Grand Dad Opry

“Ya gotta have a gimmick,” or so advised the late Stephen Sondheim in his 1959 musical Gypsy. Well, Antony Spumoni thought he had a doozy. The concept was simple: Sing country songs in cod-operatic style and wait for the variety show dollars to start rolling in. That this particular shtick failed for so long was not for want of trying, it turns out that it was simply a stupid idea. For despite superficial similarities between the two genres—both are lachrymal, over-dramatic, and unhealthily obsessed with drinking, death, and yodelling—they don’t really blend at all, and end up cancelling each other’s best points. And yet….

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Spumoni’s oddball mash-up spent a long-time gestating. Indeed, he first started telling friends he’d “invented a new musical genre” while attending the Julie Hard School of Music* in Bloomington during the mid-1970s.  He refused to say what this genre was out of a ludicrous overabundance of caution: Spumoni truly feared one of his fellow musicians might steal the idea and swipe the awaiting fortune he thought his rightful due.  

Our hero didn’t get around to putting his plan into action until 1996 (hence the punning, advanced-age referencing stage name) when he got himself transferred from the Fur, Feathers ‘n’ Fun pet store he’d managed in Sanders, Indiana for over a decade to the shop’s Nashville branch to facilitate the launch of his new career as ‘Grand Dad Opry’. It was here that Spumoni finally began re-tooling popular arias for a country audience: Thus “Libiamo Ne’lieti Calici” became “One More Drink (No, Better Make That Ten),” “O Mio Babbino Caro” became “Dear Ol’ Daddy”, “Nessun Dorma” became “Ain’t No-One Gonna Sleep Tonight”, and so on and on. A large, round man in the tradition of male opera tenors, Spumoni wore formal tails augmented with rhinestones, a similarly decked out 10-gallon hat, and a bolo tie clasped by a locket hiding a picture of his mother.

He spent several years in Music City polishing his act. Unsurprisingly, no one wanted to know. To make matters worse, he chose to self-release his music exclusively on Cassingle, calling them “the music delivery system of the future.” Perhaps if he’d been making Hastings Grimestep Glitch Techno, Spumoni might have garnered some hip cachet, but as it was (and, indeed, is), Cassingles were (and are) a thoroughly inefficient and very silly way of music sharing.

Finally, in the mid-teens, when he had all but given up on his dream, pretentious East Nashville art-school types in need of weirdo performers to fill out bills began indulging Spumoni. A cult act’s cult act, Grand Dad Opry was publicly lauded by none other than Ginger Minge of the notorious shock-folk due The Kunt and the Aids. With characteristic grace, Minge declared, onstage at DRKMTTR in Nashville, that anyone who didn’t like Spumoni’s show should be “forced to watch their own mother being sodomized and cannibalized by leprous stockbrokers, starting at the feet for both.”

And then, as Sondheim (again) would say, a funny thing happened.

A junior AT&T digital marketing executive, Michael Messerschmitt, was in town to see his girlfriend, who was performing as ‘Krystal Mess’ in an all-female The Kunt and the Aids tribute band cleverly named The Runt and the Raids.** He chanced to hear a cassette of Grand Dad Opry’s version of “Largo al Factotum”, re-titled “Here Come The Bossman”, playing over the East Room PA system. Sensing a kooky commercial hook, the adman sought Spumoni out via a mutual friend who runs The Sounds of Pestilence, one of the Nashville’s three animal embalming diorama stores. A licensing deal was arranged in short order. The ensuing series of online AT&T commercials featuring Grand Dad Opry’s music went viral, providing a balm to a pandemic, election year weary United States. Remarkably, the performances appealed to both audiences: opera buffs enjoyed slumming it and country music fans believed themselves elevated. This paved the way for a best-selling Lp compilation of his cassingles entitled Are You Sure Handle Done It This Way? (Thirty Tigers, 2020). Spumoni retired shortly after, a happy man, his vision realized.

It turns out that sometimes the stupidest ideas are the best ones.

* Ms. Hard was soon legally forced to change the name of her school. She didn’t learn her lesson, however, and suffered a similar fate with her next conservatory, The ‘Berkley’ College of Music.

**Jesus, things had gotten very meta in this particular scene.