Long before Billy Mays hawked his first cleaning product, or the first celebrity spread the gospel of Nutrisystem, there was a guy with a microphone, a very wide collar, an album full of earnest mood rock and a dream.

Promising “a new dimension in entertainment,” a long-haired, bedroom-eyed fella named Peter Lemongello crooned in late-night TV commercials for his album called Love ’76, at first in New York and then across the country.

And unlike the late Mays and his pitchmen ilk, who became geniuses at selling someone else’s products, singer Peter Lemongello made millions of dollars selling … Peter Lemongello.

“It’s like a Horatio Alger story, anytime you go from nowhere to somewhere. It was like a dream come true,” says Lemongello, whose career has taken the 62-year-old from late-night commercials to Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, to a dinner theater in Branson, Mo., to the best clubs on New York’s cabaret scene and now to Boca Raton, where he lives.

While he recently completed a cabaret appearance at Feinstein’s in Manhattan, you won’t have to travel that far to see him perform. This weekend, he’s singing at the Feast of Little Italy in Jupiter’s Abacoa development.

Lemongello, who became, briefly, the toast of the talk-show circuit and appeared at Carnegie Hall and Madison Square Garden, may not be a household name now. But he did inspire the marketing of everyone from Boxcar Willie to Zamfir, the master of the pan flute.

“The idea of doing direct marketing with music on TV was pretty cutting-edge then,” says Scott Testa, a marketing professor at Philadelphia’s Cabrini College. “He opened the gates for QVC and the Home Shopping Network. It was very innovative. QVC has a lot to thank him for. Sometimes people come up with these ideas, and they’re a little before their time.”

Lemongello’s singing career both ended, and then began again, with his induction into the U.S. Army. As a kid, he’d started playing drums with a band on his native Long Island, but his musical plans were temporarily interrupted when he was drafted when he was 18, and was sent to Vietnam.

During his six-month R&R, Lemongello spent some time in Hawaii, where he found himself in the audience of a Don Ho show. Ho had a bit where he’d say “If anyone in the audience thinks they can do better than me, come do it,” and at this show, Lemongello volunteered. At the end of his song, ” ‘(Ho) said, ‘Where you working?’ and I said ‘Saigon!’ But he said, ‘When you get out, look me up.’ “

Fate intervenes
Six months later, his time in the Army was up, and Lemongello considered taking Ho up on his offer, even though “I was flat broke, and I was not gonna fly to Hawaii.”
Miraculously, fate, and Don Ho’s booking agent, intervened, and Lemongello found out that the Hawaiian singer was appearing at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria. Surprisingly, Ho did remember Lemongello, and invited him to be a part of his shows in Las Vegas. Next, Lemongello was the opening act for insult comedy king Don Rickles for two years, and then finally got signed to a deal with Epic Records.

And then … nothing. “People were reluctant to hire (solo) singers. It was more about rock acts,” he says. “I recorded three songs, and nothing happened. I don’t think (Epic) gave me a fair chance.”
Lemongello decided to take matters into his own hands, teaming up with songwriter Teddy Randazzo, whose creations included Going Out of My Head and Hurts So Bad by Little Anthony and the Imperials. The two started working on songs for a two-album project, full of “love songs set to a disco beat” that Randazzo’s wife dubbed “mood rock.”

‘Are you nuts?’
The singer says he decided to market his music on the local six-station New York TV market because it seemed an easier way to cover the area than on radio stations, whose listeners are segmented by genre. Also, TV had the added advantage of being able to show the singer in all of his handsome, smooth, mood-rock glory. The response was unanimous.

“Everybody said ‘Are you nuts? You can’t do that!’ ” he says.
But Lemongello kept going. For a year, he worked on the album and the commercial, performing where he could. He gathered a group of Long Island businessmen, including two doctors, a muffler shop owner “and a guy in the ship-building business.”

His plan was just to get his face out there and late-night slots were the cheapest. In a year, he’d sold 1.8 million albums, turning a $390,000 investment into $6 million. For Lemongello, who had been working hard for years, the sudden explosion of fame was a trip. By the end of 1976, anyone with a late-night television viewing habit knew who he was, including Chevy Chase, who spoofed the commercials on Saturday Night Live. That didn’t bother Lemongello.

A meeting with Frank
“At that time, I was just busy being famous,” he says. “And the first time I met Frank Sinatra and he knew who I was. I couldn’t believe it.”
After a while, the appearances were fewer and far between. Lemongello worked in music and in real estate, fading from the public eye. The biggest news he made for a while was unwelcome, a bizarre 1982 episode in which his cousin, former Houston Astros and Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Mark Lemongello, kidnapped and robbed Peter and Peter’s brother, Mike, a professional bowler, in St. Petersburg.
“He just went nuts,” Peter Lemongello says simply. “He had gotten thrown out of baseball. I had a lot of money, and he tried to steal it. He had a better shot of getting money if he had been nice to me. But I don’t hold a grudge.”

Eventually, Lemongello started singing again, and doing mostly smaller gigs, eventually moving to Florida after marrying second wife Karen, a friend from his old neighborhood in Islip who he became reacquainted with on “a tour of all the Century Villages” in South Florida. Tony, Andy … and Peter
The two rented a theater in Branson, Mo., in 1995, joining the ranks of Tony Orlando, Bobby Vinton and Andy Williams. Peter sang, Karen ran the office, and the two native New Yorkers became acquainted with life in the middle of the country, which sounds like it would have been fodder for an excellent sitcom.
“People were very nice, but it was slow for us. People assumed that all Italians were in the Mafia, because they’ve seen The Godfather. This guy was telling me about some problems he was having with his business, and he said, ‘I was gonna ask you to have your boys beat him up’ and I was like, ‘What makes you think I have boys?’ “

After three years, Lemongello says he and Karen decided they missed city life. They wound up in South Florida, and Peter settled into the Florida entertainment circuit, and was enjoying his life with his wife and son Peter Jr., now 10. “I was traveling less and less, and all of a sudden, people started calling. People think of you. And before you know it, you’re traveling again.”

The stint at Feinstein’s went well, and in February, he’s headlining at the Atlantic City Hilton. And Lemongello’s constantly reminded of the risky marketing campaign that started it all. Last year, singer Will Daly did a spot-on spoof of Love ’76, where his manager has him recreate the commercial down to the sensitive facial expressions. “I look at it as a form of flattery,” Lemongello says.

And every once in a while, Lemongello says, he thinks about testing whether that commercial lightning could strike twice, although he’s not sure it’ll be in the same place. He’s thinking about maybe trying London, or China. But whether or not he ever revisits Love ’76, Lemongello says he’s focused on ’09, and beyond.
“Egotistically, I don’t know if I could ever retire. If I thought I couldn’t do it anymore, maybe,” he ponders. “But it never wears, if people like what you’re doing.”