Journey singer Steve Perry had been driving across the Golden Gate Bridge when he was blown away by the sound of a Donnie Iris song on the radio. The year was 1980 and the song was Ah! Leah!
This turned out to be the biggest hit that Pennsylvania-born Iris had under his own name. It made No 29 on the US Billboard Hot 100. The most successful song of his entire career had come a whole decade earlier – The Rapper, recorded with his early band The Jaggerz, reached No 2 in 1970.
What struck Steve Perry on that day in San Francisco was the vocal power in the chorus of Ah! Leah! Sometime later in 1980, when Iris and his band The Cruisers opened for Journey at a show in Ohio, Perry visited them in their dressing room and told Iris: “That’s the way vocals are supposed to sound!”
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The secret was in the production. Mark Avsec was Iris’s producer, bandmate and co-songwriter, and for the chorus of Ah! Leah! he had overdubbed – or stacked – Iris’s voice more than 60 times.
This was just one of many great songs that made Donnie Iris a major talent and a minor legend in the Pittsburgh music scene.
Born Dominic Ierace on 28 February 28 1943 in New Castle, a city 40 miles from Pittsburgh, Iris co-founded The Jaggerz in 1964 and was the sole writer of The Rapper. After leaving the band in 1976 he was briefly a member of Wild Cherry, who had scored a huge hit that year with Play That Funky Music. Mark Avsec was Wild Cherry’s keyboardist at this time, and it was with Avsec that Iris created his best music in the early ’80s.
Iris was not a conventional rock singer and certainly didn’t look like one. With glasses and short hair, he looked a little like Buddy Holly.
Back On The Streets, his debut solo album, featured Ah! Leah! and other slick, quirky pop rock tunes including I Can’t Hear You and Agnes.
When this album was reissued by Rock Candy Records in 2021, Mark Avsec said of his and Iris’s experimental approach to vocals: “His normal voice is not that distinctive, but as we worked together more and more I discovered the depth and range of his ability, and we began to develop a sound that was very, very distinctive.
“He has a whole Beatles style of voices that we tapped into. How falsetto is like no other, there are various things within his falsetto, whereas most singers barely have a falsetto in the first place. And of course he has the raspy growl that plays opposite the falsetto for such a dramatic contrast.”
Iris, a modest personality for a singer, said of creative partner: “Mark just has a way of getting those voices out of me.”
Referring to his signature song, he recalled: “We started out with just the hook, not even realising it was a name. We just wanted some sort of a chant vocal going on in the song. I said, ‘I know this girl named Leah. Why don’t we just make the song about her?’”
Iris’s second album King Cool was released in 1981 and yielded a top 40 hit in Love Is Like A Rock. Another single, Sweet Merilee, boasted a stacked-vocals chorus even bigger than that in Ah! Leah!
The hits dried up soon after, but Iris continued making music for many years. His last album was a 2010 Christmas collection punningly titled Ah! Leluiah! The last track released in his lifetime was the anthem Pittsburgh Made.
In 2023 Iris was diagnosed with bladder cancer. After a farewell live performance in Pittsburgh on 28 September, he announced his retirement in a Facebook post dated 9 October in which he stated: “Music has given me far more than I could ever put into words.”
He died on 26 October at the age of 83.
Back in 2021, another famous singer gave praise to this underrated talent.
“I worked with Donnie more than a few times in the ’80s.,” Huey Lewis said. “He was tremendous. I’ve always been surprised he wasn’t much more popular considering how great he was.”
