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.