When We Was Kids: Willie Phoenix and Me In 1978

Right before I folded Growing Old With Rock & Roll the first time, back in 2013, I wrote a four (really five, including an appendix) part series about Columbus, Ohio, rock & roll genius Willie Phoenix.  I wrote that series because I couldn’t imagine NOT honoring Willie’s contributions to local Columbus rock & roll and – indeed – rock & roll in general before signing off Growing Old.  If I hadn’t met and befriended Willie in February 1978 I wouldn’t be HALF the rocker I am today.  I learned more from Willie about songwriting, about rehearsing a band, about attaining a sense of STYLE in rock & roll than from probably anybody else in my life.

That being said, it wasn’t like all that rock & roll education came as a chore.  Willie – and the rest of Romantic Noise: Greg Glasgow, John Ballor & Dee Hunt – and I pretty much had a BLAST all through 1978.  And it’s not like all this stuff is ancient history; my association with Willie continues to this day.  I found the piece reproduced below just this week while researching an article I wrote for Pencil Storm – my good friend Colin Gawel of Watershed’s blog – about the vinyl release of a single by Colin’s project The Willie Phoenix Tribute Machine.

About that 2013 series: You really need to promise me you’ll check those blogs out in tandem with this one.  Those were the meat & potatoes of the Willie Phoenix story, this blog is a dessert.  Here’s some links: The Ballad Of Willie Phoenix – Part One / Part Two / Part Three / Part Four.  (appendix to The Ballad of Willie Phoenix, the songs of Romantic Noise and The Buttons is also cool, and you should check it out.)

For the 21st century PC-minded among you, please keep in mind these stories played out in 1978: before sex could kill you; when being a member of a rock & roll band carried some weight; before FUN was disallowed in rock & roll.  I have often said that the two greatest things ever invented in the United States are: 1) the electric guitar, and 2) the American teenage girl.  In 1978 Willie and I had the utmost affection & respect for both, when we was kids.

(Romantic Noise, 1978)

(reprinted from Pencil Storm blog: Three Random Willie Phoenix Stories; March, 2015)

I

When I first met Willie in 1978, when he was leading Romantic Noise, the band (Willie, Greg Glasgow on bass & vocals, John Ballor on lead guitar & vocals, and Dee Hunt – the pride of Beckley, West Virginia – on drums) all lived together in a house on 4th Street, right around the corner from that little strip-shopping center on Summit, near Oakland, where Café Bourbon Street and The Summit are now located.  (To be exact, I’m not sure Willie lived there all the time.  As always, his living arrangements were and are a mystery to me, but he was consistently there whenever I dropped by to visit.)

Frequent visitors to the 4th Street house were The CookieBakers: three teenage girls – Erin, Kim & Cindy, by name – who came to all the bands’ gigs and, true to their name, baked cookies for the boys.  It was all really quite innocent & charming; the girls really did bake cookies and bring them to the house.  They weren’t groupies exactly, but Kim and Willie “dated” for quite some time and Erin later married and still later was divorced from Greg, so more than chocolate chips were exchanged, if you get my drift.

Anyway, one day in early spring ’78 we were all at the house and Erin was telling an elaborate story about something that had happened at high school that day.  She was wearing a longish skirt, but the skirt was also really sheer and once the setting sun starting pouring in the picture window in the front of the house, she might as well NOT HAVE BEEN WEARING A SKIRT AT ALL.  So Erin’s jumping around, acting out the story and the guys and I are all stifling laughs, just staring at her essentially naked from the waist down form, when Kim walks back in from the kitchen and yells, “ERIN, WHAT ARE YOU DOING??!!!?”

She pulls a confused Erin out of the sunlight while the rest of us just fall over laughing.  Erin turns beet-red and flees the room, pulling her skirt tighter well after the fact and Kim soundly reads us the riot act: “That wasn’t funny, you guys, that was just mean.”  I think she might have actually cuffed Willie on the head, and then she spun on me, saying, “I would have expected this from these guys, Ricki, but I really expected better behavior from you.”  What the hell?  Was my twelve-years-of-Catholic-school-upbringing really that apparent, even at that late a date?

“I’m just one of the boys,” I said to a livid Kim, “you’d best not expect that much of me.”  That became only truer and more accurate as the year went on.

II

It’s after a Romantic Noise gig at either the Drake Student Union on the Ohio State campus or a club called Cafe Rock & Roll, I can’t exactly recall which.  I’m packing up gear and Willie initiates a conversation with my lead singer & girlfriend Nicole, whom I’ve brought along to the show that night:

Willie – “Hey Nicole, why don’t we go out to my car?”

Nicole (feigning naivete, she’s seen this Willie show before) – “What would we do in your car, Willie?”  

Willie – “Oh, we’d just talk and stuff.  It’d be no big deal.”

Nicole – “Well, we could talk right here, Willie, we’re talking right now.”

Willie – “Yeah, but in my car, we could listen to music, or we could talk more private.  Or do more private things.”

Nicole (in a tone like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth)  – “Oh, I’m not sure Ricki would like it if we did more private things, Willie.”  

Willie – “Oh no, Ricki would be cool with that.  Ricki’s a cool guy.”

Ricki – “WILLIE, I’M STANDING RIGHT HERE.”

Willie (glancing briefly in my direction, and then totally ignoring the outburst) – “So, whattya say, should we go outside?”

Nicole – “We’re not going out to your car, Willie.”

Willie – “Okay, just give it some thought,” patting Nicole’s hand and walking over to a random girl standing by the bar, “Hey, why don’t we got out to my car?”

(Willie Phoenix & Dee Hunt: May, 1978) 

III

Drummer Dee Hunt, Willie & I are having a bite to eat at that Wendy’s on High Street across from campus by where Schoolkid’s Records used to be and Willie starts telling us – apropos of not much – that the night before he scored with a Hare Krishna girl he picked up at the airport.  Dee & I exchange a glance, and then Dee says, “You made it with a Hare Krishna girl?”  “Yeah,” Willie says, nonchalantly, like this is an everyday occurrence in the little rock & roll circles in which we move.

“Didn’t it creep you out that she was bald?” Dee asked, in those long-ago pre-Sinead O’Connor days of the late 1970’s.

“Well, I made her wear a hat,” Willie deadpans, and I laugh so hard that some of my Frosty comes out my nose.

Willie was my hero.

I miss the 1970’s. – Ricki C. / March 4th, 2015.

(your humble author: May, 1978)

© 2020 Ricki C.

Ricki C. Tunes, part four: Today Is Father's Day (Not-So-Instant Replay: Birthday Blog, 2013)

My sainted Italian father - Al Cacchione Sr. - died 50 years ago today, of a heart attack, at the age of 56, when I was 17 years old.  I decided to re-post this blog - which originally ran June 30th, 2013 - today, in his honor, and to add a song at the end, in tribute to him.  I miss him to this day.

Birthday Blog 2013

It's my birthday today.  I'm 61 years old.  I worked a rock & roll show today, serving as a roadie for Colin Gawel & The Lonely Bones, my good friend Colin's side-project band when Watershed is not taking the stage.  That appearance was at Comfest, a local Columbus hippie fete that I have attended as an observer since its inception in 1972.  In some capacity (roadie, performer, volunteer, stage manager, etc.) I have participated in Comfest since 1978 when - as a roadie for Romantic Noise - I  helped bassist Greg Glasgow limp onto the stage after a forklift driver drove over Greg's foot at his warehouse temp job the day before the gig, and put Greg on crutches.  (Ah, the glamorous rock & roll lifestyle.)

But that's not what this blog entry is about.

This blog entry is about my dad, traveling, hotels and growing old with rock & roll.

My dad was the greatest person I have ever known.  He died of a heart attack at the age of 56 when I was 17 years old, in April of my senior year of high school.  I myself am on my second cardiac pacemaker and have so far outlived him by five years, but only with the bonus benefits of technology.

My father gave me my whole world.  When I was 13 years old in 1965, dad started to get me into the rock & roll shows he worked as a ticket agent for Central Ticket Office, an early forerunner of what Ticket Master would become.  It was my father's nighttime job after his main occupation at Columbia Gas of Ohio.  My mom and dad both worked two jobs.  They were children of The Great Depression and carried to their graves a legacy and a fear of not knowing where their next dollar was coming from.

Dad saw how interested I was in rock & roll and started bringing me along with him to shows at Veteran's Memorial or the Lausche Building on the Ohio State Fairgrounds.  I was an incredibly shy, introverted child and I think the fact that I was willing to leave the shelter/womb of our house on the West Side to see a rock & roll show heartened my dad so much he'd have brought/driven/conveyed me anywhere, let alone the three or four miles it was from home to Vet's Memorial.

At first it was package shows like The Turtles with Neil Diamond and Every Mother's Son ("Come On Down To My Boat") opening; or Paul Revere & The Raiders with The Standells and Sam the Sham & The Pharoahs.  But then, as The Sixties got into full swing I saw Bob Dylan's first electric tour with The Band (when they were still called The Crackers), The Doors, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Janis Joplin & the Full-Tilt Boogie Band, Cream and - most crucially - The Who on November 1st, 1969.  (sidenote: Not one of those shows sold out the 3000-seat Veteran's Memorial.  Dad would bring me to the show, wait for the opening acts to start, then pull me a single unsold seat somewhere.  Advance sales to The Who show in 1969 were so slow that dad pulled me FOUR SEATS; one each for my best friend and our dates, a date I almost certainly would never have had but for the grace of my dad and of the rock & roll.)  (Tickets for that Who show, by the way, were $3.50.) 

Those shows, and rock & roll in general, quite literally gave me a reason for living.  (see blog entry The Bathtub, January 13th, 2012.)

Dad gave me other stuff: he instilled in me a love of traveling.  In 1962, when I was 10, a coupla years before The Beatles first appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show and Changed Everything, dad had started to take my older brother and I to Cleveland Browns football games.  This was in the Browns' heyday, when fullback Jim Brown was a true star of the National Football League and the Super Bowl hadn't been invented yet.  We would stay at the Sheraton Gibson Hotel right off Fountain Square.  The Sheraton Gibson, and hotels in general, became MAGICAL to me.  You could LIE IN BED and watch television.  You could TAKE SHOWERS.  (Our bathroom at home sported only a claw-foot bathtub.)  You could look out the 20th floor window and see all the lights of the city spread out under you.  I felt like a king.  (sidenote: When Pete Townshend's first solo album, Who Came First, was released in 1972 with a track called "Sheraton Gibson" I was BEYOND THRILLED that I had once occupied the same building, the same square footage, as my Number One Rock Hero of that time.) 

I remember very clearly one night in 1965 on the way home from Vet's, when dad was explaining the concept of touring to me, that musicians had to be on the road all the time.  I just looked at him wide-eyed and said, "You mean all these guys do is play guitars & drums in a different city every night and stay in hotels in between?"  I was incredulous.  I was dumbstruck.  Dad couldn't have possibly realized what he had just done.  He might just as well have stamped Unfit For A Normal Job Of Any Kind across my 13-year old forehead right at that very moment.

My dad never got to travel much: those trips to Cleveland, our family summer vacations to the likes of Cedar Point Amusement Park in Upper Sandusky, Ohio, an annual autumn trip to South Bend, Indiana, to see a Notre Dame football game with his Columbia Gas buddies.  One time when I was 12 he took my sister and I to Florida.  It was my first time flying and I was so nervous I threw up on the plane.  I was such a miserable little kid.  Dad, I wish I could have been better for you.

When my father died I think I had a little nervous breakdown.  I can't really remember much of anything from April or May of that year, but by June 1970 when I graduated from Bishop Ready High School I had decided two things: 1) I was never ever going to have a job where I had to wear a suit & tie to work; and 2) I was going to travel and describe to dad all the things I saw.

It's my birthday today.  I'm 61 years old.  I accomplished the first goal by working in warehouses most of my adult life and discovering that bluejeans and a black t-shirt will get you through most days quite nicely.  On most of my vacations from work I traveled to see rock & roll bands; to Massachusetts, to Texas, to California, to a lotta points in between.

I accomplished the second goal by becoming a rock & roll roadie in my 40's and crisscrossing the length & breadth of these United States (multiple times) with Hamell On Trial and Watershed.

Dad, you were with me every step of the way: every new sight out of every car, truck, bus, van & airplane window; every street of every city & town; every mile of every tour.  This blog is for you.  It's a happy birthday.

Ricki C. · Today Is Father's Day

Except for the first verse - which I wrote in room 435 of an Austin, TX. Red Roof Inn in the mid-90's while attending the South By Southwest Festival - I wrote this song in the car on Father's Day, 2002, on a freeway near Virginia Beach.  I couldn't slow down or stop to write down the lyrics, so I just had to try to remember them 'til I got to that day's gig, somewhere in the South that I can't/don't recall. 

blog © 2020 Ricki C. / song © 2002 Ricki C.