of Summer" climbed to number 33, and the album itself reached number 60 on the Billboard 200. Carey opened a run of dates for Night Ranger while the record was moving. Critics called the song a fine opener and a powerful hit. The rest of Some Tough City keeps the same street-level cast: down-and-out folks in New York and Los Angeles, a Hollywood cautionary tale in "Tinseltown," a runaway pair in "The First Day of Summer," and a title track about scraping by in a hard town. He has said he tries to draw his characters the way Steinbeck drew his.

Before any of that, Anthony Lawrence Carey was a California kid, born October 16, 1953, in Watsonville and raised around Turlock. The music started in a church, where he was allowed to sit at the piano during off hours and, later, at the pipe organ. The family got a piano when he was seven. At eleven he had his first acoustic guitar and a little group playing Mamas and the Papas songs. His father handed him a Lowrey organ on his fourteenth birthday, and he started a neighborhood rock band that leaned on The Doors. He also played contrabassoon in the school orchestra, which is a long way from a biker bar and a fine training ground for a man who would end up covering keyboards, guitar, bass, and the vocal. At seventeen he lit out for New Hampshire and put together a band called Blessings. They landed a deal with ABC Dunhill. The album never got finished. Carey has blamed his own distraction with girls, the producer's drug use, and a tangle with the label. Two years of that, and the door was still shut.

The door that opened was a rehearsal-room wall in Hollywood. Blessings were working at S.I.R. studios. In the next room, Ritchie Blackmore, fresh out of Deep Purple, was auditioning players for the band that would become Rainbow, with bassist Jimmy Bain in the mix. Blackmore liked what he heard through the wall and sent Bain to fetch the kid. Carey was about twenty-one, the next youngest man in the room a decade older, and he took the gig. He figured it was a way into the business. He played on Rainbow Rising in 1976, including the keyboard introduction to "Tarot Woman" and the long solo on "A Light in the Black," and he did the world tours that fed the live album On Stage. By 1977 he was gone, and he has never sugarcoated it. Heavy metal held no pull for him. The lyrics, the crowd, and the people in the organization felt ice-cold. He has said folks in that camp got hurt, physically or emotionally, and that there was almost a generation gap between him and singer Ronnie James Dio. In August 1978 he left Los Angeles, a busted first marriage behind him, feeling fifty-three at twenty-three, and headed for Germany because it was the place he could still picture himself living. He met his wife there. He met Peter Hauke there. Out of those Frankfurt studio hours came the solo records, the science-fiction Planet P Project albums, and then Some Tough City, the one that put Uncle Sonny on American radio. He has called some of those left turns career suicide, and he has also said he does not much care. He had a story to tell, and he told it.

If you want the man in his own words and the records in his own shop, his official site is Tony Carey, where he keeps the Planet P Project side of the house and the news on his Songs and Stories shows over in Germany. He posts as the working musician on Facebook and on Instagram. Pull up a chair with the Zoo Crew and the rest of the Zoo Freaks over at THE ZOO, where a fine, fine day for a reunion is always on the turntable.