60 Years On From The Bathtub - October 30th, 2025

Longtime and/or serious readers of Growing Old With Rock & Roll might remember The Bathtub, the first full-length entry in the blog back in 2012, that served as a kind of "origin story" to the rest of the proceedings. 

Rather than just posting a link, I've decided to reprint the piece in its entirety here.......

The Bathtub

I was 13 years old in October 1965. Eighth grade just was not working out. I had been a shy, book-reading child, now hormones were kicking in. I loved rock & roll but I just knew I was NEVER going to know how to talk to girls. (This was years before I got ahold of a guitar.) One really bad Saturday night I decided to kill myself. I had it all worked out. I had seen a mafia movie just that week about a guy getting electrocuted when a radio was tossed into the bathtub he was in. (I was a very impressionable child.)

After everybody had left for the evening (my mom and dad were working their second jobs; my sister was on a date; my brother was at the bar) I went around the house and found a radio with a power cord long enough to reach the bathtub. I ran the bath, plugged in the radio, settled into the warm water, said a little prayer for forgiveness, and let the radio drop. What I hadn't factored in was that although the cord was long enough to reach the tub, I hadn't filled it full enough. Right when the radio hit the water the plug pulled out. I got a nasty shock, I was seeing big purple and black blobs in my field of vision, but it didn't kill me.

I lifted the radio out and laid there in the water a few minutes to let my head clear. I got out and ran some more water in the tub until I was certain I had the right water level for the job at hand. I plugged the radio back in and what was playing? "Get Off My Cloud" by The Rolling Stones. I stood there naked, dripping and chilly, eighth-grade skinny, and listened to the entire song. Right at that moment I quite literally loved that song more than I loved life itself. And then a thought came very clearly into my head: "What if the next Rolling Stones single is even BETTER than this one, and I never get to hear it?"

I set the radio down on the sink, got back in the tub, took a bath and went to bed. If "Danke Schoen" by Wayne Newton or "Roses Are Red" by Bobby Vinton had been playing at the moment I plugged that radio back in I'd be dead now. Long live The Rolling Stones. So began a life of rock & roll.
　
© 2012 Ricki C.

Employing research tools available on the InterWideWeb I've managed to figure out the exact date of that suicide attempt; using the date of the Bob Dylan show I saw two weeks later, a calendar of October, 1965, and the Billboard chart rankings for "Get Off My Cloud" by The Rolling Stones, among other signposts.

That date was Saturday night October 30th, 1965, right around 9:15 pm. 

I was 13 that night. I'm 73 now. 

Here's what's happened in between.

ME AND DAD

My dad figures heavily in my Life of Rock & Roll.  There are entire blogs about him in Growing Old With Rock & Roll.  I'm going to link one here, but it's not integral to this part of the narrative, so feel free to just circle back to it later.

Today Is Father's Day 

Looking back on that suicidal Saturday night I realize how selfish an act it would have been.  It would have very nearly killed my dad, I think, if I had gone through with ending my life.  He would have felt like he failed me somehow.  But he had ALWAYS encouraged me in anything/everything I had ever wanted to do.  He had never once made me feel like the disappointment I imagined I was to him.  I wasn't an athlete.  I was not yet a musician.  I really wasn't really much of anything but a friendless 13-year old kid who read a lot of books, listened to a lot of 45 rpm rock & roll records alone in the basement, and didn't know how to talk to people.

In 1967, within two years of surviving that night dad bought me my first guitar, an acoustic; then my second, a beat-up secondhand electric Stratocaster knock-off that looked exactly like the guitar Jimi Hendrix played at Woodstock, a guitar I loved with a passion.  In 1968 I joined my first rock & roll band.  

Dad died of a heart attack in April, 1970, less than two years after that. 

One night in 1990 - after I had debuted my solo acoustic rocker act - I played a show opening for Willie Phoenix.  Afterwards a bunch of my fellow musicians, their girlfriends or wives, and a sprinkling of friends & strangers were sitting around a big table at Bernie's Bagels.  I was talking about how dad had been the entire reason I ever survived to become a rocker but died before he could ever see me actually play a show.  A girl I had never met said, "Weren't you talking onstage about being Catholic?"  "Yeah," I replied.

"Well then, given everything you're supposed to believe in, don't you think he's seen EVERY show you've ever played?" she said quietly.

I never saw that girl again in my life, but I thank her to this day for that question.   

THINGS THAT WOULD NEVER HAVE HAPPENED IF I HAD DIED OCT 30th, 1965 

(in no particular order)

I would never have written a song.

I would never have tasted shrimp.

I would never have heard an Elliott Murphy song.  

I would never have seen every Bruce Springsteen tour from 1976 through a couple of years ago.

I would never have learned to worship Mott The Hoople in general and Ian Hunter in particular.

I would never have kissed Joyce.  I would never have kissed Marilyn.  I would never have kissed Linda.  I would never have kissed Jodie.  I would never have kissed Teresa.  I would never have kissed (and married) Pat.  I would never have kissed Kim (and ended that marriage).  I would never have kissed Mary Jo.  I never got to kiss Jenny, but goddamn did I want to badly.  I would never have kissed Sharon.  I would never have kissed (and married) Debbie, my little love.

I would never have seen a picture of Lou Reed in a black t-shirt and altered my wardrobe forever.

I would never have fallen under the sway of Tom Petty and Joe Strummer, my polar opposite rocker discoveries of 1976 and 1977.

I would never have read a book by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

THE TEN BEST YEARS OF MY LIFE

From the dawn of the 21st century - 2000 to 2010 - I served as the road manager for Hamell On Trial, a solo acoustic rocker whom I have often detailed/explained as "a four-man punk band rolled into one bald, sweaty guy."  We traversed the entirety of America - from sea to shining sea, as it were - 5 or 6 times in that ten years, hitting 44 of the 48 contiguous United States along the way.  (And Hamell played Alaska, but the promoter wouldn't pay for me to go along.)

It was the best of times with no worst of times.  Ed Hamell was a solo acoustic act; we traveled in one car with an amp-stack taller than he was, two guitars and our luggage.  Ed did not EVER want to see daylight.  He would stay up 'til 5 or 6 in the morning while I slept 2 am to 8 am.  I'd wake him up at 11 am in whatever Motel 6 we were in in whichever city, he'd shamble into the car and sleep until soundcheck in the next town, then go back to the car to sleep some more.  I'd instruct the opening act to let me know when they were 3 songs from the end of their set, then head back to the car with a can of Red Bull, wake Ed up, and he'd head into the club to tear things up with 90 minutes of some of the best music I've ever heard in my life.

Then, if need be, Ed would drive all night to the next city while I slept in the passenger seat.  He'd wake me at 8 am, and again - if need be - I'd drive the rest of the way to the next tour stop. 

The next day we'd do it all again.

For ten years.

It was heaven.

WATERSHED

Five years into that process - 2005 - Colin Gawel came into Ace In The Hole Music Exchange (my day-job throughout the traveling years when I wasn't on the road) and asked if I might be interested in touring with his band Watershed as a merch person & guitar tech when I wasn't out with Hamell.

My first reaction to that job offer was, "Who died?"  I'd been a fan of Watershed since 1990, 15 years earlier and they had exactly the same band line-up (with one drummer change) and exactly the same road crew that entire time.  It turned out longtime roadie Rob had finally had enough of the almost-constant traveling Watershed indulged in and got a straight job.

I got in that van with Colin, Joe, Dave, & Biggie, and never looked back.

I have that job to this day, 20 years later. 

THINGS THAT WOULD NEVER HAVE HAPPENED, part two

I would never have met and worked for Willie Phoenix, who improved my songwriting by about 85%.

I would never have marveled in silent wonder at the guitar playing of Mike Parks; one time in 1970 when I was still in high school, then countless times in the 1990's & 21st century with Willie Phoenix & the True Soul Rockers and The League Bowlers, when I was lucky enough to serve as his roadie.

I would never have met Jim Johnson, a Rockin' Gibraltar of a drummer.

I would never have met John Vincent, my guide & mentor into the Columbus solo acoustic scene.

I would never have gotten to play at Midgard Comics - probably the all-time highlight of my musical existence in popularity terms - and formed a decades-long friendship with owner/rocker Keith Cretin.

I would never have met Dave Blackburn - my high school best friend - who taught me everything I know about music, and whom this song is about.

WINDING UP

Okay, let's start winding this up.  The last twenty years or so of the story have been pretty well covered in this blog.  I have grown old with rock & roll as the title implies.  And that's not necessarily all hearts & flowers.

I sometimes look back in 2025 and question my behaviors.  In my late 20's in the early 1980's I used to fly to Boston on People's Airlines on weekends just to see a band called The Neighborhoods.  I now sometimes find it difficult to muster the will to drive 13 miles to WORK A GIG with one or the other of Colin's bands at Natalie's Grandview.

In my 30's and 40's I would work 40 hours a week - 9 to 5 - at a catalog showroom (a class of retail store that doesn't even EXIST anymore) called Service Merchandise; unloading trucks and pulling orders, relatively hard physical labor.  I would then roadie for Willie Phoenix from 7 pm to 4 am on Friday and Saturday nights; saving Sundays to roll out of bed at noon, not get dressed, and watch NFL football for up to 10 hours.  And then do it all over again the next week.

Nowadays I find it a lovely day when I can feed and watch birds & squirrels outside my living room sliding doors and spoil the local geese with cracked corn paid for with my Social Security cash.  

My sainted Italian father died at 56.  I am now 73.  I have outlived him by 17 years, the exact same amount of time we had together before a heart attack took him away.  What if guardian angels really exist and dad has been mine for all this time?  

I live in Ohio.  I play the guitar.  Not because I want to, because I HAVE to.  I have to. 

I still write songs.

I still play gigs.  

And I still say, "God bless Keith Richards and The Rolling Stones for saving my life in that bathtub."

It's been 60 years.  It's 9:15 pm.

Richard Cacchione at 13

Ricki C. at 73

Ricki C. is 73 years old and has two drawers full of black rock & roll t-shirts, which he wears incessantly. He also has a hand-tooled leather hippie belt from 1972 that still fits. He has congestive heart failure and prostate cancer and KNOWS that all this rock & roll nonsense has to stop someday.

But not yet.

blog © 2025 Ricki C.

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.

The Ballad of Willie Phoenix, part four - The True Soul Rockers & beyond, 1990-2013

I became a roadie for The True Soul Rockers quite by accident one Sunday afternoon in 1990 when Willie and the band were playing an outdoor show at Mirror Lake on the Ohio State University campus.  I was sitting in the audience with a girl I'd dated for much of the 1980's - who shall remain nameless for her various crimes & misdemeanors against the rock & roll - when Willie gestured for me to come up on the stage.  I actually looked around to see if he was signaling somebody behind me, but finally realized I was the one being beckoned.

I hadn't noticed that Willie had broken a guitar string until I met him at centerstage and he said, "Hey Ricki, can you change this for me?"  There were two young kids bustling around with the gear before the show - a girl with wildly curly hair I would later come to know as "Cheese" and work with for months, and a kid named Eric - and I couldn't figure why they didn't handle the string situation.  I put that question to Willie and he said dismissively, "Those kids don't know anything about changing strings.  Help me out."  I remember being totally taken aback and saying to Willie, "You have TWO roadies and neither one of them know how to change a guitar string?  You're slippin', Willie."

I broke up a long-term relationship to roadie for that band.  One night while driving home from a show at Ruby Tuesdays (where The True Soul Rockers maintained a residency similar to the The Flower Machine's earlier one) the girlfriend from paragraph one said, apropos of not much, "It's really kinda sad that all you guys are almost 40 years old and you're still trying to recapture your teenage glory days."  I broke up with her that very night, not because the comment was necessarily inaccurate or hurtful, but because it was clear she would never understand the Elemental Essential Truth of Bruce Springsteen singing, "Some guys, they just give up living and start dying little by little, piece by piece / Some guys come home from work and wash up and go racing in the street."

We weren't trying to recapture teenage glory days, we were simply trying to keep SOMETHING for ourselves in a world that seeks daily to take everything away.  Sometimes I think we still are.

The True Soul Rockers rhythm section consisted of Kozmos (held over from the Flower Machine) on bass and Jim Johnson (brought back from The Shadowlords) on drums.  The two new recruits were Mike Parks on backing vocals & shared lead guitar duties with Willie and - for at least the first year of the band - Ralph Denny on organ.  The Rockers (as they will be henceforth referred to herein) were a truly fearsome live unit.  My roadie stint with them was one of those times in my rock & roll life where I often found myself thinking, "I'm getting PAID to see and hear rock & roll music played this well, with this much power, commitment and sheer flat-out fucking QUALITY?  I've got the best job on the planet."

There were rock & roll moments I'll never forget with The Rockers: Mike Parks jamming the headstock of his Stratocaster into the brick wall at stage-right of Ruby's, using that wall to warp the neck of his guitar to get the desired bends of the notes he was searing out into the smoky air of the club; Willie venturing out almost nightly during third set-ending renditions of "Gloria" to inflict terror-raids onto the tabletops of unsuspecting audience members; Willie utilizing Kozmos as his onstage foil in Bruce Springsteen/Clarence Clemons-like rock & roll stage bits; Jim & Ralph seated stolidly at their instruments, anchoring the band John Enwhistle-style, keeping them from simply flying off into space.  It's no accident here that I've invoked my two favorite live bands of the 1960's and 1970's - The Who and Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, respectively - in that sentence.  On their best nights, The True Soul Rockers were one of the three best live bands I witnessed in the 1990's.  (For an full account of a workaday night from that gigging period check out Willie Phoenix & the True Soul Rockers vs. Frat Boy Friday Night from the May 30, 2012 entry of this blog.)

Unfortunately, (you could just FEEL an unfortunately coming here, couldn't you?) all that live firepower didn't translate to wax (or plastic, or whatever CD's are made of) on the Radio Simplicity album released in 1991, at the height of the band's popularity.  Radio Simplicity was certainly a solid collection of Willie tunes: ranging from quality rockers the band could knock out in their sleep ("Guys Like Me Don't Get Girls Like You," "Stick With Me," "Housewreckin'") to reggae or dance-inflected left-field numbers ("She's So Powerful," "Dancin' In Suspicion," "Suffocation") to the rock & roll ballads Willie had always been good at ("Walk You Home," "Dark Pages").  There was not one trace, however, of the incendiary twin lead guitar attack that Willie & Mike unleashed nightly in the live sets.  And, even more problematically, arguably the two best songs on the record - "Take My Advice" and "Hey Little Girl" - were brought back into the set in souped-up renditions from The Buttons repertoire of 10 years earlier.

And therein lies my Essential Quandary with the Willie Phoenix Experience.  At the same time I know in my heart and believe to my soul that if Willie gathered together all of his best material from the last 35 years into a Greatest Hits Set - "No Exits," "Artwork," "Knockout Girl" from Romantic Noise and The Buttons, "The Sketch" and "New York Is Burning" from The A&M Band, "This Is My Apartment" and "Misunderstanding" from The Shadowlords, even "Mild Tasting Tea" from the lackluster Flower Machine period - that it would be a live repertoire to truly reckon with, I also fully realize that Willie isn't interested in being a Nostalgia Act.  He's interested in moving forward with new material, new concepts, and his new band: Blues Hippy & The Soul Underground.  It would be hypocritical of me to ask Willie to draw exclusively on his past material and ignore progression while constantly badmouthing Pete Townshend for doing the same thing with The Who.

But goddamn, the rock & roll public hasn't had Willie Phoenix's Greatest Hits ground incessantly into pablum on classic-rock radio in mind-numbing Endless Heavy Rotation like those Who Hits, and it would be so great to hear Willie's best songs live all in one place again.

By time The True Soul Rockers split up in 1992 I had moved on from my roadie station at the side of the stage into my own solo acoustic rock & roll act.  Between that and my road manager position beginning in 2000 with Hamell On Trial and later joining Watershed's road crew in 2005 - jobs that frequently took me out of Columbus and around the U.S.A. - I kinda lost track of Willie's later bands.  (Jim Johnson played in many of those bands and would be THE authority on Willie's 21st-century output - live and on record - maybe we can get him to contribute a guest blog sometime.)

Just a few weeks ago, Colin Gawel & The Lonely Bones - Colin's side-project from Watershed - opened a show for Blues Hippy & The Soul Underground at a local Columbus club.  It's a solid rock project, with Myke Rock (of late-70's Columbus punk-rockers Screaming Urge) on bass and Johnson once again returning on drums along with new second guitarist Dan-ro James.  The effect is kinda Willie Phoenix & Crazy Horse.  The band sets up some great rough-edged rock grooves for Willie to solo over and it's a rockin' good time.  Do I wish the caliber of the original material was a little bit higher?  Yeah, I do.  Do I want Willie's lyrics to reflect our reality as 60-year old Elder Statesmen Rockers a little bit more than the same old rebels & angels sentiments Willie has mined for at least the last 20 years?  Yeah, I really do. 

But outside of that petty criticism, it just feels good to see Willie on a stage, wielding a Tele like some lovely sonic deadly weapon and singing his heart, soul & guts out.  It's a pleasure to bear witness to a Rock & Roll Survivor.  "Some guys, they just stop living, and start dying little by little piece by piece / Some guys come home from work and wash up and go racing in the street."

The True Soul Rockers, 1992

Left to right; Mike Parks, Kozmos, Willie Phoenix, Jim Johnson

Three sets a night, every gig.  Think kid bands could do that nowadays?  I think not.

The True Soul Rockers set list, December 23rd, 1990.



© 2013 Ricki C.

The Ballad of Willie Phoenix, part three - The Shadowlords and The Flower Machine, 1983-1989

After the A&M album bombed and Willie was dropped by the label, he returned to Columbus and broke up The Big Band.  (It was really too unwieldy and expensive a proposition to keep a seven-piece band together on local gigs.)  After woodshedding for a few months he returned in the winter of 1983 with the brand-spanking new Shadowlords: the ever-dependable Greg Glasgow on bass & backing vocals, Tom McClelland on rhythm guitar and Jim Johnson on drums.

I first met Johnson - who is still serving behind the drum kit today in 2013 with Blues Hippy & The Soul Underground, Willie's current band, and who might hold the record for the most years and most gigs played with Phoenix - at a gig at a Lum's Restaurant across the street from the OSU Mershon Auditorium on a snowy night in 1983.  As I recall we hit it off right away.  He hailed from Youngstown, Ohio, giving him a solid grounding in working-class Attitude, and he understood what constituted rock & roll and what didn't.  (One of my most-repeated quotes of the 30 years since that night has been, "Jim's musical interests run the gamut from The Rolling Stones to The Rolling Stones."  I think people sometimes misinterpret that phrase as a put-down.  I mean it in absolutely the most positive way.)  We somehow wound up talking that night about Willie Nile, a songwriter I loved who most people were barely aware of.  Jim admired Nile's rocker attitude crossed with a lyrical poetry bent.  I subsequently found Jim to be that rarest of rock & roll drummers: somebody who actually listens to the lyrics and serves the song, instead of just simply driving the beat.  The friendship born that night stands strong to this day.

The biggest change from Big Band to Shadowlords was that Willie had started playing lead guitar in the interim.  And Jesus, what a lead guitar player he had become.  He was a great, quirky, idiosyncratic soloist.  Willie's solos never started or ended anyway near where you expected them to.  (Later, in 1990's True Soul Rockers, when Willie was paired with Mike Parks - who essayed an absolutely slashing, rock-solid (no pun intended) style of lead guitar - Willie found the second lead guitar foil he had always needed.  Willie & Mike playing together was like having Richard Thompson & Duane Allman playing in the same band, but they somehow pulled it off.)

That lead guitar playing persona, however, proved to be both a blessing and a curse for Willie.  The band got exponentially more popular (rockers in the Midwest LOVE guitar heroes) and Willie's performances - playing behind his back, launching forays into the audience to play from atop bar patrons' tables, walking out onto High Street sidewalks with an extra-long guitar cord to play solos to incredulous passersby - started to take on Legend Status, but it all took a toll on Willie's songwriting prowess.  Where once we were gifted with melodic gems sporting pretty cool if somewhat vague lyrics, a certain percentage of The Shadowlords repertoire consisted of good-but-not-great compositions that served as a mere jumping-off point for Willie's extended guitar solos.  (I remember one night when Greg Glasgow told me in a desultory tone that nowadays the band only rehearsed the beginnings and endings of the songs and just slogged through the middles waiting for Willie to finish soloing.)

At some point I took over roadie duties from Rod Cline.  George Golding took over from me.  Then I came back.  Then George came back.  Willie would burn us out every six months or so.  It was very Tale Of Two Cities: Willie was the best of bosses, Willie was the worst of bosses.  Jan Bungart was there every inch of the way, God bless her little heart.  She was the band manager, associate producer on both Shadowlords albums - 1983's We Love Noise and 85's Not A Butterfly - and essentially held the entire operation together with spit & baling wire and sheer force of will.
 
Guitarist Steve Donnellon replaced Tom McClelland sometime in 1984.  Donnellon was a much stronger player than McClelland but somehow it seemed like the band lost a little bit of innocence when Tom left.  As a rock unit, however, Steve was a solid addition.  The main problem with the two Shadowlords albums - much like the A&M release before them - was one of inferior material.  "Why should I waste my best originals on these little indie records that nobody's ever gonna hear?" Willie told me between sets one night, "I'm holding out my best songs for my next major label deal."  Nobody, and I mean nobody, could get across to Willie that by the mid-80's the major labels were all using indie labels like Major League Baseball used farm teams.  Until The New York Yankees saw a player on the Columbus Jets produce big-time on the Triple-A level, they weren't getting their shot at The Big Show.  Until Columbia or Arista - or even RCA or Mercury - would even consider signing a new act, they were going to have to see them shift 50,000 units on their own on an indie before they'd even bother to send an A&R guy to check out the band.  The major labels wanted somebody else to do all the legwork, to lay all the groundwork, so they could simply waltz in and skim off the profits from other people's hard labor.  Times had changed in the music business and Willie wasn't changing with them.  I have a cassette full of tunes better than the ones recorded on the Shadowlords albums, and I don't even have the A-material.

As stated above, The Shadowlords were wildly popular in Columbus, could pretty much pack local clubs at will, were the undisputed Kings Of Comfest - a popular summer hippie-fest that survives to this day in Goodale Park - regularly holding down the Saturday night closing slot.  And that's about the way it stayed for the band's almost 5-year existence.  It never really got bigger, it never really got smaller, and the local tastemakers & hip intelligentsia (if there was or is such a thing in Columbus) came to view them as a talented band sadly going nowhere.  Finally in 1988, right after another Comfest headlining show, Willie broke up the band.

Willie's next project was The Flower Machine, a full-blown High Concept Band that attempted to evoke a full-on recreation of 1960's Psychedelia.  Joining Willie in the power-trio format were old Marion buddies Jim "Kozmos" Cummings and Jerry Hanahan, formerly of The Buttons and The Big Band, back on drums.  To me, the biggest casualty of The Flower Machine period was bassist Greg Glasgow.  In retrospect, Greg was the heart & soul of Willie's bands.  He was the Quality Control Master.  It was Glasgow that grounded Willie from his worst excesses, if The Flower Machine is any gauge.  He was the last musician to call "bullshit" on questionable Willie tunes and questionable Willie moves.  And when Greg left The Shadowlords he left music entirely, became a paralegal, and never looked back.  To this day I consider the absence of Greg Glasgow as a huge loss to the Columbus music scene.  He was a great bass player & great singer, and an even better person.  I miss seeing his face on a stage.

The Flower Machine set up shop at a Fourth Street bar called Ruby Tuesday's (no relation to the family casual-dining restaurant chain) and remained popular through sometime in 1989.  I kept waiting (and wishing) for them to get better, but they never did.

One Friday night, late in The Flower Machine's existence, I attended one of their Ruby's shows with Glasgow.  About halfway through their first set Greg's assessment was "Oh, this is just awful." as Willie reeled off solo after solo in hippie garb & headband and Koz - attired in what would become his trademark top hat and preacher's frock coat - attempted to find the beat woozily laid down by Hanahan.  Greg bailed after the first of three sets, flatly refusing my request to confront Willie in a kind of Rock & Roll Intervention and get him to break up the band.  "You want to tell Willie Phoenix to his face that his band sucks?" Greg said, shaking his head at my presumption.  "You go right ahead, Ricki, do what you have to do, but leave me out of it.  I've been friends with the guy for a long time and personally I want him to talk to me again sometime in the future."

After the second set, as I attempted to get Willie away from a group of admirers & well-wishers (no matter how bad Willie's bands were, they ALWAYS attracted hangers-on) to deliver my "Your band is highly deficient and you need to move on." speech, Willie spotted me, grabbed my arm and said in his usual rapid-fire patter, "Ricki, you got your car here?  You got a cassette player?  You need to hear this tape, NOW!"  Fearing the worst, and steeling myself to harsh Willie's Flower Machine groove, we went out to my car and Willie cued up a cassette.  Out of my car speakers burst "Electric Folk-Dreamin' Man" and "I Wanna Feel What We Used To" - absolutely the two best songs I had heard from Willie since the Romantic Noise or Buttons days.

I couldn't believe my ears.  Those two and at least three others on the tape were short, alternately punchy or gorgeously heartfelt new tunes that couldn't have been further afield from the hippiefied indulgences of The Flower Machine.  Before I could even begin my Flower Machine diatribe, Willie informed me this was that band's last show and he was forming a new band that could play the new songs he'd been writing.  And just like that, just that easily, just that simply, The True Soul Rockers were born.

The Shadowlords, 1985

Left to right; Jim Johnson, Steve Donnellon, Willie Phoenix, Greg Glasgow



(coming up in the fourth and final installment of The Ballad of Willie Phoenix,

The True Soul Rockers & beyond, 1990-2013.)

© 2013 Ricki C.



The Ballad Of Willie Phoenix, part two - The A&M Band, 1981-1982

After The Buttons split up in 1980, Willie turned his attentions to a solo career.  Romantic Noise and The Buttons had been pure power-pop creations: four-piece guitars & drums bands stressing harmonies and three-minute pop confections of the highest order.  Willie's next band was formed with the idea of extensively widening that rock & roll palette.

Contemporaneous articles of the time - from the Ohio State Lantern and The Monthly Planet (the completely dreck-ridden, unlamented successor to Focus as Columbus' music weekly) - tell me the name of that band was, alternately, The Stray Revival or Willie & The Passions.  I never heard the band called by either one of those names.  Rockers around town routinely called it "Willie's Big Band" and later, after they were signed, "The A&M Band."  Stray Revival or Passions?  I don't think so, though both are cool names.

That band was comprised of Willie on rhythm guitar & lead vocals, Greg Glasgow - Willie's right-hand man, held over from the earlier bands - on bass & backing vocals, Rob Brumfiel on lead guitar, Mel McGary on keyboards and Gary "The Captain" Strauss, a strapping 300-pound drum-basher.  There were always two or three female back-up singers (who were dubbed "The Willie-ettes" in tribute to Ray Charles' girl singers - beginning with CiCi Hank and Tracy LaTour - but I swear there were different girls every few months.  (If my memory serves, even Donna Mogavero - later and still a popular Columbus folkie singer/songwriter around town - was a Willie-ette at one time.)

The sound of The Big Band was solid heartland rock & roll.  Willie's songs got longer, more involved, much expanded from his previous power-pop stylings.  It wasn't prog, by any standard, but man did some of those songs have a lot of sections.  Think Bob Seger or John Cougar (pre-Mellencamp), maybe with a little Bruce Springsteen thrown into the mix.  (I remember thinking one night I was glad they didn't have a saxophone player or it all might have been a little bit TOO obvious.)

Again, Willie scrapped the entire previous bands' repertoire and started over from scratch.  A couple of songs - "Mary" and "New York Is Burning" - existed in Willie's pre-power-pop acoustic sets and were revived in revved-up form for the Big Band.  Brand-new tunes "Champaign," "Bowery Express," "Old Man," "Too Much Traffic," "Crawling King Snake," "The Sketch," were introduced into the set and the hits just kept on coming.  The Big Band had three solid 45-minute sets of material worked up and with a six-piece band behind him, Willie's performances got just as amped-up as the songs.

At one point the band held down a Tuesday night residency at a High Street club adjacent to the OSU campus called Zachariah's.  Zachariah's was a former hippie hangout - home to Columbus country-rockers McGuffey Lane and Spittin' Image - that by 1981 was trying to draw a more rockin' clientele as country-rock faded from view into the mists of the 1970's.  Zachariah's was taller than it was wide, built on three levels, with two balconies that overlooked the stage on three sides.  One night during a rendition of "Crawling King Snake" that ended the band's second set, I witnessed Willie crawl off the left side of Zach's stage, crawl up the stairs to the second level, crawl across the balcony railing to the stairs on the right, back down those stairs, and back onto stage right.  It took probably ten minutes, while the rest of the band pounded away onstage, Brumfiel and McGary trading impromptu wild solos.  It was probably the greatest commitment to a stage-bit I've ever seen.  I wouldn't have crawled on Zachariah's floor for a hundred thousand dollars.

Another night Willie ran up the stairs to the second floor and was singing from the second floor balcony railing with no mic - just bellowing out the lyrics to "The Sketch" - when a big, burly, bearded, biker-kinda guy reached down from the third level of the bar and pulled the barely 100-lb. Willie up into the third balcony.  You could hear the entire crowd catch their breath at once while Willie dangled over the thirty-foot drop to the dance floor before the guy pulled him all the way up.  If that drunk had dropped him, Willie would've at least broken some limbs, or worse.

It was performances like those that first earned Willie his "Wild Man of Columbus Rock & Roll" reputation.  The band became wildly popular and subsequently signed a major-label deal with A&M records (the first major-label deal for a Columbus band since The Godz and McGuffey Lane years earlier), but I also sometimes think it's where the seeds got sown for the later decline in Willie's songwriting.  Once Willie learned he could get over on any bar crowd or, indeed, on any rock audience sheerly on his performance charisma, it almost seemed like he lost interest in writing good songs.  I alternately dubbed it The Curse Of Saturday Night Rock & Roll or The Chuck Berry Syndrome to friends who wearily replied, "Ricki, why don't you just relax and try to have a good time for a change?"  And they very well might have been right.  Except I couldn't shake the memory of Willie saying to me, two years earlier, after a Romantic Noise show at The Agora, "You can't give the audience what they WANT, Ricki, you've got to give them what they NEED."  I've never forgotten or lost sight of that rock & roll precept, but sometimes I think Willie has.

The band decamped to Los Angeles to record their first album (of what, as I recall, was supposed to be a three-album deal, but as always, the record company held all the options) with David Anderle producing, and that's when the problems started.  Anderle had been to Columbus to see the band perform in their hometown element before they were signed to A&M, had certainly heard the band repertoire, but somehow came to the entirely wrong-headed conclusion to completely ignore Willie's strengths as a heartland rocker and record what I can only call a synth-pop record.  I fully understand that it was the early 1980's and synth-pop reigned supreme on the rock airwaves, but ignoring certified hit-song-waiting-to-be-recorded "Champaign" in favor of "Rough Kiss" (a throwaway rocker that Willie had once handed off to The Movie Dolz - an all-girl band he had championed in '78 & '79 - because it wasn't good enough for The Buttons set) was just ludicrous.  (Also, at some point The Captain was replaced by Jerry Hanahan, brought back from The Buttons to play drums.) 

"The Sketch" and "New York Is Burning" came out okay on the record, but contained little of the fire and passion that drove Willie's best songs and performances.  "Kiss Quick Say Goodnight," "Talk So Loud," and "Dead From A Broken Heart" just were NOT good Willie songs.  "Mary" and "No Signs Of Johanna" were just all right.  "Maybe It Won't Rain" was (and is) a great Willie ballad, but problematically it was at least TWO MINUTES LONGER than it needed to be, like most of the rest of the record.  Musical padding reigned supreme.  Overall the production on the record was too studied, too sterile, just plain too COLD for as incendiary a songwriter as Willie was.  

Plus it was fairly obvious from the beginning that once A&M signed The Big Band they had no clue how to promote Willie - a left-handed, African-American, dreadlocks-sporting, 5"3' rocker - to an increasingly polarized rock & roll audience.  And the fact that at the time the A&M roster also included Bryan Adams - a blue-eyed Canadian, literally fair-haired boy - didn't help matters.  Bass player Greg Glasgow once told me a story about playing a showcase gig in L.A. - wherein the various promotional staff people of A&M  Records were flown in from all over the country - and The Big Band alternated sets with Adams.  Glasgow - who, for anyone who knows him, is shy almost to the point of invisibility and sports not one boastful bone in his body - related that Willie and the boys blew Adams' band off the stage at the showcase, but that he could feel the promo people throwing their support towards Adams even before the end of the night.  So it goes.  That same year, 1982, Warner Brothers records got it right and Prince sold three million copies of 1999.

     



Willie Phoenix, 1982

left to right: Rob Brumfiel, lead guitar; Greg Glasgow, bass; Jerry Hanahan, drums; 

Willie, vocals & rhythm guitar; Mel McGary, keyboards

the A&M album cover



(blogger's note; Okay, readers, it's become painfully obvious that The Ballad of Willie Phoenix

has become A Monster, has taken on a life of its own.  It was originally intended to be a 3-part

series, but after three installments we're only up to 1982.  I'm expanding to five parts, but they

might be broken up by other blog entries.  Hang in, we will eventually arrive at 2013.  Next up:

The Ballad of Willie Phoenix part three - The Shadowlords and The Flower Machine, 1983-1989.

 

© 2013 Ricki C.



appendix to The Ballad of Willie Phoenix, part one: The Songs of Romantic Noise and The Buttons, 1978-1980

Today’s blog entry is for Willie Phoenix completists only.  (editor’s note: Q. Ricki, IS there such a thing as a Willie Phoenix completist?  A. I guess there must be, the previous (rather incomplete & poorly-written) Willie Phoenix blog I posted back in May, 2012 had the fourth-largest number of hits in the history of Growing Old With Rock & Roll.  Somebody’s reading about Willie.)

I originally wrote this piece in April 1979 for The Buttons Times, a newsletter we handed out at Buttons gigs.  I was sorely tempted to update it, but decided to leave it in its original naive form.

Romantic Noise / early Buttons – Willie Phoenix, vocals & rhythm guitar / Greg Glasgow, vocals & bass / John Ballor, vocals & lead guitar / Dee Hunt, drums (replaced by Jerry Hanahan in the later line-up of The Buttons, somewhere around spring or summer 1979).  

SONGS OF ROMANTIC NOISE AND THE BUTTONS

A rock & roll band rises or falls on its songs.  You can solo all night, but you’ve got to have a song to hang that solo on.  You can have all the special effects in the world, but they have to connect to a song.  If you don’t have the material, if you don’t have the SONGS, sooner or later you’re gonna lose.  The Buttons have songs. Some of those songs are:

CELEBRATE THE GOOD TIMES – Not the band’s theme song, but maybe it should be, somehow it sums up their whole stance and/or attitude. Pinpoint harmony from Willie & Greg, and a bright, positive, clear-eyed, hummable, boppable melody. “Call all your friends, celebrate the good times, ahhhh.”

HOLLY – John’s only current lead vocal. Instant hit single and big crowd-pleaser. Petitions to reinstate John’s other great lead vocal in "I Feel New" will be circulated shortly. “Holly, I love you to pieces.”

DAMN GOOD LOOKIN’ BUT EASY, PAINTER, THE EARLY SIXTIES, I WANT TONIGHT, GET BACK TO YOUR LOVE, NO EXITS, LET’S BE FOREVER, SHELLEY, I FELL IN LOVE WITH A BABY, ARTWORK, CRUISIN’ WITH MIMI, STOP CRUSHING MY PERSONALITY – Some of the Romantic Noise Classics. Songs that may never be recorded because they’ll be old to the band when the band is new to a wider audience. Songs that whenever somebody who saw the band in its early days hears them will trigger off memories of places the band played, people you knew then that you don’t know now, things you were sure of that you're not any more, etc. Some of these songs may only stand in the hearts and minds and ears of a few people, but they ARE magic and they WILL stand. 

STRIKE UP THE BAND – Another Romantic Noise classic that will stand. This is great rock & roll. If you can’t feel the rock in this song you must be dead and should be lying down or else you like Styx. And hey, while we’re at it, in the middle section of this song, feel free, in fact feel compelled, to shout, “GO, GO, GO BAND GO!” along with or AT the band. Get into it, feel it. Come out and be pop, come out to rock. And let’s face it, people are gonna pay $8.50 someday to shout it at an arena concert, you only paid two bucks and you get to see the band up close.

ROCKAWAY, I WANT FUN – Two of the best examples of The Buttons blend of pop and rock & roll power; the latter detailing getting roughed up at a certain popular Ohio State Campus country-rock club, the former concerning  wanting to hold someone’s hand and rocking the days away. “Greg, are you paranoid?” “Naaah.”

THE WORST SAD – What I consider one of Willie’s most underrated songs. Instantly relatable. “I’m sad, she’s sad, this is the worst sad we’ve ever had.” Who could say it any better, or simpler? Why make it any more complicated? Could be THE “Please take me back.” song of the late 70’s.

GOODBYE GOODBYE, SAILBOATS – The Buttons two best slow dance songs. "Sailboats" is a beautiful melody/riff married to great lyrics and "Goodbye Goodbye" has one of those great ending choruses that can go on forever and ever, even if the relationship it’s about didn’t, and just like you always wanted it to. “We tried, we tried, goodbye, goodbye.”

GIVE IT UP, PRETTY JANE, RUNNIN’ FROM SOCIETY, RADIO MAN, POP BAND POP BAND, LOOKING FOR GIRLS, FLY ME, SPOIL IT, UNDERSTAND ME – A selection of the middle-period classics, late Romantic Noise, pre-Buttons hits.

SITTING WITH THE BOYS, HOLD ON, LIKE I DO, I CAN’T STAND IT, OH NO NOT AGAIN – Some of the more pronounced Beatles-influenced Buttons songs. The pop edge of The Buttons power and pop equation.

YOU MADE ME SPEND THE NIGHT, I’M LEAVING, HOLD ME, BUS DRIVER, I NEED THE ACTION, COLD LOVE AFFAIR, CAN’T STOP THE RAIN, MESSAGE, POP GOES THE MUSIC – Some of the genuine Buttons Classics, the power end of the power-pop equation. New songs that have been introduced since the name change of early ’79. Songs that may be too powerful for the close confines of Mr. Brown’s Descent, but you should’ve heard ‘em in the gym at Buckeye Lake’s Sheridan High School (with 250 kids dancin’ and feelin’ GOOD) or at the Ohio Union Ballroom (where they power-popped buzz-bombed fans of The Boyzz), or at The Agora opening for The Ramones. Songs made for big stages, concert halls and huge crowds of crazed rockers.

LOVE IS MADE FOR THE KIDS – The Bee Gees meets The Raspberries. A disco-tinged pop-rocker that I haven’t heard lately, but it may return to the repertoire. Somebody (but not me) will someday call it The Buttons take on Blondie’s "Heart Of Glass."

BIG STAR, IT’S ONLY GOOD ROCK & ROLL, CHINA, SUMMER IS FREEZING, DON’T EVER SAY BYE – The brace of new songs that will be introduced at this weekend’s stand of shows at Mr. Brown’s. Decide for yourself where they fit in. Decide for yourself and let’s ROCK.

Great Lost Romantic Noise/Buttons Songs

(These are songs sadly, or not so sadly, missed from the current band repertoire. Songs that we knew and loved, or hated, when Romantic Noise WAS a romantic noise and buttons were something that held your shirt or blouse closed.)

I FEEL NEW – An exquisite slow, yearning, Byrds-esque tune sung by John from the early and middle period Romantic Noise days. Last heard (by me) at Bogart’s in Cincinnati. Very sadly missed.

I NEED A REVIEW –  A song from the early days of Romantic Noise. Willie’s personal appeal to the Columbus rock print media, Focus and Teenage Rampage, for some coverage. The entire reason I went to see the band the first time in February of ’78, because I wanted to hear my name in a song. It worked.

STARS AFTER DEATH -  Another early song, concerning (I think) a girl who only falls in love with rock stars after they’re already dead, the Jimi Hendrix/Jim Morrison/Brian Jones Syndrome.

GENERATE MY GENERATION – An excellent high-energy rocker from the early days.

STOP CRUSHING MY PERSONALITY -  Another high-energy blast. Winner of the Rock Song Title Of The Year Award for 1978.

BOOGIE ALL NIGHT – Romantic Noise’s set-ender the first time I ever saw them. This song was awful. Really, really badly awful. I mean bad, really bad. How bad was it? This song was so bad that once when they were playing it I saw a dog chasing a cat and they were both walking.  (author’s note; I think the dog & cat quote was some kind of band in-joke that I can’t quite remember.) (blogger's note 2013, I remembered the joke! It was one of Dee’s: “Man, it was hot out today.”  “How hot was it?” “It was so hot I saw a dog chasing a cat and they were both walking.”)

DEAD FLOWERS – The b-side of the band’s first single, "I Fell In Love With A Baby." Another not-very-missed song that was partially redeemed and revived in it’s later performances when John & Willie would meet at the center mike to do their best “Mick Jagger & Keith Richards Meets The Bowery Boys” vocal routine on the closing “Dead flower-a’s.”

ROSE-COLORED GLASSES – Beatle-esque tune recorded in ‘78 for an e.p. that never came out, never performed live to my knowledge.

MEMORIES – A beautifully soft song of Greg’s dropped after only a few performances, another very sadly missed song. “But in my mind it’s still ’73.”

ARE YOU IN LOVE? – An extended, different moods/tempos/accents song of Willie’s that I’m not sure is dropped from the set, I think it might just be on vacation.

(Actually these are only the first ten songs that popped into my head when I sat down to write this; by the time The Buttons record their first LP, they’ll have dropped more good songs than other bands have thought about writing. These songs will be missed, but they will be remembered.) - Ricki C. April, 1979



By my count, there are 59 songs listed above, and that piece only covered the time period from February 1978 to mid-1979, a period of perhaps 18 months. By the time Jerry Hanahan replaced Dee Hunt in The Buttons Mark II, Willie scrapped the entire old repertoire and started over. Below is the set-list from the live tape I have of The Buttons at the Columbus Agora in early 1980.  It contains 18 original songs, none of which are represented above. (The encore - "Hippy Hippy Shake" - is a cover of British Invasion-era band The Swinging Blue Jeans, and is, incidentally, the first & only cover I ever saw Romantic Noise or The Buttons perform.)  That's 77 songs in a two-year period.  I find it hard to believe how prolific a songwriter Willie Phoenix was in those days and how generally high the quality of those songs was.  Very, very few of the songs detailed in this list were what I would deem throwaways and at least 20 of them were as good as any power-pop song I have ever heard.  Willie Phoenix has forgotten more great songs than most other songwriters will compose in their entire careers.

The Buttons / Live @ The Agora, 1980

1) I Wanna Have A Baby
2) (Take It) All The Way Out
3) Fan Club
4) Back To Germany
5) Girl, I Wanna Please You
6) Knockout Girl
7) Baby
8) Now I’m So Glad
9) Alice Jayne
10) Hey Little Girl
11) Rona, I Forget
12) Just A Holiday
13) It’s A Heartbeat
14) Kissing Games
15) Mimi’s Got A Runner
16) Here Comes The Night
17) I Saw Superman
18) Born To Dance

(encore)
19) Hippy Hippy Shake

Willie Phoenix, vocals & guitar / Greg Glasgow, bass & vocals
John Ballor, lead guitar & vocals / Jerry Hanahan, drums

My set-list, for running lights at a Buttons show at the Columbus Agora, March 1st, 1979. 

(The list of colors across the top are the lights I had available.)

© 1979, 2013 Ricki C.



The Ballad of Willie Phoenix, part one - Romantic Noise and The Buttons, 1978-1980

I have a heroically garbled cassette tape from 1978 of Romantic Noise, Willie Phoenix's best band EVER, playing a song called "I Feel New."  John Ballor, the lead guitarist of Romantic Noise, sings lead on the tune and it is, quite simply, one of the most gorgeous, heartfelt tunes I have ever heard in my rock & roll life. 

Romantic Noise was stunning.  Willie wrote virtually all of the songs, played strictly rhythm guitar (he didn't start playing lead guitar until The Shadowlords in 1983) and sang about 65% of lead vocals.  Bass player extraordinaire Greg Glasgow contributed the remainder of the original tunes (of which there was a mind-boggling number & variety, which we may deal with in a later appendix) and sang lead on about a third of the Romantic Noise repertoire.  Lead guitarist John Ballor only sang about three leads - the aforementioned "I Feel New,"  "Holly," and an early raver maybe called "Politician, Politician" - but Willie generously handed him off some truly killer songs to sing.  When original drummer David Machnicki (who employed a rather Ringo Starr-inspired style of playing) was replaced by madman Keith Moon-styled smasher Dee Hunt - the pride of Beckley, West Virginia - the Romantic Noise line-up was complete.  (And Dee was height-compatible to fit in with the rather diminutive Small Faces-styled Romantic Noise than the too-tall Machniki.)

For the purposes of full disclosure, I was a roadie for Romantic Noise from probably May or June of 1978 until sometime in 1979 (after they had become The Buttons), so I'm hardly unbiased.  I was a roadie for Romantic Noise because I fell in love with them the very first night I saw them, a week after The Great Blizzard Of 1978, at Drake Union on the Ohio State University campus.  I was a roadie for Romantic Noise because I realized very early on that I wasn't good enough to actually get INTO the band, that the internal cohesion between those four players was so balanced, precise, fragile and perfect that I had no hope of entering the circle.  I ran lights for that band, I took care of guitars, I published a band newsletter, I did pretty much anything that was asked of me.  Willie said, "Jump" and I asked, "How high?"  I was a roadie for Romantic Noise because they were one of the five best bands I had ever seen. 

In my Columbus rock & roll existence I have witnessed The Dantes, The Rebounds, The Fifth Order, The Four O’Clock Balloon, The Grayps and countless other "garage" and "progressive" bands of the 1960’s; I saw The Godz rockin’ the bikers and the hippies in 1975 with their white Marshall amps and McGuffey Lane drawl out their laid-back country-rock pickings that same year; I caught the R.C. Mob and The Toll in their 1980’s formative years right up through their major label deals; in the 1990’s I watched Watershed and Howlin’ Maggie grow up right in front of my eyes into killer rock & roll assemblages; in the 2000’s I got in on the ground floor of Mrs. Children as they transmuted into The Whiles.  And let me say this very clearly: not one of those bands was as good as Romantic Noise. Romantic Noise was, quite simply, the BEST COLUMBUS BAND I have ever seen.

I learned so much from Willie that first year: watching Romantic Noise from the wings or from the balcony lighting board at The Agora was like a songwriting clinic.  I learned to sharpen my rather expansive songwriting down to a succinct precision.  I learned how to pace sets.  I learned a sense of personal style.  (Willie would actually dress the entire band for big shows, like when they would open for The Ramones or the David Johansen Group.  Greg, John & Dee had to bring changes of clothes in for Willie's approval and he would mix & match the outfits so they looked individually AND collectively great.  Every time in 2013 I witness some jag-off modern rock band on David Letterman or Austin City Limits in some hideously mismatched & pedestrian bag o' rags I think back on Willie and the range of his imagination in 1978.)

Willie Phoenix sidelight interlude, number one:
 One summer evening in 1978 my lead singer Nicole and I had to meet Willie at that Wendy’s just north of Schoolkid’s Records (now Used Kids Records) to get some tapes. So we were hangin’ out waiting because Willie was a rock star and rock stardom requires being late. Finally Willie waltzes into Wendy’s. You’ve gotta try to get the mental picture: Willie’s a five-foot tall black man with dreadlocks wearing girl’s pegged black jeans, a spangled tank-top, and not one but TWO neckties tied around his bare neck, held together by a Mickey Mouse watch. Plus, it almost goes without saying, platform boots. AND THIS WASN’T EVEN FOR A SHOW OR A NIGHT OUT, IT WAS JUST WHAT HE HAPPENED TO BE WEARING THAT EVENING. Ladies & gentlemen, it was 1978 in Columbus, Ohio: everybody else in that restaurant was wearing bell-bottom jeans and raggedy t-shirts.  Kinda needless to mention, but the guy turned heads. I can still see it, 35 years later.

1978 FLEW by.  Romantic Noise played all over Columbus and the rest of Ohio.  (They had already traveled to New York City a couple of times and played CBGB's  in the 70's heyday of that fabled rock mecca before I even met them.)  The band played everywhere: clubs, student unions, outdoor shows at a little stage on the riverfront by where COSI now stands, high schools (playing all original material at high schools in 1978 was unheard of - no pun intended - and every one of those shows went GREAT).  They headlined their own shows at Mr. Brown's Descent, Cafe Rock & Roll, Bogart's in Cincinnati and The Columbus Agora, where they also opened shows for the likes of The Ramones and David Johansen Group.

The band released a 7-inch single ("I Fell In Love With A Baby" b/w "Dead Flowers") and a 4-song ep - '78 Affair - that comprised two of their best songs ("Painter" and "Runnin' from Society") and simultaneously two of their worst songs ("Oh No, Not Again" and "Hold On").  This kind of breakdown in song selection on records would unfortunately continue throughout Willie's career.  NONE of Romantic Noise's best material ever got recorded in any kind of intelligible, releasable form.  (Rumors have persisted for years that Willie has well-produced versions of that material stashed away, but I've never seen nor heard concrete proof of that fact.  And what are we waiting for?)

Similarly, two of Willie's best songs from the 1982 period when he was on A&M Records - "Champaign" and "Bowery Express" - never saw wax.  (Though that may have more to do with A&M's total mishandling of Willie's entire stint on the label than it does Willie's judgements of his material.  But more on that in part two of this tome.)   I also have a 60-minute live cassette of The Buttons (Willie's band immediately after Romantic Noise) at a Q-FM Hometown Album concert in 1980 and cassettes full of unreleased Shadowlords songs, most of which are better than anything actually released by those bands on vinyl back in the day.  Further, the three best songs in the repertoire of Willie Phoenix & The True Soul Rockers in 1990 - "Lookin' For Wendy," "I Wanna Feel What We Used To," and "Electric Folk-Dreamin' Man" - never saw the light of day.  And except for the A&M record, Willie had the final say on what material was released in his name.

It was that inability to relinquish even the most basic of control that characterizes Willie to this day.  And while I'll defend to the death Willie's defense of his artistic vision I gotta add that it would've been nice if he could occasionally have collaborated with his bandmates or producers to execute that creative vision.  The first manifestation of that singularity was when Willie announced to the rest of Romantic Noise in November or December of 1978 that come January of 1979, the band would be changing their name to The Buttons (a really pedestrian moniker after the vastly more poetic & lyrical Romantic Noise) and that Willie would be taking over all the lead vocals of said band.

In the heady days of The Summer Of 1978, my most fervent hope was that Romantic Noise would get signed to a record deal and that Nick Lowe would produce their first album.  (Lowe's production work on those first two Elvis Costello records - My Aim Is True and This Year's Model - and his production credo of "Bash it down and we'll tart it up later." would have been PERFECT for Willie & the guys.)  By the spring of 1979 Dee Hunt had been booted from the band, ostensibly over the cliched "musical differences," but actually he was the only band member who would ever talk back to Willie and (this is my purely subjective opinion) Dee's increasing popularity with the female contingent of The Buttons' audience became problematic to Willie.  I quit the road crew when Dee was replaced with Jerry Hanahan, a really good drummer in his own right.

The Buttons subsequently played a lot of really great shows - the aforementioned Q-FM Hometown Album Concert and a KILLER set opening for Talking Heads at Mershon Auditorium right when the Heads' cover of Al Green's "Take Me To The River" was starting to burn up the charts - but the band was never really the same for me after Dee got fired, ya know?  The Buttons Mark II (or Version 2.0 for you 2013 cyber-geeks) with Hanahan on drums released one single, which, true to form, contained one GREAT song - "Hey Little Girl," that stayed in Willie's repertoire until the 1990's - and one middling tune - "Blue Bicycle," which of course Willie regarded as the A-side of the 45.  (The Buttons most popular radio song - "I Saw Superman" - was recorded when Hunt was still in the band.)

Okay, so that's 1700 words already and we're only up to 1980.  Coming up in The Ballad Of Willie Phoenix part two we'll be covering the A&M "Big Band" and Willie Phoenix & The Shadowlords (with maybe The Flower Machine thrown in for good measure).  But first, some Romantic Noise pics, a Focus live review and a scan of a Buttons Times.

 

Romantic Noise, 1978

(Did I remember to mention to the editors at Focus that I was working as a roadie for the band I was
 reviewing in this column?  Ummm, that particular conflict of interest might have slipped my mind.)

(For three random Willie stories from 1978, check out When We Was Kids, published 2020.)

© 2013 Ricki C.

   

Rock & Roll Geniuses I Have Known, part two: Willie Phoenix

blogger's note: This blog entry has been replaced by a longer, more comprehensive

and (hopefully) better-written 4-part series of postings:

The Ballad of Willie Phoenix: 

 part one - Romantic Noise and The Buttons, 1978-1980 (12/3/2013);
part two - The A&M Band, 1981-1982 (12/9/2013);
part three - The Shadowlords and The Flower Machine, 1983-1989 (12/21/2013);
 part four - The True Soul Rockers & beyond, 1990-2013 (12/29/2013).   

Please follow along from the Romantic Noise link provided. - Ricki C. 12/3/13