When I
attended Notre Dame I was the drummer in two rock bands. The first was
the Dark Ages, which covered a lot of British Invasion tunes. Our lead
guitarist, Chicago South Sider Rich ("Gink") Downes, was a big Keith
Richards fan. Consequently we came pretty close to replicating It's All Over Now, among other Rolling Stones chestnuts. Day Tripper by the Beatles and the Hollies' Bus Stop were
always on our set list. Our repertoire also included several tunes
from the large catalogue of hits by Chicago-based bands like the Cryan'
Shames, the Buckinghams and the Shadows Of Knight. The latter's smash Gloria (itself
a cover of the Van Morrison original) was one of my two favorite songs
to play because of the drum roll at the end. If I hadn't consumed too
many cold ones by the time we performed it, I went for the rim shot on
the last stroke. My other favorite, the Surfaris' instrumental hit Wipe Out, was a song I'd been playing since high school. Nothing but tom tom thumping. (I always thought the song should be titled Work Out.)
Despite our preference for the British and Chicago sounds, the song
we performed best was not in either category. Rather, it was Time Won't Let Me by an underrated outfit from Cleveland called the Outsiders. The only song on which I sang lead was The Kids Are All Right.
I was probably given that responsibility because none of the other
four guys knew the words to that classic by the Who. Otherwise the lead
singer's role went to Sal Santino, a versatile Italian Brooklynite who
could dance and sing simultaneously. Sal had great stage presence, and
was a real charmer.
The heyday of the Dark Ages was my sophomore year, 1966-1967. We played gigs both on and off campus. Live music was huge then, and it was fun to be a part of that scene. Our big moment in the sun was being selected to play on the South Quad before ND's homecoming game against Army. We set up right in front of Dillon Hall and drew a big audience. It may well have been the only gig we ever played without imbibing. At other shows we were usually up there trying to keep pace with the swilling crowd.
As I have admitted more than once to my son Michael, an extraordinary guitarist who has devoted hundreds of hours to his craft, neither I nor any of my bandmates considered ourselves to be serious musicians. In all honesty, we were simply "in it" to meet girls and drink (usually) free beer. The demands of studying were too time consuming to practice more than occasionally. We shot for once a week, but that was a loosely enforced regimen. Since we did not write music -- a truth having more to do with talent (or lack thereof) than time -- we were relegated to playing covers. Sadly, we were playing mostly the same twenty-five or thirty songs in the spring that we'd been playing the previous autumn. It took time to learn new songs, and time was a luxurious commodity none of us possessed. Thus, our repertoire became stagnant. Some weeks it was even hard to find the time to listen to new music, let alone play it. Things started winding down as we approached the end of the school year.
When I returned to The Bend for the beginning of junior year, I did not even bring my drums with me. I had spent my summer vacation working the second shift at a sweaty tool and die shop, Olsen Tool Company in Richfield, and as a result I was too pooped to practice much during those three months. The way things had tailed off in the spring with the Dark Ages, I figured we would not reunite in the fall of '67. You might say I was correct, but with an asterisk.
Some time in the late autumn of junior year, Gink and Maverick (the Dark Ages' bass player) approached me about a new band they were trying to put together. Gink had formed a friendship with one Kevin Mahoney, an older (mid-twenties) guy who, as I recall, had previously attended Notre Dame but had not graduated. He had some kind of sales job in The Bend, a perfect match for a person who came across as a big talker and a wheeler dealer. Kevin definitely had local connections, obviously helpful if not mandatory for landing gigs. He also had what Gink described as a "common law wife," which in those days simply meant that he lived with his girlfriend, Terry. (Legally, Indiana has never been a common law state.) That in itself was pretty cutting edge for 1967, at least in the semi-sheltered culture of Notre Dame, but the icing on the cake was that Terry was black.
Kevin had lined up a high school kid named Drew Lattimore to play lead guitar. Kevin, Gink and Maverick told me that Drew was lights out, the best guitarist in town. I figured that had to be hyperbole, since there were many very good bands with very good guitarists in the area. They also wanted to add an ND underclassman, Bob Daily, as lead singer. At first I was not all that interested in the proposal. By the time this initial conversation took place, I had readjusted to life as a totally committed student without the responsibilities that come with being a band member. Except for a handful of isolated times, I had not even played the drums in over six months. But the biggest negative for me was the omission of Tom Beamer, one of my best friends at ND, who was the rhythm guitarist in the Dark Ages. Being in the Dark Ages was a lot of fun. Playing with Sal, and especially Tom, was the main reason.
Beamo was a pre-med major from Broadview, Illinois, a western suburb of Chicago. With the exception of my cousin Louie, he was and remains the funniest guy I have ever met. Tom and I lived a few doors away from each other in Cavanaugh Hall freshman year, and escaped the clutches of its rector, Father Micheli, by fleeing to Dillon sophomore year. (Check out my December 16, 2012 post, Black Matt Lowers The Boom.) Tom's Dillon roommate and mine were brothers, Ron and Wayne Cuchna, and the four of us hung out together quite a bit.
I have conveniently deleted from my memory most of what Tom and I discussed surrounding the demise of the Dark Ages and my invitation to hook up with Gink and Maverick in a new band. In retrospect my decision to eventually accept the invitation was misguided, but thankfully Tom and I have remained good friends for almost fifty years. In fact, I was a groomsman in his wedding, circa 1971, and he was my best man in 1976.
After wrestling with the decision I did decide to give band membership another try, and threw in my lot with Gink and Maverick. There were probably more (and better) reasons not to do so, including my friendship with Tom and the omnipresent time-budgeting problems. The Dark Ages was fun; the new band would be more business. But what twenty year old hasn't made a few dumb decisions? Part of my rationale was that I missed playing the drums, and I wanted to try to get back into that "hobby" to take my mind off of school for a few hours a week. The other part, I'm a little embarrassed to write, is that I was flattered when "Salesman Kevin" and my two former bandmates started singing my praises about my "talent" on the skins. It just goes to show that, under certain circumstances, flattery might get you somewhere. I knew Kevin was excellent at slinging the BS, yet when he used it on me I fell for it like a real rube.
We decided to have a practice or two with all five band members before anything became official. That was the first time I met Drew and Bob. Drew was just a seventeen year old kid, but he was everything I'd been told he would be. You might say he was the Jonny Lang of South Bend. Whoever coined the phrase "the hand is quicker than the eye" must have seen Drew work the frets; lightning fast. The piece de resistance was that he could play We Ain't Got Nothin' Yet by the Blues Magoos, one hit wonders who had reached # 5 on the Billboard charts earlier that year. We became the only band in The Bend whose guitarist could play that break, so naturally it became our signature song.
I don't remember much about Bob except that, for a lead singer, he was quiet and kind of on the shy side; just the opposite of Sal. They were both good singers, but with two different styles. Sal was the visceral Levi Stubbs to Bob's smooth Smokey Robinson. Somehow both techniques worked well in a rock band.
During that musical era there were a number of bands which had goofy but catchy, sometimes nonsensical names: Strawberry Alarm Clock, the Electric Prunes, Vanilla Fudge, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Moby Grape, 13th Floor Elevators, etc. The guys decided it would be hip to pick a name along the same vein for our new band. We kicked around a few, and finally settled on Lemon Oil Mahogany. It would be a better story (and name) if there was some hidden meaning to that choice, but alas, it came out of nowhere.
Kevin may have been full of bluster, but I will admit that he did, in fact, earn the one-sixth cut we agreed to give him to be our manager. He got us as many gigs as we could handle, which, given the fact that we were up to our eyeballs in school work, amounted to only one or two a month. We played at some clubs, house parties, bars (if they didn't ask if we were of legal age), and fraternal lodges around South Bend. Terry was our biggest fan. She never missed a show, and always showed up with a bunch of her friends. Kevin always worked the room, passing out business cards with our band's name and his contact information.
Ironically, the most memorable gig we had was the one we never performed. LOM was booked to play at a union hall in The Bend on Saturday night, April 6, 1968. As you might know, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis two days before, April 4. There were riots all over the country, and South Bend was no exception. I remember Kevin getting ahold of us the next day and telling us that the situation in South Bend was not safe, and that he was going to cancel our booking. I wouldn't be surprised if that was Terry's idea, but in any event, that's what he did. Who knows, the venue may have cancelled the show anyway, even if Kevin hadn't himself.
Like many cities in the country, South Bend took awhile to recover from the riots stemming from the King assassination. The tension was still in the air when we all went home for the summer. Needless to say, we did not book another show during that two month period.
After another summer grind of working at Olsen Tool, I was back at ND in the fall of '68, ready for my senior year. With studying, going to class, reading and worrying about the Viet Nam war every day, and realizing graduation was on the horizon, Lemon Oil Mahogany took a back seat in our collective minds (at least in the minds of the three of us who were seniors, i.e., Gink, Maverick and me). We decided that we had had a good run, we'd entertained a lot of people, and we mostly got out of the band experience what we had hoped for originally. After the Christmas break, LOM never played together again.
***
In the year 2000, Momma Cuandito and I went on a road trip with Jill (The Minnow) and her friend Susan Martinson. The water parks at Wisconsin Dells and lodging at an Amish farm in central Ohio were two biggies on our itinerary. The Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame in Cleveland was on my must-see list. As the four of us presented our admission tickets at the door, Jill went up to a uniformed concierge and asked him with a straight face, "Could you please tell us where the Lemon Oil Mahogany exhibition is located?" The poor guy answered that he didn't know.
The heyday of the Dark Ages was my sophomore year, 1966-1967. We played gigs both on and off campus. Live music was huge then, and it was fun to be a part of that scene. Our big moment in the sun was being selected to play on the South Quad before ND's homecoming game against Army. We set up right in front of Dillon Hall and drew a big audience. It may well have been the only gig we ever played without imbibing. At other shows we were usually up there trying to keep pace with the swilling crowd.
As I have admitted more than once to my son Michael, an extraordinary guitarist who has devoted hundreds of hours to his craft, neither I nor any of my bandmates considered ourselves to be serious musicians. In all honesty, we were simply "in it" to meet girls and drink (usually) free beer. The demands of studying were too time consuming to practice more than occasionally. We shot for once a week, but that was a loosely enforced regimen. Since we did not write music -- a truth having more to do with talent (or lack thereof) than time -- we were relegated to playing covers. Sadly, we were playing mostly the same twenty-five or thirty songs in the spring that we'd been playing the previous autumn. It took time to learn new songs, and time was a luxurious commodity none of us possessed. Thus, our repertoire became stagnant. Some weeks it was even hard to find the time to listen to new music, let alone play it. Things started winding down as we approached the end of the school year.
When I returned to The Bend for the beginning of junior year, I did not even bring my drums with me. I had spent my summer vacation working the second shift at a sweaty tool and die shop, Olsen Tool Company in Richfield, and as a result I was too pooped to practice much during those three months. The way things had tailed off in the spring with the Dark Ages, I figured we would not reunite in the fall of '67. You might say I was correct, but with an asterisk.
Some time in the late autumn of junior year, Gink and Maverick (the Dark Ages' bass player) approached me about a new band they were trying to put together. Gink had formed a friendship with one Kevin Mahoney, an older (mid-twenties) guy who, as I recall, had previously attended Notre Dame but had not graduated. He had some kind of sales job in The Bend, a perfect match for a person who came across as a big talker and a wheeler dealer. Kevin definitely had local connections, obviously helpful if not mandatory for landing gigs. He also had what Gink described as a "common law wife," which in those days simply meant that he lived with his girlfriend, Terry. (Legally, Indiana has never been a common law state.) That in itself was pretty cutting edge for 1967, at least in the semi-sheltered culture of Notre Dame, but the icing on the cake was that Terry was black.
Kevin had lined up a high school kid named Drew Lattimore to play lead guitar. Kevin, Gink and Maverick told me that Drew was lights out, the best guitarist in town. I figured that had to be hyperbole, since there were many very good bands with very good guitarists in the area. They also wanted to add an ND underclassman, Bob Daily, as lead singer. At first I was not all that interested in the proposal. By the time this initial conversation took place, I had readjusted to life as a totally committed student without the responsibilities that come with being a band member. Except for a handful of isolated times, I had not even played the drums in over six months. But the biggest negative for me was the omission of Tom Beamer, one of my best friends at ND, who was the rhythm guitarist in the Dark Ages. Being in the Dark Ages was a lot of fun. Playing with Sal, and especially Tom, was the main reason.
Beamo was a pre-med major from Broadview, Illinois, a western suburb of Chicago. With the exception of my cousin Louie, he was and remains the funniest guy I have ever met. Tom and I lived a few doors away from each other in Cavanaugh Hall freshman year, and escaped the clutches of its rector, Father Micheli, by fleeing to Dillon sophomore year. (Check out my December 16, 2012 post, Black Matt Lowers The Boom.) Tom's Dillon roommate and mine were brothers, Ron and Wayne Cuchna, and the four of us hung out together quite a bit.
I have conveniently deleted from my memory most of what Tom and I discussed surrounding the demise of the Dark Ages and my invitation to hook up with Gink and Maverick in a new band. In retrospect my decision to eventually accept the invitation was misguided, but thankfully Tom and I have remained good friends for almost fifty years. In fact, I was a groomsman in his wedding, circa 1971, and he was my best man in 1976.
After wrestling with the decision I did decide to give band membership another try, and threw in my lot with Gink and Maverick. There were probably more (and better) reasons not to do so, including my friendship with Tom and the omnipresent time-budgeting problems. The Dark Ages was fun; the new band would be more business. But what twenty year old hasn't made a few dumb decisions? Part of my rationale was that I missed playing the drums, and I wanted to try to get back into that "hobby" to take my mind off of school for a few hours a week. The other part, I'm a little embarrassed to write, is that I was flattered when "Salesman Kevin" and my two former bandmates started singing my praises about my "talent" on the skins. It just goes to show that, under certain circumstances, flattery might get you somewhere. I knew Kevin was excellent at slinging the BS, yet when he used it on me I fell for it like a real rube.
We decided to have a practice or two with all five band members before anything became official. That was the first time I met Drew and Bob. Drew was just a seventeen year old kid, but he was everything I'd been told he would be. You might say he was the Jonny Lang of South Bend. Whoever coined the phrase "the hand is quicker than the eye" must have seen Drew work the frets; lightning fast. The piece de resistance was that he could play We Ain't Got Nothin' Yet by the Blues Magoos, one hit wonders who had reached # 5 on the Billboard charts earlier that year. We became the only band in The Bend whose guitarist could play that break, so naturally it became our signature song.
I don't remember much about Bob except that, for a lead singer, he was quiet and kind of on the shy side; just the opposite of Sal. They were both good singers, but with two different styles. Sal was the visceral Levi Stubbs to Bob's smooth Smokey Robinson. Somehow both techniques worked well in a rock band.
During that musical era there were a number of bands which had goofy but catchy, sometimes nonsensical names: Strawberry Alarm Clock, the Electric Prunes, Vanilla Fudge, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Moby Grape, 13th Floor Elevators, etc. The guys decided it would be hip to pick a name along the same vein for our new band. We kicked around a few, and finally settled on Lemon Oil Mahogany. It would be a better story (and name) if there was some hidden meaning to that choice, but alas, it came out of nowhere.
Kevin may have been full of bluster, but I will admit that he did, in fact, earn the one-sixth cut we agreed to give him to be our manager. He got us as many gigs as we could handle, which, given the fact that we were up to our eyeballs in school work, amounted to only one or two a month. We played at some clubs, house parties, bars (if they didn't ask if we were of legal age), and fraternal lodges around South Bend. Terry was our biggest fan. She never missed a show, and always showed up with a bunch of her friends. Kevin always worked the room, passing out business cards with our band's name and his contact information.
Ironically, the most memorable gig we had was the one we never performed. LOM was booked to play at a union hall in The Bend on Saturday night, April 6, 1968. As you might know, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis two days before, April 4. There were riots all over the country, and South Bend was no exception. I remember Kevin getting ahold of us the next day and telling us that the situation in South Bend was not safe, and that he was going to cancel our booking. I wouldn't be surprised if that was Terry's idea, but in any event, that's what he did. Who knows, the venue may have cancelled the show anyway, even if Kevin hadn't himself.
Like many cities in the country, South Bend took awhile to recover from the riots stemming from the King assassination. The tension was still in the air when we all went home for the summer. Needless to say, we did not book another show during that two month period.
After another summer grind of working at Olsen Tool, I was back at ND in the fall of '68, ready for my senior year. With studying, going to class, reading and worrying about the Viet Nam war every day, and realizing graduation was on the horizon, Lemon Oil Mahogany took a back seat in our collective minds (at least in the minds of the three of us who were seniors, i.e., Gink, Maverick and me). We decided that we had had a good run, we'd entertained a lot of people, and we mostly got out of the band experience what we had hoped for originally. After the Christmas break, LOM never played together again.
***
In the year 2000, Momma Cuandito and I went on a road trip with Jill (The Minnow) and her friend Susan Martinson. The water parks at Wisconsin Dells and lodging at an Amish farm in central Ohio were two biggies on our itinerary. The Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame in Cleveland was on my must-see list. As the four of us presented our admission tickets at the door, Jill went up to a uniformed concierge and asked him with a straight face, "Could you please tell us where the Lemon Oil Mahogany exhibition is located?" The poor guy answered that he didn't know.
Great post, Dad!
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like such an exciting time in your life! I can't wait for you to dust of your drum kit and start playing again.
Jill