I want to wish everyone a Happy Holiday Season! Happy New Year in 2009! I am also posting a new video here from my trip to Las Vegas. It is a docu-music video – documentary footage that was recently edited into a music video format. Just uploaded onto youtube.com – Hope you enjoy it!
Peace and Love,
- Pauli
This is the news story from NYC about Hal Jackson’s Celebration Event. There is a quick shot of me on stage at the Apollo.
Pauli
Robert K. O’Daniell/The News-Gazette
Pauli Carman will be backed by the Tons ‘O’ Fun band at a benefit holiday concert Friday at the Virginia Theatre in Champaign.
CHAMPAIGN – As lead vocalist for the band Champaign, Pauli Carman toured the world. As a solo act, he became a star in Hong Kong and the Philippines and more recently performed at the famed Apollo Theater in New York.
Now he’s back in music full time after an eight-year hiatus during which he worked with children with behavior disorders and adults with developmental disabilities.
He has two management agencies representing him, has re-formed Champaign to record an album and will star in “Feel the Season’s Magic … Like a Child,” a holiday show Friday evening at the Virginia Theatre.
“This is Pauli’s show,” said Larry Fredrickson, a member of the Tons ‘O’ Fun band, which will perform at the benefit as well.
Carman, also a singer and percussionist in Tons ‘O Fun, called the annual holiday show, now in its fourth year, a labor of love for himself and Fredrickson. It’s also a way to give back to the community, he said. The proceeds will go to the Virginia Theatre restoration fund and the Developmental Services Center Tree of Hope campaign.
This past year, Carman worked at the center, which serves adults with developmental disabilities. “DSC is very near and dear to my heart,” he said.
Carman left, though, to concentrate on music full time and to re-establish Champaign. The band recently recorded a new album, “Carma,” at Pogo Studio in Champaign.
“Karma is everything,” Carman said. “It’s what you give. It’s what you get back. It’s all about karma. Lately we’ve just been trying to do things in music for a cause rather than do it for the CD’s sake.”
Carman hopes to have Champaign touring again to support the album, released in October, and to record a new one late next year.
Carman describes the new Champaign sound as soulful, much the same as the old Champaign, but with a new edge. He and Fredrickson started the first incarnation of Champaign in the late 1970s.
“I was like Peter Best of the Beatles,” Fredrickson said. “I thought, ‘This band isn’t going to go anywhere,’ so I left to play with Pork and the Havana Ducks.”
Champaign went on to score a major hit in 1981 with “How ‘Bout Us,” which had been written by keyboardist Dana Walden and re-arranged by Carman in Earth, Wind and Fire-style. “How ‘Bout Us,” the title track from Champaign’s first album, went on to become No. 1 across all the charts all over the world, Carman said.
Champaign’s second album, “Modern Heart,” released in 1983, contained the Top 10 R&B track “Try Again.”
In 1986, Champaign broke up, and Carman began his solo career, releasing his first album, “Dial My Number,” that year on the CBS/Columbia label. The single “Dial My Number” spent several weeks on the BET video charts and also got airplay on MTV.
In 1990, Carman and Champaign got back together to record “Champaign IV,” released in 1991; its single, “Trials of the Heart,” spent a brief time on the R&B charts. In 2003, Champaign released a greatest-hits compilation.
Carman came back from Asia to record those albums and play Champaign’s final concert at the Virginia Theatre, with all of its original members.
In 1989, Carman had moved to the Philippines to live and work with a band from Ohio that he split the bill with as Pauli Carman and Champaign. They toured Asia extensively, and Carman appeared for a year and a half on a Filipino weekly television variety show, “Sabado,” singing Champaign songs.
He stayed in the Philippines until 2000, living in a stone-and-marble house in a jungle-like setting. There were two reasons he decided to return here: China had taken over Hong Kong, and Carman felt he was losing touch with his own country.
Carman, who looks far younger than his 55 years, said music has been his life and passion all of his life. He grew up in Decatur, the seventh of 10 children born to a furrier and homemaker. The Carman family sang at church and home, and Pauli performed in plays, musicals and bands through junior high and MacArthur High School.
While a high school student, he also was a member of the group Blues Alliance, which had gigs at the Red Lion in Champaign when Carman was not old enough to be in a bar.
After graduating in 1972, Carman moved to Champaign, where he was represented by the Blytham Agency, operated by Danville native Irving Azoff, who went on to have a major career in the music industry.
Carmen’s first gigs here were with the Finchely Boys, then Coal Kitchen and later Champaign. When Carman went onstage at the Apollo Theater on Nov. 6 for a tribute to Hal Jackson, the first African-American radio personality of note, the Ray Chew Orchestra played Champaign’s “How ‘Bout Us.
“It was so nice to hear people go, ‘Pauli!’ You remember me after 20 years?” he said. “It was quite a treat for me and the highlight of my career, playing at the Apollo Theater.”
Jackson, who turned 93 and worked for WBLS in New York City, had happened to break “How ‘Bout Us” in the United States soon after the record was released.
“When we left, the single had not charted,” Carman remembered. “It went gold in Europe and platinum in the United States. We went to London, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam. We came back home to a No. 1 record.”
