Jerry Blavat Finds the Fountain of Youth
He’s 67 but still rockin’, with a new WXPN audience for his doo-wop oldies. Our writer spent an exhausting week together drinking wine, learning about Indians, meeting Connie Francis, watching him hang upside-down on an inversion board — and finally figured out what keeps the Geator with the Heator snappin’ away
I learn that when one of the Geator’s middle-aged fans approaches him in a restaurant, he stands up, rears back like one of the tinier dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, snaps his fingers five or six times — SNAP SNAP SNAP SNAP SNAP — and says, “Oh, I love ya, you’re the BEST!”
I learn that the Geator is not a “deejay.” He’s a “performer,” like his dear departed friend Sammy Davis Jr., who came up to the Geator when the Geator was just 14, dancing on Bob Horn’s Bandstand, and told him, “Hey, you’re like a white me.” I hear this story three times by the end of the night.
Hey, you’re like a white me.
I keep drinking, keep learning. I learn that there is only one kind of music, good music, and that the music of today is not this kind of music. I learn that kids today are nonetheless attracted to the “honesty” of the good music (the Geator calls it, simply, “The Music”), as delivered by the Geator: “Young people are intrigued by the energies that the Geator puts forth.” I learn that if you love what you do, you cannot get old. (“Charlie Chaplin was 90 years old and still zooming broads.”) And the Geator absolutely loves what he does, which is to narrate and interpret The Music for his thousands of superloyal fans — who, contrary to the wayward beliefs of the Mafia-busting New Jersey State Commission of Investigation, have always been the sole source of the Geator’s power and influence. The Geator says that if anyone ever prevented him from playing The Music the way he wants to play it, like certain station managers have tried to do in the past, the Geator would be like the Native American Indians, who used to “have the freedom to run, until we saddled them … until we put them on reservations.” Says the Geator, “I am a Native American going back to the very beginning, when they had the freedom to roam and hunt when they were hungry, to live off the land and be a happy people.”
I learn that the Geator is 100 percent not kidding about this.
Most importantly, I learn that “as long as there’s an audience out there, young or old, who wants to hear music as honest as it is, any time period, I’ll be around. Until the good guy upstairs says, okay, I need you up here with Sammy.”
