SPILL FEATURE: ONES: THE BEATLES #1 HITS – A CONVERSATION WITH FRANK ZIRONE

ONES: THE BEATLES #1 HITS – A CONVERSATION WITH FRANK ZIRONE

A CONVERSATION WITH FRANK ZIRONE

The Beatles stopped touring in 1966, for many reasons. One reason was that they could not replicate their new songs on the stage. In fact, during their tour of the summer of 1966, they did not perform any songs from their then-current album, Revolver. This means there were a number of albums that fans never got to hear The Beatles perform live. But thanks to Frank Zirone and his stage show, ONES: The Beatles #1 Hits, Beatles fans can get a glimpse and feel the excitement of hearing these classic songs performed live.

The show has been attracting sell-out audiences for ten years, and presenters on The Beatles’ own radio station on satellite radio have given the show a great deal of praise.

“I had a band playing Beatles music; we didn’t dress like The Beatles or talk in British accents, but there were five of us, and we did a really good job of playing Beatles music,” says Zirone. “And at one point, I was trying to get it sold; agents came to come and see it and buy it. We had a couple of offers but inevitably we would lose them to wigs and suits bands.”

In the world of Beatles tribute bands, it is important to come up with a different idea of how to present the classical music. It is a very competitive field. But Zirone came up with a brilliant idea.

“I saw a Beatles band, and they were doing a charity function in a theatre in Keswick. I thought, maybe that’s the way to bring up the profile of this band. I thought, I will book myself a soft seater gig for 300 seats, cross my fingers and hope like hell that I can get this band some gigs. In that process, there was a flip that went on in my mind. And because we all had a passion for The Beatles’ music and we all wanted to play it as it was on the record. I realized that the only way I could get strings and horns was to bring in strings and horns. No one felt good about prerecorded music. As soon as I brought in the strings and horns, I started thinking like Broadway Danny Rose,” Zirone laughed. “What’s next?”

This is one of the reasons that makes ONES: The Beatles #1 Hits stand out. At points, there are 22 musicians on the stage faithfully performing the Beatles hits.

“I came up with the idea of ONES, oddly enough on a beach in Punta Cana. I was reading Rolling Stone magazine and scratching my head as to what the theme was going to be for this show. And I am reading Rolling Stone on my iPad and I read that The Beatles 1 album is still selling 15,000 copies a week (1 has sold well over 32 million copies, making it the fourth best selling album of all time, and the largest selling album of this century. It continues to sell). I thought, ‘well that’s interesting, The Beatles are still popular,’ and I put my iPad away. As I am walking down the beach and thinking, what do I base this show on?’ and suddenly, it came crashing down on me like a wave in the Atlantic Ocean,” he says. “It is going to be about their number one hits, and why? Because I put together a full chronology based on 27 hits that went to number one. I can walk an audience through the years from 1964 to 1970 and suddenly…they say that once you have defined a problem, you are halfway to solving it. I defined it as my journey and based on my personal experiences.”

For Zirone, it is more than a show; it is also very personal.

“I was ten years old when they came in on Ed Sullivan and by the time I was 13 I had a band, and it was all because of what I had seen. In a sense, The Beatles is where I came in, and I thought after I had retired from the corporate world, and I had a career in the music business (Zirone was a member of the very popular bands Zero One and Hanover Fist in the 1980s), but after I retired from the corporate the world I thought ‘I want to leave the dance with the girl I came with’, and that is where the ONES came from,” says Zirone.

In a world where there are a number of Beatles Tribute bands, ONES is something very special. And for Zirone, this show, ONES, was going to stand out.

“It starts when The Beatles landed in New York, and Al Joines, who used to do The Beatles Brunch show on Q107, so I brought him in. I wanted to surround myself with people who knew The Beatles universe, and Al came in to do the narration. The theme of the show is the chronology through the hits,” he analyzes.

Zirone continues, “As for the show, it has grown like crazy. I wanted to put together, something that was taking me back to everything I had experienced in the music business. When I had my own career, albums, tours and things, I was used to a larger, more spectacle, with lights and sound and large stages and large audience groups. And that is what I wanted to put together again. Fortunately for me, it worked. To get to that point, I had to take whatever the ONES show made as profit and put it back in the show. And I had to because that plan of getting agents and people buying the show never happened, because nobody believed in the show.”

The instruments, though not made in the 1960s, are authentic to the period, and this was very important to Zirone.

“There are 26 different instruments on that stage at any given time, and they represent the actual instruments used in the recordings and as close as I can get. I do have a couple of authentic 1960s instruments in there, which I try not to tell too many people about because I don’t want to lose them,” laughed Zirone. “But when Rickenbacker makes a recreation of a John Lennon guitar, and they have spent time and care on it, or Hofner makes a Paul McCartney bass, I go out and get those. Just recently, Fender had a reissue of the Rosewood Telecaster to George Harrison’s specifications. I put my name in for one, but I got it on a technicality.

“As the story goes, I kept putting the profits back into the show, purchased all the instruments and put everything in good road cases and made it a transportable show,” he says. “I have had auditions where people turn up with KISS guitars, and I am thinking, ‘you really don’t know The Beatles, do you?’

As with all the bands and shows, during COVID, ONES could not perform, so Zirone and company took it as an opportunity to complete different visual aspects for the show.

We were on this amazing trajectory, like a 747 taking off, but then COVID hit. And suddenly, everything we had in the offing, like playing with an orchestra at the Lincoln Centre, suddenly everything went dark,” he remembers. “But in that time, what I did was develop a couple of things. Between Jane MacMillan and I, who is also the creative director; she is the one who puts together all the wonderful screen shows. I took those two years to develop the media for the show, having a crystal-clear idea of the show because we had been performing it for three years.  Of what the show needed and where it needed to go, what I wanted it to do to tell my story a little bit better.”

A lot of care and love has gone into ONES: The Beatles #1 Hits, and there is a lot of love in the show.

“I feel really fortunate with the show, as it is doing a lot more than I expected, especially in its philosophy,” says Zirone.

A splendid time is guaranteed for all.

ONES: THE BEATLES #1 HITS TICKETS ON SALE HERE

Ones Links