by Courtney H. Naliboff

A former cruise liner cocktail lounge piano player, who celebrated his first year operating his own real estate office on Highland Avenue, looked back on his time tickling ivories on the high seas.

“My musical career’s not over. I might be in New York, you never know. But I kind of like doing this real estate thing on my own because I don’t answer to anybody,” said David J. Palermino, of Palermino Realty.

Palermino worked as a Carnival Cruise pianist before working for a real estate agency and later working as an independent agent, he said.

“Both my parents were in the entertainment field, my mother sang and my father played bass,” said Palermino, who grew up in Everett and lived for a time in Wakefield.

Palermino’s father played with Tony Bennett and Dizzy Gillespie, and his parents made sure everyone in their family took piano lessons, he said.

While at Northeastern University, Palermino began playing the piano professionally, he said. “I met these guys, talked with them, five minutes later we’re across the street. I was playing the piano and they said: ‘fine.’”

The band played 1970s popular music and standards, he said.

The band never recorded and he thought the experience was just part of the college experience that he left behind when he graduated from college, and moved to New York City, to teach high school English, he said.

Then one day at the high school, while he was fooling around with some songs, he said his life took a different turn. “I was playing the piano in the music room and one of the teachers said ‘I have a friend who has a bar,’ and I played there on St. Patrick’s Day.”

“Before I knew it I was playing all the time,” he said.

Palermino said he made the decision to take a music career seriously, so he quit his teaching job and attended Berklee College of Music. After Berklee, he joined a touring band called Signature. “We played a lot in the Midwest.”

With the Signatures, he was able to combine his passion for music with his other passion, old cars. “I still have the 1958 Cadillac we used as band car.”

The next turn came with Signature’s saxophone player, Tim Misika, landed a gig with the Carnival Cruise lines. With the help of his buddy, Carnival hired Palermino, where he said played for couple of years.

The two were on the same ship, but they did not play together onstage or off. “I was the cocktail pianist and he was in the band,” he said.

“He was into traveling and heavy partying. Even on the ship I couldn’t party like those guys did. They would wheel cartons of whiskey right into their cabin and they’d have three or four-foot stacks of fifths of liquor,” he said.

“I’m not made up like that, I mean, I do party, but these guys. It was every night ‘til five, six in the morning. A little too much for me,” he said.

Palermino said he is still in touch with his old shipmate, who left to play with George Benson. “It’s funny the kind of offers you get when different people see you play on cruise ship.”

Now, Misika is playing with former Stray Cat, Brian Setzer’s orchestra, and played on Setzer’s “Jump, Jive and Wail” album, he said. “He’s a great player.”

“When Tim went to Hollywood, he called me to get me to join him. He’d say: ‘Come out here! There is so much action!’” he said.

“But, it wasn’t for me,” he said. “I’m a bit of a home body.”

Palermino said his life on the ship had a nice routine. He played 20 hours a week, including the lunch hour, an hour at dinnertime and the first portion of the ballroom entertainment each night.

“I was off the stage at nine o’ clock and I’d take the back way up to my cabin. It’d be a quick shower and a quick drink and change in 15 minutes so I could be back and chilling out,” he said.

“You sign autographs and all that stuff, it’s not a big deal,” he said.

Palermino said he won audiences over with his confident personality, often he’d open a show telling the patrons they would have a good time – whether they liked it or not.

His sang froid persona came in handy when things got out of hand, he said. One evening, during his post-bingo set, a drunk and belligerent woman grabbed his microphone to announce she had won the bingo prize.

“She’s screaming at the top of her lungs and I’m thinking oh man, I’m just going to play through this,” he said.

The woman was eventually removed, he said, and the remaining audience passed a hat and collected hundreds of dollars to compensate Palermino. “It became a subject of discussion. My boss would ask if I’d planted the woman,” he said.

No longer singing for his supper, Palermino said music is still an important part of his life and personality. For his real estate agency’s first anniversary May 15, Palermino had a band that included his 88-year-old father on bass and nine-year-old Joseph Sullivan on cello on the sidewalk in front of the business. It is the type of thing he wants to do every year.

To keep his line in the water, Palermino said he travels to Manhattan twice a month to help out at a friend’s recording studio. He does whatever needs to be done, some playing, writing and producing.

“I’ll always have the music, there’s no doubt about that,” he said. “That’s what makes the world go round.”

Then looking around at his real estate office, he said he was happy right where he is. “This is my fiefdom. I deal with who I want to deal with and I don’t have to answer to anybody.”