David began singing locally where he formed a vocal group called The Hi-Fives in 1958. His soaring tenor voice led him into joining Joey Dee and The Starliters, who exploded with the #1 hit, The Peppermint Twist in 1962. When David left the Starliters, he was replaced by Eddie and along with organist Felix Cavaliere, guitarist Gene Cornish, and drummer Dino Danelli they formed The Rascals in early 1965
A whistling father, a musician mother, and two brothers five years apart on a street in Bergen County.
Five years and change behind his brother.
Their father, Edward Sr., was a whistler. Their mother, Connie, was a musician. Both sons learned to whistle from him, and bird calls turn up on records they would make twenty years later.
Eddie is about eleven. David is sixteen and already has a group.
This is where it starts, and it starts with David. He was five years ahead, he had the friends and the songs, and he let Eddie in. Every part of what came later runs through that decision.
David and Eddie, Garfield — the family’s own snapshot.
EBDB Music Corp · Eddie’s personal collection
David forms a vocal group in Garfield. Three singles for Decca Records.
None of the three singles charted, but the direction was set for good.
Never did homework again.
The Hi-Fives — David’s vocal group in Garfield.
EBDB Music Corp · Eddie’s personal collection
David goes first. Eddie follows him into the band and takes his place in it.
David sings with Joey Dee and the Starliters. The record goes to number one.
The Peppermint Lounge on West 45th Street was the room where the twist broke out of Harlem and into midtown. David was in the house band. So, at various points, were Felix Cavaliere and Gene Cornish.
Joey Dee and the Starliters were one of the first mixed-race groups working the scene.
The record sold two million copies in six weeks and made Joey Dee the name on the marquee — by David’s own telling, until “Peppermint Twist” Joey was the bandleader, and after it he was the lead singer. What the band saw of the money, David summed up in four words: “We got no royalties.” They were on Morris Levy’s Roulette.
The song itself is Joey Dee and Henry Glover’s. David’s own writing turns up on the other side of the label — “Face of an Angel,” which he co-wrote, was the B-side of Joey Dee’s “Shimmy Baby.”
Joey Dee and the Starliters, publicity photograph.
EBDB Music Corp · Eddie’s personal collection
The younger brother takes the older brother’s chair.
Eddie made his recording debut around the same time, on the Joey Dee single “What Kind of Love is This.”
Joey Dee and the Starliters, “What Kind of Love Is This” — Eddie’s recording debut.
Roulette Records · Shown editorially
Five years, four number ones, and a stance that cost them dates in the South.
Felix Cavaliere, Eddie Brigati, Gene Cornish, Dino Danelli.
Organ, two voices, guitar, and one of the most watched drummers of the decade. No bass player — Cavaliere covered it with his left hand on the Hammond pedals.
The first all-white group Atlantic Records ever signed.
Atlantic was built on Ray Charles, Ruth Brown, LaVern Baker, and Otis Redding — a label whose entire identity was Black American music. Ertegun saw four kids from New Jersey playing a room in Westhampton and signed them.
It is the fact everyone repeats about this band, and it is usually told backwards. The point was never that they were white. The point is that the man who built the most important R&B label in the country heard four kids from New Jersey and decided they belonged on it.
A cover of a record by The Olympics, taken at a gallop.
Number one. Written by Cavaliere and Brigati.
No drums to speak of, a conga, a bassline that strolls, and two voices in the middle of it. It sounds like the afternoon it describes.
David is on it, as he is on most of them — arranging the background vocals and singing them.
The Young Rascals, publicity photograph.
EBDB Music Corp · Eddie’s personal collection
Eddie sings lead. Accordion, waltz time, and a lyric that does not resolve.
Written by Felix Cavaliere with both Brigatis — David co-wrote it, though he is not on the label credit.
The band’s own stance. It cost them dates in the South.
This was not a clause Atlantic imposed on them and it was not a press release. It was a condition the four of them set on their own bookings, in the middle of the decade when setting it had consequences, and they lost work over it.
Number one, in the summer of 1968.
Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in April. Robert Kennedy in June. The record came out in July and spent five weeks at number one.
A pop group at the height of its commercial power released a plain, unhedged record about human freedom and watched it become the biggest thing they ever did.
David sings lead on the title track.
The fifth Rascal steps out from behind the harmonies for one song on his brother’s record.
The Atlantic contract expires. The band signs to Columbia. He doesn’t go with them.
Brothers on a record of their own, and a voice other singers sent for.
David and Eddie start a singer-songwriting partnership with the New Jersey musician.
It produced dozens of songs over the next several decades, including the 1976 Brigati album “Lost in the Wilderness.” The collaboration continued into the 2000s, when Eddie co-wrote “Starliter” as a tribute to his brother — David recorded it, and it appears for the first time on “Dave’s Faves.”
Edwin Kobylarz, David and Eddie’s post-Rascals songwriting partner.
EBDB Music Corp · Eddie’s personal collection
David arranges and sings the background vocals on King Harvest’s record.
If you know one piece of David Brigati’s work without knowing it is his, it is probably this. The voices behind that chorus are his arrangement.
The brothers make a record together, under their own name.
Written with fellow New Jersey musician Edwin Kobylarz, who became the brothers' songwriting partner for decades to come.
Live at the Beacon. Both brothers.
Three halls of fame, and four men back on a stage in 2013.
Inducted with Cavaliere, Cornish, and Danelli.
Vocal Group Hall of Fame
Cavaliere and Brigati, inducted for the writing.
The halls of fame that came before were for the band. This one is for the songs — which is the part Eddie actually did with a pen.
Eddie Brigati and Felix Cavaliere, Songwriters Hall of Fame induction.
EBDB Music Corp · Eddie’s personal collection
Richard Rodgers Theatre, April 15 to May 5. Then seven months on the road.
Steven and Maureen Van Zandt built a stage show around the band and got all four original members onto it, forty-eight years after they started. It ran at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester first, then Broadway, then a tour that reached Toronto.
Four men who had started a band as kids in New Jersey, back on one stage, playing to a full house. Nobody in that theatre was taking it for granted.
Sixty years on, and the people carrying it forward.
The drummer everybody in the room watched. He passed away at seventy-eight.
He passed away on 7 March, at eighty-five.
He started all of it. Five years ahead, with the group and the songs already going, and he let his kid brother in.
Six decades of singing followed, and a sound a great many people know by heart without ever knowing whose it was.
Members of the Rascals are inducted.
Members of the Rascals — Eddie Brigati and David Brigati among them — are to be inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame.
Seven decades after four kids from New Jersey signed to Atlantic, a home-state honor.
With Cavaliere, Cornish, and Danelli.
With The Rascals.
With Felix Cavaliere — for the writing.
With The Rascals.
David and Eddie, honored through an exhibit at The Recording Academy Grammy Museum Experience.
David and Eddie Brigati at the Recording Academy Grammy Museum Experience, 2022.
EBDB Music Corp · Photo: Joe Russo · Eddie’s personal collection
Every honour listed here is documented. Anything we could not verify is not on this page.