Meeting This Famous Singer at a Grand Prix Race Was Very Revealing

In 1987, I was fortunate enough to interview a race car driver who just happened to be a successful and famous singer from San Antonio.

As a kid growing up in the Alamo City, Chris Geppert didn’t think anything about racing or messing around with cars at all. He wasn’t wealthy and didn’t have any cool fast cars. Plus, no one in his family was into racing either; his dad was a doctor and his mom was a nurse.

After I scored some VIP tickets (from my employer, HEB Food/Drugs, who was a sponsor) to an actual Grand Prix Race in downtown San Antonio, I made arrangements to enter the pit area prior to the race and hopefully get an interview with famous racer A. J. Foyt and perhaps the local native.

Foyt didn’t work out, but I was lucky (serendipity kicked in) the San Antonio guy.

“The desire to race hit me just a few years ago in Europe when I was on tour,” when I asked him to explain how he branched out from composing and singing to racing. “A fan came up to me in Italy who was a Ferrari team Grand Prix driver, Patrick Tambay.”

“We hit it off and he invited me to come watch him test a track in nearby Modena and he’d give me a ride.”

“I was totally fascinated the speed and exhilaration. All of it. I even even had lunch with Mr. Ferrari, the commendatore himself,” he laughed. “He didn’t really know who I was, but his 13 year old granddaughter, turned out to be a big fan of mine.”

“I was stoked about racing. Wanted to give it a try,” he explained. “Tambay set it up for me to enroll in a French driving school for some concentrated training.”

“Years before I went to driving school north of San Francisco but just to hone my street-driving skills to survive on Southern California highways,” he continued. “Racing never even crossed my mine.”

Tambay recommended he get in touch with Danny Sullivan, a Formula One driver who won the Indianapolis 500 the previous year.

“Danny showed me how to get into club racing, how to find the equipment I needed, things like getting the right truck and trailer, everything I needed besides a car to go racing,” he said. “Tambay wanted me to drive in Formula Atlantic, but Sullivan suggested Super Vees. There were definite limitations to what I could drive because of my weight.”

The man I was interviewing, standing over 6 feet tall and weighing close to 200 pounds was kind enough to elaborate.

Before long, living in Santa Monica, he started driving in both regional and national races which eventually led him back to Texas for this first time ever event.

“Do you remember ever performing here back in the day?” I inquired.

He laughed.

“As a matter of fact I vividly remember performing just up the street from here in 1970. It was a cool place. ZZ Top and the Allman Brothers played there that same month and just by chance, Deep Purple was here but their guitarist became too sick to play.”

Later, I researched his story. It occurred on August 28,1970, at a downtown club called the Jam Factory. The band had been given mandatory flu shots before the show, and Ritchie Blackmore had a severe reaction and could not play.

A local promoter named Joe Miller, who was managing a nineteen-year-old guitar player out of Alamo Heights High School, put the former student forward. Miller’s pitch was that “there’s this guitarist in town who’s a big fan of Ritchie’s and he could probably step in.”

So the teen sat in with Deep Purple. He admitted “we played the songs that I knew and then we jammed some blues.”

Afterwards he was so syked he drove to the San Antonio International Airport to see if he could see them off before they flew off.

He was able to speak with Blackmore, who “thanked me for covering for him. He was cool.”

That nineteen-year-old was Christopher Charles Geppert, born in San Antonio on May 3, 1951, son of an Army pediatrician.

The world knows him as Christopher Cross.

His first album came out at the end of December 1979. “Ride Like the Wind” went to number two and “Sailing” went all the way to number one. Then at the 23rd Grammy Awards, in February 1981, he won Record of the Year, Album of the Year, Song of the Year and Best New Artist, the first artist ever to take all four of the big ones at a single ceremony. Guinness World Records keeps that one. The following year he won an Academy Award for “Arthur’s Theme.”

He’s in his mid-seventies now and still hitting the roads like a rock star!