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Sitting amid a festive crowd in a dim Midtown bar on a recent night, working the keys of a battle-scarred upright, piano man Rick McDonald is upholding several traditions.
He’s doing his part to keep the classic American songbook alive, rolling through chestnuts such as Irving Berlin’s “Another Cup of Coffee” and Rodgers and Hart’s “The Lady Is a Tramp.” He’s upholding a family tradition — when he was growing up in Ireland, household singalongs were a standard form of rainy-day entertainment.
And as one of the resident piano men at Bill’s Food and Drink, he’s carrying on the tradition of the legendary piano bar Bill’s Gay Nineties, which occupied this East 54th Street townhouse for 88 years.
When Bill’s was shuttered in March 2012, it was a blow to fans of the former speakeasy — and also to fans of McDonald, who played there weekly for a dozen years.
But with the space reopened last November, Bill’s piano is back in business — and so is McDonald, who was brought back in April by the new owners, restaurateur John DeLucie and his Crown Group Hospitality, who also operate Crown and the Lion.
“We wanted to maintain the old New York saloon feel as much as possible,” says DeLucie — which, in part, meant keeping the piano pedals pumping nightly from 8 p.m. on.
So it was that McDonald, in suit and tie, took his place at the bench on a recent Wednesday and got to business doing something at which he’s become expert during 30 years of playing city barrooms — working a crowd.
He starts slow, with incidental music that won’t drown out dinner conversation. But after a while he picks up the pace, singing in a winsome tenor: “Accentuate the Positive” by Johnny Mercer, and “Luck Be a Lady” from “Guys and Dolls.”
People take up spots around the piano, and as McDonald swings into a Billy Joel medley — “The Stranger” segueing into “You’re My Home” — the vibe spreads to the bar, where a pair of middle-aged guys start belting along. “Great song,” enthuses one.
Next up is the Sinatra favorite “That’s Life,” and by the time McDonald hits “I pick myself up and get back in the raaace,” the low-ceilinged room is under his spell, fists pumping, voices lifted.
“Look at the way he gets the crowd going,” says Denise Sturm, a vice president at a securities firm, who’s gone to hear McDonald weekly for 20 years. Often this was at Bill’s Gay Nineties, and “when it closed, I was devastated,” she says. “Now it’s like finding an old friend again. He plays these old wonderful songs, and everyone comes together and sings, and it just warms your heart.”
Watching McDonald from a nearby table, finance exec Ken Donenfeld concurs.
“He’s a gem,” says Donenfeld, who’d listened to McDonald at the old Bill’s and came tonight after hearing he was back. “He just fills up the keyboard, and he’ll go from Gershwin to Willie Nelson. He’s the best.”
The target of all those plaudits is no outsized showman, but rather a polite, low-key 50-year-old, a divorced father of two who describes himself less as a featured attraction than as a party enabler. “Camaraderie and harmony” are what he’s after, he says, sipping a cranberry juice one night before work. “You have to build it from scratch, every single night.”
McDonald was born in New Jersey, where he was playing piano by ear by age 5: “I just took to it immediately.” When his ad-man grandfather retired to Ireland, his newly divorced mother followed, and McDonald spent the rest of his youth in the town of Portarlington, 50 miles from Dublin. In addition to his musical clan, he cites the influence of the family’s doctor, who would gravitate to the piano when he made housecalls.
“He played very well, and he would always be the first one invited to parties,” he says.
After boarding school, McDonald started playing pubs at 16, and when he moved to New York City in 1982, he landed work in a series of bars — sometimes bartending by day and playing by night. “You’d take the sawdust shoes off and put the patent leathers on,” he says.
Playing regularly, he began building a voluminous repertoire that numbers many hundreds of songs.
“When people would request something, I’d go home and study it,” he says.
Part of the skill of the piano man is figuring out what will engage a crowd, and to that end, McDonald is always taking stock of his audience. He’ll gauge people’s ages, listen to the tonal register of their voices to calculate the best keys to play in; he’ll listen for foreign accents that might dictate a crowd-pleaser.
The most requested song? “Happy Birthday,” he says, followed by “New York, New York.”
While he’s kept working since Bill’s Gay Nineties closed — playing private events as well as bars — he felt a void, and is “delighted” to be back each Wednesday and Friday at a spot where communal song is a focal point.
“It’s a hard thing to find,” he notes, and on this night, the crowd, whose energy stays high as McDonald zips through “We’re in the Money,” “Summer Wind” and a score of others, seems glad to have found it.
“It’s an old-fashioned way of blowing off steam, and it’s not done enough,” he says. “You surround yourself with people and you try to create harmony.”