Roxanne Fontana
Roxanne Fontana is a dual-national Italian American author, singer, songwriter, musician, recording artist, poet, actress, clothing and jewelry designer and cult icon.
Early Life
Fontana's parents were working class Italian-Americans from Brooklyn’s Bedford Stuyvesant slums. Fontana spent her 1960s childhood a few blocks from the childhood home of writer Arthur Miller[1], in the predominantly Italian and Jewish neighbourhood of the part of Brooklyn bordering Midwood and Bensonhurst. Here in 1968 she developed her talent for fashion, longing to be a fashion designer after a child modelling try-out in a Lexington Avenue agency in New York City. Fontana developed her songwriting, guitar playing, singing and journal writing while living in Elmont, Long Island, USA, during the 1970s. She ran an international fan club for Rolling Stone Brian Jones in the mid- to late 1970s[2]. The Rolling Stones referred all press regarding the late Stone to the teenage Fontana.
Music
Fontana has over 80 songs registered with the United States Copyright Office, authoring both lyrics and music.
Fontana began her music career at New York City nightclubs, during the 1980s with performances at CBGB, The Bitter End, and Webster Hall, among many others. Fontana’s bands The Blue Way, Kid Blue, and Ruzenka and the Big Dream, were male rock groups. Fontana wrote their material and fronted them. She also performed under her name Roseann Fontana for acoustic shows and fronting bands as a solo artist. Fontana recorded unreleased material until her first release in 1999. The unreleased material included a popular Fontana song called, “Lifetrap” which was mixed by Ivan Kral during Iggy Pop recording Sessions for the album Party. Other well-received songs recorded but never released were “He Does The Look,” “I Don’t Wanna Be In Love,” “Public Tragedy,” “Motion” and “All That Isn’t Seen.”
In the early 80s the young Fontana relocated alone to Los Angeles, her home at various times since. Roxanne played the club circuit of Los Angeles in the early 1980s. In the mid 1980s the young Fontana travelled to Europe and lived two summers in Holland, recording with a local rock band in Arnhem on the border of northern Germany. Fontana returned home seeking to release the recorded music, which went unreleased for decades.
Fontana took up residence again in New York and shortly thereafter graced the cover of the East Village’s local newspaper Downtown where she was labelled, “The Hippest Lady In New York.”[3] Fontana soon after left for Los Angeles again before returning to New York in the mid-1990s to form the psychedelic group Ruzenka and the Big Dream with drummer Rich Teeter from New York punk rock group the Dictators. That group lasted several years, playing residencies at the Bitter End, and recording at Electric Lady Studios. In 1993, Andy Warhol assistant, poet, and photographer Gerard Malanga wrote of Fontana during that time. Among other lyrical statements he predicted Fontana as “the voice reaching the millennium.”[4]
Fontana was known as Ruzenka after her band from the mid-1990s. Upon its disbanding she legally changed her name to Roxanne Fontana. Fontana states this was the name her mother wanted to name her in 1959. Roxanne did the college circuit of the New York City area fronting a country-rock band and drawing from her songwriting catalog for country-influenced songs.
In the Spring of 1999 in New York City, Fontana hooked up with legendary drummer Dino Danelli of the hit 1960s rock group The Rascals, after specifically seeking him out to play drums on one of her songs. Danelli wanted to produce Fontana for a full album, and did so at Bomb Shelter Studios in New York City. His electronic dance ideas were imposed upon the folk-rock Fontana. Fontana would record her songs in the studio and come back days later to do vocals to sometimes unrecognizable backing tracks created by Danelli and guitarist and engineer Eddie Fritz. When Atlantic Records rejected the disc on the grounds that such a woman doesn’t do this kind of music, both Danelli and Fontana strongly disagreed and were disheartened by the closed-mindedness of the industry for what the duo thought was a brilliant juxtaposition of an intellectual rebel with a sweet voice singing over electronic beats. The album included musical contributions from Marty Willson-Piper from the Australian rock band the Church, and Benjy King, formerly of the hit new wave group Scandal. Fontana decided to start up her own label in New York City and, against Danelli’s wishes, released the record. AllMusic called the record "Mysterious and inviting stuff."[5]
The next year Fontana followed up with a folk-rock CD which was more in line with her favourite music, the orchestrated folk-rock of the mid-1960s. Gordon Raphael, producer of the Strokes, recorded the album for her at his Transporterraum Studios in New York City’s East Village and played on every track on the record. The album also once again featured Fontana’s friend Marty Willson-Piper. Critic Joe Viglione said of the album, "Fontana does a fine job producing herself, and the record is a departure from the sound forged on the debut disc."[6]
A review by Joseph Tortelli of Goldmine Magazine revealed Fontana to possess an "innocent-yet-world-weary voice." Contrasting the two releases' styles, Tortelli stated, "Title these CDs 'a tale of two pop sounds': one electronic and percussive; the other haunting folk-rock."[7]
Fontana put her music career on hold in 2001 when she married and moved to Los Angeles with Montreal guitarist-singer Mat Treiber. She co-wrote many songs that Treiber would perform in Los Angeles night clubs including “Je Ne Peus Pas Voler,” “Go All Around the World,” She’s Got It Good,” and many more. Fontana managed husband Treiber at the beginning of their marriage.
The couple moved to England to be near Treiber’s chosen musicians and band. They have lived there since 2006. Since that time Fontana has released some recordings from her unreleased catalog starting with a song entitled “Green,” recorded with her band Ruzenka and the Big Dream at Electric Ladyland Studios in New York City in the mid-1990s. She also released a number of tracks recorded in Holland entitled, The Best of the 80s. She continues to record sporadically: “Another Place”, a song by Francoise Hardy; “The Fields of St. Etienne”, a song by Gallagher and Lyle. In 2013 in Brighton, England, Fontana recorded originals “New Moon Child” and “Passing Bye”, produced by Russell C. Brennan[8]. Fontana and husband Mat Treiber enjoy making Scopitone-style videos to Fontana’s released material. Fontana’s record sales and interest in her music have an international cult status in the truest indie-artist manner. She has played occasional acoustic shows in New York City, Prague and London in the 2010s.
Discography
Albums
Love Is Blue, Etoile Records 1999, produced by Dino Danelli
Souvenirs D’Amour, Etoile Records 2001, produced by Roxanne Fontana, recorded by Gordon Raphael.
Best of the 80s, Etoile Records
The Singles (2010-2020), 2022 Sprezzatura Records
Phantasmagorgy 2022
EPs
The Best of the 80s, recorded in Arnhem, Holland.
Singles
“Fields of St. Etienne” 2009 “Green” 2009 “Another Place” 2010 “New Moon Child” 2013 “Passing Bye” 2014
"Don't Leave Me" 2023
"The Singer Not The Song" 2024
"Daydream In the Dark Night" 2024
Film
Shorts all 1976-1978, directed by Joe Marzano, of Venus in Furs notoriety:[9] “Fur” “The Leather Girls” “Leprosy” “Roxanne” by the Police, music video “Recta-Soft”
Published Work
American Girl is the memoir penned by Roxanne Fontana about her life up to and including the recording of her Love Is Blue album. The book specifically ends when she meets her husband Mat Treiber, and includes the story of Fontana’s fascinating life as a single woman getting discovered in the music business, her spiritual journeys, childhood street fights, and many travels and love affairs. Fontana also chronicled her lifestyle as a marijuana dealer to support her artistic ventures in the 1990s. Fontana is planning “Part Deux” in the future to share her adventures since the ending of the last book. American Girl has been met with rave reviews in its ebook form since its release in 2012 and is planning a re-release in print new edit for 2015. Reviewer Keri English remarked about the book, "I found myself unable to stop reading at points [...] Even as she discovers horrible things about the men she chooses to let in her life, she overcomes a great deal. In matters of faith, life and love, hope is never quite lost."[10]
“America – Whore of Babylon –Mars Mars Mars” is a poem written by Fontana in Italy, immediately after becoming an ex-pat of the USA in 2006. It was published in the poetry compilation, Ava Gardner – Touches of Venus in 2007, alongside pieces by Margaret Atwood and Robert Graves, after the editor discovered her poem on her website. Critic James Srodes said of the book, "To read through this book is to realize that more than the saccharine lyrics sung to Marilyn, Ava was both a frame of reference and an inspiration for young women and young men both in their lives and in their muse. How she would have laughed."[11]
Fashion
During Fontana’s pregnancy in Los Angeles she started her own jewelry design company “Chanson de Tangier,” which consisted solely of men’s and women’s beaded chokers. The designs were influenced by the style of her favourite fashion icon and musician, Brian Jones. The pieces were constructed of antique and vintage beads. Fontana would combine trade beads from Italy from the 1700s with sterling and African beads, some over 1,000 years old. The pieces were sold at top Los Angeles boutiques, including Lorenzo’s on Sunset Plaza Drive, the trendy Kitson on Robertson Boulevard, and many more shops from West Hollywood to Venice. Before her expat status she began creating art nouveau influenced pendants using black Czech Glass and Miriam Haskell beads from the 1920s.
In the Summer of 2013 Fontana opened up her boutique Atelier VivaFontana1959, which featured her art: her cds, jewelry and clothing.[12] The tiny shop up an alley way in the ancient Market Town of Ledbury, England, featured Fontana’s original and labelled designs, which consisted mainly of lingerie-weight summer tops designed of French fabrics bought on shopping trips to Paris, and Italian mesh fabrics. Fontana acquired colourful printed fabric of Florentine designers Save the Queen, which she used for her own designs. Other clothing designed and hand-made by Fontana and featured in the shop were crushed velvet hot pants, baby-doll dresses, and her signature “Little Queenie” velvet hat, shaped like a baker’s beret, lined in Satin, with couture Grosgrain, some feathered, some featuring antique glass buttons.
Personal Life
Considering herself a Christian mystic, the Roman-Catholic-born Fontana has studied the esoteric sciences and abandoned 11 years of Occultism in 1992. She became a born-again Christian while living in the New York City apartment of a recently-deceased Rosicrucian. She was free to keep the cross of the very old Czech who had passed away, after the apartment he’d lived in since the 1920s was taken over by Czech artists and hippies who invited Fontana to live with them. She still owns the antique ceramic cross with its various pentacles, rosebud center with Hebrew letters painted in gold, etched planetary symbols, which sat on a Star of David base. A keen astrologer and practitioner of the natural healing arts, she states she is closer to ancient Rosicrucianism than to any modern branch of the Christian church. Rudolf Steiner and English Christian author and occultist Dion Fortune are two notable figures of history which Fontana says have influenced her way of understanding Christianity. Fontana states that her relationship with the cosmos and God is her first and foremost relationship from which everything about her, her art, her love life, her relationship with the human race, extends.
In January 2001, at age 41, Fontana married Montreal-born guitarist singer-songwriter Mat Treiber, age 21, at the Neighborhood Church on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, New York. The party reception was held in Times Square with a small number of 60 guests at Johnnies Italian Restaurant, the reputed mafia-related watering hole of Frank Sinatra as well as celebrity hang out during the 1960s and 1970s. From 1997 to 2001, Fontana had rented a floor as her apartment and home of her Etoile Records from the owners of the restaurant.[13]
References
- ↑ Miller, Arthur (1955). "A Boy Grew in Brooklyn," from Echoes Down the Corridor: Collected Essays, 1944-2000. Viking, New York. ISBN 0670893145
- ↑ "Brian Jones Memorial Fan Club website". Archived from the original on 2019-04-02. Retrieved 2023-03-24.
- ↑ Gordon, Renee. "The Hippest Lady in New York", Downtown Magazine, New York, 24 February 1988.
- ↑ Malanga, Gerard. The New York Press, New York, July 1993.
- ↑ AllMusic review of Love Is Blue
- ↑ AllMusic review of Souvenirs d'Amour
- ↑ Tortelli, Joseph. "Discoveries", Goldmine, Issue 165, USA, February 2002.
- ↑ "Roxanne's Latest Has Stellar Inspiration", Ledbury Observer, Ledbury, England, 4 December 2013.
- ↑ IMDb Filmography of Joseph Marzano.
- ↑ Indie Reader Review of American Girl, Indie Reader, USA, July 2012.
- ↑ Srodes, James. "BOOK REVIEW: ‘Ava Gardner: Touches of Venus’", The Washington Times, Washington, 21 May 2010.
- ↑ Beddis, Nadelle. "Atelier Viva Fontana 1959", Ledbury Focus, Ledbury, England, August 2013.
- ↑ Schlesinger, Toni. "Shelter", The Village Voice, New York, 9 June 1998.
- Roxanne Fontana, American Girl (Bookbaby, 2012)
- Gilbert L. Gigliotti, Ed. (2010). Ava Gardner: Touches of Venus, p. 114. Entasis Press, Washington, DC. ISBN 0980099951.
This article "Roxanne Fontana" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Roxanne Fontana. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.
