<i> Dooby-dooby-doo </i> : Lounge Wizard Buddy Mix Teaches the Pacing, the Patter, the <i> Attitude </i> of Singing a Song

In his five-week vocal workshop, voice teacher Buddy Mix never teaches his student rockers and poppers how to sing.

But how to dress for an audience.

“If you don’t have a body like an athlete, don’t wear tight clothes,” Mix counsels. He usually is trendy in shapeless jackets and oversize shirts above baggy pants because physically he’s more B.J. Thomas than O.J. Simpson. “Go with who you are, not who you’d like to be and don’t put a sock in your pocket because there’s only one Tom Jones. . . .”

Don’t clutch a microphone like a claw hammer.

“If you hold it in a clenched fist and close to your chest, you’re making an angry statement. Hold it with the palm of your hand towards the audience so that it forms a nice, open line between you and them. . . .”

Do place songs before dialogue.

“The audience is not there to hear you talk; they are there to hear you sing,” goes the stage lore according to Buddy Mix, no relation to Holly nor Tom. “A good set is three high-powered first songs, boom, boom, boom. Take a moment to be reflective, sing a few ballads, and then pick up the pace to the closer. . . .”

So go the teachings as you enter what Mix markets as the Vocal Zone, a new dimension of timing and spacing limited only by the imaginations and ambitions of those who pay him $150 to take the course.

It is held Thursday nights at Ernie Taylor’s Singing Store in Van Nuys. That is to unknown vocalists what the Comedy Store is to uncelebrated stand-up comics.

It is not a postgraduate curriculum in vocal projection and inflections. But a 15-hour study in the realities for anyone taking that first slippery step from shower to stage, lounge and studio; a course on the do’s and don’ts, as it were, of dooby-dooby-do.

Most recently, the student roster has included a public-relations copy writer who wants to work lounges as a hobby; a mother of one who was radio psychologist Toni Grant’s secretary until her own psyche began searching for challenge; a grandmother of four who sells pink plastic storks as birthday greetings; a breeder of dachshunds doubling as a preschool teacher; a retired Department of Defense contract secretary looking to become the next Ethel Merman--and a burned-out UCLA anesthesiologist hoping a lounge act will be his gurney out of the medical business.

Mix, 36, had been gnawing on the need for such a vocal guidance program since leaving UCLA with a music degree in 1976. His education had been fine and high. But, he said, he was a rookie short on street smarts.

“In the most classical sense I had learned to analyze the theoretical aspects of a sheet of music and identify a chorus versus a bridge,” he explained. “But UCLA didn’t teach me how to build music into a career.”

Nor did college teach him how to write a press release, craft a resume, cut a demonstration tape, find a personal manager, seek auditions, dress for the stage, develop an artist’s persona, locate a route to radio stations, build an act and accept that the music business has become an industry of bottom lines and bean counters.

“Corporate America has basically bought out the artistic community,” he believes. “And like any other business, it is always looking at the acquisition of businesses.

“You can either get upset at that . . . or accept that, as an artist, you have to become your own little business and know how to set yourself up for a friendly takeover.”

Mix, unfortunately, hasn’t been taken over by anyone, friendly or hostile.

Cassette for Crooners

But he has written and recorded a few songs. He instructs at the Los Angeles County High School for the Performing Arts. “Enter the Vocal Zone” is his how-to videocassette for coming crooners and the title of a show (“somewhere between MTV and Star Search”) he produces and hosts for public access television.

For the past year there have been six workshops and 40 students who have learned wrinkles such as how to use the 38 seconds every singer should allow for breath and introductions between songs. You don’t waste them by announcing that “Cry Me a River” was a big hit for Barbra Streisand in 1962.

“Three seconds into the song they (the audience) are going to know that,” Mix says. “But you can give the audience a piece of yourself by telling them a personal story about an event in your life that this song expresses.

“You’ll be remembered better for that. One day, someone who was in that audience, may come up to you and say: ‘Hey, you’re the guy whose mother died when you were 16 and that’s why you sing ‘Feelings.’ ”

Last week, in this month of society debutante goings-on and educational comings-out, there were on-stage graduation exercises for Mix’s current class of Warbling 101.

It was held as a free show in the Wing Walker bar at the Airtel Plaza Hotel in Van Nuys, an ideal, totally Valley setting of transplanted palms, twinkle-lighted atriums and happy-hour singles.

Copywriter Tim Shell, 31, sang “Fly With Me.” He was Sinatra and Jack Jones and Bill Murray. He came equipped with taped musical accompaniment, years of experience as a bathroom baritone, white bow tie on black shirt and one-liners to trade with a rooting section from his Woodland Hills office.

Why did he take the course? “To put my money where my mouth is,” he explained. Anything else? “To meet women.” Get real. “To get out of the apartment on Thursday nights and be able to afford a better car than a Datsun 210.

“OK,” Shell conceded, “singing really is a hobby, but maybe in the back of your mind you also are thinking you might like to sing for money. It (singing in public) also is terrifying. But the more you do it, the more you’re pushing through fear and it’s that old Nietzschean philosophy: Anything that doesn’t kill you will make you stronger.”

Fresh from motherhood and management of Toni Grant’s business schedule came Dolores Cabaldon. Having graduated from an earlier workshop, she sang as something of a ringer. She also thumped out “New York State of Mind” with a set of lungs sounding louder than Liza Minnelli on a bullhorn. And with a cold at that.

In an entertainment world enormously overpopulated by contenders and pretenders, however, there shouldn’t really be any place for a show-biz rookie like Cabaldon.

“But I’ve just finished four months at Topper’s in Eagle Rock,” she said. “I’ve showcased at the Comedy Store and do backup vocals . . . hey, I’m in control, on my way and having a ball.”

Sat Out Graduation

Grandmother Becky Livingstone, 46, of Santa Clarita, sat out the graduation. She said she hadn’t practiced. Then there was her mother’s 70th birthday party and 45 people to dinner. Livingstone is up to her Samsonite in vacation preparations. She also was bowing before one final obstacle.

“I’m real scared,” she said.

Darlene McElderry of Burbank, retired at 52 from a world of military expenditures and aerospace contracts, wore yellow silk Jacquard. Pearls to the waist. A bow to the knees. Early June Cleaver.

She sang “Memory” from “Cats” and filled it with enough honest tenderness (McElderry on stage: “It’s such an emotional song I get chills singing it”) to melt Garfield.

McElderry offstage: “My uncle was a tenor on the stage so you could say I was born to singing. My wildest dream from all of this? Well, if somebody offered me the lead in ‘My Fair Lady,’ I’d take it.”

It was an evening without prizes beyond the personal satisfaction won by each vocalist. Or as Mix put it: “From this, they’ll have a greater understanding of the artist, the learning, the height of their achievement . . . and know that without an audience, a singer is still in the shower.”

It was a night of genuine applause and sincere aw-rights from an overflow crowd recognizing this was better than MTV and much more touchable. They also would never have the stomach for what they were seeing. Or as one patron put it: “I’d only get up there as part of a group. Me and Jack Daniels, Johnny Walker, Jim Beam, I.W. Harper and Hiram Walker.”

Farewell to Medicine

Then there was graduate cum vox laudable Dr. Nicholas Vasiloff. He has spent 30 years in medicine and teaches anesthesiology at UCLA. But, Vasiloff said, he’s spent too long doing the same thing in a profession that he feels has changed for the lesser.

So Vasiloff, 55, plans to pull the plug on his own medical career “in a few more months.” He’s not sure what he will do. He might go back to his native Canada. Or he might sing professionally. That’s why he signed up for Mix’s course in the tonsil specialties.

“But can you take any of this seriously?” he asked. His arm swept to indicate students, stage, audience and emcee Mix. Maybe. Maybe not. “I don’t know either. My mind is open at this point.”

Then Vasiloff, a John DeLorean look-alike in dark business suit, twilight hair and crisp dress shirt, slipped from his physician’s poise and into an alien realm of hand-mikes, voice enhancers and any doctor’s worst enemy--customers who talk back.

Vasiloff borrowed “Always on My Mind” from Willie Nelson.

Then a number from Engelbert Humperdinck.

With this, the anesthesiologist hinted at perhaps a higher calling in comedy.

His lyrics began: “I will sing you to sleep . . . “