Sweet harmony, mellow with age
For 60 years, the Fabulous Invictones men’s choir croons the tunes their fans still love
Ron Covert is nearing the end of his singing days.
“Not much longer, I don’t think,” the 84-year-old Torontonian said, sitting down after an hour’s performance. “The old legs just don’t take it anymore.”
For 60 years, Covert has sung in a men’s choir dubbed the Fabulous Invictones — performing in retirement homes, long-term care facilities, hotels and hospitals across the city. The men serenaded visitors at Expo 67’ outside the French Pavilion. They used to fill Minkler Auditorium at Seneca College on a Friday night. Though their membership has waxed and waned over the years, as hair turned silver and joints began to creak, approximately 20 remaining members took the stage on Wednesday for a geriatric audience at Scarborough’s Providence Healthcare. But Covert is the only one left from the original Invictones.
“It started in the fall. September in 1958,” he said. He was 25 years old. They wore red vests back then, he said — painted the hue they wanted, not able to find a manufacturer to make them — and jaunty boater hats. Covert marked time passing in changes of uniforms, from the vests to gold jackets to white frilly shirts with bow ties. These days, their bow ties clip on. But very little else has changed. “We try to do songs that people hear on the radio or are familiar with, like the old type of songs,” he told the Star. “The seniors love the old songs. If you don’t sing the songs that they can relate to, they can’t sing along.”
As the Invictones crooned through arrangements of “Splish Splash” by Bobby Darin and Nat King Cole’s “LO-V-E,” an elderly man took the hand of the woman in a wheelchair beside him, gently swaying and tapping her weathered hand to the rhythm. More than 80 per cent of the 288 residents in the Cardinal Ambrozic Houses of Providence have some form of dementia.
It’s a simple Valentines Day in their quiet corner of Scarborough.
Music connects and engages residents of “all capabilities,” Providence spokesperson Emily Dawson told the Star. It helped residents feel linked to one another through memories, through movement, she said.
“You could see that tonight in their smiles.”
Connections between music and memory have been made across the world, with studies asserting a deeply rooted space in the human brain for the music of someone’syouth. During the Wednesday night show — starting at 7:30 p.m.— residents of the houses bounce their hands and feet along with the tunes, whistling softly or humming along.
During an instrumental bit, a gentleman in the audience sings his own verse.
“If you get into the newer songs, they don’t know ‘em,” Covert said, chuckling. “And neither do we! Especially us old timers.”
Of course, the show will still go on when Covert leaves. The Invictones are in constant search of new members. “If you have ever sung in the shower, in a choir, at karaoke nights, or at stop lights, you will find your place with us,” their website says. “You don’t need a great voice but a big heart helps.”
Alan Sinclair, 59, is their newest addition and among the younger men in the group. He joined a few months ago after talking to Invictones member Dennis Tuck. “He never asked me if I could sing,” Sinclair said of Tuck, who sidled up next to Sinclair after the show.
“No auditions required. Just come out,” Tuck said.
All you have to do, Sinclair told the Star, is show up Wednesday nights and wear a bowtie. During his first practice, he was introduced to the whole group, and says all the names went past him. He was handed a binder of song lyrics and a CD of music, which he studied rigorously for two weeks.
“Going over it, and over it, and over it, until it was running in my head even when I didn’t want it,” he recalled. “I put a lot of effort into learning the words. I mean, some of them are tougher than others!”
The group is something he plans on sticking with.
Wednesday’s show moved through its hour-long program in an intricate dance between high-energy numbers and gentle ballads. They pulled out cowboy hats and clutched their belt buckles for one song; a gyrating Elvis impersonator emerged for another. He slowed down his highkicks, which one member joked led to serious chiropractic bills, to serenade the ladies in the audience with a rendition of “Can’t Help Falling in Love.”
“The women are always after us,” Covert said after the show, laughing. And indeed, the ladies in the audience laugh and beam as the Invictones’ Elvis impersonator moved through the crowd, taking their hands in his during slower ballads.
When the show closes, it does so with a musical goodbye.
“We’ll meet again,” the Fabulous Invictones croon. “Don’t know where, don’t know when. But I know we’ll meet again some sunny day.”