Matti Caspi and Achinoam Nini, two of Israel's brightest pop talents, have set their sights on the U.S. But while one is trying to salvage the wreckage of his career, the other is getting the break of a lifetime. Los Angeles The modest ad, which appeared in late January in a Los Angeles Hebrew-language weekly, announced the impending arrival in the West San Fernando Valley of Matti Caspi. It said the singer-producer-composer-arranger would be available for private and group lessons in piano, guitar, voice and acoustics.
Noam Niv, an Israeli living in the Valley town of Tarzana, read it with incredulity. "It can't be him," declared Niv. "It's as if you were living in some backwater suburb of Tel Aviv, and you saw an ad in Ha'ir, the local Hebrew weekly, saying that henceforth, a certain Elton John would be available, indefinitely, to teach songwriting."
But it's true. Matti Caspi, 44, one of the most prominent figures in Israeli pop over the last 25 years, turned up in Los Angeles three days after the Northridge earthquake sent less stalwart expatriates scurrying out of town to look for solid footing. Accompanied by his companion Gal Wenger and their two-year-old daughter, Caspi hung out his shingle in Westlake Village, in Ventura County northwest of L.A.
A combination of personal and career problems forced Caspi to flee Israel to Toronto seven months previously. He and his ex-wife Doreen went through a messy divorce a few years ago, after he left her and their two children for Wenger. In the aftermath, Caspi claims, severe mismanagement brought him to the point where he had to perform at bar mitzvahs to earn a living. He also fell heavily into debt. After Caspi left Israel, his ex-wife claimed he was so far behind on mortgage payments that the banks almost foreclosed on her home.
Over dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Northridge, the doe-eyed Caspi acknowledged that personal difficulties played in his departure from Israel, but refused to discuss them in detail.
"I got to the point where I'd simply had enough," he says. "It was time to indulge an impulse for adventure that I had previously repressed. I needed to relax. I needed to go somewhere where I could shop for cereal without some guy I didn't know bellowing out, Tell me, do we know each other from somewhere?'" Like so many other Israeli performers, Caspi got his show-biz start in an army entertainment troupe. After the army, he became a popular soloist, but even more important was his role as a composer and innovator for 25 years, the ballads he wrote with lyricist Ehud Manor were among the most beautiful in Israeli pop, among them "Ain Shalvah" (There Is No Calm) and "Henai, Henai" (Here It Comes, Here It Comes). In the late 1970s, Caspi triggered a sustained Israeli rage for Brazilian music; in 1988, he composed the songs for and produced the hit album "Mah Zot Ahavah?" (What Is Love?), which propelled singer Riki Gal into stardom.
Despite a steady and supportive following over the years, Caspi himself never attained top-flight popularity, most likely because of his dour and baleful stage manner. Caspi stubbornly refused to woo segments of the public turned off by his lower than low-key manner. And he clearly feels alienated from the latest developments on the Israeli pop scene.
"All kind of bands are coming out that are influenced by MTV, and try to copy what they see there," he says. "I can't watch more than 10 minutes of it myself." His first stop after leaving Israel last fall was Toronto, home to a large community of Israeli expatriates.
"I found Toronto the polar opposite of Tel Aviv," he says, "a place without the disorder, noise and mess. I was relaxed there, but it became cold, and I started to think where I could go without being that cold. L.A. looked good, and I arrived a few days after the earthquake."
Thanks to deft advance work by a handful of local friends, he has a full Caspi: I got to the point where I'd had enough'