Lifesaving, music are in EMT’S heart
Hero medic ‘likes to make people smile’
FDNY EMT Joe Siciliano can carry a stretcher — and a tune.
The lifesaving singer, who twice made the pages of the Daily News for resuscitating flatlining patients, marks his 10th anniversary as an emergency medical technician this year. But he’s known as much for his voice as his vocation.
“I have people I’ve never met and they’re like, ‘You’re the singing EMT guy, right?’ ” said Siciliano, who transferred in February from Division 1 in Manhattan to Station 46 in Elmhurst. Queens.
Siciliano, 31, arrived to find his reputation preceded him. His new lieutenant let the new guy know that he would not work a tour without first singing for the stationhouse.
“I’m the station jukebox now,” he says. “Everyone’s like, ‘Can you do this one?’ ”
Siciliano’s love of singing dates to his childhood, with inspiration striking — as it would for any true New Yorker — over pizza.
“There was a pizzeria by where I lived in West Hempstead called Viva Las Vegas,” he recounted. “My father took me there, and I wanted to know who the guy wearing the white suit on the pizza menu was. And the guy told me ‘Elvis.’ ”
The Long Island pizzeria owner gave the 6-year-old year-old Siciliano a video of a Presley concert that played on a loop in the restaurant. Siciliano found himself mesmerized by the King of Rock ’n’ Roll.
“I must have watched it until the tape ran out and I couldn’t watch it anymore,” he recalled. “That was really my intro into doing this.”
Siciliano grew up listening to oldies with his parents and grandmother and naturally picked up on big-band swing and jazz, pulling inspiration from the likes of Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett.
“I’m lucky my parents brought me up listening to that stuff, the old stuff,” he recounted. “I never had any actual training.”
Singing still takes a back seat to his heroic work. In 2015, he helped save the life of a man who suffered a seizure while driving along the Long Island Expressway. And in February 2018, he helped resuscitate a Houston Rockets employee who suffered a heart attack in a lower Manhattan gym while the NBA squad was working out.
His EMS colleagues and his patients aren’t Siliciano’s only fans. The EMT performs in a Billy Joel/Elton John tribute band called Face to Face LI, often booking two or more gigs a weekend during the summer.
On Memorial Day weekend 2018, the EMT was riding a Queens-bound subway when he and a fellow straphanger led the entire train car in a version of Joel’s “Piano Man.” The clip soon went viral, and the Siciliano legend only grew.
“I like to make friends,” he explained. “I like to make people smile and I like singing.”