Gary James' Interview With Don Mancuso Of
Lips Turn Blue
Don Mancuso has quite a resume. He was the guitarist in Black Sheep, a group that had as its lead singer, Lou Gramm. Lou Gramm would go on to be the lead vocalist of Foreigner. Don would later team up with Lou Gramm in The Lou Gramm Band. These days Don Mancuso is part of a new group called Lips Turn Blue, or LTP for short. Their debut album was released on May 4th, 2022 on the MIG (Made In Germany) label. And so we spoke to an Upstate New York guy who forged a name for himself in the world of Rock, Mr. Don Mancuso.
Q - Don, what an appropriate name for a Central New York guy to call his group, Lips Turn Blue!
A - (laughs)
Q - How long did it take you to come up with that name?
A - It was about a month or two. I think after we decided we needed to make a change. It was actually our manager and our record company that kind of took to that name. We put it up on the board with the other five or ten ideas we had. We said, "That one works. LTB." (Lips Turn Blue) (laughs)
Q - When did you put Lips Turn Blue together?
A - It was basically another band to begin with, which was called D Drive, which was kind of the child of one of my second solo albums. We decided to name the band that. It's had a number of different people in the line-up. Basically, with the people we had, just before the pandemic started it was still being shopped as D Drive. But we decided it wasn't a good move to keep the name even though we owned it. We've had it forever. There's a band in Japan that's making a huge leap ahead of us as far as following, and this incredible, beautiful girl, guitar player who shreds. She's awesome. It's more of a Prog/Metal/Rock type of thing. Her name is Yuki. Once she got on YouTube, D Drive was no long a bunch of Rock 'n' Rollers. It was a gorgeous girl, shredding in a good band in Japan. So, we don't want to compete with that. Let's have something new.
Q - Are you guys in Lips Turn Blue based out of Rochester, New York?
A - We are, except for our keyboard player, who is located in Phoenix, Arizona. He just moved a few months back.
Q - When you call a rehearsal, that must be tough!
A - Yeah. We were doing Zoom rehearsals, which is not an easy thing to do for the couple of shows that we had, one in Phoenix and one here. But we've been playing together for so long it's not the kind of thing that we have to get together. Most of our music isn't like Yes or Genesis. We can adapt to it rather quickly. It just takes one quick sound check and we're ready to go.
Q - Your label, MIG is out of Germany. Are they a label in the traditional sense? Did they reimburse you for studio time? Do they pay for your publicity? Do they do all the things that we think a record label would do?
A - Not all of 'em, but about half of them. It's tough with labels now. It's hard for them to make money unless they're jumping on a bandwagon with tons of money already invested. So, I think they covered maybe a third of the album, of what it costs to do the album. But they are doing the marketing and they're responsible for us getting a lot of this press that we're getting, which is hopefully going to get the word out to the right people that can get our following together over the next few months or next year. They paid for the pressing. We paid for the artwork. So, it was part of a 50/50 deal and we're all kind of in it together, hoping we come up with something.
Q - And they're distributing the CD as well.
A - Correct.
Q - Where are you going to take your music? Are you preparing for a tour?
A - We're prepared to go anywhere there's a market where we're getting air play or a lot of interest. Nowadays unless you're living in Mom and Dad's house, to go out and tour you got to go out and make nothing, sleep in your car or van. Just do what you can to get by out on the road and take every opportunity you can get. We're kind of all like veterans, been there and back a few times. (laughs). So, we're looking at it like there might not be a big tour unless we get some kind of hit on it somewhere. If it doesn't, I'm sure it will get some interest in different pockets in areas where we can hopefully get to and play with a bigger headliner or do smaller shows ourselves. So, we're ready.
Q - Now, I saw Black Sheep at the Onondaga County War Memorial in Syracuse, New York back in 1975.
A - (laughs)
Q - Were you in the group back then?
A - Oh, yeah. I was. That was one of the stories from my book I'm going to be doing.
Q - You're writing a book about your life, are you?
A - Yeah. It's just a little thing about my past. I've had a lot of cool experiences that I want to share with people if they're interested. I'm not going to be a writer. I just want to do an autobiography and see if it helps anybody else. It makes a good read.
Q - I don't remember who you opened for.
A - I do. It was Leslie West. It was his band Mountain, featuring Felix Pappalardi and Mitch Ryder from The Detroit Wheels.
Q - This is back in 1975?
A - Correct. Yeah.
Q - I never saw Mountain in concert.
A - Well, actually we did two shows there. We did one with them and we did another one with Areosmith with their secondary line-up, two different guitar players.
Q - That was probably the show I saw.
A - Yes, it was Aerosmith. That was a good show too. It was a lot of fun. Not quite as memorable other than a couple of things, 'cause I didn't like to fall in front of 6,000 people with my guitar. (laughs)
Q - What did you trip on, a cable?
A - Our drummer was in the habit of throwing his drum sticks on the stage. In those days our management had us wearing platform shoes. I was not real good with those. I was not that great in high heels. I went to walk out in front of the stage to do a solo and hit a couple of the drums sticks and my feet were up in the air and my head was on the ground, with my guitar banging and clanging. (laughs)
Q - I don't remember that.
A - That was at the Leslie West show.
Q - When I saw Black Sheep I recall thinking these guys must have an in with the promoter.
A - No. I think it was our booking agency. We had some good management. They were moving us from being the first American act signed to Chrysalis Records to Capitol (Records) and getting a three record deal there. One of our managers happened to be one of the big wigs at ICM booking agency, so he got us on a lot of tours; the Ten Years After tour, Hall And Oates, the KISS Alive tour.
Q - Opening for KISS must have been difficult.
A - No. It was actually great. It was a lot of traveling. We weren't flying. We were driving, doing the Eastern seaboard. Touring the mid-West with them was exciting. They were at the top of their game at that point, doing something no one could do.
Q - Did Black Sheep ever play the clubs in Syracuse? I'm talking The Lost Horizon and The Brookside.
A - Yes, both of them. I remember those rooms.
Q - So, you remember the pole right in the front of the stage at The Lost Horizon?
A - Yup.
Q - And you remember The Lost Horizon's Greg Italiano?
A - I don't think I ever met him. I was too young. I wasn't really fraternizing, making connections, which I should have been doing probably during that era. Know people and get their numbers. I was more into the music.
Q - Did Capitol Records do enough for Black Sheep in terms of promotion or did the band break up for some other reason?
A - They did what they could. We weren't a front load act at that point. They were more focused on the up-tempo, boogie bands and things that were easy draws, getting air play easier. They invested what they could. They did a little marketing thing for each album. We definitely got reviewed in Rolling Stone and a few notables. The reason we broke up is basically we had a couple of truck accidents during the Winters where the truck flipped over and we lost all our gear. The second round of that, we lost all our equipment and our management informed us they didn't renew our insurance and they could do nothing. So, we told them, "Okay, we're not going to be doing the third album. That's more than obvious. And we're not going out on tour. We're probably going to break up because we have nothing right now." Everybody kind of went their separate ways and tried to get their lives together doing something else.
Q - I would guess that only you and Lou remained in the music business then?
A - No. Bruce Turgon went to California. He played with Steve Stevens in a couple of Heavy Metal bands that were popular out in that area. He stayed in it and probably did a lot better than I did. He made a lot of connections by doing Lou's solo act and started doing commercials. Licensing music to different TV shows.
Q - That's a tough field to break into, isn't it?
A - It is. I've tried for years. I haven't had much luck at it, but I don't try as hard as some people. I'm not in the right place at the right time.
Q - You'd almost have to be in Los Angeles, wouldn't you?
A - Correct.
Q - You went back to school at Monroe Community College and got an AAS degree in Electronics Engineering. Is that similar to recording engineering?
A - Yeah. It basically is. It enabled me to work on, understand and do audio engineering, as well as repairing a lot of my thousands of dollars of gear I've collected over the years that I love and have to maintain. It gets expensive. That was my way of helping myself and actually I did take a number of years away from music, but I wasn't available to go on the road. I was just recording at home and working a day job at Kodak so my wife could stay home with kids and diapers for a few years and they could have a mother rather than a nanny. So that worked out good. Actually, I did get a two year degree in music in the College Of Marin when I was out there too (California). It was mainly theory and voice training. I was there for a couple of years after Black Sheep, and saying "I'm never going to play guitar. I hate music. I'll just go to school for the fun of it." I went to make it fun again. (laughs) Of course I came home right after that and got into like three or four bands and started writing and recording again.
Q - You worked with Jimi Hendrix's cousin, Regi Hendrix.
A - Yes.
Q - What, if anything, did he remember about his famous cousin?
A - (laughs) He doesn't remember much. He was a couple years old. He's got a picture of Jimi holding him when he was a baby. I think he's still got one of his Wah-Wah pedals, his original Cry Baby set that was given to him by the family. He's a great guy. He's actually an artist too. He does a lot of Hendrix By Hendrix, like pictures of his cousin. It's amazing. He knew every detail on the guy, doing images of Hendrix's guitar for guitar manufacturers for awhile. He's a great artist as well as a great singer.
Q - He's a singer and a guitarist?
A - He's a singer and a guitarist. He's left-handed.
Q - You took him into the studio and produced him?
A - We've just worked together off and on. We try to do whatever we can. We've done stints of live acoustic stuff locally in town just for fun with friends. He did a solo album. He had me help co-write a couple of things and vice-versa on one of the D Drive albums. I actually wanted him to sing one of my songs that I had written, "Straight Up The Middle". It was more of an Industrial R&B, up-tempo type of song. I wanted him to sing it and I had him sing it with my pilot track that I put down for him to reference. It was great. He does this voice. It sounds like one of the ghosts in Ghost Busters, the one that has the three voices when he talks. It's like he's got three voices at once and he does that at the beginning of that song. (laughs) We kept that and our producer refused to put his vocal part on because he wasn't going to be playing live with us. He used my track. More of a "Hot Rod Lincoln" Rap song with Regi on the intro with this little saying that he has. It's awesome. You gotta listen to it.
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