The Oral History of Old Money

In 2011, just outside of Jacksonville Florida, the greatest music group that you’ve never heard of was born. 

The following is a collection of interviews collected over the last nine years.

The following is an oral history of Old Money.

Yulee Florida- March 14^th 2011. David Cross is placed into the St. Vitus Retirement Community.

David Cross: My kids got tired of taking care of me after their mother passed. It was only a matter of time before I knew I’d be shut up in the can.

Laureen Cross-David’s daughter: It was after he wet my bed for the third time that I gave up. Mind you, not his bed, he made his way upstairs from the basement to wet my bed.

David:  The tour she gave me of her house was very misleading if you ask me.

It was his first day at St. Vitus that David ran into Clancy Brown, over a game of chess after lunch.

Clancy Brown: David stared at me throughout lunch without saying anything or even blinking for that matter. So I asked him if he wanted to play me in chess.

Dwayne Bacon- Associate Professor of Elderly Behavior in Relation to Pop Culture at Florida Atlantic University: You have to remember, this was 2011, chess was still king in retirement homes. Chess was a form of initiation. If you didn’t know your way around with a bishop, you were not going to have many friends.

Clancy: I check-mated his ass in 4 moves.

David: But my game is not chess.

Clancy: That’s when he told me his game wasn’t chess. It was music. After a long pause I asked him what he meant by his game being music. He looked me in the eye, like he do, and said if you don’t play music, music plays you. I’ll never forget that.

The two begin talking about music on their morning walks through the halls, and over lunch. Not much happens until they run into Sal Dinero.

Clancy: Sal Dinero…where do I begin.

David: His last name was fake, I can tell you that.

Dwayne Bacon- Associate Professor of Elderly Behavior in Relation to Pop Culture at Florida Atlantic University: In northeast Florida at that day in age, many people in music changed their last names to something more Latino. Sal Dinero’s actual name was Sam Dennis.

Olivia Guadalupe-Dinero, Sal’s fourth (out of five) wife: At that time Sal and I had just started dating. I would deliver mail to St. Vitus and he would hit on my every time I brought in a package, and I guess you could say I was signed stamped and delivered.

Clancy: His way with women was disrespectful. Not to women, but to all other guys. It was disrespectful how good he was… the problem was he was an asshole.

Olivia: He had a way with words. I remember he told me on our first date “You better leave that husband of yours, or else,” It really brought joy to my heart.

Dale Guadalupe- first husband of Olivia (of six): F*** that guy. But I do respect Olivia for keeping the Guadalupe name throughout all six of her marriages. To me that made it all worth it.

Clancy: So David and I are walking through the halls one morning, we weren’t allowed outside after the accident (of 2010), and we see this man our age (80’s) embracing a woman of about 20-25. After she leaves we ask him, was that your grand-daughter, and he tells us “If that’s my grand-daughter I’m in big trouble,” That was how we met Sal.

Sal Dinero was an amateur music producer throughout his career. He launched acts such as The Daytona Dames, The Jacksonville Jacks, and the Tallahassee Tall-a-Hussey’s. He was nominated for three Northeastern Florida Grammy's, with zero wins.

David: Sal comes to find out we are interested in making sheets (slang for sheet music). So he tells us about his career. The moment he told Clancy and me that he worked with the Tall-a-Hussey’s, our jaws dropped, and I don’t think they’ve un-dropped since.

Clancy: Sal had a motto, “In music, as in love, everything is better in three’s,” We needed a third member.

David: It was almost divine intervention, but moments after he told us that we heard this voice. The voice of an angel, or at least a mermaid.

Sophie Polaski: Singing was my passion, still is. I used to sing and sing and sing and sing in that retirement home until they were forced to drug me to sleep. And that would happen every night.

David: The problem up front was, I didn’t know how to play any instruments. Neither did Clancy. And Sophie’s singing range wasn’t very expansive. But you have to remember, music was my game.

In what many historians deem to be the seminal moment for the group, David, Clancy, and Sophie all meet with Sal after dark in a storage room.

Clancy: Sal brings us into this stuffy old storage room and there’s silence. He looks at each one of us in the eye and then says “Let’s make some wet sheets,”

Dwayne Bacon- Associate Professor of Elderly Behavior in Relation to Pop Culture at Florida Atlantic University: The thing you have to be cognizant of is, at the time, there was a clash of culture in retirement homes in that part of Florida. You had your big band 40’s era fans, your 50’s Sinatra swing fans, and then of course you had your southern rap fans.

David: With all the division at the time in musical preference, we wanted to make music in a style to merge all three. Sal told us we were going to be “Glenn Miller meets Sinatra meets Lil Wayne,”

Clancy: I was a welder my whole life, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t know music. There’s music in welding. The heat. The passion. The masks. When Sal told us his vision, the first song popped into my head: Shoot Me to the Moon from Kalamazoo.

Sophie: I was the only one of the three, or debatably of the four, who knew anything about music. So Clancy comes up with this genius title for our debut track and I just start writing.

Olivia: Sal would tell me these just fabulous stories from the supply closet that became their recording studio. One of their biggest challenges was getting Sophie her oxygen tank on between verses.

David: There were a few times while recording Shoot Me to the Moon from Kalamazoo that Sophie almost didn’t make it.

Clancy: We stole a keyboard from an inmate, and luckily my nephew had a snare drum he let us use.

David: If you listen closely to that track you can hear some didgeridoo in the background. That was a stroke of luck that (REDACTED), an inmate from Australia, knew how to play.

(REDACTED): They never game me any credit on their tracklists so I would prefer not to be associated with them.

(REDACTED) died of severely bruised ego in 2017

Olivia: Every start up band needs a hit to launch them into the stratosphere. Sometimes it’s a song, sometimes it’s just the chorus. For this group it was the very first couplet.

Sophie: We have this filthy snare beat going, Sal is on the piano, and the first words just came to me: Shooting to the stars so fast it isn’t funny/ best believe you’re gonna hear of Old Money.

David: Right then and there we knew we had our name. Old Money.

Clancy: To me it was the perfect way to blend the culture at the time, with groups such as Young Money, with the music we grew up with.

David: I didn’t know there was a group called Young Money, but after the lawsuit came I sure did.

(Due to the drastically different music styles and for the drastic difference between young and old, the lawsuit was dropped)

David: So we finish Shoot Me to the Moon from Kalamazoo. Sal tells us he needs some time. A few days go past…nothing. Then one day during social hour, I see Sal walk up to the record player, he pulls this shiny new record out, and puts the needle down. That right there was the moment we became famous.

Alex Thanderson-resident nurse at St. Vitus: Pretty quickly all these senile folks recognized the voice on the record with Sophie's. They had all heard her sing nonstop each and every day, and had all grown to detest her. But now it was different. Now she was famous. I couldn’t stop what followed.

Clancy: They didn’t realize we all made this track. They only heard Sophie, so they start mobbing her, asking for autographs. And it hurt. It hurt me to the core.

David: I had never felt so disrespected, this was worse than being abandoned at the home, this was worse than my wife cheating on me during the war, and this was even worse than the food at St. Vitus.

Dwayne Bacon- Associate Professor of Elderly Behavior in Relation to Pop Culture at Florida Atlantic University: Very quickly there was a rift within the group. You had Sophie receiving all of the attention while Clancy and David didn’t get any. While I am still not sure what David contributed to the group, he had a right to be upset.

Olivia: They held an emergency meeting with Sal. David and Clancy were embarrassed that they weren’t getting enough attention, and frankly, I think they were upset a woman was upstaging them.

David: Listen, I have heard all the hubbub about us being mad about a woman being more successful yada yada yada, it had nothing to do with the fact Sophie was a woman. It had to do with the fact that we were men.

Olivia: Things at St. Vitus got even worse when Sal released the Old Money EP: This is Old Money.

Clancy: Sal plays the EP during social hour again, and it is wild. When the second track hits, Pussy Cat Serenade, the inmates lost their minds.

Alex: So I’m monitoring social hour that night, and when Pussy Cat Serenade hit, which by the way, is definitely the raunchiest thing these people have heard in the last 20 years if not their entire life; it was chaos. The inmates got a hold of lighters somehow and are swaying with them for the first song, but when Pussy Cat Serenade plays, they start lighting things on fire. And then they start spraying their oxygen tanks around, which didn’t help any.

Dwayne Bacon- Associate Professor of Elderly Behavior in Relation to Pop Culture at Florida Atlantic University: Some historians, such as myself, argue this was the first “lit” concert of all time, as it started a massive fire. It is amazing that, presumably, no one died.

David: The only casualty of that fire was our group.

Olivia: After the fire, I could tell Sal was acting different. I don’t think he could have grasped how much influence this group would have over people.

Clancy: That third track, to this day, has never been listened to.

Dwayne Bacon- Associate Professor of Elderly Behavior in Relation to Pop Culture at Florida Atlantic University: When people call Old Money a one-hit-wonder I always counter that with Pussy Cat Serenade, and the lost track.

Olivia: That social hour concert was it. After that David confronted Sophie, she got upset, transferred retirement homes, and that was that. David and Clancy approached Sal about starting a duo act, but Sal died of a stroke before that ever materialized.

Clancy: That flirty bastard managed to get divorced, re-married, and die within a three day period after the fire. With his fifth wife he finally got what he called “one for the thumb,"

David: What hurt me most about the fallout is Sophie not showing up for Sal’s funeral. This man gave you so much and you’re gonna do him like that?

Sophie: I couldn’t attend the funeral because my new retirement home didn’t let us out for any reasons. Do I feel bad about that? Sure. Do I feel bad about being the most successful of the group? Ask Adam Levine if he feels bad.

Dwayne Bacon- Associate Professor of Elderly Behavior in Relation to Pop Culture at Florida Atlantic University: With the fallout being so fast and so heated, it really removed most traces of the group. Only 4 copies of the EP were made. Three burned in the fire and the last one was cremated with Sal. So unless they can put the ashes together, the songs Pussy Cat Serenade and the mysterious third track will never be heard again. There are two copies of their first single, and those live on through David and Clancy.

Clancy: I listen to Shoot Me to the Moon from Kalamazoo every damn day. And not a day goes by I don’t regret how things happened.

David: I don’t regret anything. That track is proof to my family that even though they don’t want to live with me anymore, I can sure live fine with myself.

Nine years later, talk of a reunion retirement tour was shut down when Sophie lost her ability to speak above a whisper. That tour was unlikely as the three stars of Old Money haven’t talked since Clancy broke out of St. Vitus in 2017 and moved to somewhere in remote Manitoba. As for their legacy, it is carried on mostly in overly drawn out retellings by the retired folk who witnessed it.

Dwayne Bacon- Associate Professor of Elderly Behavior in Relation to Pop Culture at Florida Atlantic University: Whether you like their music or not, there’s no debating that Old Money was, without a doubt in my mind, the greatest musical group to come out of a retirement home in Yulee Florida in 2011.

(All names and likenesses related to any real people are coincidental)