Most teenagers can’t wait to get away from their strict, protective parents, and Renée Ciarra Dunaway was no different. She had music in her soul that needed to be unleashed. And when she was young and nursing her secret musical desires, she never gave much thought to the fact that her family was, well, a little different. Those looming, finger-wagging parents of hers had once been part of the high-flyingest, shock-rockingest bands ever to explode on stage. In famous travails, they had once crossed the world in a shower of glitter, fake blood and chicken feathers.

But all that had no affect on Renée’s music. Or so she thought.

She never did get to see her father Dennis Dunaway play bass in the raucous Alice Cooper band. The father she knew was a slender, quiet man with health issues who managed video stores. As she and her sister Chelsea grew up in a brick home on a pleasant Stamford street, they just knew that money was tight but creativity was free. Music and art were everywhere in the house. She would stare at the face of Beethoven on the album jacket while playing his symphonies over and over. Then her uncle would come in and blast AC/DC’s “Whole Lotta Rosie” at top volume, and that became her favorite song. Beethoven and AC/DC became sonically and romantically intertwined.

Her uncle was Neal Smith, drummer from the Alice Cooper band and brother to Dennis’s wife Cindy. Six-foot-three, long blond hair, powerhouse personality, Neal would swing by and the stories would be flowing. Renée and Chelsea would watch with dry smiles.

“For my sister and me, it was just … silly.” Renée is seated in the Glory Days Diner on East Putnam, a tall girl with merry, soulful eyes. Her jeans have what appear to be dozens of hammer loops down the sides, and she wears gold and black boots. “Growing up around these old rock stars, there’s something hilarious about how serious they take having fun through music. Sometimes when we’d watch videos of old stage shows, my father would be kicking and dancing around, and Alice is slithering around and trying to act sexy. But for Chelsea and me, we’re like, ‘What were they thinking?’ ”

Thus she kept quiet about her own musical ideas. She saw her father retreat into a quiet world of his own when he worked on his music, and she began to do the same. There was a little recording studio set up in the basement, and from the age of six she understood what to do. “It was just … that’s what you do in life. You write songs that push the envelope and touch people.”

She practiced her singing when no one was home or behind locked doors. Sometimes the anxious parents would plead for her to open the door. Come on, dear, we know you’re singing in there.

But still she waited. “I didn’t tell anyone till my last year in college,” she recalls now with a merry note of triumph.

And now she has a new CD she’s produced, and she’d like to tell you about it.

The first time I met Dennis Dunaway, it was 1972 and he and his bandmates had just moved into a tremendous mansion on Doubling Road in Greenwich called the Galesi estate. Alice Cooper was astride the booster rocket called pop fame and had risen in a fast trajectory from being a larky highschool band in Phoenix named the Spiders to a sudden all-media sensation with hit songs and huge sell-out concerts.

A hard-rock band desperate to get attention, it had invented an outlandish stage show and a form of heavily costumed theater-rock. (After fame struck, they would quickly be copied by other acts such as David Bowie and Kiss.) Practicing ten hours a day, they delivered thunderously good shows. Bassist Dennis Dunaway was the cowriter of their bona fide teenage hits, “I’m 18,” “School’s Out” and “Under My Wheels.”
So they were flying high by the time they landed in Greenwich, where they’d moved to be near New York City. They had a forty-two-room, 15,000-square-foot mansion, complete with ballroom. They sleazed it all up pretty fast.

But the guys in the band were not really sleazy, in fact. They still seemed like what they’d been just a few years before — high school lettermen having some fun. They worked hard, drank a lot of Budweiser to unwind and constantly regaled anyone within earshot with endless stories of show-biz kitsch. They were like a troupe of campaigning vaudevillians. Although the offers of easy female companionship were everywhere, singer Alice Cooper (real name Vince Furnier) and Neal Smith had steady girlfriends, and Dennis Dunaway traveled with his wife Cindy, who designed the costumes.

Visiting writers (like me) loved the band because it was an unusually welcoming crew. They were also riotously quotable. And the Dunaways really stood out as a charming couple. Cindy, tall and blond like her brother, has these radiant, sparkling eyes and a manner that makes people want to start talking right away and join in her kind of fun, an equal mix of spiritualism and sarcasm. Dennis, lanky and dark, shared her wry amusement at the world, and while he seemed to move slowly like someone with a backache, it was evident that he didn’t miss much and would come out with one terrific yarn after another. Their happiness together made them an unusual sight on a rock ’n’ roll caravan; they joked that they were like grandma and grandpa. At the time, they were, however, just in their early twenties.

The band did not survive the convulsions of fame. Alice, veering into alcoholism, split away and became a solo star, which, after finally drying out, he has remained till today. The rest of the band soldiered on, calling themselves the Billion Dollar Babies for
a while until it all just stopped. Two band members spiraled seriously downward and returned West. But Neal and Dennis looked around at Fairfield County and realized it was home. The Galesi mansion, however, was not home. Six months after the band moved out, it burned to the ground.

Neal had already invested some of his rock loot in real estate. He began to flip some of his properties. With his flair and outgoing manner, he had a natural talent for the trade. Today he is a realtor in Westport and seen every month in a blue blazer at the Rotary meetings. He still loves his drums.

Cindy Dunaway continued designing costumes for the likes of David Bowie and the Who and ran a dress shop called Grenouille in Greenwich. Dennis kept writing music and devising stage ideas but was collapsing from the strain of a stomach
ailment that no doctor could figure out. Desperately needing health insurance, and finding that no one would hire him once they found out about his past, he finally got a job in a video-rental store. It was a living hell, but he dutifully went at it until he was eventually made manager of three stores.

It would take many years before it was found that he was suffering from Crohn’s disease. (He only got a proper diagnosis while he was unconscious and being prepared for an exploratory operation. A surgeon passing by leaned over and asked if they’d thought of Crohn’s.) The treatment turned into another hell. The high dosage of the steroid prednisone that he was prescribed had the unfortunate side effect of giving him a terrible temper.

“He was ill for a long time when I was in high school,” Renée says. As she speaks of her new career, it is clear she knows much of it is shaped by the past. “We didn’t talk, we didn’t get along. The prednisone makes people fly off the handle. That, in combination with me being thirteen, made for an unhappy household. My mom tried to make everybody happy. But I was a fighter — just fight, fight, fight. I didn’t want to let him have the excuse that just because he was on medication, he could do that.

“I didn’t understand why the band really broke up, or why he never reclaimed his musical career. He just seemed unhappy with the music he was doing.”
 
Although they weren’t speaking, there was one way they communicated — over music. They would sit by the stereo, and Dennis would introduce her to one style of music after another. She took up guitar, first electric and then finger-style folk, and the two of them would meet up at night with their guitars, wordlessly improvising for hours.
Renée went to Ithaca College to major in film, and it was during a year abroad that she finally reconnected with her father for real. In Paris, she was startled to hear Alice Cooper music still being played. At first she just thought it was nostalgia. Then she heard something else. “The structure, a lot of sick emotions that I carry and put into my films. I don’t know if I’ve inherited it or just heard it my whole life.”
 
Then there were the cards.

“He sent me postcards literally every day,” she recalls with warmth. “I have a whole book of postcards he sent. Simple thoughts. Or ideas that he had. So that’s when the healing began.”

Now, calling herself Renée Ciarra (although she might add the Dunaway to her stage name someday), she has teamed with Ithaca classmate Tyler Finck in a band called Jetsetter. Their first album, Vasoverga, is a dense but appealing aural collage that mixes catchy, pounding beats and melodies overlaid with sound sworls and her soaring voice. If there’s anything to compare it to, it might be imagistic, beguiling experiments put together by Moby. In brief, it offers soundtracks for imaginary urban movies. She sings of seeing “a metropolis of skewed Hirschfeld faces.”

When it’s suggested that her album sounds like a movie soundtrack, she lights up. “Not by accident!” she smiles. “We did a lot of soundtracks for friends. It’s just as much about storytelling as emotional expression. We try to create our atmospheric world.”

The atmosphere in Dennis’s work on his Bones From the Yard CD is a trifle darker and moodier. (To hear sample songs by Dennis and Renée, see box on page 128 for websites.) The Dennis Dunaway Project he’s assembled includes guitarist Rick Tedesco, keyboardist Ed Burns, drummer Russ Wilson, and they’ll get a visit at times from their occasional bandmate Joe Bouchard, guitarist from Blue Oyster Cult. All of them are veteran musicians and were able to take Dennis’s song demos and give them a few thousand watts of added urgency. The band has played at the Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Kenny’s Castaways in Manhattan and at Hartford’s Webster Theatre.

“It just so happened we came out with these albums in the same section of time,” Renée says. “It has really brought us together. Now I’m mature enough that
I can take his input — And also encourage him and his projects as well. This new album, I’m really happy for him. I think he’s been struggling for a long time, but this is the happiest I’ve seen him — since I was born!” Her laughter rings like silver bells.
Talking to her, it was clear that another thing she’s inherited from her folks is that sardonic clarity. Accordingly, she and her sister have always maintained zero interest in drugs, which she thinks turn people into zombies. Besides, she says, “I’m a control freak, and I just can’t lose my judgment.

“I’ve always been a super-independent chick. So I’ve had two boyfriends and, yes, they were both bass players. Chris, my current boyfriend, we’ve been best friends since I was eleven. And he’s not similar to my dad, but they have this other dimension that they’ll just escape to.”

When Cindy Smith was growing up in Phoenix, her house was the place where kids hung out, and her mom was the person that all the neighborhood kids could confide in. The stack of records on her mom’s stereo reflected her adventurous taste — there was Glenn Miller followed by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir followed by the Yardbirds.

“Our house was always full of artists and musicians,” Cindy recalls. “We had great conversations around the table. And I wanted to have that kind of house for our family and keep all the channels open.”
 
One day recently, Cindy had some company over for bagels and coffee, and the conversation around the table could have gone on forever. The house naturally reflects the Dunaway style — a little Victorian formality and grace crisscrossed with all sorts of whimsical asides. There’s kind of a Lewis Carroll surprise to it all, as if the damask shawl over there concealed a porthole to an underground kingdom.

For the past twelve years, the public face of Cindy’s style has been her antiques shop, Moon Hollow, on Route 7 in Wilton. It’s an intriguing warren of the old, new and marvelous. As Dennis says with a proud smile, it’s a place where people come in to buy a candlestick and feel compelled to describe not just the room it goes in but the whole house as well, not to mention large tracts of their life story. But Cindy gets it, and people depart happy.

In the Dunaway house today, in Stamford, happiness reigns also. Daughter Chelsea, twenty-two, is living in Los Angeles, working in cyber marketing, viral videos and fashion. And with Dennis and Renée out there promoting new albums, all sorts of new attention has flared up in their lives. They can feel things … happening again.

But do not think that in taking up the family business, daughter Renée will pound the same doors and play the same deck of cards. In thirty years, the music business has been turned upside down.

“My father has this rant that the music business is decrepit, it’s over, it’s dead, nobody can make any money,” Renée says with a laugh. “But I think — and this was my thesis in college — that it’s all new media. It’s cross-platform. It’s not 'music-versus-books-versus-movies.’ It’s all mixed and interpolated. If you leverage correctly, there’s all sorts of opportunity.”
 
Dennis listens attentively. He’s the sort of fellow who likes to take amused shots at the big picture and then take note of the little details. His memory is so good, he says, he’s writing a book on how one rock band constructed a road to fame. For who knows how long the songs will keep spinning?

“Celebrity is a fleeting thing,” Dennis observes, while Renée nods. She’s likely heard it before. “Fame is just something you were able to achieve last night at Madison Square Garden, and now you’ve got to achieve it again. You’re still down at the diner with some waiter who doesn’t want to serve you eggs-over-easy.

“You just can’t believe what you read about yourself: You’re creating an illusion, and if you believe that illusion is true, then life will get harder later. You’ll say, ‘Wait, I’m famous.’ Well, that’s not how it works.

If your work is the most important thing, then you’ve got a chance.”

Rock ’n’ roll fame in his day meant the sale of millions of records, which brought advances and royalty checks. Much of that has disappeared in the new age of digital downloads. Dennis: “People think, ‘Should I download this song legally and hope that some of the money will trickle to the artist? Or should I just steal it?’ Theft has just crushed the industry.”

Renée listens and demurs. “You just evolve with it,” she says simply.

And when he refers to albums as “records,” Renée and Cindy laugh at his use of the archaic term. He grins sheepishly. “You know, I finally started calling them CDs instead of records,” he says, “but now, it’s not even a CD. It’s a download. What do you call it? A music file? Now I’m just going to call it an ‘air platter,’ because it’s not a tangible thing anymore!” He offers his familiar what-the-hell-ya-gonna-do-about-it grin.

Renée watches him, patient, bemused. “Dad,” she says, “it’s a song.”