This has now overtaken Nic Cage’s old-school, reincarnation-vampire-theory-generating photo as my all-time favorite celebrity look-alike!
Jimmy Fallon unleashed this bad rascal during his “Screengrabs” segment from last evening’s episode of the Tonight Show. To be honest, I didn’t believe that it was authentic but after discount double checking I can attest to the fact that Genya Ravan is a real person and that this is the cover for her 1978 album Urban Desire:
Click on either image for a full-screen Fallon-alike look!
About Genya Ravan, real name Goldie Zelkowitz, via AllMusic:
In the summer of 1962, she asked to sing with the Escorts (not Felix Cavaliere’s band from Syracuse University nor the ’50s group or U.K. band of the same name) who were performing at the Lollipop Lounge in Brooklyn, NY. She remembers it was the summer because: “I had pants that showed my belly button, they could not get their eyes off it.”
After she left the Escorts, Zelkowitz formed Goldie & the Gingerbreads, an original all-female band that was only the first of many firsts for Zelkowitz. All girls in a man’s music world was as daunting a task as a woman trying to become president of the United States. Petula Clark, Lulu, Cilla Black, Skeeter Davis, and Kitty Wells simply did not have a crew of women backing them up. Where the Go-Go’s became a bit of a novelty years later, the people who came before that hit ’80s band, Goldie & the Gingerbreads, Fanny, and later, Isis, all had a harder edge and would have done more for the cause’s credibility had they had the hit singles to go along with their critical acclaim.
Genya works alongside E Street Band and Sopranos star Little Steven Van Zandt as a producer and DJ on Sirius/XM’s Underground Garage.
The rocker had a great sense of humor about the striking resemblance as she tweeted, “So OK Jimmy Fallon didn’t announce my name right, but hey….he had me up there…”
