Over the last rough couple years, Jack Hunt, better known as Johnny Angel, came pretty close to singing with the angels.
His group, Johnny Angel and the Halos, which reunites for a comeback show at Rivers Casino on Saturday, played its last show in February 2020, just a few weeks before the pandemic shutdown.
In April of that year, rather than experiencing the pandemic via the TV, as most people did in early days of COVID-19, Hunt got hit with it — hard.
“I was in the hospital for a month and a half,” he says. “I was in intensive care for 11 days, had to be on oxygen for about nine straight months, couldn’t walk, couldn’t talk, everything. I mean, they had to teach me how to brush my teeth — that’s how bad it was. And then, during recovery, my lung capacity was so bad, I had double pneumonia, I had blood clots in my heart and in my lung, and I didn’t think I’d sing again.”
Although he was still struggling with his voice and his breath in early 2021, he got his sea legs back. He had dropped a lot of weight — “Not a good way to lose it,” he says — and was walking three miles a day on a track.
Everything was going well, until April 2022, when he contracted a second virus that, he says, gave him liver and kidney failure and diabetes and blinded him in one eye.
“I mean, it was just like a disaster,” Hunt says. “It was ugly.”
Several months after that, his friend Mike Vale invited him to play the farewell show of the Crystal Blue Band, the core group that backed Tommy James as the Shondells.
“I said, ‘You know, if my voice comes back, I'd love to do it with you,’ and, sure enough, about two weeks before that, my voice did start to come back and I did the goodbye show,” Hunt says.
That prompted the Halos to get back into the rehearsal hall.
The group goes back, way back, to 1964, when they formed as The Cordells, with Hunt being from the North Side and the rest of the guys from West View.
That, of course, was the year the Beatles invaded the U.S., with their earthshaking “Ed Sullivan Show” debut and first American tour.
“All the guys, they were all Beatles fans,” Hunt says. “They loved the Beatles. I was the wild child in the band. I particularly didn't care for them when they first came out because I was a hardcore doo-wopper and my roots went into the soul venue rather than a rock venue.”
He was more about The Temptations, The Four Tops and other vocal group legends of the ’50s and ’60s.
“I was the leader of the group, so they usually went in my direction,” Hunt says of The Cordells. “At first, they were kicking and screaming. But, later on in life, the path that we took, there weren't many blue-eyed soul groups playing and so we had a real niche.”
The Cordells released a single, “You Do a Thing to My Mind,” that got play from local DJs Porky Chedwick, Mad Mike and Chuck Brinkman and reached No. 78 on Billboard’s Top 100 in 1966.
Beginning in the late ’70s, The Cordells evolved more into rock and hard rock bands under banners of Harmboree, Higher-Up and Slow Cooker. The popularity of a comedy skit they did based on a ’50s group led to the formation of Johnny Angel and the Halos.
It didn’t take long before the Halos were embraced by the oldies community and placed on 3WS oldies bills at Three Rivers Stadium and other venues with the likes of James Brown, The Temps, The Tops, The Drifters and Martha and the Vandellas.
Hunt considers going on stage and singing “My Girl” with The Temptations to be a career highlight. He has a lot of that history captured at his colorful Johnny Angel’s Ginchy Stuff and Music Museum in Manchester.
Amazingly enough, the Johnny Angel and the Halos that fans will see at Rivers Casino on Saturday consists of four of the six members of The Cordells (one passed away and another retired) and seven of the nine original members of the Angels, including Gary “Bubba” Daley, with whom he grew up singing on North Side street corners.
“We started rehearsing a couple of months ago and my voice is back 100%,” Hunt says. “So many people have been so supportive of me since I got sick and, like, the prayer network was just incredible. I mean, people were praying, sending me messages.”
It will be part holiday show, but Hunt says, “When we decided to go back, I thought we should cover the beginning of our career, with the stuff that we've done in the past. So the first hour is gonna be just a memory of all the things that we did in the good times. We have 1,800 tickets sold already for the casino, so it's kind of crazy because I couldn’t fathom that that many people still wanted to see us.”
The show, which will include holiday tunes, is at 7 p.m. Saturday. Tickets start at $20; riverscasino.com/pittsburgh.
First Published: November 29, 2022, 11:00 a.m.
Updated: November 29, 2022, 1:41 p.m.
