A job just to get through the pandemic turned into a career boost for Gino Gerussi.
Langley musician Gino Gerussi has a brief encounter with a no-nonsense construction
foreman at the beginning of his music video.
“Hey Gino, I heard you can sing,” says the foreman,
whose hard hat is labelled “the boss.”
“You heard wrong,” Gino replies. His hard hat is labelled “career labourer.”
“Don’t quit your day job, then,” the foreman says as he walks away.
Gino goes back to shoveling gravel.
As Gerussi, still in his hard hat, work jacket and gloves, croons “Just In Love With A Girl”
over a jazzy mix of horn, piano and drum, his co-workers form up a dance line
and deliver some Vegas-style kicks.
It ends with a hint that it may have all been a dream,
when the dozing Gerussi is jolted awake by the foreman who warns him
about sleeping on the job and tells him to get back to work.
The music video has generated thousands of hits on social media as
“Construction Guy Can Actually Sing” since it was first posted.
And yes, Gerussi is an actual construction worker, and those are his foreman and co-workers.
It is his real voice, and he co-wrote the song with jazz legend Miles Black.
Gerussi, a single dad who lives in Brookswood,
wasn’t getting much work as a musician during the pandemic,
so he returned to construction, something he did as a day job in his 20s, to help pay the bills.
“COVID hits, I can’t play music,” he summarized.
“I’m a single dad of two full-time, so I’ve got to make the best of it.”
He ended up working for Jacob Bros. Construction, at their job site at Coquitlam city hall.
After awhile, his coworkers learned that Gerussi was a singer,
and when an aspiring video producer named Rayden Wickop found out about it,
Wickop had an idea – why not do a music video, on the construction site?
And the rest as they say….is history.