Why Joe Dolce sold the publishing rights to Shaddap You Face
The story of the unlikely global hit is well known. Less well known is that Dolce has worked all his life on two other obsessions: poetry and cooking
Joe Dolce had been footnoting his way around American and Australian culture long before any of us saw him on Countdown or heard him on the radio.
He was born at a dot in Ohio called Painesville, east of Cleveland and a few hundred metres south of Lake Erie. About 15,000 people lived there at the time. Not many more do now. But it has thrown up two musicians of note: Dolce and the late drummer Pat Torpey. (Never heard of Torpey? He was a member of The Knack and later of Mr Big whose derivatively dull campfire singalong To Be With You was one of the world’s biggest hits in 1992.)
Dolce attended the Thomas W Harvey High School. Everyone did. It was the only one in Painesville. In his final year he played Mascarille, a would-be cosmopolitan young man in Moliere’s satire Les Précieuses ridicules.
On stage with Dolce was a woman, a year older, Carol Dunlop. Like Dolce she had an inquiring mind and pushed Dolce away from the novels of Ian Fleming, just starting then to be made into the world-conquering James Bond movies. “She was kind of like my first literary mentor and my first date,” Dolce recalls.
Dunlop became a friend and turned Dolce towards poetry and the words of Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. These greats of American literature captivated Dolce – and their authorial feuds had the nation’s attention, too, with the pompous Faulkner dismissing Hemingway’s prose and Hemingway issuing the immortal putdown: “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.”
Dunlop’s life was brutally short and astonishingly crowded: a writer, she married early, had a son, divorced and moved to Paris where she met and later married the brilliant Argentinian Julio Cortázar, an avowed socialist and perhaps then the most celebrated writer in the Spanish language. One of his short stories was made into the counterculture classic film Blow-Up starring Vanessa Redgrave and Sarah Miles with Herbie Hancock and the Yardbirds providing the soundtrack.
Together, Dunlop and Cortazár wrote The Autonauts of the Cosmoroute, a road-tripping love story describing their travels around France in a VW bus. Dunlop had been ill much of her life and died in 1982. Cortazár, much older, followed two years later. Well before then Dolce had embraced these possibilities while studying at Ohio University where he formed a band with Minnesota folk singer Jonathan Edwards called Headstone Circus.
Edwards would leave, go acoustic, and in 1971 record the much-loved hippie anthem Sunshine, a major Billboard hit (and No.47 on the Australian charts in February 1972).
Dolce meantime met and married an Australian, the sister of Australia’s best-known fashion designer Prue Acton and they came to Melbourne.
Dolce enjoyed Australia and remained after his marriage ended. He became actively engaged in the bohemian arts movement around the inner-Melbourne suburbs of Carlton and Brunswick that spawned artists, poets, actors and songwriters in venues such as the Pram Factory, La Mama Theatre, Catch a Rising Star and the Flying Trapeze Café. Skyhooks sang about it all on Carlton (Lygon Street Limbo) on their debut album Living In The 70s.
A recently launched venue was The Troubador, run by Englishman Andrew Pattison. One night each week was open mic, but artists could call and book a spot. Pattison received a call from a Giuseppe who, in heavily accented English, explained that he managed two excellent acts and wondered if they could appear. One was Big Joe Texas, who wore a 10 gallon hat and sang Ain’t No UFO Gonna Catch My Diesel. The other was Joe Dolce Serious Musician. Of course, it had been Dolce under the absurd hat. And it was Dolce as Giuseppe who made the booking.
As Dolce’s cabaret act developed he started working on the Giuseppe character and what the world would soon know as the song Shaddap You Face took shape – small, often drunk audiences improvising with the “hey” at the end of the chorus lines.
The story of the unlikely global hit is well known. Less well known is that Dolce has worked all his life on two other obsessions: poetry and cooking.
Les Murray, the esteemed poet and long-serving literary editor of Quadrant, spotted Dolce’s talent and started publishing his poems, and they appear in that magazine to this day.
He inherited the cooking gene from his Sicilian grandmother. Dolce’s family made their own bread, grew their vegetables, kept chickens and the men made wine in no-go sheds. He particularly liked the comfort food regulars, spaghetti and meatballs and the stuffed meat rolls known as braciole into which they would stuff provolone and pancetta.
But Dolce moved away, his grandmother passed away, and if he wanted again to enjoy such trusted dishes from his childhood, he’d have to learn to make them himself. He understood intuitively that cooking was not a science – that it was a balance of taste and instinct, neither of which cannot necessarily be learned.
He created over and again the Italian standards of his youth and today cooks them by heart, but, as he lived and travelled he collected many hundreds of recipes from around the world – dishes he loved and then recreated at home. “When I discover a recipe I like, I keep making it over and over again until I don’t need the recipe anymore,” Dolce says. By then it is firmly incorporated in to his repertoire “but I’m changing them all the time, changing balances”. As French chef, Jacques Pépin once astutely remarked: “Cooking is about adjustments.”
His new book, Joe Dolce Cooks: My Most Loved Recipes, of course includes Grandma’s Spaghetti & Meatballs, but the book is as creative and adventurous as its author: it includes Vietnamese soups and salads, his version of Ethiopian Leg of Lamb, Milanese Osso Buco, New England Corned Beef and Cabbage and his Cashew Nut Kari, that he cooked for the similarly multifaceted artist and polymath, Lin van Hek on their first date in 1980. He still cooks it. Half a lifetime later they are still together. It works! He also credits Van Hek as being the single most important creative influence in his life.
“My relationship with my grandma was profound,” says Dolce , speaking at his Carlton home of four decades. “When my dad went off to (war in) Korea. My mother and the kids moved in with my grandmother. And so my grandmother was actually the matriarch.”
He says it was hard for his mother “because my grandmother was a genius cook and my mother had to work all the time to support us”. His grandmother cooked without recipes, but Dolce points out that he might only make some of his dishes once or twice a year and needs the recipe as much as an experienced musician still works from charts. “This (book) is a score for people that aren’t familiar with a lot of this stuff.”
On Dolce’s dining table was a tasty cake he had made that morning and that he served Lin and me. “I made it with tangerines, because I didn’t have oranges.”
Dolce has read widely about the techniques to extract the benefits from some foods, such as the North Vietnamese stocks that “basically you make over 12 to 24 hours”.
“I mean, literally you boil the hell out of these bones and you get all the collagen and it becomes a very healthy broth,” he says.
“A lot of western athletic trainers and nutritionists are saying bone broth is one of the best things for athletes because it puts all this stuff in you, back into your body,” he adds, pointing out that there is a reason the Jews’ chicken soup has long been known to ward off colds and is called Jewish penicillin.
Not only has Dolce experimented with at least five versions of each of the recipes in the book, but he has searched widely for inspiration. He once took a cab to what was considered a dangerous part of Harlem to test the soul food in a restaurant that had been recommended. The driver thought Dolce was taking a risk, but Dolce had called ahead and the maître d’ was waiting for him. He was taken into a room that reminded him of a 50s diner and there were “all these old black people sitting in there all dressed for Sunday”. He ordered tasting dishes of everything on the menu. “All these black women are like, ‘Jesus – boy must be hungry’.
“And I’m tasting this and that, I’m tasting fried chicken. I’m tasting grits and tasting chitlins, which is made from pig’s intestine. I just had a bit of everything ... and then I made my own, right.”
Dolce quotes Salvador Dali at this point: “Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.”
The book is adorned with Lin’s charming art along with some of Dolce’s poems and songs – the lyrics to his 1979 song Boat People is among the Vietnamese pages. He dropped his recipe for pigs’ tails and gravy because the photo “made it look like three giant penises”, but included the song whose five verses spell it out: “Pigs’ tails in gravy ain’t that hard to cook; remember this song and you won’t need no recipe book.”
The book is dedicated to their daughter Blaise who died suddenly last year.
But the hit he had all those years ago still resonates in Dolce’s life. He has funded the book from selling the publishing rights to Shaddap You Face to Mushroom.
In any case, it is an inescapable phenomenon that was No.1 in 12 countries, sold more copies that any other Australian recording, and has been recorded in many languages, including Aboriginal and Papua New Guinea versions. Andrew Sachs, in character as Manuel from Fawlty Towers, recorded it, and Samuel L Jackson did an amusing spoken-word version on British television.
But one man unimpressed by all this is the irate Scotsman, Midge Ure. Dolce’s song kept Ure’s band’s signature song Vienna, with its unforgettable echoey drum pattern, from the top of the British charts for three weeks. He is reported to have stuck a few bars of Dolce’s hit into live versions of Vienna. Ultravox bass player Chris Cross said Dolce’s chart performance – Shaddap You Face knocked the recently murdered John Lennon’s song, Woman, from top spot – “annoyed Midge Ure”. But Ultravox’s keyboard player, Billie Currie, once confided in a taped interview: “I mean I thought it was dead funny, that Shaddap You Face. Great chorus. I wish we’d come up with it.”
Ure himself has said: “That ghost will never be laid to rest.” In 2020 the Daily Mail reported that Ure’s “blood still boils” at the thought Dolce kept Vienna from the top. It reported that Ure cringes “when I hear the name Joe bloody Dolce”.
When Ure was last in Australia he performed not far from Dolce’s home. Dolce contacted the promoter thinking Ure might want to meet to bury the hatchet Ure keeps so sharp. Ure snubbed him.
“I’ve spent 40 years of my life talking about him and his bloody song.”
What’s-a matter him?
Signed copies of Joe Dolce Cooks: My Most Loved Recipes (Busybird Publishing) are available at www.joedolce.net