Chicago Sun Times

Lunch with Reggie Benjamin

March 10, 2002

BY DEBRA PICKETT STAFF REPORTER

    If we were in India, lunch with Reggie Benjamin would be a very big deal. Something along the lines of meeting all five Backstreet Boys at once. "I can't walk through the airport there, he says, shaking his head in delight and disbelief.   I can't walk anywhere by myself without getting mobbed."
    There were 12,000 people at his last concert in India, most of them female and screaming for him to take off his shirt. They knew every word to his hit song, "Hurry Up." They almost trampled his mother, telling her that they wanted to take her son home.   Fifty thousand more people logged in to the concert's Webcast. No way to know what they were screaming.
   "I come back here, and I kind of miss it," admits Benjamin, who lives, as he has for most of his life, with his mom and dad in suburban Hinsdale. The only people crowding him today, as we eat pasta at Pompeii, the casual Taylor Street eatery, are the busboys asking him to slide in his chair so they can more easily pass by our table.
    Call it the David Hasselhoff principle: Fame isn't really fame if it doesn't happen in the United States.
    Reggie Benjamin wants to be really famous. Like Indian-version-of-Ricky-Martin famous.
    He's got a shot at it. His album, "2x- centrix," will be released here Tuesday. MTV will air videos from two singles--"Hurry Up" and "Turn." "Entertainment Tonight" and Billboard magazine have already done stories about Benjamin and his music.
    So now he's just waiting, getting ready for what fame will be like and practicing his lines.
He's already mastered the art of the entourage.   His manager has accompanied him to lunch, arms loaded with promotional T-shirts, posters and CDs. And Benjamin has also invited the restaurant's owner, his longtime friend Tommy Davino, to sit with us. The three have positioned themselves at a table for six, right in the center of the crowded dining area, and, together, they somehow manage to make it look full.
    Benjamin is wearing his sunglasses indoors, the way a good celebrity should. With his long, wavy black hair and copious silver jewelry, he isn't making any effort to blend into the lunchtime crowd of families and UIC office workers. A few of them ask who he is, if he's famous or something.   His manager beams and says, "He's about to be." The questions were probably prompted by the fact that a photographer was shooting pictures of him as he spoke, but the members of the entourage are sure that The Look had at least something to do with it.
    Benjamin has clearly spent a lot of time on The Look, which has that slightly androgynous quality that most of the world's sexiest men seem to possess. The Look is gorgeous and semi-exotic, but also could be easily imitated by suburban club kids, should it come to that.
    In this, he cites Elvis as a role model.
   "Elvis was really big in India," he says, as if I should probably already know this.   "My mom used to sing his songs to me all the time. But, more than his music, she liked the way he looked."
    Benjamin's parents were born and reared in the south of India and met each other when they were studying to become nurses. They immigrated to Canada, where Reggie was born in 1970, and settled near Chicago, taking jobs at Hinsdale Hospital, a few years later.
    When he was 8, Benjamin's family headed to Washington, D.C., for a big family reunion. He discovered his true calling there, he says as he picks at one of the green salads Davino has brought to the table at my request, when he managed to make $51--a dollar a head--performing his version of "Rock-a-Hula, Baby" for his relatives.
   He cut his first demo album nine years later, paying for the studio time with money he'd saved up from his part-time job selling women's shoes and from the occasional party and under-21 club gigs he got with his band, Rapid Party Motion.
    His sound hasn't changed much. It's pure pop in the tradition of Michael Jackson and George Michael and Prince before he got weird.   It has a good beat, and it's easy to dance to. I find myself humming it all day.
    Benjamin is a musician. He plays the piano and the guitar and the drums and has a degree from Columbia College in composing. But he harbors no illusions about what he is and what he hopes to be. Talent and training are only part of the equation that adds up to "star."
    Being famous is a job like no other, which is a good thing because Reggie Benjamin has no other job. When he isn't performing in Asia or Europe, which he does every few months or so, Benjamin spends his time, you know, getting ready. Right now, he says, he's getting ready to shoot his next video.
    What, exactly, does that involve?
"Well," he says, "it's mostly about The Look thing.   You know, working out,"
    Benjamin's daily workout is more than two hours long.   It includes 90 minutes of tap dancing, which is great cardio, and some stretching and weight lifting.   It's keeping him lean, subtly muscled and very hungry.   He tears into a bowl of his favorite meal, Pompeii's homemade eight-finger cavatelli, washing down bites of the hearty stuffed pasta with long gulps from his cupful of coffee and cream, pushing the salad away with disdain.
    He also goes to the movies a lot, maybe two or three times a week, and watches his favorites--like "Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo," --over and over on DVD.
    In case you haven't gathered this, Benjamin is a thoroughly American kid who just happens to have Indian parents.   Before he started performing there, his last visit to India was when he was 5.
"I remember seeing a lot of poverty," he says of that early trip.
   Then came the single he recorded as a giveaway to promote his singing for private parties and events.   It was his older sister's idea to send it to some public relations firms in India.   Apparently, they liked it.
"We got an e-mail telling us that it was No. 7 on the charts," he says, still laughing at his good fortune. "They wanted to know if they could have the video."
   There wasn't a video, of course.   But Benjamin wasn't going to let a minor detail like that get in the way of his ascent, not when his lifelong dream seemed suddenly to be within reach. Benjamin's catchy single has been climbing the top 10 lists across Europe and Asia, reaching as high as No. 2, without the benefit of a major record label or expensive promotion.
"We wondered how we could do a video when we didn't have a dollar" he says, "so we knew we were going to have to get someone to help us out."
    Someone famous, of course.
    Perhaps because he knows how hard it is to get Americans to pay attention to you and remember your name, Benjamin has tremendous admiration for almost anyone who has managed to do it.   During a one-hour lunch, he manages to drop the following names, identifying them all as friends and acquaintances who have helped his career: Hugh Hefner, Joanie Laurer (known as "Chyna" when she was a WWF wrestler), Bull from "Night Court," Gary Busey, Tito Puente, Wesley Snipes.
    Hef gets top billing because he's the one who made Benjamin's first video happen.
    Wouldn't it be cool, Benjamin thought, to shoot the video at the Playboy mansion? The difference between Reggie Benjamin, future American icon, and most people is that Benjamin actually decided to make it happen.   He got the number for Playboy Enterprises by calling 411. He called, by his estimate, "about a million times."
     Eventually, he wore them down.
     Because the video was a pretty low-budget affair, Benjamin got his entire family involved in its production. His brother and sister appear briefly on screen--blink and you'll miss them--but the video has gotten so much play that they're now recognized when they travel to India, too.
   "They're in heaven, "Benjamin says, "They really like the attention they get whenever they go there."
    Telling his mother, whom he describes as "a very proper Indian lady," that her three children were heading off to the Playboy Mansion was easy, Benjamin says. She had no idea what Playboy was.
   "I said we'd be filming in the backyard of a mansion, with flowers and plants and very nice scenery," he says.
    Flashing an impossibly brilliant smile, he shows me a photo of himself in that backyard, flanked by five blond models in tight tank tops.   It's good to be famous. Really.
    Reggie Benjamin of Hinsdale plans to attain the type of stardom enjoyed by the likes of Ricky Martin after American audiences hear his album 2x-centrix,'' being released Tuesday, and see his videos on MTV.

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