Rex Smith still taking our breaths away

CEBU, Philippines - The ‘You Take My Breath Away’ singer, Broadway veteran, original Daredevil actor and film/television star serenaded Cebuanos in a pre-Valentine’s show Saturday evening at The Gallery of Ayala Center Cebu.

The former teen idol on almost getting killed by a mafia, on recording his biggest hit in just one take, on steering away from the drug that is fame and that one Pinoy snack he always has a stash of at home

 “I really like Ding Dong!,” singer Rex Smith’s eyes light up as he mentions his favorite Philippine brand of mixed nuts, one which he always makes sure to take a bunch of back home in California whenever he’s in the country.

We are backstage at The Gallery of Ayala Center Cebu Saturday evening and Rex is set to come out on stage in a few minutes for a pre-Valentine show with Pinoy YouTube sensation JV Decena serving as his powerful opening act. Laid out on a table inside the makeshift dressing room is a spread of drinks and chips…and what else but a few bags of his beloved Ding Dong!

“I love the name too! Actually with my eldest son [Brandon], ‘Ding Dong’ has become one of his expressions because I always have these around the house. This is like a Philippine thing. And then my son has now his own son [Buchanan] who sometimes utters ‘Whoopi Ding Dong,’” shares Rex of how the nut snack has invaded his American household.

Rex, still a studly frame at 61, has been a frequent performer in the Philippines, most especially during this month of hearts.

“I’ve been coming here for 17 years now and with your beautiful weather…it’s just lovely to see your city. While Manila is like New York, Cebu to me is like the Los Angeles, California of the Philippines. It reminds me of where I live,” he points out.  

“I’ve done Valentine’s shows here that you just remember forever. Those were great evenings, great audience. Warmth and love always fill the room.”

True to form, warmth and love indeed engulfed The Gallery as Rex serenaded the crowd, beginning with the upbeat “Build Me Up Buttercup” and then wasting no time in segueing to his own hits “Don’t Give Up On Us,” “Forever,” “Simply Jessie” and “Let’s Make A Memory” while handing out red and pink roses to a few nostalgic females in the audience.

Of course, Rex ended what was a brief yet memorable show with his biggest hit “You Take My Breath Away,” the song that catapulted him to teen idol status during the late ‘70s.  

Valentine’s season remains Rex’s busiest, and he isn’t complaining. “Usually my wife is travelling with me. We just got a new puppy, so it’s like having a baby at the house. Her name’s Joy. She’s the cutest thing. I have five children, I mean they’re grown-ups, but I still have a 12-year-old daughter and a 17-year-old son at home. With the travels I have to make around the world, my family’s gotten used to it. If we don’t have Valentine’s Day on Valentine’s Day, we have it on another day.”

Married four times over, Rex says his typical February 14 is spent performing. “Every guy thinks that my wife is gonna be really knocked out when she sees you at a show, but everybody gets used to it,” he says of his wife, a doctor. “I’m not saying she’s unimpressed, but it’s more like, ‘You were a little off on that song.’”

As his career takes him around the world up to this day, Rex credits his stamina to a youthful outlook.

“I’ve never become hard or bitter. I’m still very youthful in my heart. I think that’s one of the reasons why I sort of have a youthful outlook and youthful health. My doctor says I’m 10 years younger than I should be whenever I get a physical. My dentist says the same thing.”

Youthful outlook aside, it helps that Rex loves gulping down H2O and is addicted to juicing. “My wife says I drink a lot of water,” explains Rex of his enviable health. “And I have one of those Nutri Bullet machines which I use to blend something every morning. So I’d do raw beet, carrots, spinach and water. I put a little orange juice in it just to add a little flavor. It’s not supposed to taste good, but I tell you, it’s so full of vitamins that when I’m without it, I really miss it.”

The daily dose of nutrients comes in handy when Rex has to do  back-to-back-to-back performances. Not to mention, it has helped to maintain his good looks.

“Being on the road is sort of being in suspended animation for 23 hours, and then you come alive and be super animated for two hours, and then you just try to restore your energy until the next show because every time I come down here, I have shows, shows, shows.”

‘I have a hit’

Thousands and thousands of shows after and with people requesting “You Take My Breath Away” each time, Rex will be the first to tell you that he will not once get tired of performing this very song that changed the course of his life.

As the story goes, Rex knew the minute he listened to his first recording of the track that he had a hit in his hands.

“All these struggles to make it to New York to get signed… and also, I was doing a movie [‘Sooner or Later’]. That was the first song I recorded in the album. It was my first day of shooting my first movie, so I had been up since five in the morning. And then I went into the recording studio and did that one track. I sang it on one take. I did one pass at it just to set the levels,” narrates Rex, still humbled and in awe of the memory after all these years.

“At the end of that one take, Charlie Calello – who produced the Four Seasons and Frank Sinatra – he goes, ‘We got it.’ What do you mean you got it? I only did it once. He says, ‘That’s all you need.’

For a 20-year-old desperate for cash and that one break after years of paying his dues – that realization of finally landing a hit had him bowling over inside a restroom cubicle.

“I started listening to it and about halfway through, I said ‘I gotta go to the bathroom.’ I locked myself in the bathroom and I really broke down in the most wonderful way. I thought, ‘I just made a hit record.’ I knew it. You could tell by the way Charlie was looking and by the way it sounded,” he says, before adding, “Suddenly, all the stars had aligned and all the work paid off.”

What was about the song that made him predict it was going to be a massive hit? “There was something organic about the fact that I didn’t do a hundred takes. The spontaneity of it. It was not manufactured,” Rex offers.

For someone who began singing professionally at 15, it was hard enough to wait for his turn to finally come. But what made him truly emotional was how he had to go through the terror of being threatened by a mafia, just so he could get one step closer to his recording artist dreams.

“By the time I was 17, I was in Atlanta with the most successful local band and the other guys were like 28 years old. I had a fake ID so I can work in the club. So I had worked thousands and thousands of hours singing, playing, working my way up through clubs where, you know, you would go to get paid and the guy would go ‘Hey, we didn’t make any money this week.’ And the guy would pull out his gun and start cleaning it. And I would go, ‘Well, that’s fine. Thank you very much.’”

He continues, “And it was a long time ago, but it still has resonance in my life. But I don’t wake up every day going ‘Hey, my hit song…’ I mean, how many hit songs have there been? But I’ll never forget that achievement of, you know, in the course of making it to getting signed up by Columbia Records, some people in the mafia wanted to own me. They wanted me to sign a lifetime contract.”

“They paid for my recording that got me my record deal. But they told me if I didn’t sign a lifetime contract, they would kill me. That’s true. So imagine making it through that. They told me I had one week to pay them the money for the recording, and I didn’t have the money. The deal was, I would perform at some of the night clubs they owned and in exchange, I could use their recording studio. But then they said, ‘We’ll kill you. Either you sign with us or we’ll kill you.’”

“I had to go to the district attorney and tell them the story and the mafia ended up paying me to leave town. And they gave me my recordings for free. And that’s what got me started with Columbia Records. I have a one-man show called Confessions of a Teen Idol, and I tell the story of how it all came about.”

Imagine that scenario, and then going to what he calls a “supremely wonderful moment” of recording “You Take My Breath Away.”

“I’ll never forget that feeling. It wasn’t a feeling of ‘Oh, I’m gonna be rich.’ It was just, ‘Thank you for…’” pauses Rex as he struggles to find his words, “rewarding my efforts with the best kind of reward because it came out of my heart.”

With that experience, Rex advises young singers he comes across not to despair when potholes and roadblocks appear their way – for these very same obstacles may just be leading them to their very own hit.

 “What has kept me, I think interesting to people and interested in what I do, I’m still curious as when I was 23. What may be, could be, who knows, what’s around that corner? What exciting things could still come? You can’t predict these,” the feather-haired seasoned performer says.

“You can be at the best crossroads of your career and you don’t know that that left turn felt like, ‘Oh, everything’s a disaster,’ yet that’s actually leading to a moment like that where you go lock yourself in a bathroom and go ‘It’s a hit! It’s a hit!”

Like a Walt Disney movie

That hit could have easily been his ticket to superstardom the likes of Michael Jackson, yet Rex surprised the industry by shunning the pop star path as he instead diversified out into Broadway and later on, television and movies, including a superhero turn as Daredevil.

“I could have made the decision to be more of a pop star,” he explains, “but I tell you what, I was friends with Michael Jackson and Prince and I came out of the gate at the same time with our first albums and everything. The fact that I’m here enjoying and talking to you – I’ll take a day above ground any day of the week. I wanna enjoy this life. My great grandmother lived until 106. So I’m like, I’m in for the long run.”

In hindsight, Rex believes his decision to go Broadway was instrumental to his longevity, to his being very much alive and kicking, for him not going the way of the teen idol downward spiral.  Superstardom, he says, would have been his kiss of death.

“I think doing Broadway has been very healthy for me. The responsibility of eight shows a week is incredible. To take people on that journey is a point of pride for me,” says Rex.

 “I am so grateful that my life in this treacherous business didn’t have me needing drugs or other things to survive. It’s all been a very healthy life. I mean, my backyard has nothing but humming birds and squirrels – it’s like a zoo back there. I sit outside and have my coffee. I live 1200 feet up and there are no homes behind me so there’s open land and it’s where all the creatures go. It’s like a Walt Disney movie.”

Lonely at the top

The height of his popularity, Rex reveals, was also the loneliest times of his life. With fame came people with agenda, all buttering up to him and  few being genuine.

“It’s kind of hard to describe how in that era, I was sort of the tail-end of what would be an overnight sensation. With the movie I made and with ‘You Take My Breath Away’ – ABC, NBC, CBS, there were like four channels on TV. There weren’t a thousand channels like we have now. So the impact of that…when they did a screening of it before it came out in New York City, it must have been a 2,000-seat theater at Paramount Studios, and when I went in, I’ve never seen the movie. And there’s 2,000 people in there and I was just another guy coming in and sitting down with my brother.”

“When the screening ended and the lights came up and I stood up, 1,999 people looked at me in a different way than they looked at me on my way in. They never looked at me differently again,” he recalls.

Early on, Rex knew that fame was fleeting, and he was good with that. He, after all, doesn’t live for the applause.

“I’m the guy going to Home Depot getting paint to color my bathroom. That moment, I remember when I stood up, the power of that – what occurred right there, the overnight effect of that was, suddenly all my friends we’re going ‘You’re different.’ And I would say, ‘No, I’m not different. You’re different.’ I was the same guy I was yesterday, but now you’re looking at me differently because of the effects of what’s happening around me. Aren’t you my friend and such?”

“I’ll never forget a Saturday night in New York, I was on top of the world in my penthouse at the 33rd floor looking out at Manhattan, sitting at the dining table just head in my hands, just – and I don’t cry a lot. But I couldn’t…I couldn’t meet a girl that after the second or third time of seeing her, I would hear the same things. I mean, can anybody just be real with me? I became an artificial icon and for some people, it’s the worst addiction in the world: fame. It is a dangerous drug.”

Not that Rex isn’t thankful for once breathing the rarefied air of celebrity. But these days, he’s all about living out the rest of his life with grace.

“I’m just grateful and I’m moving towards grace in my life. What I tell my children is, ‘That’s what you work for.’ The hardships you go through are really just the building blocks for gratitude and grace.”  (FREEMAN)