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Sha na na co-founder and La Jolla resident Jocko Marcellino refuses to get a real job
By David Moye
June 19, 2006
La Jolla--Oldies radio has disappeared from the San Diego airwaves but not the oldies musicians themselves.
Case in point: Jocko Marcellino, the drummer and frontman for the oldies preservation band Sha Na Na.
When the band isn’t performing, he makes his home in La Jolla and is pretty recognizable from the corporate fat cats and trophy wives who live in the area because, he admits, “I wear my black leather jacket almost everywhere I go.”
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Sha Na Na, minus the Bowser (Photo courtesy Sha Na Na) |
Since the music of the 50s and 60s has pretty much disappeared from radio, Marcellino says his group considers it a duty to “carry the flag of the classic era of rock – between 1956 and ’62.” And he’s convinced rock and roll IS here to stay. “It’s all cyclical. You might not hear Little Richard or 1950s-era Elvis but a lot of doo-wop shows are popping up.” |
After nearly 4 decades in showbiz, Jocko knows something about cycles.
This year marks the group’s 40th anniversary in show business and Sha Na Na made their debut on to the world stage at the 1969 Woodstock festival, where they dressed up as greasers and made fun of the hippies.
The band was paid $300 for the appearance – and the check bounced. Still, Marcellino doesn’t mind since the group has the unique distinction of appearing in “both the biggest documentary of all time – Woodstock – and the biggest musical of all time: Grease.”
Still, while the phrase, “Everything old is new again” has long been the Sha Na Na philosophy, now the group believes, “Everything new is old again.”
The band just released its first album of original material, “One More Saturday Night,” and, according to Marcellino, it was a long time coming.
“We have four good songwriters in the band. For instance, Screamin’ Scott Simon wrote ‘Sandy’ for the movie Grease. Over the years, I just collected the songs and when I wrote this new song, ‘Cat In The P. T. Cruiser,’ I knew we had an album.”
Even though the album was recorded at a modern state-of-the-art studio, Marcellino says the band took great pains to “make it sound like it was recorded on tape, not computers.”
The video for “Cat” was filmed at a P.T. Cruiser rally at Seaport Village and Marcellino hopes to turn it into a promotion for the car with various dealers across the country.
So far, Marcellino is pretty happy with concert goers’ reactions to the new songs and is especially proud when a fan asks, “Is that an old song or a new one?”
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David Moye is a fifth generation resident of San Diego county and has the same birthday as Reggie Bush--but none of the athletic ability.
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