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I remember it showed up on the juke box at Caroselli’s Pizza in Kinsmen, Ohio and Dan Meshersmith played it on Y-103 out of Sharon, PA. There may have been others that I don’t recall.
Peppermint Studio 1971
A few months later I was playing electric piano (RMI) and electric guitar (Fender Mustang) in a Folk/Country rock band called Wild Bull Curry.
We were playing some small local bars and taverns (we were at the Silver Fox quite a bit)
Also some parties, dances, and opened for some national acts at Ponderosa Park.
It was a great musical experience and a fun social experience. We played a lot of music that was definitely NOT mainstream music. Groups like Ten Years After, The Band, Commander Cody, Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. We also did some songs by Ry Cooder, Leon Russell, and Graham Parsons.
There was some well known material like the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and mainstream country such as Merle Haggard, Hank Williams, etc. You either loved us or hated us We enjoyed both reactions. We really loved what we were doing.
 RMI Piano that I used at the time
  My Fender Mustang
Left to right – Me, Gary, Scott, Tom, Joe
During this time I had been preparing to major in music when I went to college. I had been studying piano with one of the professors at YSU Dana School of Music. It was a bad experience and I was having serious doubts about taking up music in college. I was advised to look up another YSU professor (Orlando Vitello or Orlee as we called him) who gave private lessons in Music Theory.
Orlee was a musical goldmine on two legs. He was a 50 year old mischievous child. He was a great friend and a fantastic teacher. Orlee gave me an intense six month course in practical music theory that left me able to teach myself anything I needed to accomplish as far as music was concerned.
I graduated from high school the next year and I needed to find a job playing music that I
could live on. I failed an audition in Baltimore for a keyboard player in what was known as a ”Show Band.“ i.e. a nightclub act. The people in Baltimore told me about this hot musical director they met when they were in Youngstown and how he was hooked up with a promotion company putting together show bands. You guessed it Orlee Vitello was the musical director.
I got a job with a group they had just put together as a keyboard/bass player.
Orlee knew that I could do something I had never tried. He had me get a dual keyboard Farfisa
portable organ and run it through a Leslie (Sounded just as good as a B-3). It had bass keys on the lower manual. He had me play bass lines with my left hand and comp/solo with my right. It worked and I had a high paying job as a working musician.
Most of the show material was corny but challenging and the rhythm section (Drummer, Guitarist, and Keyboard/bass) played a dance set. We were able to pick just about anything we wanted to play which was a lot of blues, jazz, and pop stuff that people could dance to.
Once again the material was not anything I had ever listened to or played but it was great stuff. Some Dave Brubeck, Wes Montgomery, Jimmy Smith, Bill Evans, Vince Guaraldi,
lots of good music.
I’m at the top left.
The money was good but I just didn’t like the music that we played during the show or the show itself. Within a year I had enough Jimmy Webb and Burt Bacharach to last me a lifetime. It’s ironic but true, when the music is great people will stick together with little or no income. On the other hand if the music makes you cringe the money doesn’t make up for it.
The next spring I hooked up with a blues band that was heavily into the Allman Brothers and just jamming and riffing for an hour or two at time.
The band only played out once or twice but the musicianship was outstanding and it was
an incredible experience doing a 5 piece improvised blues/jazz jam sessions.
It was also when I first worked with a very talented young singer, Ray Escot.
Man could he sing those Allman Brothers tunes. He could sing anything but
you could tell he really loved that style of music. So did I.
 Suite case style Rhodes I used in "the blues band"
After the blues band with no name (or income) I worked odd jobs and gave guitar lessons for a while. I still don’t recall how I met them but I start playing with a band
that was just forming with the dubious name of ”Tender Butt“ which had a logo of
a young woman bending over dressed in a skimpy nightgown. What can I say?
It appealed to my sick sense of humor. We were playing anything with a funky beat like Tower of Power, Average White Band, Doobie Brothers, and just about any album cut if
it had a driving, rhythmic, dance beat.
When I came on it was 6 pieces (drums, bass, guitar, keyboards, tenor sax, and B3 organ. Then we added a trumpet and lead singer (Ray Escot). It was great music but you can’t make any money with eight people in the band. It eventually shrank back to guitar, bass, drums, keys, and a lead vocalist.
Four drummers later I moved on. By the time the fourth drummer came on we were trying to do a show/lounge act to make some money. Besides I wasn’t sure I even wanted to play live for a while. At this point in my career I was now playing a Fender Rhodes electric piano and had acquired a Hammond B3 organ (otherwise know as ”The Beast“) with a full size Leslie.
  
About that same time I was approached by my old friend John Harrow to get involved with a studio (Marjon) that he was doing some work with at the time. John Krizancic the owner was an old school do-it-all yourself musician.
He was huge and still is active in the tamburitza ethnic and polka music fields. John was amazing. He could play music, record it, and lathe a master which where all the most expensive parts of making a product you could sell. I went to check it out and ended up being a combination part time employee and friend of the family.
I helped John do whatever he needed help with and in return he helped me get session work with people who were recording at the
studio. He also taught me how to set up, record, and do maintenance/calibration on a state of the art 24 track studio. He didn’t like engineering the loud rock music so he had me do it and he did the polka/ethnic sessions.
I also became a member of a country band (The Silver Spurs) that was the studio band from time to time. It was a great experience and a rare opportunity to learn so much and have such a good time doing it.
Working at a 24 track studio really gave me the bug to record more so
I purchased a Teac 4 track reel to reel tape deck and a small mix console. It was a big boost to my music writing and by listening to my recorded songs I learned to be more objective and critical in a constructive way.
At about that time I got a call from Jim Kendzor who was the lead singer of a local group Blue Ash. They had been very big locally for years and had recorded and released one album on Polydor records. He said they had a new record deal and were beginning rehearsals. They also wanted to add a keyboard player and wondered if I was interested. Are you crazy? Of course I was interested!
So once again I said my goodbyes and made my way onward to new group of friends and musicians. Blue Ash was my first experience with a true rock band. They were avid fans of the Byrds, Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Who. They were enthusiastic, outgoing, fun, and downright insane at times. They were definitely my kind of people. Here I was being encouraged to freely write keyboard parts for original material that was going to be on a national release! It looked like I was going to get a shot at a financially successful music career that I would love doing. Yeah, well what we all were unaware of was that our record company –Playboy Records - was doomed! As the album ”Front Page News“ was released, the financial plug was pulled on the record company, and we went spinning down the drain like bugs in a bathtub. That’s the music business.
We kept trying to keep things going for a while but eventually we all went back to making a living and paying the bills with day jobs.
Several years went by without any real opportunities locally or otherwise. I had tried living in Los Angeles for 6 months pushing original material of my own and some
Blue Ash tapes without any luck. Things were changing in the music business too.
The days of the A&R departments was over and it was getting harder to make contacts
over the phone or otherwise.
A year or so later I was back home and checking out the new ”toys“ at a local music store. Live equipment, especially keyboards was starting to get very interesting. I was checking out the Yamaha, CP-80, portable baby grand piano. The salesman working the floor was about my age and asked if I played and I said yes so he said ”Try it out“. So I played. He had to wait on some customers so he said to make myself at home, that he’d be right back, and closed me in the keyboard room so I wouldn’t leave. The salesman was Brian McCall and I had no idea that we would end up working together in a full time money making band for the next 15 years.
I guess this was one of the first steps made toward forming The Fabulous Flashbacks.
We actually had no intentions whatsoever of being a copy band let alone an oldies copy
band. The reason everyone got involved at the beginning was to write and record original material with the goal of securing a record company contract. It started out with 6 people from 5 different bands forming a studio band. After two people left the four of us found ourselves working low paying jobs on different schedules and having a hard time getting everyone or anyone together to record. We rented a studio that was available to us 24/7 but we weren’t getting much accomplished. The idea came up that we could make more money playing oldies (60’s) in clubs than we were making at our jobs plus we would have more time and be on the same work schedule.
The Fabulous Flashbacks 2000
Left to right – Brian McCall-Gregg Yochman-Nick Gligor-Me
Gregg was original bass player from Mom's Apple Pie and Nick played for several years with a local
recording band Poobah.
We still spent a lot of time recording and writing but we also had a bigger demand than we could’ve ever imagined for The Fabulous Flashbacks. The unexpected demand meant we could pack clubs and get paid a lot of money.
We had money to spend on equipment which meant I could buy the new (at that time) multi-voice and sample playing keyboards. We were able to learn songs and duplicate everything live. We already had the vocal capabilities and the talent to play the stuff all I had to do was put all the orchestra, horn section, sound effect elements into the show.
It was a lot more difficult than I make it sound. There was a lot of reading poorly written owner’s manuals and a lot of programming. But it was well worth it.
We worked hard and became very polished at what we did during those years. The most amazing thing is that after all that time and everything we went through (it wasn’t all rainbows and springtime) we’re still friends and play music together from time to time.
During the time that I played with the Flashbacks I had the good fortune to have some of my original music licensed for commercials. The two most prominent were for Avanti Car Corporation and The George Bush Sr. presidential campaign (not ”W“).
I’m still writing, recording, and releasing music with the intent of getting some material licensed to TV and film. I also have this website (a work in progress) as an information and communication hub. I’m working full time and doing all this other stuff too so it gets hectic but I’m not complaining. Playing and writing music always makes me feel like I’m on top of the world ……and I am!
One of my personal projects during the later years with the Flashbacks was an album of instrumental songs entitled "Under the Influence"
Written, performed, and recorded entirely on a MIDI sequencer or (as I prefer) recorder
by me.
Mix Engineer ..........Gary Rhamy
Cover Photo .......... Dan Montecalvo
Cover Art ............. Jamie Thomas
I recently re-mastered and re-released it as "Dreaming I'm Awake". The album was one of those projects that I felt I had to do. I could forsee the end of my days playing live music and I wanted to release something original. I had argued that a music album could be played on MIDI gear and recorded with the same technique as analog or digital multi-track. Of course everyone thought I was crazy (and they were right but that's beside the point) and it just wouldn't work yadda, yadda,.
That's how I ended up doing everything myself. It became a mission to prove that it could be done. I wanted to keep everything digital as much as I could so I finished rough mixing everything and took the gear ( Roland MC-500 - Emulator EmaxI - Korg M3R - Roland D10) to Peppermint studio and Gary mixed a digital master as we played back the equipment plugged into the 24 track console.
It worked! I had a master that was 98% digital and super clean for dirt cheap costs.
The problem was I didn't have enough money to press CDs (they were still expensive in 1992 so I just had cassette copies duped).
Well there's a little more of my music history.
To be continued.............
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