‘WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ROCK AND ROLL?’

Now sipping his very own coffee, Hamilton speaks with cool-headed erudition about the artistry of record-making—the challenge of blending and balancing each track, perfecting each voice with vintage microphones and tape. His eyes flash with interest and intensity when he talks music.

If the wooden pipe he occasionally produces from his coat pocket makes it hard to believe that he once played nightclubs with a rock band, his passion for music is unmistakable. And by most accounts, it always has been.

Hamilton grew up in a modest home in the Bronx, with non-musical, working-class parents. An only child, he taught himself to play guitar on a cheap acoustic.

“Very early on, I had the key to our apartment,” he says. “I found myself alone a lot, so I would read or play music.”

He was soon playing with friends and in church services. In the fourth grade, he wrote a musical called “Whatever Happened to Rock and Roll?” In the play, the protagonist, a young boy, hounds his parents for an electric guitar.

“I was almost screaming for an electric guitar,” Hamilton says. “We put it on at P.S. 119, P.S. 125—it was a little Bronx tour,” he says.

“My parents didn’t even see it. They both worked,” he adds with a chuckle.

Hamilton did get that electric guitar, eventually, and by the time he was in high school, he was playing in a band. Before long, a 16-year-old from another high school asked his group to play a song she had written.

It was Donna, and three months later, they were dating. “It wasn’t really a reflective time,” says Hamilton, trying to recall what sparked the romance. “We became ever closer as friends, working together, talking for hours on the telephone, working together until we finally realized that, you know, it was meant to be.”

STOP THE SUN; I WANT TO GO HOME

For nearly a decade, before and during Tiny Lights, John and Donna remained personal and professional partners.

“They’re almost like one being,” Dreiwitz says. “One feeds the other, and it’s always been like that.”

The two made it official in 1989, tying the knot when Tiny Lights was at its peak. They used their wedding money to buy an unfurnished condo, a far cry from the spacious home in Arlington where they live today. One week after the ceremony, they left for a three-month tour.

Scarpantoni left the group in 1991, and the band spent some time recording in California. There the members recorded their fourth album, “Stop the Sun I Want to Go Home,” in 1992. That same year, Tiny Lights earned a nod from Rolling Stone Magazine.