The following entry, written in 1974, includes mistakes.
The birthdates for the guys are incorrect.
It is reprinted without any corrections.

Encyclopedia of Pop, Rock, and Soul
The Rascals
Entry authored by Irwin Stambler - circa 1974

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The Rascals

Vocal and Instrumental Group

Original members:

Felix Cavaliere, born Pelham, New York, November 29, 1944
Dino Danelli, born New York, New York, July 23, circa 1945
Eddie Brigati, born New York, October 22, 1946
Gene Cornish, born Ottawa, Canada, May 14, 1945

Reorganized group in 1971 included Cavaliere; Danelli;

Buzzy Feiten, born New York, New York
Robert Popwell, born Daytona, Florida
Ann Sutton, born Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

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"Blue-eyed soul brothers," "the groups' group" - these are just some of the unofficial titles collected by the Rascals in the second half of the 60's. By any standard, the group must rank as one of the United States' most striking contributions to both rock and soul music. The group's three founding members - Felix Cavaliere, Dino Danelli, and Eddie Brigati - all had grown up in and around New York and had considerable experience as sidemen before they began the Rascals, then called the Young Rascals, in early 1965. Cavaliere started taking classical piano lessons as a boy. However, when he began listening to the recordings of such R & B greats as Ray Charles and Otis Redding, he knew this was the kind of music he had to play.

By the time he started frequenting the soul clubs of Harlem in his teens, he had learned many of the R&B standards on both piano and organ. For a time, while he was in high school, he was the only white member of a soul group from Pelham called the Stereos. He left the group and started attending Syracuse University in upstate New York. However, whenever he could, he returned to New York and spent time at such clubs as the Peppermint Lounge and the Metropole. Dino Danelli started playing drums before he reached his teens and started playing professionally at 15. His first interest was jazz rather than R&B. In his mid-teens, he found a job with Lionel Hampton, and later moved on to work with a band on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. As he recalls, that job was a turning point. "The roots are all still there in the South. You listen and learn playing with funky New Orleans cats. New Orleans taught me a lot and changed the direction I was going musically. from jazz to R&B." Dino returned to New York and found work as a sideman and session performer in the R&B field. By the time he met Felix, he was playing in support of R&B artists, such as Little Willie John.

Felix and Dino became acquainted at the Metropole. A short time before this, while playing with a band in a New Jersey club, Dino had met Eddie Brigati, a young singer who sat in with R&B groups when he could. After meeting, Felix and Dino went to work in Las Vegas in 1964 as part of a backup group for singer Sandu Scott. After that job, Felix joined Joey Dee's Starlighters at New York's Peppermint Lounge. This group included Eddie Brigati, who had added tambourine playing to his talents, and a guitarist from Canada named Gene Cornish. As these three and Dino spent more of their spare time together, the idea for beginning their won rock group took hold. During the winter of 1964-65, they locked themselves up in Felix's house and worked out a repertoire of 25 songs, many of them written by Felix and Eddie, who jointly wrote many of the group's later hits. (Felix wrote the music, and Eddie the lyrics.) In February 1965, the band opened in a small New Jersey roadhouse, the Choo Choo. Later in the year, they became the regular band at the Barge, a floating nightclub in Westhampton, Long Island. The Young Rascals became one of the most talked about groups in the New York area during the summer, and, after Sid Bernstein, the promoter who brought the Beatles to America, heard them, he became their manager.

Soon after, the Young Rascals, as they were then called until 1967, signed with Atlantic and provided a hit single almost in their first effort. "I Ain't Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore." They followed with two more successes, "Good Lovin'" and "You Better Run." Their first two albums, "The Young Rascals" and "Collections," also made the charts, and one of them provided another single hit, "Lonely Too Long." The group gained an international reputation in 1966. It went to England and was featured at such major rock clubs as the Scotch, Blaises, and Sybylla's. Hardly anyone knew the quartet when it arrived, but after its first performance, its fans included the elite of English rock music; the members of the Beatles, the Animals, the Rolling Stones and English entrepreneur Brian Epstein, among others. During the year, the Young Rascals played to enthusiastic audiences in the U.S., ranging from nightclubbers at such New York discotheques as Harlow's, the Phone Booth, and the Scene, to teen-age concert-goers in major cities across the country.

During 1966 and 1967, the group performed on many major TV shows. In both years, it won enthusiastic approval from thousands of listeners and from music critics for it's performances at the Rheingold concerts in New York's Central Park. As the 60s went by, the group continued to produce important recordings, usually featuring Brigati as lead vocalist, but in some instances, as on the 1967 gold-record hit "Groovin'," with Cavaliere giving a performance that caused some critics to compare his vocal ability with that of Ray Charles. The LP title "Groovin'" also was a chart hit, as were the 1968 album releases "Once Upon A Dream" and "The Rascals Greatest Hits." The covers for the last two were painted by Danelli. The Rascals continued to appear regularly on the charts in the late 1960's. Their singles hits from 1967-69 included "A Girl Like You," "How Can I Be Sure," "It's Wonderful," "A Beautiful Morning," the gold record soul hit "People Got To Be Free" (1968) and "A Ray of Hope." The group entered 1970 with a chart album, "See."

The group continued to rank as one of the best in its field at the start of the 70's, but there were internal strains among the members, and there was little chart action for the band's recordings in 1970. In 1971, the group moved from Atlantic to Columbia and also changed personnel. Cavaliere and Danelli remained as the central figures in the new band, but three new performers were added: Buzzy Feiten, Robert Popwell, and Ann Sutton. (A sixth performer, vocalist Molly Holt, worked with the Rascals n their first Columbia sessions.) (Detailed info about Feiten, Popwell , and Sutton snipped) The new group's debut album came out in the summer of 1971. Called 'Peaceful World," it moved on the charts in June and remained on them through the summer. The group's next album "The Island of Real," issued in the spring of 1972, also made the charts for a time. However, it was obvious that the audience for the band had diminished, and it disbanded during the year. Danelli later joined Cornish in a group called Bulldog. The band had a chart-hit debut album, "Bulldog," on Decca in '72, and a single success, "No."

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