At the End of a Song

There was a lot I didn’t know about Nick Edenetti, including the fact that Nick Edenetti wasn’t his real name. It was Lawrence Weistreich.

He changed it because he figured you had to have a snappier name to become the town’s leading saloon singer, and he changed it because he wanted to sound Italian, like his idol Frank Sinatra.

I also didn’t know he had two grown kids and two grandchildren, but I did know, as one of his kids told me, that if there was one thing in life Nick wanted it was to be a star.

That may have cost him his marriage a long time ago, because Nick was always on the road, his son said--35 years of reaching for that star.

What measure of fame he did achieve was mostly within the circle of those who hit the small clubs in town. Everybody knew Nick there and turned out to hear him and maybe get a chance at the mike themselves.

He was known as the guy who sang like Sinatra, and he looked a little like him in a certain light: the snap-brim hat, the raincoat over one shoulder, the cigarette glowing in a fading spot.

It’s quarter to three, there’s no one in the place except you and me. . . . The guy owned every record of every song Old Blue Eyes ever sang and performed them at places like Gio’s and El Floridita and Grappa Ristorante.

When Sinatra died in May, Nick, who was also dying, mourned and said, “He got there first. Maybe he’ll be waiting.”

Maybe he was. Nick joined him over the weekend.

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I first saw Edenetti at a nowhere little place in Burbank called the China Trader. I’d wandered in out of a rainy night for food, not music, and here was this guy on a stage belting out songs like he was playing Carnegie Hall.

I was the only one in the place except for a couple of waiters, but that didn’t seem to bother him at all. I mean, he was up there performing like it was a packed house. I was impressed.

I admire people who try, who do what they do against all odds, who keep running when the race is lost and play hard when the score is against them.

I wrote about Nick after that first show, and I wrote about him another dozen times over the past 15 years to the point where editors were telling me no more Edenetti, for God’s sake.

They didn’t understand.

Nick was not only L.A.’s quintessential saloon singer but the lion in us all, struggling to survive in a tense and competitive urban jungle.

It wasn’t always easy.

In one club the spotlight caught fire and the place went dark, but Nick just kept on singing by the light of flickering candles.

So set ‘em up Joe, I got a little story you oughta know. . . .

At another place the sound system went dead, and Nick shrugged and raised his voice a little while someone puttered with the connections.

I could tell you a lot, but you’ve got to be true to your code. . . .

A cigarette in one hand, a mike in the other, not missing a beat. What a guy.

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It was the cigarettes that did him in at age 60. Five packs a day eating away at his body, creating the cancer that took his life.

“It’s in the lungs and there’s a tumor wrapped around my heart,” he said to me in our last conversation, gasping for whatever air he could get. “What’ve I got, three months, a year? I can’t believe this is happening.”

That was 14 months ago. He stopped smoking and talked about making commercials for the American Cancer Society about what Joe Camel had done to him, but they never materialized.

One of the reasons, I guess, is that he began smoking again.

“He took it up in the last couple of months,” a friend, Jay Byron, said. “I knew when he did that he’d given up.”

I wrote about his impending death and came to realize just how many friends Nick had. I made him look pathetic, they shouted at me over the phone. I shouldn’t have said he told dumb jokes. I shouldn’t have said he gave us encores whether we wanted them or not.

They didn’t understand. I liked Nick as a character and as a person, but I was never a part of his booster club. I had to write what I saw, and what I saw was a saloon singer, the last of his breed, up there singing his heart out even if there was only an audience of one.

So make it one for my baby and one more for the road.

I’m sorry the song had to end, Nick. Take a bow.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Tuesdays and Fridays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com.