During the Big Band era, drummer Anthony J. D’Onofrio – Tony Dee, for short – toured nationally with a number of well-known bands. In time, he returned to his hometown of Elmira, N.Y. and played in places like the Eagles Club during the late 1950s.
The percussionist may not have known it, but he became a major influence on a high school boy who wanted to become a drummer.
“He was a great teacher,” said Steve Mitchell, a Lewisburg musician who once belonged to such rock ‘n’ roll bands as Jimmy Beaumont and the Skyliners and the Cleveland Wrecking Machine.
Mitchell’s family had a dairy farm in Troy, Pa., about 25 miles south of Elmira. His parents liked music, and Mitchell, then a teenager, often accompanied them when they went to the Eagles Club to dance.
Tony Dee played there frequently. Although Mitchell never took lessons from the drummer. “I just listened to him,” he said. “Any place I could hear musicians, I was up with my chair, learning what they were doing.”
Although he later became part of the San Francisco scene, Mitchell never forgot Tony Dee and the Eagles Club.
“That’s where I got my groove,” the drummer said.
Even today, “When I get the groove going, it’s like I’m right there at the Eagles with Tony Dee, and my parents are dancing the polka,” said the 71-year-old Mitchell, who performs regularly at the Bullfrog Brewery, Williamsport; The Bull Run Inn, Lewisburg; and the Hotel Edison, Sunbury.
San Francisco bound
When he finished high school, Mitchell studied music education at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, receiving a BS degree in 1967.
After that, “I was in a band called the Skyliners,” he said. The Skyliners had had a smash hit in 1959 – “Since I Don’t Have You.”
A white doo-wop group, “we really pursued black rhythm and blues,” Mitchell said.
“I was touring with the Skyliners in ’67 and when we got to San Francisco, we all wanted to stay longer, “ he said. “… We wound up staying another two months.”
The singers eventually returned to Pittsburgh, but Mitchell stayed in San Francisco and joined a quartet called the Cleveland Wrecking Company. It “was very much an experimental rock band. We didn’t record. We played all over the place … All the money went to The Diggers.”
“The Diggers” was an organization that provided food, lodging and medical care for the young hippies who had descended on San Francisco, which had become a magnet for the 1960s counterculture.
1967 was the year of San Francisco’s Summer of Love, and “there were thousands of kids,” the drummer said.
Mitchell was playing as much music as he had with the Skyliners, “but I wasn’t getting any money. … At the time, I didn’t care about money.”
“I played one of the great Be-ins in the park (Golden Gate Park) with Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. … The Grateful Dead were out of tune, but they had something that was so great.”
“I lived the musician’s life in San Francisco,” Mitchell said, adding that during the winter of 1967-68, “I played every day. Some of it paid. Some of it didn’t.”
Talent recognized
During his decades in San Francisco, Mitchell performed in “Garfield the Cat” and “Charlie Brown” television specials and on soundtracks for movies such as “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
Mitchell also appeared onscreen – as a musician, of course – in the 1988 movie “Tucker: The Man and His Dream” that starred Jeff Bridges as automotive designer Preston Tucker, an entrepreneur who designed an innovative car, the Tucker Sedan, during the late 1940s.
“I conducted the band that’s onscreen in the scene where they unveil the Tucker,” Mitchell said.
At one point during the 1970s, the percussionist had a standing gig at a San Francisco night spot.
“I started playing, and the dance floor would fill up,” Mitchell said. “I played four or five hours a night.”
During this time, he was invited to a dinner sponsored by the San Francisco chapter of the National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences, but “I didn’t go.”
He said that he thought the price of the tickets – “$60 or $70 a plate” – was too steep, and “I couldn’t afford to miss a night of work.”
The drummer learned later that during the dinner the organization had recognized him – in absentia – as “the Best West Coast Studio Musician in 1975.”
Back to PA
Mitchell returned to Pennsylvania in 1995 and soon became a highly visible – and audible – part of the Susquehanna Valley’s musical scene.
“He’s an excellent drummer,” said Sunbury percussionist Jack Lawton, who has known Mitchell for about 20 years.
“I’ve heard him at various events. He’s a solid player, but he doesn’t overplay and he doesn’t get in the way of the other musicians musically,” Lawton said. “He plays so tastefully. … I’ve heard Steve play where he’s not playing a lot of notes, but the notes are all extremely well placed so that he complements the song.”
Lawton said that some years back, he was scheduled to be the drummer for the Ann Kerstetter Band at an event, but became ill on the day of the performance.
“That morning I was just sick as a dog,” Lawton said. “Before I left for the hospital, I called Steve and asked if he’d fill in for me with Ann. He said, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ He bailed me out then.”
“He’s a good guy that will do anything for anybody,” said Lawton, who owns and operates the Lawton Drum Co. in Sunbury.
A true ‘Animal?’
According to Meghan Beck, co-owner and manager of the Hotel Edison in Sunbury, the “Electric Mash-Up” musical event held at the venue combines both the hotel’s history of being the first commercial structure illuminated with electricity by Thomas Edison, and a common belief that Steve Mitchell may have inspired Jim Henson’s creation of the Muppet Animal, whose fictional band was called “Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem”.
“With the mixture of The Edison and Steve’s lead role in the Mash-up,” Beck said, “the name and location seemed destined.”
Mitchell said he met Henson in the mid-1960s.
“He saw me playing at the Cheetah Club in New York City,” he said. “We talked afterwards”.
They met again in a Los Angeles recording studio.
“He remembered me and we chatted,” Mitchell said, though he humbly admits he can’t prove whether or not the beliefs that are out there of him being the inspiration for the famed Muppet are true.
