THE STEINETTES (1980)

Text © Robert Barry Francos / FFanzeen, 1980/2023
Images from the Internet unless indicated

The Steinettes were a brief moment in time, yet their short span made them a cult classic to fans of the ‘60s girl group sounds that they emulated, and for the comic timing in the two singular-word-titled Robert Altman films in which they appeared, HealtH and more famously Popeye, where they appeared as Olive Oyl’s four girlfriends. In both, they were sort of the Greek Chorus with a song in their hearts.

The group as a collective is gone now, but every once in a rare moment, they regather at parties and perform their old routines. Luckily, often, there is someone there with a camera.

This interview appeared in FFanzeen, issue No. 6, dated Year-end 1980.

(photo by Dennis Concepcion)

The Steinettes (1980)

Alphabetically, it’s as follows:

Natalie Blossom, far right
(photo by Dennis Concepcion)

Natalie Blossom. Blonde and sort of modish-looking with ‘sixties hairdo and make-up. The ham of the group, she is always making faces and clowning for both the camera and the audience. Hailing from Cleveland, Ohio, she now resides in Brooklyn, just a stones-throw away from the Midwood Theatre. Some of her solos are the Angel’s “My Boyfriend’s Back” and Betty Everett’s “The Shoop-Shoop Song (It’s in His Kiss).”

Julie Janney (photo by Dennis Concepcion)

Julie Janney. A blonde who tends to wear a red T-shirt from her home state of Indiana. Of the foursome, her voice is the strongest, so she gets some of the more difficult songs to sing, like “Be By Baby,” and “Walking In The Rain,” both by the Ronettes. Usually, she sways her hips when she sings.

Julie, Patti Katz, Natalie Schaffer 
(photo by Dennis Concepcion)

Patty Katz. The spokesperson of the group and the only native New Yorker (Great Neck, Long Island). This brunette is the bass vocalist (very rare in all-female groups) and her repertoire includes one of the unit’s best renditions, the Shirelles’ “Foolish Little Girl” (with Natalie), and “Dedicated to the One I Love.” Patty is the one who talks the cops out of kicking the group off the street corners when the crowd exceeds the sidewalk and spills onto the roadway (as they usually do, by the second song).

Dianne Shaffer. The “Ringo” of the group, was the last member to join. This brunette is also the shortest. She wears pigtails and is the group’s verbal comedienne (as opposed to Natalie’s physical comedy). A couple of her songs are Shelley Fabares’ “Johnny Angel” (a la Swan Lake), and the Chantel’s “Maybe,” in which she holds the record for saying the most “maybes” in the shortest time span. Naw, I’m just making that up, but I still wouldn’t be surprised.

Singing "Sugar Fit" from Health
(photo by Dennis Concepcion)

Put ‘em all together and no, they don’t spell mother, but they do spell out Steinettes. Now, there are two questions that may be plaguing your mind at the moment:

First, and quite simply, what are the Steinettes? Well, so far we’ve established that they are a singing quartet of girls…er…women. So, what’s so unusual about that? Well, they are New York street performers who make their living by putting a trick-o-treat pumpkin out front and singing a cappella. This summer, it was on West Broadway, twixt Houston and Prince, in SoHo. Next summer, who knows? The police have been giving them a bit of a hassle about their listeners blocking traffic. They also perform once in a while in Sheridan Square Park, on Christopher Street.

Singing "Dominique" by the Singing Nun
(photo by Dennis Concepcion)

As you look over their names, you will notice that there is no one in the group named Stein. The second question, therefore, is how did they get the name Steinettes? The first version of the group, (sans Dianne), was formed by comedian Phil Stein for a review that he was putting on. The quartet was used as filler (what a waste of talent!) during his costume changes. When the show ended, so did the Steinettes. They re-formed for another review, this time with Dianne. When they rehearsed under the Washington Square Arch and a crowd started forming, they thought, “Hmmm.” And a quartet was born – sort of a “Hey kids, let’s put on a show” history. (For more specific details on their early career, check out an article written in the New York Daily News, October 17, 1979.) But think that’s a dull story. Here’s the one they prefer:

Patty Katz: I was going uptown on an express train, and Julie and Dianne were sitting next to each other and singing. It was real empty. I sat down next to them and for some reason I came in with the third harmony. And (Natalie) just got in. She was going to Brooklyn. And she came in and did fourth harmony. And we said, “Hey, cool!”
Dianne Schaffer: “We got a group!”
Natalie Blossom: And they were really getting off singing to each other. I thought they all knew each other. They were laughing at themselves, and I was laughing with them, so I just came in with the fourth harmony.
Patty: We were all singing different songs.
Natalie: That’s why it was so funny.

Any way you look at it, the first official gig as the Steinettes (as opposed to four actresses singing together) arrived around Labor Day, 1978.

(photo by Dennis Concepcion)

Hanging out with Dennis Concepcion in the spring of 1979, we were eating at the late and lamented Burger Towne at Sheridan Square on 7th Avenue South and Christopher Street, across the narrow road from the triangular park (you see it coming, don't you?). As we ate our burgers, through the window we saw this large crowd gathering. Having finished, we went outside to see what was going on.

We entered the park, and saw the four. All were wearing silver jackets with their “Steinettes” logo on the back, sort of like a gang would. Three of the four were wearing sweat-sox in the bobby-sox style, with sneakers. Natalie was wearing black pumps and had on a black and white striped T-shirt that just came short of her waist; Julie, her red Indiana T-shirt; Patty’s was white with a Minnie Mouse design; and Dianne’s was blue with some writing that I can never quite remember. These are still, to this day, their work clothes. Two blondes, two brunettes.

It was love at first sight.

Since that time, between Dennis and myself, we have renamed the spot “Steinette Park,” and thus it shall ever more be. But that was the last we were to see them for a long time.

During the early Spring of this year, FFanzeen managing editor Stacy Mantel, art editor Alan Abramowitz, and I were walking around SoHo (see it coming again, huh?) to the SoHo Music Gallery, a really good record store on Wooster, and we saw a large crowd. I heard the voices long before I saw who it was, but there was no question in my mind who they were. “My God, it’s the Steinettes!” I shouted. The three of us went over and there were two more Steinettes converts – proselytizing was unnecessary. We sat through both of their one-hour sets (with a five to fifteen minute “intermission” to catch their breath and new audience.

A few months after that, an actor with whom I worked named Richard “When’s FFanzeen comin’ out” Hill asked, “Hey, did you ever hear of a group called the Steinettes?” He seemed surprised that I did. Well, as it turns out, Patty is his friend, and before the week was out, my friend Dennis and I had interviewed them. Now we rarely miss a performance.

Of course, there is an argument against them – namely that they are actresses and not really rock’n’roll singers; that they do not deserve as much attention from the music world as they are getting. Bull. They are, in fact, four girls who grew up listening to the Chantels, and Ronettes, and Shangri-Las, and loved them as kids (didn’t we all?), and in their way, are singing for both fun and (hopefully) profit. But that element of fun is very important to the way they perceive their music. No two sets are identical, distinguished by all the improv joking around that happens between them and their audience – even among themselves. They are always talking to the audience, sometimes including them in the act. But more than anything else, they have fun. And more than anything else, that is what rock’n’roll is all about, isn’t it?

Scene from HealtH

But still, there is the acting part of the group that cannot be ignored. And their career seems to be taking off. Robert Altman was turned on to them, and he offered them the role of the pseudo-Greek Chorus in his film, HealtH (1980). HealtH, which took what seemed like forever to come out, has been released in LA, where it was badly shot down by critics (nothing bad said about the Steinettes). So, it was canned before it ever reached New York. However, they are also in Altman’s Popeye (1980), which appears as if it will be a hit. Maybe if it does really well, they will re-release HealtH.

As far as publicity for the film goes, the Steinettes seemed to have been almost ignored. When Life Magazine had a large feature on Popeye, they were never even mentioned in the cast. Ditto with many film magazines. Luckily, they haven’t been totally ignored. Papers such as The Daily News and The New York Post have run articles on them. And now they are going to be on”20/20”, and have a great shot at a guest appearance on the new season of “Saturday Night Live” (it didn’t happen – RBF., 2023).

I hope they go far, because they represent a genre of song-style that has not been around lately, but is sorely missed.

Dennis Concepcion and the Steinettes
(ffoto by Robert Barry Francos)

The following short documentary gives a nice overview of their music, after an intro by Patti. Dennis, mentioned above, took some of the still photos of them performing live, and can be seen wearing a Schaffer Music Festival tee-shirt in front of the crowd at 11:36.

 

Refections on Being a Record Collector

All photos from the Internet

“Hello, my name is Robert, and I am a record collector.”

Is the term “record collector” usable these days? Maybe “music collector”? Perhaps “physical music collector”?

My very first record was one of those yellow plastic kid ones, with a song about Noah that I can still recall part of the chorus (“It rained for 40 days and nights/It poured and poured and poured…”), though I can’t seem to remember what was on the flip side (Moses?). It was played on a portable electric all-in-one player that was a 1-foot square cube (when the lid was down), and played 4 speeds (78, 45, 33-1/3, 16!). My mom used it to listen to her 78 RPMs, including Vaughn Monroe’s “Stout Hearted Men”, Nelson Eddy’s, “Song of the Mounties” (but not Jeanette McDonald, oddly enough), a truly cool version of “The Volga Boatmen’s Song,” and Al Jolsen doing the “Hatikva.” And yes, I still have most of them.

My father only knew Big Band Swing, like the Shaw brothers, but my mom was a bit more contemporary, loving Nat King Cole and especially Johnny Mathis. Both parents were pretty clueless, however, about rock and roll. My dad hated it, and my mom wasn’t against it, she was just never interested.

I’m not sure how my dad made his choices in what to give me and my older brother, but he seemed to rely on soundtracks and greatest hits. He brought us Mary Poppins and West Side Story, as well as collections of hits by The Beach Boys, Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, Gary Lewis and the Playboys, and the Four Seasons. He also got us Beatles ’65. And, yes, I still have them all.

Sometime in the mid-1960s, one of my mom’s cousins decided she didn’t want her record collection any more (all 15 or so), and she gave them to my mom, who gave them to me. It was a weird grouping, from Jackie Mason’s I'm the Greatest Comedian in the World, Only Nobody Knows it Yet!, Gretchen Wyler’s Wild Wyler Wildest, the Broadway soundtracks to Funny Girl and Carol Channing’s Show Girl, and even one of a military brass band! And yes, I still have almost all of them.

When my brother was old enough, he started bringing home some Simon & Garfunkel, The Who and CSNY. Somehow, they got incorporated into my collection. While I don’t remember the first LP I purchased by myself, I do recall the first singles, a 3-for-$1 sealed-in-plastic set of The Blues Image’s “Ride Captain Ride,” Ray Stevens’ “Mr. Businessman,” and Manfred Mann’s “Quinn the Eskimo.” And yes, I still have them.

Around 1970, my cousin moved out of his parent’s house, and unknown to him then, my aunt gave me his 45 collection, which consisted of two 45s boxes (the cardboard ones with the plastic handles and metal latch that never latched). She must have had some prescient knowledge that I would be interested. A large chunk of it was doo-wop era, like The Crests’ “Trouble in Paradise,” Randy & the Rainbow’s “Denise,” Bobby Lewis’ “Tossin’ and Turnin’,” and Frankie Avalon's "Why." It was a music history lesson, and I loved it. And yes, I still have them all.

By the early ‘70s, I probably had about 75 albums and about 100 singles. Then I met my first influencial record collector in high school, Bernie Kugel. The first time I hung out at his house, I saw his shelves of vinyl. I fully admit that at the time I met him, I was still pretty clueless, but then again, compared to Bernie’s extensive musical knowledge, I always would be (in relation). He played all this music I had never heard before, like Slade, Move, Roxy Music, the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, and rare Dylan. I liked some of the stuff he played, others I didn’t. Yet, I still didn’t get the collecting bug.

Bernie and I headed into Manhattan pretty often, usually in Greenwich Village, but occasionally uptown. One time we were rifling through the bins at Colony Records, which is connected to the Brill Building, on Broadway and 49th Street. As I languidly flipped through one of the discount bins, Bernie looked at the other. He walked over to me excitedly, holding an LP. He said, quite bluntly, “Buy this!” It was $1.97, and I had never heard of it. Bernie briefly gave me a history of International Artist Records from Texas (who also put out the 13th Floor Elevators). He convinced me into buying the Red Crayola With the Familiar Ugly’s The Parable of Arable Land. There were two copies in the bins; he took the Mono one, so I took the Stereo. It was pretty wild, and yes I still have it. I thought I had gotten off pretty easy, actually, because I remember being in shock around that time at Bernie having paid $15 for a Flamin’ Groovies EP.

It was after I started going to CBGB’s, Max’s Kansas City, etc., that I really started to get interested in music. I liked the bands, and I wanted to learn more about where they stylisticly came from. There were so many albums that became sought out a couple of years later that one could find in the dollar bin in the mid-70s, like the Velvet Underground, the New York Dolls, and the Modern Lovers. But what really got me started is when the bands I was watching starting coming out with music. At the time, it was pretty easy to just buy them as they came out, if one knew the stores to hit, and we did. From Television’s “Little Johnny Jewel (Parts I & II)”, to Talking Heads’ “Love --> Building On Fire” to the Heartbreakers’ “Live at Max’s,” to Richard Hell’s seminal “Blank Generation,” to even bands we hadn't seen, like the very first EMI single of “Anarchy in the U.K.” by the Sex Pistols, we just bought them one by one as they were released, and then two by two, and so on. And I kept them all.

What pushed me over the edge into serious collecting started in July of 1977: I published the first issue of my fanzine, FFanzeen, which ran until 1988. The records started pouring in to be reviewed, including most releases from SST, Alternative Tentacles, Frontier, BYO, Placebo, and many other important independent labels. Even when I didn’t like a particular record, I respected the work and financial payout of the indies, so I refused to get rid of them; I kept them all. Of course, my collection was expanding enormously, getting around 50 or more records a month, on top of those I was buying.

Meanwhile, I was still hitting up record stores, garage sales, and Sallie Ann-type places to see what was available. I was also into the obscure and odd. One time in New York, I went to a thrift shop and found this really cool EP (that’s a 7” that played at 33-1/3). It was a doctor explaining about diseases of the heart. He would interject between the sounds of heartbeats to explain what was physically wrong with it in medical terms. I thought this was so cool; I brought it up to Bernie’s house in Buffalo, where he attended college. After I played it, he reached into his own collection and brought out just about the same record, except it was the sounds of the lungs. Seems it was part of a series. In the other direction, I was entertaining (i.e., playing records for) a younger friend (who would later go on to have his own extensive and expensive collection…sorry Walter). He said, “Have you ever heard of this band called Love? I hear their records are hard to find.” I casually reached behind me and pulled out four of them. “You mean these?” I thought his head was going to explode.

Still, even as my collection grew and grew and grew, it was still dwarfed by Bernie and some of the people he would introduce me to, such as Greg Prevost of the Chesterfield Kings, and Mad Louie the Vinyl Junkie. Those were record collectors on a scope I couldn’t even fathom. Still are.

Through these associations, I learned not only about collecting, but also about collectors. In a grossly general way, collectors usually fold into two categories: there are the completionists (hunters) and the serendipitious (gatherers).

The completionists are those who have a gap in their collection, and will go to extraordinary lengths to fill that hole, sometimes paying exorbitant amounts for a record. These tend to be people who are into things that are hopelessly obscure, which takes a large knowledge of music to know when something is rare-first-printing level or just a reissue. Sometimes completionists can be a bit elitist, only wanting to deal with others who know nearly as much as they do (though they tend to respect those who know more), but fortunately most of the completionist collectors I know are happy to share. I remember a few times standing in the House of Guitars in Irondequoit/Rochester with Bernie, Greg and Louie talking, and I didn’t really understand much, but I listened and learned. It was like being in a really cool school.

Then there are the serendipitious, like myself, who feel like they score a coup when they find something exciting and hopefully rare, but look in general, not going out of the way searching for that particular item. Such a case was finding a doo-wop single on its original, local label in southern Florida in some obscure store for 5 cents, rather than the national one released later. While the completionists would search in magazines like Record Collector , the Rock Marketplace or Goldmine, one thing they both have in common in the love of the process of hunting in garage sales and thrift shops. But the former will be willing to pay the extra fee to get to a collector’s market early to grab up the goodies, where the serendipitious are happy to hunt and find in a more casual manner.

I will leave this topic for now with a true story: During the late 1980s, I was hanging out in Kenmore, New York (essentially a suburb of Buffalo, though I doubt they see themselves as such) at a used record shop on Main Street owned a friend, Friday Night Dave Olka. Dave and the kids who hung out in his store (who would later form Green Jello) smoked tobacco like fiends, so I had to get out of there after a while and get some air. I decided to walk around the block.

Around the corner, I saw a sign for a garage sale, so I stopped in. There I found a nearly mint condition first edition of the Stones’ Their Satanic Majesty’s Request, with the 3D cover. I bought it for a dollar, and brought it back to Dave. I saw that Dave had been selling a pretty beat-up copy for nearly $30. I walked back into the store and said, “Hey Dave, look what I bought around the corner for a buck!” I thought he was going to laugh, but instead he turned bright red, and threw me out of the store. Later that evening, he called me and apologized, saying he wasn’t really mad at me, he was projecting at the person who sold it to me. He said, “I have a used record store right around the corner. Why didn’t she just sell it to ME?” Well, I would say now, it was just serendipitious. And yes, I still have it.