“He made good money and was booked for the next five years.” White hired Valentine to be an opening musical act, enabling Valentine to relocate to California, bringing his brother John along as guitarist. “I met this pool-shark named Jack White, who played exhibition matches on the college circuit,” remembers Valentine. By the early 70s, Valentine was touring the midwest singing with soul-jazz group Young-Holt Unlimited, but was hungry for more. There, Valentine studied at the feet of the touring soul greats playing Leon’s en route to Harlem’s Apollo theatre. “My sisters tended bar, my brothers and I held down the bandstand.” His beloved older brother Alvin had escaped to a regular gig as an organ player in Hackensack, New Jersey and invited a 15-year-old Billy east as opening act at Leon’s Cocktail Lounge. His parents ran a nightclub in Columbus, Ohio, Club Faces. Valentine had started out as an entertainer.

That’s my calling.”īilly Valentine is a unicorn – those kinds of voices just don’t exist any more Bob Thiele Jr “I finally had something to say,” he says. “I felt truly scared.” But this dire confluence was also a “perfect storm” that shaped and guided his remarkable comeback album, Billy Valentine and the Universal Truth, and renewed his sense of purpose. “On television, I saw George Floyd being killed, I saw Black Lives Matter protesters in the streets, I saw President Trump holding a vigil in front of a church,” Valentine remembers, reciting the events like scenes from a fever dream. “It just wasn’t my time.”īut that all changed in 2020, as the pandemic took hold and the US was engulfed by chaos. “There were periods when ‘Billy Valentine’ wasn’t needed,” the 73-year-old humbly reflects today, via video call from his home in Los Angeles. I n the years that followed Billy Valentine’s first brush with fame – when he and his brother John scored a breakthrough with their Reagan-era protest song Money’s Too Tight (To Mention) – the veteran singer made peace with life away from the spotlight.

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