Feature Article |
Is This Kid About to Be a Star?
By Jessica Pressler
KEVIN MICHAEL PICKS AT HIS AFRO in the mirror and frowns. In the humidity it tends to spring into ringlets around the bottom, threatening to channel Retro Lionel Richie rather than Modern Shaft, and it’s a warm day. Atlantic Records, which partners with Downtown Records on several projects, has set up a photo shoot for him in a wide white studio in Brooklyn, but Kevin forgot the vast supply of complimentary Converse the stylist bestowed on him back at his hotel, so now he’s just waiting patiently. He is good at waiting.
Kevin started singing when he was eight. His father, Henry Seward, a shady but benign local character on the music scene who goes by the name Ric Star (and who requested that the magazine use a five-pointed star symbol in place of his last name; alas, the copy editors insisted otherwise), used to sneak Kevin into bars behind a speaker and have him, thus hidden, do backup vocals for his band, Ric Star’s Mystique. “The texture of his voice was of a nature that it could be mistaken for a girl’s,” Star reminisces. “But it had this wonderful richness. Like Michael’s.” As in Michael Jackson.
A partnership was born. Star had never really had a traditional job, but he made up for what he didn’t provide in financial support by turning the development of his son’s talent into a full-time occupation, making endless rounds of phone calls, squiring him around to places like Larry Gold’s Studio in Northern Liberties, introducing Kevin as his client and carving a reputation for himself as “one of those eccentric personalities that I’ve seen in the music industry forever,” says Montez Roberts, who manages the Studio and has spent hours fielding Star’s calls. “He definitely epitomizes that hunger and that hustler mentality you find in a poor man’s city. Like, ‘Yo, I’m trying to get up outta here.’”
In Chester, Star had some run-ins with the law (“Not like killing anyone or armed robbery or anything like that,” he explains), and neither he nor Kevin’s mother, Tione Venditto, wanted their son to experience the same thing. Venditto, who stayed single and worked in accounting, struggled to send Kevin to Cardinal O’Hara, a Catholic school. He got good grades, but like his father, he saw stars.
“I wanted Kevin to not be good, not be better than good, but be, like, the absolute excellen-tay,” says Star. “I would always say, ‘You gotta be extraordinary, kid, you gotta think outside of the box. You gotta be the greatest entertainer, man. One of the best in the world.’”
Kevin started singing when he was eight. His father, Henry Seward, a shady but benign local character on the music scene who goes by the name Ric Star (and who requested that the magazine use a five-pointed star symbol in place of his last name; alas, the copy editors insisted otherwise), used to sneak Kevin into bars behind a speaker and have him, thus hidden, do backup vocals for his band, Ric Star’s Mystique. “The texture of his voice was of a nature that it could be mistaken for a girl’s,” Star reminisces. “But it had this wonderful richness. Like Michael’s.” As in Michael Jackson.
A partnership was born. Star had never really had a traditional job, but he made up for what he didn’t provide in financial support by turning the development of his son’s talent into a full-time occupation, making endless rounds of phone calls, squiring him around to places like Larry Gold’s Studio in Northern Liberties, introducing Kevin as his client and carving a reputation for himself as “one of those eccentric personalities that I’ve seen in the music industry forever,” says Montez Roberts, who manages the Studio and has spent hours fielding Star’s calls. “He definitely epitomizes that hunger and that hustler mentality you find in a poor man’s city. Like, ‘Yo, I’m trying to get up outta here.’”
In Chester, Star had some run-ins with the law (“Not like killing anyone or armed robbery or anything like that,” he explains), and neither he nor Kevin’s mother, Tione Venditto, wanted their son to experience the same thing. Venditto, who stayed single and worked in accounting, struggled to send Kevin to Cardinal O’Hara, a Catholic school. He got good grades, but like his father, he saw stars.
“I wanted Kevin to not be good, not be better than good, but be, like, the absolute excellen-tay,” says Star. “I would always say, ‘You gotta be extraordinary, kid, you gotta think outside of the box. You gotta be the greatest entertainer, man. One of the best in the world.’”
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