Vince Mira Won't Walk the Line
Billed as the Second Coming of Johnny Cash, a teenager from Federal Way wowed rock stars, morning news shows, Ellen DeGeneres, and the Cash estate. There’s just one problem: Vince Mira is done parroting the Man in Black.
Neither Emmanuel nor his mother—whom Market officials required to accompany the underage busker when he performed—could’ve guessed that the stranger who approached them on a cold Saturday in April 2007 would change their lives. Nor could they guess that the man, who identified himself as Chris Snell, had an alter ego, Herr Doppelganger, master of ceremonies at the Can Can, where in rubber wig, big-ass Elvis sunglasses, suspenders, and oversize tie—a cross between Martin Short’s hypernerd Ed Grimley and Joel Grey’s oily showman in Cabaret—he bellows from the stage, introducing the Can Can Castaways, the in-house quartet of burlesque dancers, Faggedy Randy, Fiona Minx, Jonny Boy, and Rainbow. Snell, a classically trained opera singer and longtime LA concert promoter, bought the Patti Summers Lounge in 2004 from the eponymous Seattle jazz singer and turned it into the Market’s most poorly kept subterranean secret, a red-lit cavern draped in purple and host to surrealist French entertainment, which attracts, much to Snell’s secret chagrin, “A lot of ladies-night-out parties.”
Snell was walking to work on that cold Saturday when, as he was about to descend the stairs into the Can Can, he heard it: “I hear the train a comin’, it’s rolling round the bend.” What? That sounds like… But… There on the sidewalk in front of Left Bank Books was a Latino kid sitting on a milk crate, his small frame wrapped around a guitar, working his fingers over the strings, and singing, “I ain’t seen the sunshine since I don’t know when.” “Is this your son?” Snell asked Lupe. “Would you two mind coming downstairs?”
The next day the 15-year-old climbed on stage and ran through his repertoire for Snell and his artistic advisors, Rainbow and Jonny Boy from the Can Can Castaways. He was nervous. He sang to the floor and rushed into one song after another. “Out on the streets people just walk by, and some don’t listen and some do,” the singer later recalled. “But with this you’re playing for people and they’re going to listen. It’s nerve wracking.” But that voice… Snell and his team exchanged glances. They wanted Emmanuel in their weekly variety show, I See London, I See France. But the kid needed a name, something as compelling as Herr Doppelganger and Faggedy Randy.
“Juanny Cash” played for his first crowd a few weeks later. But Juanny sounded so much like the real thing that Snell suddenly had a problem on his hands. His email and voicemail were flooded with accusations that he was exploiting a young kid with a gimmick. “Basically, they accused him of lip-synching.”
So the next time he had the singer on stage Snell tried something different. “Ladies and gentlemen, back, due to popular demand, Juanny Cash! However, last time he was here, everyone said that he was lip-synching. So we’re going to do a little test here. All right Juanny, what I’m going to do is, every time I tell you to stop singing, I want you to stop, and we’re going to go through this a few times, just to prove to everybody in this crowd you’re not lip-synching.” The teen would start, “Love is a burning…” Stop! “I fell into a ring…” Stop! “And so we did this back and forth thing for a little while,” Snell recalled, “and then people realized it was no BS.”
By June, Juanny had his own Tuesday show at the bar. But Snell had bigger ideas for his newest act. For several months he tried to reach Cash’s son, famed producer John Carter Cash. He sent some 50 emails, all ignored. “Of course I gave him this sob story,” Snell recalled. “‘You’ve got to help this young kid out, man, he’s the right guy,’ da da da.” Finally John Carter requested a demo. He liked what he heard on the demo but before he would produce a record he wanted Emmanuel to come up with original material.
Next: A flurry of fame—Mira wows Ellen, Good Morning America, and Pearl Jam’s Stone Gossard.
Published: July 2009
I dug the Johnny Cash act, (have you ever seen it? It’s A-MAZ-ING) but there has already been a Johnny Cash – And Vince is amazing enough to pull his own weight and not just ride on the man-in-black’s coattails.
If he knows what is good for him, he’ll start refusing to sing like Cash. It’s just too eery.
Thank you for pleasing us and sing for us, you have improved A LOT and I am very impress and proud of you because I know how hard it is to feel alone and You are back. Te quiero mucho. Thanks again.