The Band went through periodic changes in personnel, but there was an enduring philosophy that prevailed no matter what the combinations were. We had established from the beginning that fun would be among the priorities. Teamwork and individual effort went hand in hand, and more often than not, the total exceeded the sum of the parts.
In the early years, the band worked as five pieces. I guess we were the founding fathers…imagine that.
Tony was still the drummer. We had arrived at some place in the middle of the New Jersey cornfields, an old converted wooden frame house with the bar on the first floor and a blinking sign out front. Our first words to the early crowd occurred by accident. Tony was lifting up his drum stuff onto the stage, unaware that a nearby house microphone (circa 1946) had been turned on and was about two inches from his mouth. We were getting our stuff ready too, and there was the usual banter and joking around. Tony’s initial contribution to the conversation at that point was, “Christ! What a toilet!”
Maybe the early crowd and the bartender were already too drunk to notice or care, but that old microphone did an outstanding job of projecting Tony’s comment throughout the bar, and was likely heard on the second and third floor where there were lots of dim lights.
The stage itself was made of thin plywood. It sort of dipped in the middle from lack of proper support but, at least, we were three feet off the dirt floor.
Tony’s drum stool had sturdy metal legs. The rubber tips had long since worn away. Around 1 AM, Tony was singing “Lonesome Town”. A sudden flurry of irregular drum and cymbal noises interrupted the second verse, and I turned around from my spot on the front line to see Tony disappearing into the depths of whatever there was below the plywood. There were couples on the dance floor, thankful for the ballad. On his way down Tony pointed to me and said, “Sing!”
Until that moment I had never publicly sung lead and got paid for it…Teamwork)))