THE LOVE SONG OF TJ LUBINSKY

By bringing honor to past pop stars, Bradley Beach producer becomes public TV's pledge-drive king

Posted by the Asbury Park Press on 08/6/06

BY MIKE BARRIS SPECIAL TO THE PRESS

NEW YORK — The baby-faced dude with the hip buzz cut is on PBS Channel 13 this Saturday night, gushing. "This is music about lu-u-u-v-v-ve!" TJ Lubinsky exclaims. "This is music about what was happening in our lives. This is when music was — music!"

Balling his hands into fists, wiggling his eyebrows and flashing a shy little smile, the nervy kid from Evergreen Avenue in Bradley Beach seems determined to touch the hearts of viewers, transporting them to "a place that is very special to them." The TV camera — a magnifier of intimate details — picks up Lubinsky's passion for his cause: bringing "honor and respect" to the legacies of forgotten pop stars.

"That feeling in your heart and that feeling of love — that's what this is about," Lubinsky says. The 34-year-old pitchman in the dark suit and T-shirt, who brings to mind a rounder Tom Hanks, says time is running out — not only for this public-television station pledge break, but for the aging artists he is striving to immortalize with his nostalgic pop-music specials.

TJ Lubinsky: Saving pop for posterity.

"If you love the fact we can share this music with your kids," Lubinsky says, "we need your support."

TJ Lubinsky (the TJ stands for Terry James, although he's always been known just as TJ) is the mastermind behind the "My Music" extravaganzas that frequently are shown during pledge drives on PBS, the nonprofit public broadcaster. Even if you don't watch PBS regularly but channel surf just a little, chances are you've stumbled across a Lubinsky-produced show at one time. His latest program, a "best-of" compilation, premieres this week on PBS and NJN stations.

From "Doo Wop Calvacade" to "Magic Moments: The Best of '50s Pop," the formula is as familiar as an old pair of disco shoes: Stars from different musical genres return to a concert hall to sing their famous hits before a live audience. The taped performances are interspersed with sonically restored archival footage. The stylish production always includes plenty of shots of the folks in the auditorium seats, most of whom are graying or white-haired, mouthing the lyrics to the music of their lives, remembering "when."

32 specials since '99 The 32 concert specials Lubinsky has produced for the Public Broadcasting Service since 1999 have raised an estimated $200 million. The young man who used to wait tables at a half-dozen Shore restaurants every summer to feed his prodigious record- buying habit has become the most successful fundraiser in the nonprofit network's history.

But don't try to give this grandson of Savoy Jazz record-label founder Herman Lubinsky the star treatment. TJ Lubinsky, who now resides in Pittsburgh but still returns to Bradley with his wife and daughter every summer, likes to remind his audience that he's just a "Jersey guy from Exit 7A, 100B" (his respective Turnpike and Parkway exits).

He's certainly a Garden State booster. He swells with Jersey pride at the sight of that alleged state delicacy, the pork-roll-and- cheese sandwich. He still dreams about such childhood aromas as ocean tar and French-fry grease. He has used Asbury Park's Convention Hall and Atlantic City's Trump Taj Mahal hotel-casino as backdrops for his TV concerts, and he even hosts a Sunday night oldies-requests radio show on Manahawkin's WJRZ-FM (100.1), doing the program remotely from his Pittsburgh home when he isn't at his summer house in Bradley Beach.

"The minute you make yourself the star, the minute you allow your ego to get in the way of what you're here to do, the minute you say, "Well! I did this,' is the first minute it all stops," Lubinsky says in an interview. "It is so not about me. It's trying to reach and touch people's hearts and take them to a place that's very special to them."

That insistence on being "just a vehicle" for the spirit that informs him — connecting songs, performers and audiences through his encyclopedic knowledge of recordings and artists (his first language at times seems to be the titles of old 45s), has taken him closer to achieving his declared dream: creating a "complete video archive" of American popular music.

For example, since 1997, he says, he has filmed nearly 300 doo- wop groups in concert. Before then, he says, footage existed of just 20 such acts, who specialized in a style of street-corner rhythm-and-blues singing that was in its heyday between the mid-1950s and the early 1960s but was deemed unsuitable for network TV.

"They weren't allowed to be on TV back then," Lubinsky says. "That was the devil's music. On television? On a national show? It certainly wasn't on Ed Sullivan, or "Hollywood Palace.'"

Consequently, he says, no footage exists of the Drifters (of "Under the Boardwalk" fame), one of the pre-eminent vocal groups of the period.

Despite his professed adoration of R&B-flavored pop, however, Lubinsky isn't content to be "just a doo-wop guy." With an estimated 5,000 CDs and 5,000 45s in his personal music collection, he is immersed in a considerably wider part of the American music spectrum. Much of it is music he listened to growing up in Bradley, whether he was hitting the timber at a nightclub (he stayed out on the dance floor for hours to keep staff from discovering he was underage and had sneaked in), congregating with pals on the boardwalk, cruising around town in his Toyota Corolla or grabbing a late-night snack of eggs and hot chocolate at a diner.

While his peers were rocking to such bands as Men at Work, Tears for Fears and Wham, he was utterly knocked out, he says, by the Miracles' 1966 hit "Going to a Go-Go"; by the Marcels' '61 record of "Blue Moon."

With the help of his uncle, Buzzy Lubinsky, a popular Shore nightclub disc jockey, and Ron-Na-Na (Ron Meyer), the house DJ he befriended at the Yakety Yak Cafe in Seaside Heights, he had a pipeline to every new sound that touched his heart. He was a regular at Belmar's Galaxy Records, pestering the owner each day after Bradley Beach Grammar School to help him find the tunes that were catching his ear on New York or Philadelphia oldies- radio stations.

TJ Lubinsky

From Florida to Pittsburgh Before TJ was of legal age, his dad, Herman Lubinsky Jr., who worked in the industry, was sneaking him into clubs to hear such R&B artists as Fats Domino.

At 16, a high school dropout (he got a diploma by passing the General Educational Development, or GED, exam), he apprenticed at Monmouth Cable Channel 34, producing news and studio programs. He was just 22 when he landed at a PBS affiliate in West Palm Beach, Fla., and started bringing in doo- wop groups during fund drives. With the groups, the station would raise $30,000 in a day — an "unheard of" achievement at the time, Lubinsky says.

Knowing his projects needed a stage with a higher profile to reach a truly big audience, he moved to Pittsburgh and its PBS outlet, WQED, renowned as the home of "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood." After years of unsuccessfully attempting to take his vision to a national audience, he finally caught the attention of PBS. With the $325,000 the network gave him, he produced "Doo-Wop 50," which became the single most successful piece of fundraising programming in PBS history.

"I've got to hit a home run every time, 'cause you're only as good as your last show in this business," Lubinsky observes. Even with PBS kicking in a third of his costs and the distributor of the home- video versions of his shows another third, he puts "some of my own risk" into every show, he says.

"And so, if these things don't work, I lose my house."

Formed own production company In 2002, he left WQED to form his own production company, TJL Productions, from which he continues to churn out specials for PBS. The stars he's brought back to the small screen include '60s folkies Judy Collins and the Kingston Trio; Motown singers Mary Wilson and Martha Reeves; soul superstars Isaac Hayes and Percy Sledge; disco heavyweight Leo Sayer; '50s pop luminaries Pat Boone and Patti Page; '60s and '70s poppers Lou Rawls (who died early this year) and Frankie Valli; '50s rock icons Jerry Lee Lewis and Bo Diddley; '60s rockers Gary U.S. Bonds and Manfred Mann; and many more.

Although he seems merely to be taping concerts for TV, his job requires a much larger skill-set than that. He's also a detective, a social worker and a magician; that's what it takes to find and reunite performers who may not have sung, let alone performed together, in many years, and whose voices may be in tatters due to disuse, abuse or neglect.

A lot of personal coaching and nurturing — not to mention generous studio overdubbing and aggressive editing — often is called for, he says.

"We give them help. We put them up on a pedestal because we're dealing with people's legacies," Lubinsky says.

Over time, he's seen America's commercial TV networks and radio stations, eager to attract the 18-to-49 demographic that advertisers lust after, gradually tune out the music he loves; music he knows other people love; music he believes new listeners could still love. His indignation comes through loud and clear this chilly early March night at the midtown Manhattan studios of Thirteen/WNET, where he is co-hosting pledge breaks for the premiere of his "My Music" special "Moments to Remember," a salute to the stars of 1950s and early 1960s pop taped in California last year.

The lineup includes such Eisenhower-era luminaries as Frankie Laine, the aforementioned Page and Julius LaRosa, as well as former Asbury Park resident Lenny Welch and the Duprees of Jersey City. The late Rosemary Clooney, Perry Como and Nat "King" Cole appear in vintage film clips.

"I am angry because I come home to New Jersey where I'm from, and you can't hear Patti Page on the radio in New York City," Lubinsky tells viewers. "If someone had said, ‘I'm not going to hear Patti Page on the radio anymore; I'm not going to hear the great Rosemary Clooney on the radio anymore,' you'd think this was a foreign country or something," he says.

Building a connection with the TV audience is a way to keep great music alive, notwithstanding commercial stations’ perception that these artists are too old for advertisers and ratings, Lubinsky says into the camera.

"You know what, we don't have to worry about the advertisers, we don't have to worry about the commercial pressure if we have this connection with you," he tells viewers. "If we're making the connections tonight, allow us to preserve the history."

Breaking tedium Lubinsky's impassioned plea energizes the pledge break, which otherwise can be a tedious exercise during which viewers (those who haven't changed the channel, that is) are asked to support the local station and its commercial-free programs with a pledge of cash.

"We're not going to be here after this broadcast asking your support," Lubinsky reminds his audience, who, though they might like to get up and get a soda from the refrigerator, can't take their eyes off this baby face. Not now.

“Time is not our friend," he confides to co-host Denise Richardson, adding that the youngest performers he has yet to preserve on film are in their mid-70s.

"Now's the moment."

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