Accordion great has seen it all

Dick Contino performing at the Cotati Accordian Festival in 2008. (photo by Crista Jeremiason/PD)

‘‘You wanna hear a joke about me?” asks accordion player Dick Contino.

It turns out he’s heard a few “Dick Contino jokes” over the years, but this one is his favorite:

“Two guys are on death row and they’re about to be executed and the warden asks the first guy, ‘What’s your last request?’ The guy thinks about it and says, ‘If you don’t mind, I’d like to hear Dick Contino play ‘Lady of Spain’ on the accordion.’

“The warden says, ‘You got it.’ Then he turns to the second guy and asks what he wants for his last wish and he says, ‘Execute me first.’”

It’s the same self-deprecating sense of humor that has kept Contino afloat through a 65-year career that teetered from an early billing as “the world’s greatest accordionist” to the lowly label of “draft-dodger” to 1950s B-movie cult star and then a gradual decline for decades as the accordion fell out of favor in pop music.

At 82, Contino lives in Las Vegas and plays about a dozen shows a year, which includes headlining the Cotati Accordion Festival this weekend.

“Don’t expect me to walk on water,” he warns. “I just like to go out and have fun and I like to think I can play somewhat like I did back then.”

From the 48 appearances on “The Ed Sullivan Show” to the half-year spent in jail, he’s seen it all. Born and raised in Fresno, Contino first picked up the accordion at 12.

“I had always been very shy and inhibited and I found that by playing the simplest of songs I could express my feelings,” he says.
When he asked his father for a new accordion, he was told, “If you learn 75 new songs, we’ll go to San Francisco and buy a new accordion.”

Seventy-five songs later, he strode into Guerrini Accordions at the corner of Broadway and Columbus in San Francisco and met his mentor, Angelo Cognazzo, a seasoned accordionist who would teach him how to improvise and play with a passion beyond the notes on the page.

Taking that knowledge, Contini entered the Horace Heidt-Philip Morris national radio talent contest when he was only 17. Playing “Lady of Spain,” he won and would go on to win dozens of radio contests all over the country while taking the song to No. 47 on the singles charts.

“It was like winning a lottery ticket right out of high school,” Contino remembers. “Suddenly I was the teenage idol of America with an accordion, believe it or not.”

In an interview with the Arizona Republic last month, accordion player and parodist Weird Al Yankovic sized up the pop lifespan of the squeezebox: “Back in the ’40s and ’50s, it had a lot more gravitas than it does today. You could play the accordion and still be a respectable pop artist. Dick Contino was like a rock star, for example. But post-Lawrence Welk, it took on a bit of a square image.”