Tony Orlando’s career comes full circle as legendary singer performs final live show at Mohegan Sun

Tony Orlando’s live performing career essentially began with an all-star benefit concert in Hartford in March 1961, and he’s choosing to end it with a concert on March 22 at Mohegan Sun Arena.

The concert is titled “The Finale, A Memory Forever.”

Ask him why he’s giving up live performances after over 60 years, and he’s true to his nice-guy image as a consummate professional who thinks about the needs of others.

“I don’t ever want to be in a position where I’m walking out to a third of a house,” he said. “I don’t ever want to be in the position of letting a buyer down who’s paying me and may lose money. I’ve never been in that position and I don’t want to get there.”

Mohegan Sun says this will be Orlando’s 65th appearance there. He’s been enshrined in its Mohegan Sun Walk of Fame — an honor reserved for a select group who have done exceptionally well at the arena from Taylor Swift to Matt Rife — since 2010.

Orlando lives year-round in Las Vegas, Nevada. He’s already done his final Vegas performance, a sold-out event in January. He also has a home in Branson, Missouri, though he sold his theater there long ago and no longer performs there.

“I’m in show business now 65 years,” Orlando told the Hartford Courant in a wide-ranging phone conversation last month. “I would’ve been happy if it were 63 days. I said to my wife, ‘I can still hit the ball, I’m getting great reviews, but I just can’t run the bases.’ There’s a lot of waiting in airports. That’s how I started thinking about retiring. But I’m only retiring from live performance. I still have a radio show on WABC that’s number one in its time slot. I’m beginning a new company because I always want to write for film. I don’t know if I’ll be successful at it, but I’m beginning a new journey.”

How did Connecticut become the lucky location of Tony Orlando’s last live show?

“The reason I picked Mohegan Sun is because out of all the venues I’ve worked, it’s my favorite,” he said. “I’ve played there since 1999. I think I’ve worked there more than any other artist in its history. I’ve worked the Wolf Den. I opened the Cabaret with Tony Bennett. Then they put me in the arena. I’ve played the arena ever since Tom Cantone took over as the director of entertainment and sports. They’re like family to me there. I spent holidays there with the Mohegan tribe. Coming to Connecticut is coming home.”

Interestingly, one of Orlando’s first major live performances was also in Connecticut, at The Bushnell in Hartford in 1961.

“I was 16 years old. My career actually started there,” he said. “It was a fundraiser, get this, for a leper colony in Burma. There were all these superstars, and I was this kid with a No. 1 record in Connecticut called ‘Halfway to Paradise.’ I came out to a full 35-piece orchestra. And who introduced me? Ethel Merman! That was March 16, 1961. That’s another reason why I’m coming back to Connecticut now, on March 22, 2024.”

He remembers signing the celebrity wall in The Bushnell’s basement. “I wrote ‘Bless you — Tony Orlando’ next to Al Jolson’s name.”

He’s conscious that he was charting his path in music history at a time when major changes were happening in the industry. “I worked with the greats,” he said. “I was in the studio with Burt Bacharach and Carole King making records. I was making records with Jerry Wexler, the founder of Atlantic Records. I made an album with Muscle Shoals (the famed Alabama studio musicians).

“I remember when FM radio first happened,” he added. “I’m gonna blow your mind: ‘Whole Lotta Love’ is six years older than ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon.’”

He in turn became an influence on others. He has a wild memory of Bruce Springsteen walking up to him in the New Jersey Hall of Fame singing “Halfway to Paradise,” one of Orlando’s earliest hits. “I said ‘Oh my god Bruce, you know the words to that.’ He said ‘Are you kidding? I grew up with that.’ Then (founding guitarist of Kiss) Paul Stanley, on my radio show the other night he said, ‘We all learned from those days, Tony. Before there was a Beatles, before there was a Rolling Stones, before there was an E Street Band and before there was a Kiss there was Tony Orlando.'”

Besides his long recording career, Orlando was a major TV star. With Telma Hopkins and Joyce Vincent Wilson (the rest of Dawn), he hosted a top-rated variety show on CBS in the mid-1970s. He notes that the “Tony Orlando & Dawn” show was the first multi-racial prime-time program of its kind in TV history.

In the ‘70s, Orlando generously used his TV clout to turn around the falling fortunes of George Carlin, who was considered unbookable on TV after the lawsuit and controversy surrounding his “Seven Dirty Words” routine. “I get this phone call: ‘Tony. I’m in trouble. No one wants to touch me.’ He was this genius and he was being shunned. I said ‘George, come to the office, I have an idea.’”

Orlando insisted that Carlin get a regular segment on the “Tony Orlando and Dawn” show. When producers challenged the scheme — Orlando said CBS’s legendary head of programming Fred Silverman told him “Tony, you’ve lost your mind” — he would simply ask them if Carlin was funny, and no one disagreed. He told Carlin, “George, just clean up a little bit,” which the comedian did — a little bit. For the first segment of “It’s Time for George,” Carlin began “You know … you’re gonna die. I’m gonna die. We’re all gonna die.”

“I looked up in the booth,” Orlando recalled, “and see all the suits at CBS hanging their heads and saying ‘Oh my god, he’s talking about death on national television.’

“He comes off and I say, ‘George, of all the things to do comedy about, and as funny as it was you picked death?!’” Carlin responded that he wanted to prove to the world that there was a word worse than the F-word. “That was so George,” Orlando said.

In 2016, Orlando appeared on the podcast of another unfettered comedian, Gilbert Gottfried. It’s a remarkable episode, in which Orlando shared some of his wilder show business stories and duets with the vocally challenged Gottfried on “Tie a Yellow Ribbon.”

“I was a big fan,” Orlando said of Gottfried, who died in 2022. “That was a wonderful experience. We really bonded that day.

“I’ve been lucky with comedians,” Orlando added with characteristic understatement. “I gave Garry Shandling his first job. I helped Rodney Dangerfield with a comeback,” giving the self-deprecating comic a chance to open for Tony Orlando & Dawn in Las Vegas. “At that time in Vegas, with the TV show and No. 1 records, you couldn’t get more success. We were that hot.

“Laughter is the glue to healing everything. It was an honor to work with those guys.”

Some of Orlando’s more intriguing career moves had unexpected motivations. He took over the lead role in the Broadway musical “Barnum” while its star was on a two-week break to prove that he’d kicked a cocaine habit. “I thought if they saw me walking a tightrope they’d know I wasn’t doing drugs.”

He studied circus arts with the Big Apple Circus.

“I used cocaine for a period of nine months after Freddie Prinze died in my arms,” he said. His close friendship with the comedian ended with a heartwrenching final moment together when Prinze was on his hospital deathbed following his self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Though Orlando started out as a singer in his teens, his music career took a detour into the business side of things when he was in his early 20s. He worked for legendary record company executive Clive Davis. “I represented James Taylor and Taj Mahal. I signed Barry Manilow.” It was during that time that he was asked to sing lead on a demo version of the song “Candida.” His version ended up being released and was a hit, which led to the even bigger hits “Knock Three Times” and “Tie a Yellow Ribbon” and a hit TV variety show.

“Tie a Yellow Ribbon” in particular led to countless public appearances as the song (which features the lyric “I’m comin’ home, I’ve done my time”) became an anthem for those fighting overseas in Vietnam and other wars. The tune has been used for decades to raise funds for veterans’ causes.

Now Orlando is stepping down from live performance, “comin’ home” after a lifetime of traveling from stage to stage.

“I’m gonna miss the people,” he said. “I’m gonna miss the meet and greets. I’m gonna miss standing onstage looking at the smiles on people’s faces, or if I struck a chord with someone, the tear in their eye. I’m gonna miss the sound of the applause. I’m gonna miss the sound of the guitar player’s solos. I’m gonna miss the handshaking. I’m gonna miss the guy who walks up to me and says he has fourth-stage cancer and that my show made his day. I’m gonna miss being able to raise millions of dollars on behalf of veterans as a performer. I think I’ve raised over 100 million dollars since ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon’ came out in ‘73, that’s what they tell me.

“I’m gonna miss all of that. I am not gonna miss the fight to get to the dates, the overhead, the cost of things today, the 24-year-old guy who’s running some of these places and has never heard of Tony Orlando. It’s time to say I recognize that. It’s time to move over. It’s time to have that next pair of shoes to take that journey that God has blessed me with.”

Tony Orlando’s “The Finale, A Memory Forever” concert is on March 22 at 7:30 p.m. at Mohegan Sun Arena, 1 Mohegan Sun Blvd., Uncasville. $33.90-$55.35. mohegansun.com.