Joe Pesci moved in rock circles in the New Jersey of the early 1960s. A friend of the Four Seasons, Pesci also played guitar in Joey Dee and the Starliters several years before Jimi Hendrix’s brief stint in that band. I’m not sure what happened during the intervening years, but in 1968, Pesci released his debut album on the Brunswick label: Little Joe Sure Can Sing! It’s not easy to come by—at the moment, there are a couple of copies on eBay selling for around $100.

Pesci says that he took the name “Little Joe” in imitation of the great jazz singer Little Jimmy Scott, whom Twin Peaks fans will recognize as the singer of “Sycamore Trees”:

Just as he was called Little Jimmy, they were calling me Little Joe. My first album, in fact, was titled Little Joe Sure Can Sing. All I wanted to do was sing like Little Jimmy Scott. I became his disciple. I’d follow him around after gigs, see if I could help him in any way. [...] We’d sing together nonstop for hours, sometimes all night. He’d teach me phrasing and harmony.

The album includes Pesci’s interpretations of three Lennon-McCartney songs, but the only one I’ve been able to find online is his rendition of McCartney’s love song to cannabis, “Got to Get You into My Life.” [“It’s actually an ode to pot,” said Macca, “like someone else might write an ode to chocolate or a good claret.” Who knew?] This was the track Rhino chose to include on the fourth volume of their Golden Throats series, Celebrities Butcher the Beatles, which I think explains its relative availability. I hope someday to hear Pesci sing “The Fool on the Hill,” “Fixing A Hole,” and the album’s three Bee Gees covers (“Holiday,” “To Love Somebody” and “And the Sun Will Shine”).

If you’re hearing this for the first time, you’ll notice that there are some salient differences between a George Martin production and an Artie Schroeck production. At some point in this file’s chain of custody, someone bookended the track with snippets of dialogue from Casino and GoodFellas that are probably NSFW.