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John O’ Hurley - A Class Act
by Jackie Saunders
Actor John O’ Hurley isn’t spouting Hemingway-esque soliloquies on the merits of a men’s Norfolk-style suede jacket or appraising a slice of cake from the wedding of King Edward VIII circa 1937 in his real life. However, like J. Peterman, the character he portrayed on Seinfeld, O’Hurley does have a taste for the finer things. And one of those things is music.
Melody-driven composers, Verdi and Puccini, swelling themes from movies like Gone With the Wind, and grand orchestral melodies by Henry Mancini,a re just some of O’Hurley’s musical influences. O’Hurley—a triple-threat thespian as evidenced by his Dancing With the Stars win, classically trained voice, and status as a beloved icon from “the show about nothing”—also plays the piano, guitar, and shows off his powerful pipes in musicals like Chicago on Broadway and Spamalot in Las Vegas, where he played King Arthur for two years.
Despite all his musical prowess, the piano is O’Hurley’s instrument of choice, even though he has no formal training. What
few fans know about the Family Feud game show host and popular author is that O’Hurley loves to compose on the piano and has been compiling an arsenal of melodies in his head since he was four-years-old. He released his first CD collaboration with cellist Marston Smith, Peace of Our Minds, in 2005, which sold out within eight minutes on QVC. The album is also the first completely independently produced CD to ever reach #13 on the Billboard Music charts.
Musician in the Making
Like so many other people, O’Hurley, 54, started his fascination with music when The Beatles came to America. “It was dizzying how they literally captivated the whole country,” he says. “I was just mesmerized by their presence, I couldn’t wait to get my first electric guitar.”
Unfortunately for O’Hurley, his first guitar wasn’t exactly the Gretsch Country Gentleman Harrison rocked out on during The Ed Sullivan Show—it was a red and black acoustic model from the Sears catalogue. “It was ugly as sin,” says O’Hurley who was in fifth grade at the time. “I was so disappointed when I came down Christmas morning and saw it under the tree. I was embarrassed to bring it to guitar lessons.”
Years later, 16-year-old O’Hurley put together what he calls “the worst rock and roll band ever assembled,” The Whiskey Rebellion. The band’s first and last booking was O’Hurley’s younger brother’s seventh-grade graduation dance, where they split $50 between the three members. “It took us six weeks to finally come up with 14 songs,” he says. “It never occurred to us that it was a three-hour event and our songs only added up to 45 minutes.”
Dealing with the typical seventh-grade awkwardness—boys and girls glued to opposite sides of the gym until the final
song—The Whiskey Rebellion was forced to play the same set over and over again to fill up the time. Eventually, O’Hurley got creative, making up his own words to Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe” and performing his take on Jimi’s classic guitar riff in “Purple Haze.” O’Hurley reminisces: “We thought we were pretty darn good.”
While O’Hurley was studying theater and voice at Providence College in Rhode Island, he developed a desire to play the melodies swirling around in his mind, or as he calls it, “emptying the hard drive in my head.” He soon realized he didn’t have the ability to play his grand melodies on the guitar, so O’Hurley began sneaking into the college theater at night to play his tunes on the piano. “My career has always been driven by my imagination; if an idea hits me in a recurring fashion, I must complete it,” says O’Hurley of his desire to play. “I’ve lived my life by this concept.”
A self-taught piano player, O’Hurley does not read music, rather, he simply composes the melodies he creates.
“Composing is a very private thing, I do it for myself,” he says. “I love to play at home, I am not a performance-oriented musician.”
Besides late nights spent plunking away at the piano keys, and hearing his melodies come to life, college holds another special music-related memory for O’Hurley. “At the end of a day, whether it was spent studying or carousing, a buddy of mine and I would call it a night by listening to the 1812 overture,” says O’Hurley. “We would sit back and listen, lights out, we were into theater so we were exposed to various forms of culture.”
A Private Pianist
Although O’Hurley has been composing melodies since college, it wasn’t until a few years ago that friends urged him to make a CD to record his songs. Knowing nothing about producing an album, he met cellist Marston Smith, who plays an electric six-stringed model, mounted on a medieval battle breastplate—the kind of dramatic flair O’Hurley admired. He asked Smith to help him embellish his melodies on the album, and the two recorded the double-disk, Peace of Our Minds. “Lo and behold, all of a sudden we did well,” says O’Hurley of the album’s immediate success. “It amazed nobody more than me.”
Because of the success of his first album, O’Hurley and Smith decided to work together again and the pair released Secrets From the Lake in January. Despite the public’s enthusiasm for his work, O’Hurley still has no plans to perform his pieces in public. “I’m not concert-driven on the piano, my stuff is more contemplative,” he says. “I don’t know how the audience would stay awake.”
The people who do get to hear O’Hurley play on his Kawai Digital Grand Piano are his wife, Lisa, two-year-old son, William, and two dogs, Scoshi, an elderly Maltese, and Betty, a Dachsund/Black Lab mix. “I think the dogs are most comfortablewhen I play,” says O’Hurley who practices regularly in his Los Angeles home. “They feel the vibrations and just sack out. They are either intensely relaxed or intensely bored.”
William also enjoys listening to his father play. O’Hurley sat his son down on the piano seat as early as three-months-old. At a recent Family Feud holiday party, O’Hurley handed out his latest CD, which someone put on the sound system. William was running around the studio until he heard the music and stopped abruptly. “His mom asked, ‘Who is that?’ and William said, ‘Dada!’” says O’Hurley. William has a little violin and miniature version of his dad’s red electric guitar that a friend designed. Remembering the good old days of Whiskey Rebellion, O’Hurley takes out his guitar with William and plays “Purple Haze.” “He’s two years old so he doesn’t mind that I still don’t know that Jimi Hendrix riff,” says O’Hurley. “He doesn’t turn his nose up at me or say, ‘Dad, the emperor’s not wearing any clothes.’”
Despite hosting Family Feud, speaking at various engagements, and doing voiceovers for TV and commercials, O’Hurley still makes time to play the piano daily. Although he has numerous musical influences and favorites, he is content just to play his own compositions. “Some of my chord structures are reminiscent of other people’s stuff, but I don’t read music well enough and it isn’t a concern of mine,” he says. “I like to live within that little world; I’m not drawn to play anything else.”
For O’Hurley, the piano, and music in general, is an outlet for emotion and expression. Because of this, it’s no surprise to him that so many actors are drawn to music and playing an instrument. “I think all great actors are sensualists and that’s at the core of it,” he says. “Music is an expression of that sensuality and vulnerability. There are great musicians that become great actors. It’s like pouring beer into a different container; it still is beer, just a different shape.”
Dabbling in all sorts of endeavors from theater and dance to writing books, O’Hurley is somewhat of a renaissance man in the realm of the arts. Since the success of Seinfeld, he has done everything from writing the New York Times Bestseller It’s Okay to Miss the Bed on the First Jump: And Other Life Lessons I Learned from Dogs and Before Your Dog Can Eat Your Homework, First You Have to Do It to hosting USA Network’s Get Golf with the PGA Tour and NBC’s The National Dog Show. Besides many voiceover jobs like playing King Neptune on SpongeBob SquarePants, he has also guest starred on shows like The X Files, Murder She Wrote, Frasier, and Melrose Place. In an ironic twist of fate, O’Hurley teamed up with the real John Peterman and is a part owner of the J. Peterman Company.
But, he holds a special place for music. “I think music and poetry are the highest forms of the human experience,” says O’Hurley. “Incommunicable things are released in music and poetry.”
Looking for more articles on piano? |
| Opening Up the Keys |
| Keyboards and Accessories |
| It's Never Too Late |
| Secrets of Playing Piano Bars |
| The Pianists - A home for amateurs with a passion for piano |
