Inside the
Winter Issue:

Home Page

Growing Up
With Hunger

Fan Fare:
Randy Rossilli

Fan Fare:
SpoonWalk

Tulane, Too Soon

Journal Provides Eye Into
Food Banks’ Efforts in
Katrina’s Wake

Chapin Christmas CD
Is a Hit Throughout
The Seasons

“Doing Something”

Goat Tales

Chapin Family Marks
WHY’s 30th Anniversary
With Benefit Concerts
in New York City

Harry Chapin Celebration
Concert Review

Time to Remember

Letter to the Editor:
Elizabeth Paquette

Letter to the Editor:
Greg McCaig

Circle! Calendar

Frank Walker and Ramona Spooney of SpoonWalk Photo by Eileen McGlone

Fan Fare:
Chapin Fans Making a Difference

SpoonWalk

by Freddy Zalta

Ramona Spooney and Frank Walker, known together as the New York-based musical group “SpoonWalk,” recently shared with Circle! how Harry’s music and work has inspired them, and how they use their own music and their live performances to make a difference.

How was SpoonWalk first started?

Frank: We met at a mutual friend’s open mic night in Levittown, NY back in 1998. Our friend was singing a popular song we both knew and we were standing in two different parts of the room, talking to people. From our standpoints, we both started singing the same harmony first, catching each other’s ear, meeting up by the stage, finding separate harmonies and finishing the song with our friend on stage, like it was planned!

We instantly clicked and as we got to know each better from then on, we noticed a very magical connection on many levels that’s hard to describe, so we don’t usually try to! The greatest part is that our musical understandings and needs are usually unspoken and a given!

How long have you been performing together?

Frank: We started in July 2000 as a duo. Doing live gigs, we stuck to mostly cover pop-folk-rock music, but then we started writing and adding our own songs to the live mix on occasion.

Our first song written together was called In Front Of You, for my Goddaughter Samantha, and is on our CD. I had a basic lyric idea and asked Ramona to rearrange them and come up with melody ideas for it. She did, recorded it on cassette, and I finished it up by putting chords behind her melody.

We still work that way, usually, very similar to the Elton John/Bernie Taupin “Two Rooms” idea. All of our music information can be found on www.spoonwalk.com.

How often do you perform Chapin-related songs and which Chapin songs have you performed?

Frank: As often as possible! The type of place we’re performing in determines what music we perform that day. We always try to "cater to the room" the best we can. I’ve done Cat’s In The Cradle, W*O*L*D, Taxi, Sequel, Flowers Are Red, If You Want To Feel, I Wanna Learn A Love Song, Mr. Tanner, Circle, and others.

My favorite Harry song is Story Of A Life, for what it says and for the beautiful melody behind it.

I performed it once at a benefit where Jen Chapin, Bill Ayres (executive director of World Hunger Year) and his wife were all in attendance and they all paid me very nice compliments on it, which coming from them means the world to me.

Ramona does a killer version of Shooting Star (which is our take based on Pat Benatar’s 1987 Tribute version), as well as Flowers Are Red and Last Stand. We once opened for Jen at a small local Huntington venue and did Shooting Star, saying it was our take on Pat’s take on Harry’s song. Jen said, "No, this is your take of Harry’s song, period!" We’ll also occasionally cover Jen’s I Could Fall In Love With You, with Ramona putting her own spin on it.

Tell us about how Harry has influenced your life.

Frank: I briefly met Harry early in 1981 at Huntington High School.

My uncle took my brother and I to see a benefit concert there where he, his brother Tom, and Pete Seeger sat together playing each other’s songs for at least 3 hours with no backing band!

It made an incredible impact on me as a person and musician.

A few months later, I was getting ready to go to Eisenhower Park on July 16, 1981, and was drawing a poster-sized picture of Harry to give to him that night, when we heard the news on TV about his car accident. My uncle took me there later that night anyway and everyone was just standing around laughing, crying, singing, playing, but all celebrating him in various ways.

I put the poster I made down against the small brick wall in front of the stage and after walking around a while, came back and found the poster surrounded by candles in a shrine-like setting. The poster was featured on a local TV news station that night and it became my indirect way of paying tribute to and thanking him for what he gave me at the time.

Why did you perform Last Stand at the recent “Wild About Harry” tribute concert on Long Island?

Frank: Shooting Star was already taken (laughing). When we performed at last year’s “Wild About Harry” benefit show, we did Flowers Are Red and didn’t feel as comfortable with it as we would have liked, so this time we listened to John Wallace’s version of Last Stand from the 1987 “Tribute” concert (and the “Celebration In Song” versions since then) and loved what we heard!

Ramona and I met John Wallace at the Long Island Cares 20th Anniversary concert at the IMAC Theater in Huntington in October 2001.

She tells the story much better than I could!

Ramona: The amazing range that John possesses moved me. In fact, it moved me so much that I offered to bare his children. (Laughing). To which John responded, "That’s the best offer I’ve had all year!"

What is Prune Belly Syndrome and why does SpoonWalk do so many benefits for that cause?

Ramona: Frank can tell you the "what". My "why" is that Frank Walker is a heart with feet.

Frank: Prune Belly Syndrome (PBS) is a rare medical condition that I was born with in 1967, stemming from being born with little, or in my case, no abdominal muscle, which then carries over to creating problems in other parts of the body, usually connected to kidney, respiratory and urinary issues.

The general stats are that only 50-percent of anyone born with this, 95-percent of which are male, will survive past their second birthday.

Some doctors told my family at the time that I wasn’t expected to survive, but without a proper explanation as to how, I have beaten many odds against me along the way and have had muscle transplant surgery 23 years ago that corrected 95 percent of the PBS.

Prior to the availability of the Internet to gain information, we were very limited in what we knew about it. Since the Internet, I searched PBS on line in 1998 and found www.prunebelly.org.

It is run by people who either have PBS themselves or have family members who do. I am their current Vice President. They serve as an international informational and educational website about this condition and include a community of roughly 400 families with ties to the condition.

Everyone in the community utilizes the site for sharing and obtaining information and comparing stories, and it is an amazing support tool for people who normally have no other access to helping people born with PBS. Most PBS people who find the site for the first time cannot believe that anyone else aside from them have even heard of or have this condition!

The corrective surgery I had done years ago is uncommon and no one else has had anything similar done since then. Given how well it worked for me and seeing how much worse off people are now, I need to see that changed as soon as possible.

Infants are still dying from the same thing I survived, and that’s just not acceptable. We need awareness, both publicly and medically. We’re working on finding the proper steps to take to become eligible for research funding to know where this comes from and how to treat it.

What kind of reaction do you get from people who attend their benefit shows?

Frank: Shock that something like this exists in today’s world of medical advancement and technology, amazement at the little the public knows, and reassurance that despite the huge undertaking it requires, people are trying to do something about it from any level.

We try to make the musical benefits light, fun and enjoyable, but I always stop at some point and make a point of giving my personal explanation and account of what I went through growing up with PBS, and why the need for benefits are necessary. I usually wind up a weeping mess by the time I finish, but it makes the point.

Jen Chapin with Frank Walker and Ramona Spooney of SpoonWalk Photo by Darlene Ward

Tell us about the song you recorded with Jen Chapin and how that came to be.

Frank: She and her husband Stephan are just amazing people and musicians in every sense of the words. I’m very honored to call them friends for six years now. We’ve worked together a few times on local WHY benefits and we’ve been honored to back them vocally on I Could Fall on two occasions.

In late 2003, I wrote a song called Not The Only One which covers three different outlooks of PBS: someone having the condition, someone asking for spiritual help, and someone asking for general awareness.

As I said before, many PBS people initially think no one else has or has heard of this condition until they find the PBSN website. This song covers every angle of that idea. Obviously, I’m the one with the condition so I sing from that perspective.

Ramona is very spiritual so it seemed only fitting that she sing from that perspective, and she willingly and graciously did so.

Being that Jen and her family are very well-known for doing work for noble causes, I asked her if she would do us the tremendous honor of lending her voice to the awareness portion of the song, and she also willingly and graciously did so. As a thank you, I gave her a personal donation for WHY in exchange for making time to help us out.

Not only did she sing the lyrics, but at the end of the song, during what I call my "Hey Jude moment" (laughing), the song repeats a sing-along verse and being that I’m working with two amazing singers who have amazing gifts for inspired ad-libbing, I asked both Ramona and Jen to just "go off" for a while and it really adds to the emotion and energy of the song.

The outcome still amazes me and I’m very grateful for their and everyone’s input into making the song as emotional as I hoped it would be in order to convey the proper message.

The oddest spin on all this is that just recently, Jen became aware of a friend’s son requiring surgery for other reasons, but who also had PBS, she forwarded this information on to me.

I told Jen how bizarre I found it that she has now has two indirect connections to PBS!

What role can performers play in affecting social change?

Ramona: Music communicates on the soul level, which is where I believe all change originates.

Frank: All you need to do is look at things like George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh, or Bob Geldof’s Christmas singles and Live Aid and Live 8, or the We Are The World single, or all the 9/11 and Hurricane relief efforts to find the answer to that.

Or the fact that half of Harry’s yearly music itinerary and income went to charity.

Obviously on a high-profile level, there are millions of people who appreciate the music someone creates, and if you have the willingness to use that to also help a worthy cause of any kind, it can only be beneficial to that cause.

We are a local Long Island music duo who would love to make a living solely on what we know and do musically. And because we have strong beliefs and ties to certain things that need attention, we try our best at the level we are at to help things that we believe in.

We’ve hosted and taken part in benefits for World Hunger Year, Long Island Cares, U.S. Marines Toys for Tots, the American Red Cross, various 9/11/01 charities, Habitat for Humanity,

Why have you both gotten so involved in making a difference?

Ramona: Because one person can inspire another who can in turn inspire another, and another and so on. I figure, we are all sharing this planet, so we should share the load of life.

Frank: For me, all the things I mentioned here, but mostly Harry.

He wasn’t afraid to do whatever it took to help a cause, and in that sense he was very selfless.

He would encourage people to "Do Something" -- get involved in anything you believe in.

Some choose causes he was directly involved with and some choose whatever means the most to them. We try to find a middle ground and do a little of both when we can and we hope Harry’s messages still affect people today.

What inspires you to keep doing what you do?

Frank: The need doesn’t go away after one benefit and until there are actual positive and definitive resolutions and outcomes, the need will always be there to get to that point.

Same with the PBSN or any cause that requires help.

Harry talked about a grade school class raising money and food for hungry people during Thanksgiving, then wanted the school to say, "OK great. Now what do they eat tomorrow?"

Watch for the Next Issue of Circle! on March 7