As if I needed a reminder of the capriciousness of Fate, I came across the receipt for the NAD 5120 "floppy arm" turntable I sold years ago, and do you think I could turn up the one for our refrigerator, which is still under warranty?
Some of the items spared by the ongoing water incursion were souvenirs from bygone bands, like this Polaroid from the first band I belonged to:
Too bad it's such a poor photo of the band's gear. For all the complaints about excessive volume, looking at these powerhouse amps makes me skeptical about them generating substantial sound pressure levels, you know?
That's a vintage Vox on the left, albeit a solid-state Berkeley II. Barely visible behind that amp is an RMI Explorer, the combo organ some consider an early synthesizer.
[I still own both pieces of gear, but the RMI was stored in the swimming po-- er, basement, when it started filling up.]
This being 1970 or so, and about 100 miles from Chicago, the band was called Rapid Transit (though, surprisingly, not Rapid Transit Authority) when I was asked to join them. The American flag/peace sign logo, on the bass drum head, indicates how the marketing department failed to effectively conceptualize for us.
Apart from the logo, what I remember most about Rapid Transit was that our version of "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" clocked in at a cool three minutes, thirty seconds. Including drum solo. Kind of makes me suspect that there weren't a lot of other solos going on.
Fortunately, rather than following the example of our namesake, and shortening it to Rapid, the group chose a new name that was at a least familiar concept to our youthful, rural listeners:
Considering that this was a band of high school students, not many "Clubs" availed themselves of the "heavy rock music" of AXE. The group's specialty became covering Alice Cooper, which might have made sense of the original tag line -- "AXE: Our rock and roll with chop you down!" -- had it not been long gone by that time.
Here, AXE is playing an outdoor event . . .
. . . using a (rented) Shure VocalMaster PA. Rented. As often as we used this rig, we probably could've owned it several times over. Karen Carpenter used to appear in ads for this PA, and see where it got her! (Meaning the gold records, not so much the anorexia.)
Another performance, this one in a high school gym . . .
. . . taken from the perspective of the guy who's preparing to dump a bucket of pig's blood on me. Apparently, just two spectators were able to withstand the onslaught of AXE's heavy rock music.
That blue box, precariously positioned on folding chairs, with a straw hat and a bunch of other junk on it, is a homemade Leslie cabinet. The rotating baffle was run with a sewing machine motor (a little noisy, yeah), speed controlled by rheostat. So, unlike an actual Leslie, this baby had infinite speed variation! Sweet!
Wish I still had it.
One of the few surviving recordings by this aggregation doesn't offer many clues to our set lists. It's largely taken up with numerous attempts at an "original" composition, "Fork In The Road," featuring progressively unmanageable guitar effects -- echo, wah-wah, slide -- and progressively deteriorating tuning, and me affecting some bizarre dialect, pronouncing "wheel" as "will" . . . perhaps in an effort to make the lyrics sound interesting.
Oh, and the tape includes a rendition of Jethro Tull's "Locomotive Breath." Because you just know that was huge with the high school sock-hoppers.
This card . . .
. . . raises soooo many questions:
Is that a color?
Who did that font design and where is he or she institutionalized?
What is a "Way*Star" (or, what does a star weigh)?
What, no polka?
Shame about the nausea-inducing biz card, because this was, sporadically, a great band. When I was invited to join on keys--as an afterthought, natch--one of the guitarists was an Alex Chilton-looking/Paul Westerberg-acting liability who proposed naming the band, Jumping Johnny and the God-Eaters.
Suddenly, Way*Star sounds positively bankable.
The original lead singer -- and I have to be careful here because, one day, he will be out of prison -- shares a name with a venerable Vegas performer, lending some humorous irony to him fronting a pretty darned heavy rock band (to paraphrase a business card I read once). Unfortunately for him, and to our benefit, he took a header into a bus with his motorcycle not long before our debut performance, and, though he recovered fully, he never returned to the band.
True to the haphazard nature that seems to characterize bands I've been in, Way*Star did a mix of eclectic covers and fairly varied originals by three of us. The covers ranged from "Back In New York City" and "Squonk" (Genesis) to "Slow Train" and "Big Fat Mama" (Status Quo) to "Just One Victory" (Utopia), and the originals represented those influences, plus Procol Harum.
Our brush with success came when we recorded four tunes at a studio owned by music professor and Henry Mancini orchestra drummer, Frank Gilfoy, engineered by the superlative Kirk Butler, concurrent with John Mellencamp recording at the same studio with the same engineer. He signed with MainMan and his Gilfoy tracks became half of his first album, Chestnut Street Incident, and now he's in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
We didn't sign with MainMan. The Hall of Fame still ain't called.
Still, our Gilfoy session was a great tape.
The drummer for Way*Star pulled a knife on me once. And that wasn't even the worst thing he did while I knew him. The last I knew, the rest of the band went to L.A. to "make it" while I stayed behind to finish school. They may very well be playing "Slow Train" or "Satin Street Strutter" tonight at the Whiskey.
So keep an eye out for that electric green business card.
In my next pulse-pounding, credulity-installment, a Sex Pistol poaches our band name, we appear to play at Stonehenge, I narrowly escape a beat-down by A Flock of Seagulls' road crew, and we all go home for a nice, long rest.
Coming soon!
