For Joey Spampinato, a gradual return to health and to the stage
Alittle over 20 years ago, the musicians Kami Lyle and Joey Spampinato bought a house together in Nashville. Shortly after, they visited Cape Cod, where Joey’s brother, Johnny, a founding member of the long-running band the Incredible Casuals, had been living for years.
Though Lyle had attended Berklee College of Music, she’d never found time to explore the Cape. “I was so busy, I never left the block,” she recalls.
She was instantly smitten. “I fell in love with the Cape so hard,” she says, “the light, the colors, the water, the people.” Back in their new home in Nashville, she called Spampinato, who was on the road with his band, NRBQ.
“I was sobbing looking at our vacation pictures, and I said, ‘Can we move?’ ”
They’d been living in bliss on the Cape ever since — until, that is, Spampinato’s cancer diagnosis in 2015. They had to raise money to cover their medical expenses.
Now, after years of treatment and recovery, he’s finally feeling better.
At 75, he has made a quiet return to the stage this year, playing alongside Lyle at South By Southwest in Austin and the Boston Harbor Distillery. With drummer Jerome Deupree (Morphine) and keyboardist Barbara Blaisdell and guitarist Tim Utt of the Vermont-based band Sensible Shoes, they’ll play the Distillery again on Sunday. The show is billed as an audience participation event — the “Kami Lyle Sing-a-While.”
“We have a total blast together,” Lyle reports, sharing a phone interview with her husband. “They make us laugh really, really hard.”
Spampinato was an original member of NRBQ, joining piano player Terry Adams and original frontman Steve Ferguson in the mid-’60s. He stayed in the band for nearly 40 years, the last dozen or so alongside his brother Johnny, who replaced the guitarist Al Anderson.
Though he’s still not strong enough to consider hitting the road, Spampinato never thought he wouldn’t perform again.
“You don’t really — or I didn’t, anyway — think about the long term,” he says. “It was just the things I had to do right now. Otherwise, I would have thought it was a big mountain to climb. You just do things as they come, and you’re able to walk through those doors one at a time.”
From the beginning, NRBQ has passed through an awful lot of doors, musically speaking. Some of the band’s best-known songs have showcased Anderson’s soulful roots; others, Adams’s love of the unorthodox jazz artist Thelonious Monk and his dictum, “The piano ain’t got no wrong notes.”
Spampinato, meanwhile, brought a gentle disposition expressed in his melodic bass lines and his unabashed love songs. He grew up on the Everly Brothers, the Beatles, and Brian Wilson, as well as the Great American Songbook.
Trained as a trumpeter, Lyle released her debut album, “Blue Cinderella,” on a major label in 1997. Asked where her husband’s sweet, almost childlike songs come from, Lyle has a simple answer.
“He has a pure, beautiful heart,” she says. “He’s kind of from another planet.”
When Spampinato was a kid in the Bronx, she says, one day after school, he was following a classmate who swiped an apple from a sidewalk display outside a grocery store. So Joey pocketed one, too.
“But by the time he got home, he didn’t like who he was,” his wife explains. So he went back and returned the apple.
Many years later, while she was in New York City recording that debut album, a friend insisted that she come see “the greatest living rock ‘n’ roll band on the planet.”
“We met in the basement of a club called Tramps,” she recalls, “which somehow seems perfect.”
They share a lifelong belief in the sheer joy of making music.
“There’s so much anger and hatred and whatnot in the world right now,” Lyle says. “I think a group of people getting together on a Sunday to sing some really great original songs is not a bad thing.”