At the age of 10, Nathan Cavaleri has had leukemia, a hit album and a Hollywood movie deal. Larry Schwartz discovers how he juggles schoolwork and stardom.
TO get away from it all, Frank Cavaleri took his wife Joanne and sons aged 10 and six to a remote camp site, three hours’ drive from their home near Campbelltown, south-west of Sydney.
The day they were due to head back, Mrs Cavaleri spied her eldest, Nathan, chatting to a stranger. When the boy came back on his bike, she asked about the conversation. “What happened? Were you naughty or something?” “Oh no,” came the reply. “He saw me on Steve Vizard.
The Cavaleris had a good laugh. “We just cracked up,” Mrs Cavaleri recalls. They were not amused when they returned that day to find spray-painted graffiti on the cream-white wall outside their house, AIN’T NO HENDRIX.
For the first time since Nathan’s gift for guitar-playing drew attention to the quiet family, Joanne Cavaleri started thinking they might have to leave the modest brick-veneer home of 13 years “purely just so people don’t know exactly where he’s living”.
She believes the graffiti was a teenager’s scrawl. It was certainly no secret they would be away. Nathan, performing at a local shopping centre the day before they left, had said as much when interviewed via satellite by Ray Martin for his `Midday’ show.
For Joanne, the jibe written the moment their backs were turned soured strong support in the community since Nathan contracted the life- threatening blood disease leukemia a few years ago.
“Until that time everyone was so supportive of him,” she says.
“They’d known what he’s gone through and everything. And then this happens. It’s a bit of a shock.
Not that the slightly built guitar prodigy was fazed. “Ah, I didn’t really care much about it,” says Nathan. “It’s just nothing. I just ignore it. I don’t like Hendrix anyway.
Last year, Nathan released his first single, a remake of the Elvis Presley classic, `Little Egypt’, with Chris Bailey on vocals. Nathan’s debut album, `Jammin with the Cats’, this week reached number 48 on the national charts.
Featuring musicians including Diesel and Tommy Emmanuel, the album was recorded in Jimmy Barnes’ Bowral home studio, half-an-hour’s drive from home. The former Cold Chisel frontman’s wife, Jane, is helping manage Nathan, who has a hand in writing six of the songs on his album.
His father, who plays rhythm guitar, has helped to pen three.
Then, there is the Hollywood film deal with New Line Pictures, makers of the `Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ movies and `Nightmare on Elm Street’. “I’d like to do acting,” says Nathan. “It’ll probably really be fun. You see yourself in this big movie …
Hailed as a could-be antipodean Macaulay `Home Alone’ Culkin, Nathan will tell you he is interested in film only as a way of bolstering his music career. He was reportedly pursued by every major studio. Disney, MGM, Fox, Tristar, Amblin, Michael Jackson’s National Films. Their interest
came after an appearance on America’s popular Arsenio Hall television show.
Mrs Cavaleri says a script is being written around Nathan and he will play a part based on himself, a young guitarist who helps a rock band that has fallen from grace to clean up its act and return to the top.
Filming is scheduled for December but the deal, says Mrs Cavaleri, is worth not nearly as much as the $1.4 million cited in one report.
UNTIL you hear the first flourish of his guitar-playing, Nathan seems in many ways just another suburban kid. Eagerly unwrapping a Milky Bar chocolate after school. Sprawled on the carpet watching TV. Talking of classroom activities that day: funny faces drawn with crayons, a spelling
game.
A gold signet ring from mum on his right hand notwithstanding, just a boy with a taste for chillies and pizza biscuits dipped in salsa sauce, books by Paul Jennings and Roald Dahl, Gameboy, Nintendo, Bruce Lee movies, `Back to the Future’, `Terminator 2′.
Yet there is something beyond his years that has to do with more than a flair for blues and jazz that led his father to insist he sing on one track on his debut album, if only to remind listeners that he is after all, a boy. Something almost adult in the slow, deliberate way he answers questions,
even when lolling about on a loungeroom chair.
When he was six, Nathan’s parents were wakened around 1am on a night of heavy rain and floods by the sound of his screams at severe pains in his back. After a week of testing at hospital, doctors concluded the boy had a virus and sent him home. But his health would not pick up. He
developed an ear infection, a cough, lost weight, was lethargic. Glandular fever, the local doctor decided.
Later, came the realisation of the nature of his ailment. “It’s been a hectic old life,” Mrs Cavaleri laughs ruefully. “There were times when he was really sick, when I thought I was going to lose him. I never showed him that …
Nathan last received chemotherapy treatment more than two years ago.
The thick head of hair that fell away then is now kept stylishly trimmed. He is in remission and doctors say there is just a 10 per cent chance the leukemia will return. “The pain was in my back,” Nathan recalls. “It was in my arm. It was in my stomach …
“The needle was worst. They gave me what was called a lumbar puncture and it’s like really thin. Like thinner than my finger nail and, I don’t know, about two-and-a-half centimetres long. And they dig it into your spine. They push fluid into it and grab the blood out.
There is a determination about him when he says, barely audibly: “It’s gone. Like, if it has to come again, I’ll punch its head in.
The way his mother tells it, his passion for music played a big part in the recovery. “When you are that sick _ and he was in that much pain in his muscles and all the kids are out riding bikes and stuff like that _ you can do something positive. Or you can sit and dwell on it and become sicker,
I think … He didn’t do that. He put all these energies into the guitar.
“And when he was feeling angry. I mean, chemo, when you think what it’s actually doing to your body. He was really angry. It’s like `I’m not going to take these tablets any more and I’m sick of these injections’ and the whole bit. He just vented his anger through the guitar.
He would take his guitar with him on visits to the Prince of Wales Hospital, in Randwick, east of Sydney. Medical staff would not let him plug it in. But they knew to put the drip in in a way that would not prevent him playing guitar. He has this to say of the role of the music at that time: “The
pain in my body just went away. It was like this magic thing. You waved a wand and it was gone.
It is not yet four years since the Starlight Foundation, which grants wishes to terminally ill children, flew the Cavaleri family to London to meet Mark Knopfler, Dire Straits’ lead guitarist. Nathan’s parents remember a pet rabbit was high on the list of wishes he drew up after being nominated
by doctors. Nathan remembers only asking to meet the guitar great. “I still love his guitar-playing,” he says. “It’s just radical.
Filmed for Channel Nine’s `Today’ show, the meeting brought a first taste of the media attention that would follow.
Eleven on 18 June, his mother wonders how she will give him a birthday party where fans don’t intrude.
The Cavaleris live in Ruse, a suburb named for ex-convict James Ruse, who received the colony’s first land grant in 1791 in an area that would later be called Parramatta. In the driveway is a late model, red Mercedes 180-E that Mrs Cavaleri says is the result of hard work six days a week by
Frank, a bricklayer, not her son’s success.
NATHAN wakes up each day to the sight of luminous stars on his bedroom ceiling. He has three teddy bears. The largest, Big Ted, at the foot of the bed; Little Ted near a window overlooking a small back yard with a Jimmy Barnes jumper among the clothes on the line; middle-sized and
mauled beneath the bed is plain old Ted.
It might be any kid’s room, except that not every kid has a gold plaque on the wall, a gift from Mark Knopfler _ Dire Straits had received it for the mid-1980s album `Brothers In Arms’. And not every kid has photographs on the wall of himself with Tommy Emmanuel, Red Symons, Craig
McLachlan, Daryl and Ozzie.
He reels off lead guitar to his father’s rhythm strum in the downstairs garage. Nathan has five guitars. He endorses an American brand, Peavy, so he could not let his Fender appear in a photograph.
Among his favorite guitarists is the late Stevie Ray Vaughan; he has little time for guitar heroes such as Joe Satriani.
Frank, who has been playing since he was 15, says their taste is “exactly the same … that swing, Texas type of blues”. Frank Cavaleri shows how he first taught his son to play. A forefinger barring the highest two treble strings creates part of a G-chord.
Slide it back two frets and it becomes an F; forwards two, an A. And so on. Nathan doesn’t read sheet music. Frank believes it’s more important to teach theory of scales and relation of notes that make up chords.
“I’m really happy he’s not a technical musician,” he says. “…
Even up to this day, I’m still giving him lessons in theory. But I can’t give him lessons in improvising. It’s like learning the English language. Once you’ve learned it, it’s up to you which words you use, how you want to express yourself.
This proficiency by one so young earned him the only standing ovation at a concert in San Francisco late last year to mark the anniversary of `Guitar Player’ magazine.
Ex-Doobie Brother Jeff (Skunk) Baxter dropped to his knees as Nathan played in the grand finale of an event that featured 17 guitarists, the likes of John Lee Hooker, Ry Cooder, Steve Morse of the Dixie Dregs, avante guardist Henry Kaiser and blues-rocker Harvey Mandel.
Frank says with obvious pride: “When I turned around and saw all these people standing up, I just had a big smile on my face.
Nathan watched them get up off their feet: “Yeah, I saw them all. I don’t know why, they sort of …
Frank: “Yeah, what is the feeling, Nat? Come on.
Nathan: “It makes you feel confident. You know when you play a solo and they cheer, you play even better. It’s like: `Wow, thanks’.
He had come a long way since his first public performances. Mrs Cavaleri says that at the time he met Knopfler, he was nowhere near as proficient as he would become. “I think at that time everyone thought: `Ah isn’t it cute? Isn’t that nice? Isn’t that a lovely story?”‘ She says interest would
have “just dwindled away” had it not been for his determination to busk outside the old post office in Campbelltown she had transformed into a coffee shop.
Seven years old then, he was a little nervous, not sure if he had it in him to play in public. He told his mum he was scared. “And I said, `If you don’t push yourself … you’re going to hate yourself for not doing it. It’s always going to be something that you wish that you would have had the
courage to do’.
The next Saturday, he was out on the shop’s veranda with a little bucket for the coins, an amplifier, a guitar. “He’d sit himself up there with a backing tape and play,” Joanne says. “The whole footpath would be chock a block. No one could walk around. It wasn’t just the front of the shop, it
was the footpath across the road. You’d look out and there’d just be people stuffed there.
Nathan still gets a little anxious before he performs. But it did not prevent him getting up in front of 10,000 at Sydney Entertainment Centre with Jimmy Barnes and Diesel last June or before 15,000 at the San Francisco Blues Festival later in the year. What’s it like? “Ah, butterflies. But I like
it when they cheer for me. It’s really quite fun.
Bluesman Albert Collins, then celebrating his 60th birthday, was the major drawcard at the blues festival the night Nathan played.
Nathan: “I feel like I can never be like Albert Collins. I just can’t work out the things that he plays on guitar. I try to pick out one of his licks. He’s stretching his fingers way apart …
Then again, Collins has a 50-year start on Nathan, who first showed an aptitude for music on a small ukelele at three and knew how to strum with a plectrum without being shown. Soon he had a three-quarter size semi-acoustic guitar. Long since set aside for full-size instruments (the back
of the neck of one has been shaven to make it thinner and easier for his small hands), he had mastered Pat Benatar’s `Hit Me With Your Best Shot’ at four.
When Joanne was 11, her mother gave her a portable record player.
She’d close her bedroom door and turn up the volume on Slade, T-Rex “and all those heavy sorts of things”. Nathan’s grandmother gave him the player and Joanne’s old singles. “I remember him in his bedroom playing and I’d be yelling: `Nayyythannnnn, turn it down’. The first time I did
I thought: `Hang on, that’s what mum used to do to me. Only I was like 11 or 12 and here’s this kid, three’.
She says little money has come from the music career so far and she and Frank have eaten into their savings covering costs including travel to America so frequently that Nathan’s brother, six-year-old Joshua, now says “ah, not again”. Mrs Cavaleri says the film company could still pull out
of the movie deal, paying only a reserve fee. But if it does go ahead and money starts rolling in, they will invest it for Nathan, in real estate perhaps. “But Frank’ll still need to work for us.
WITH Nathan and Frank in the garage playing blues, fledgling drummer Joshua Cavaleri races about the yard. “Josh is probably more on our minds than Nathan,” says Joanne who is determined that her younger boy gets his share of attention.
Asked what she wants for her sons, she says: “That they stay close.
That they are just happy, healthy whatever they want to do.
“It’s not good, your parents pushing you into something that you don’t really want to be. You end up unhappy and not really good at it.
What’s the use of that? It’s a wasted life.
“We haven’t drummed into him that music is your career. He might one day say, `To hell with this, I’ve had enough’ and walk away and do something else. We don’t have any idea of wanting to be in the glamorous life or any of that sort of stuff. That doesn’t appeal to us at all.
Nathan has his own views on being a celebrity. “It’s really fun being a normal kid. It’s even more fun being a star or something like that.
For the family, Nathan’s fame and likely fortune has come at a cost, not just in the spray-painted Hendrix-jibe that greeted them when they returned from that recent camping weekend.
Nathan has good friends at the local primary school where he is not made to feel he has been singled out as special, despite the rollercoaster life that has been his lot.
But next year he will probably attend St Gregory’s. The Catholic school is two bus trips away from home. Mrs Cavaleri wonders if she will have to drive him there and back. “He gets mobbed now …
The crowd that followed him at the local shopping centre when the family recently tried to beat the clock and buy Mother’s Day gifts 15 minutes before closing has convinced her to leave him home with dad next time she needs to shop in a hurry.
“I just don’t look at them,” says Nathan. “If they say: `There’s that Nathan Cavaleri over there’, I just don’t worry about it. If they want an autograph, I just give them an autograph.
His mother talks of the frantic life they now lead. “It’s totally changed. We don’t have much time for our friends and relative as we’d like. That’s the hard part because you don’t want to be perceived to be (raises her voice ever so slightly) `Oh, they don’t want to hang around us any more’.
Frank says: “It started to all happen where we are realising that our private life isn’t there. You know, our life belongs to everyone else.
And this is where Joanne and I say to ourselves, `Are we doing the right thing?’ “I’ll pull him out of the business, the day that he’s unhappy … at this moment he’s enjoying it. He wants to perform really, really badly.
Is there no risk of ruining his childhood? “He’s handling it OK,” says his mother, “because we’re making sure everything is not blown out of proportion .. We don’t boast about Nathan. We virtually keep it very quiet. If we’re excited about something, we say `you did a really good job’. But we
don’t keep harping on how great he is. Parents who do that end up with these really obnoxious little kids who think that they’re too cool. They’re just too good.
WE are in the kitchen. It is late in the day. Joanne is sweetening tea with honey. Frank has a guitar on his lap, explaining how to play lead. A softly spoken son of Italian migrants, he would dearly love to jam with a veteran bluesman of the calibre of Albert Collins. “That’s one of my dreams
… but not in front of people.
His wife says Nathan is sometimes asked if he is not acting out his father’s dream. “What he’s doing isn’t my dream,” says Frank. “This is stupid what I’m going to say. My dream, what it was, is for him and I and a drum machine to be playing three nights a week at a restaurant. Playing the
music we want to play. I don’t care where. As long as he can have guitar. And I can. And we can do what we want to do … Now I’m doing this all because … I don’t know. Why are we doing this, Jo?” Joanne: “I don’t know. I suppose it’s to set him up, I suppose.
Frank: “… with a future or something.
Nathan doesn’t get much time for it these days, but he loves to accompany dad to building sites on Saturdays, with his own little trowel.
Not too many months ago, his ambition was to be a builder and own a VW convertible. He has changed his mind since then. The film company sent him a model of the car he now wants _ a bright red Ferrari Testarossa, these days selling for over $430,000. He thinks he might not lay bricks
when he grows up after all. “What I’m doing now is my dream,” Nathan Cavaleri says.
Just how good is he? “Somehow he knows where the blues comes from. That passion will take him anywhere he wants to go.
Tommy Emmanuel, Australian guitar legend “It’s scary. He just goes for it. He grabs a note and bends and twists it with his face all screwed up and he becomes Eric Clapton or B.B. King. He plays from the heart, which is something you either have or you don’t. He’s got it so obviously that
he scares me.
Diesel, this year’s Australian Recording Industry Association best album winner “I know a lot of kids with technique but I’ve never seen anyone play with that much heart.
Jeff Baxter, ex-Doobie Brother Nathan Cavaleri “played a very impressive guitar and traded licks with Albert Collins like an old pro.
`Blues Life’, music journal
The Sunday Age 30th of May 1993
Larry Schwartz Writer 