Perhaps never in the history of Licorice Pizza Records events has a band made as grand an entrance as Italodisco bon vivants the Dolcevita Brothers. To quote the jet-setting bio on their minimalist website, DBone and Mr. Ciao arrive “from Tokyo rooftops to Milan back alleys, Paris runways to Rio beach raves” to Studio City, rolling down Ventura Boulevard to their Sprezzatura album release party in a sparkling white Rolls-Royce that looks straight out of Whitesnake video.
“We drive the vehicle ironically, only. We don’t drive vehicles literally,” quips Mr. Ciao. “Everything ironically. Nothing literally or seriously, ever.”
The Dolcevita Brothers, Mr. Ciao and DBone, pose with LPTV host Lyndsey Parker in front of Licorice Pizza Records. (photo: Max Scott)
Furthermore, the Dolcevita Brothers certainly are the only band to ever serve Licorice Pizza audience members a charcuterie board during an in-store concert, while alternately playing keytars and cradling tiny purse dogs. Pretty much everything these suave, turtlenecked playboys do, they do it with sprezzatura, ironically or not.
“Sprezzatura is that effortless charm that you show in everything you do in life and you make everything look easy, even the toughest tasks,” Mr. Ciao explains. “It’s a lifestyle. You choose to live by the idea of sprezzatura. You make everything feel a little bit more easy, and you don’t care that much.”
“Like, you fly a private jet while eating KFC,” DBone adds in his silky-smooth, ‘70s-AM-radio-DJ voice.
Yes, the Dolcevita Brothers just might be the most interesting men in the world. But along with being men of elegance and killer style (DBone notes that “dolcevita” means “turtleneck” in Italian), they’re also international men of mystery.
Very little information exists about this pop duo, other than the elaborate origin story that plays out like a spicy Italian telenovela on their debut concept album. Are they really brothers? Are they really from Italy? Rumor has it they may actually be Emmy-winning director/photographer Carlos Alberto Orecchia and singer/actor Derek Reckley. But during their hilarious LPTV interview over wine and cheese in the Licorice Pizza back room, they claim to be long-lost half-siblings and the illegitimate sons of a 1970s Italodisco heartthrob who was known as “the Italian Barry White.”
“Our real father, Gepy e Gepy, is one person. That’s how big that guy was,” brags Mr. Ciao.
“We were both looking for our father, and we found ourselves at the Rainbow on the Sunset Strip,” says DBone. “Neither one of us knew our father, and we found out that he had slept with both of our moms on the same night. And then we found out together that we had a brother.”
“We never met him, but it’s OK,” says Mr. Ciao. (Gepy, whose full name was Giampiero Scalamogna, died in 2010.) “He gave us the gift of Italodisco.”
“I was interested in the masculinity that exists within Italodisco,” adds DBone, whose estranged superstar father would have been (if we’re doing the math correctly) close to age 40 on the magical, mythical night of the Dolcevita Brothers’ not-so-immaculate conception. “Because everybody I saw [in the Italodisco genre] was middle-aged, and then there’d be two beautiful chicks and they’re just shimmying. I was like, ‘Oh, my hair’s thinning. I could get up into this!’”
“[Our father] allowed us to take this adventure,” states a grateful Mr. Ciao.
And what an adventure. According to Dolcevita Brothers lore, the only photograph that the Italian-born Mr. Ciao and Indiana-raised DBone ever had of their parents together was of Gepy, Mama Bone, and Mama Ciao partying topless in a hot tub, which became the cover of the Gepy e Gepy album Body to Body. And so, for Sprezzatura’s climax, so to speak, they decided to bring everything full-circle — much like a pizza itself — and pay tribute to their heritage on the “Body to Body”-interpolating “Children of Gepy.”
“The last [Sprezzatura] track is both of us singing with our long-gone father. It’s kind of emotional, if you’re invested in this magical journey,” says Mr. Ciao. (The epic story-song opens with the surely tearjerking line, “Thank you for all the pizza!”) “You get to the end of this insane story, and you get rewarded with this beautiful song called ‘Body to Body.’”
If there’s any album art more glamorous than 1979’s Body to Body, it’s got to be Sprezzatura’s cover. Of course, it’s hard to separate the fact from the fiction, the fun facts from the actual facts, in the Dolcevita saga. But apparently the LP’s sepia-toned, Polaroid-style cover, featuring the Italian-American stallions leaning against their roadside Rolls-Royce, was captured by DBone’s famous neighbor — a onetime member of the gastronomic Lou Reed tribute band the Pizza Underground.
“We were in [DBone’s] driveway with the Rolls-Royce, and we shot the cover on a Hassleblad vintage film camera that only had like 12 shots on it,” recalls Mr. Ciao. “There’s no electronics, there’s no self-shot; you can’t time it or use a timer. And we were only the only people there. So, we needed another person to press the shutter…”
“I was like, ‘Let me call my neighbors and see if anybody’s home.’ And the only one was Macaulay Culkin,” says DBone.
“[Culkin] showed up in 30 seconds, and he gave us so many cool directions and ideas,” recalls Mr. Ciao. “And of course he was like, ‘Are you going to give me a photo credit?’”
“And if you zoom in on the moon of the picture of the album cover, you can see Macaulay’s face,” DBone points out.
The Dolcevita Brothers seem to wear many fashionable and rakish hats. Apparently one of Mr. Ciao’s many former day jobs was creating and hosting the Apple TV series All the Pizza (“a psychedelic journey through the subculture of pizza” — hence why Licorice Pizza was the perfect setting for the Dolcevita Brothers’ first-ever public performance). And while Mr. Ciao was unable to secure Culkin as an All the Pizza guest, he did book party king and known pizza enthusiast Andrew W.K., with whom he teamed on the song “Pizza Paradise” and a “whole episode discussing philosophy on why pizza is pure happiness.”
Mr. Ciao clams he also once played in Genesis tribute band back in his home country, while DBone once fronted a very un-Italodisco-esque act, releasing a country-rock album and a Halloween album under the DBone and the Remains. And when two of the latter album’s tunes ended up on the soundtracks for Hocus Pocus 2 and Adam Sandler’s Hubie Halloween, DBone fully developed the relatively late-in-life “bug for doing music” — right around the time than he and longtime friend Mr. Ciao discovered that they were blood-related.
The result is Sprezzatura, a “sonic passport to joy” that would surely make the dear departed Gepy proud. Sexy standout tracks include the steamy hot tub slow jam “DIMYWTF” (“Does It Make You Want to Fuck”); the Eurodisco dancefloor-filler “I Feel Giorgio” (“It could go on for 72 minutes, and you’ll still dance the whole time”); and another acronym banger, “GYAT Delulu,” which was inspired by the Gen Alpha slang of DBone’s 11-year-old daughter, just to bring the record out of the ‘70s/’80s a bit.
“She was like, ‘There’s a word, GYAT,’ which means, ‘Girl, your ass thick,’” DBone chuckles. “And then she was like, ‘Your big ass is making me delusional,’ which is ‘delulu’ in kid language. And I was like, ‘Ohhh, we need to do a song right away!’”
On that note, the Dolcevita Brothers could one day expand to become a larger, multi-generational family affair — “a whole universe, a cinematic universe” — perhaps requiring a larger, family-sized Rolls-Royce SUV. Because Mr. Ciao says, “We just realized, as we speak, that our father Gepy e Gepy must have reproduced more than just the two of us! … So, if you don’t know who your father is, and you kind of sound like Barry White, but you’re Italian, you might be our brothers.”
But in the meantime, the dynamic duo of DBone and Mr. Ciao — whoever they are — are going to savor this moment and let their mythology grow organically.
“It’s just an excuse to make you dance and feel good and forget about the atrocities and complexities of modern life,” Mr. Ciao says of Dolcevita’s Hi-NRG music. “The intent of the album is to just make you time-travel a little bit, a few decades back. … It’s simple. Simplicity. Going back to not overcomplicating everything, like we’re now doing about all aspects of life. Just enjoy yourself and have a good time.”
