THE MARQUEE GHOSTS, The Logic of Lunacy

By any measure of whatever folks consider success in the music industry, Pat Melfi has enjoyed an extraordinarily impactful career in multiple capacities behind the scenes, from VP for MCA Records/Alexas Music Productions and Tour Management (where he was a five time award winning Promoter of the Year) to his current role as personal manager for multiple Grammy winners Rebecca Lynn Howard, Juice Newton, multi-platinum artist Champaign and country singer Michael Peterson. In what must seem like another lifetime, he produced and managed international concert tours for countless legends, from Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, The Rolling Stones and the Eagles to Meatloaf, Elton John, Barry Manilow, Rod Stewart, Vince Gill and Colli Raye, whom he later managed.

In the wake of his tours with Pink Floyd and Supertramp (during their Breakfast in America heyday), Melfi, exploring his talents as a monster songwriter, producer and arranger, drew on the inspiration of those particular bands and wrote and recorded a ton of powerhouse pop/rock/prog-rock styled songs that are only now – nearly four and a half decades later – seeing the light of day. Working with an ensemble of talented, equally game but ultimately lost to musical history musicians, Melfi and his “band” The Marquee Ghosts created one full (we’re talking 14 tracks!) album of epic tunes featuring powerhouse vocals and splendidly grandiose production, ranging from bitingly incisive slices of social/political consciousness to personal, heartfelt, deeply spiritual expressions.

But listening to the clever, pointedly titled The Logic of Lunacy isn’t just an exercise in nostalgia. It’s a fascinating opportunity to not only experience a unique “hidden” aspect of Melfi’s creative life, but to ponder just how prophetic rock and roll songwriters can be as they react to the chaotic world around them.

Amazingly, these pieces emerging from Melfi’s 1981-82 outburst of often drug-facilitated creativity sound even more relevant to Trump’s America in 2025 than they did expressing the fears of what might happen to the country after Reagan’s election in 1980. Melfi’s lyrics are intense, powerful and richly poetic. As I journeyed through the expansive landscape from the beast of a power ballad opener “Children of the Static” (which opens with the ominous spoken words: “We were promised the sky/We were handed glass”) to the plaintive, ever questioning and surreally soaring “Is There Still Enough Time,” it hit me that had The Logic of Lunacy been released in 1982, it might now be considered an era-defining classic rock album. And main vocalist Martin Christopher might pop into colorful conversations about the genre’s most rangy, supple powerhouse voices of the era, on par with Steve Perry, Lou Gramm, Geddy Lee, David Lee Roth and the late Bon Scott.     

Recorded in 1982 at Sunset Sound in L.A, The Logic of Lunacy showcases the talents of Melfi (piano, strings, keys and arrangements), guitarists Slim Harpo and Pete Currenti and drummer Elliot Piazza, with vocals by Christopher, Piazza and Currenti. There is also an incredible saxophone player whose name now escapes Melfi, and some lovely cello (also now anonymous). “The Lie We Told,” whose title pretty much sums up the insight and searing in the moment cynicism of many of Melfi’s lyrics) is a duet with a soulful female rock singer named Tommi Jordan. Melfi says that as far as he knows, everyone involved with the project has now passed away, making this a poignant listen even as we feel some of Christopher’s visceral, darker emotions. In our minds, we can imagine these amazing guys who never got famous in their lifetimes on earth taking the stage at an arena somewhere in the mist – perhaps on the secondary stage in the “big show” the Righteous Brothers sang about in “Rock and Roll Heaven.”  

“We called the group The Marquee Ghosts because we knew we would never release the music because of contractual conflicts,” Melfi says. “The title ‘The Logic of Lunacy’ came about in a brainstorming session about the world political events. One of my most used words of the time for politicians was ‘lunatic’ and all the guys used to say ‘everyone’s a lunatic in today’s world.’ I blurted out how illogical it was. We put the two together and came up with ‘The Logic of Lunacy.’”

Thinking about the contemporary political landscape, the steady Project 2025ing of America and the fracturing of America into ideological camps, it truly feels like nothing’s changed. Melfi, who updated a few his early 80’s lyrics to reflect bits of modern technology (most notably, the line “The emperor streams in 4K, polished, proud and loud”), could have written this in 2024 and been more spot on than ever. As ABBA once sang, “the history book on the shelf, is always repeating itself.” The Carter-Reagan era seems quaint and charming now in retrospect – but Melfi and company weren’t buying the mythological “Morning in America” concept and weren’t afraid to shout from the speakers about it, even if nobody beyond that room could listen. Maybe they’ll listen now…

Not gonna sugar coat it - The Logic of Lunacy is an intense listen on multiple levels, from the bold production values, scorching vocal performances fiery solos and intensely heartfelt melodies to Melfi’s lyrics which are like intricate poetic era-capturing gifts that keep on giving. Listeners who take the time to really dig in – and they s should – will probably find the experience on par with deciphering what the Beatles wrote from 1967 on – or what any progressive rock band in the 70s (Yes, ELP, Jethro Tull) was rambling on about. They’re that meaningful. Listening all the way through from tracks 1-15 (on big ass headphones, naturally) might overwhelm modern listeners used to EPs, singles and concept free albums. So IMHO, here are some of the best entry points to The Logic of Lunacy experience.

Let’s start with the “The Lie We Believed,” which opens with soft cello and piano behind Christopher’s elegant voice before it evolves into scorching power ballad territory as a duet with Tommi. As Melfi says, “By early 1981, people were being sold the ‘Morning in America’ myth but shadows still hung heavy. The post-60s activism energy had curdled into cynicism. . .This song was written to live at that dangerous intersection where rebellion becomes branding, truth becomes PR and dissent becomes…inconvenient.” Listeners can meditate on Melfi’s couplets endlessly, starting with “They spoke in branded riddles, signed the future with our name/Then rewrote the rules at midnight and left us holding shame.” Or how about “It was the lie we believed, the speech that felt like truth/We swore the oath with borrowed sight and gave away our youth.” The fact that insights, however dark, like these sat languishing in a vault for decades seems criminal – but let’s all be grateful that this grand centerpiece of the album can wash over us now and make us think like very few contemporary pop or rock albums do these days!    

From the get-go, on track one, Melfi creates the perfect phrase for young people of his generation: “Children of the Static.” He wrote the symphonic, sax-drenched prophetic song to sound like it came from the kids raised on transistor radios and broken promises, already burned out by 16, “clutching Walkmans and watching static when the broadcast ends.” A line like “The prophets lost their signal; the poets won’t write back” is pure haunting gold, topped only perhaps by a hook that rolls like a mantra for a lost generation: “We are the children of the static, wired by alone/Living in echoes, touching ghosts through phones…” Thankfully amidst the gloom and doom, The Marquee Ghosts offer a glimmer of hope: “We’ll find our signal beyond the noise/In broken hymns, in whispered voice…”

Speaking of essential symphonic rock power ballads, let’s try the title track “The Logic of Lunacy” as potential entry point #3. Love the way the tension builds from gentle and pretty to soaring, blistering and intense as heavier points are made. Melfi wrote it “inside of a world teetering on the edge of madness, and I was convinced it was perfectly sane.” (Wow, sounds like the gaslighting that happens every day now when any of us scroll the news – and THIS was when we only had network news channels to get information!) He adds, “I wanted it to exist as a cold, poetic scream trapped inside a society obsessed with order, authority and cosmetic peace – anti-propaganda poetry, wrapped in military polish and broadcast over flickering airwaves.” The “couplet king” strikes again with heavy duty outpourings like this: “They painted calm on warheads, signed peace deals with their fists/They filed our minds in boxes marked ‘assets to assist” and “The sirens sing like lullabies, each death a staged routine/They built a morgue of theater seats and sold the war as clean.”

In some ways, another potential key entry point, “Symphony for a Vanishing World,” kind of makes Melfi and his cohorts the musical Al Gores of their day, adding full bodied steroids to Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” and mourning the man-made destruction of the planet with lines like “We paved it all in progress, wrapped the forest up in wire/But the earth still hums a warning like a fuse about to fire,” capped by a line in the chorus which laments, “Every skyline sings a requiem for the green we gave away.” At the time, Melfi was reacting to Reagan’s cutting solar funding and deregulating polluters, and the fact that that tech optimism was replacing romanticism about nature. Decades later, manmade global warming is literally intensifying nature’s wrath all over the planet and those in charge care more about the profits of donors than preserving this sacred earth.  

While The Logic of Lunacy is a full-force socio-politically motivated concept album, Melfi and the Marquee Ghosts offer a unique respite from the podcast-worthy commentary with the deeply personal, classical flavored musical prayer “Lord Can It Be” – whose theme and lyrical tone may remind listeners of Supertramp’s exquisite album cut “Lord Is It Mine.” He wrote this tender-hearted, vulnerable yet richly impassioned ballad while he was in a drug rehab program as his scream out to God for help.

Blissfully, it’s not some sort of blasé contemporary Christian song, but more a prayer that the divine exists behind the religion Melfit was handed, a graceful anthem for what he calls a “broken kind of faith, the kind that doesn’t need proof or polish, just permission to ask.” It’s the sound of him saying, “I still believe,” underscored with gorgeous cello, unresolved piano and silence to match the mood and artfully expressed in lines like “The world says you’re an old song they’ve muted from the score/But the echoes in my chest say there’s something more/I’m tired of pretending that I’ve got this figured out/I’m tired of smiling quietly when I only want to shout.”

For all the intensity and musical and lyrical brilliance on The Logic of Lunacy, “Lord Can It Be” is its true emotional centerpiece, the ultimate defiant “spiritual but not religious” song even the most cynical agnostics and atheists might find common ground with. The fact that the video Melfi created for it accumulated nearly 225,000 views on YouTube in its first two weeks makes it clear that the song is resonating with many today who may feel right now like he did back in 1982. The album’s coda “Is There Still Enough Time” is a likeminded brilliant ballad that finds him (via the power of Martin Christopher) wondering if there’s enough time left for him to repair anything he’s broken (including women’s hearts) throughout his crazy journey through the music business and life.

Our country, the world itself, hasn’t redeemed itself at all since the early 80s, but individually we all have a chance to make amends. This is ultimately the story of The Logic of Lunacy, the long lost but thankfully found and soon to be released debut album and final will and testament of Pat Melfi and The Marquee Ghosts.