Geezer Palooza Rehearsals

RBL Unplugged

From a recent rehearsal for Geezer Palooza:

The Rover:

In My Time of Dying:

Also, from an earlier rehearsal, something very much plugged in:

How Many More Times:

One Night Only

One Night Only

One Night Only is the name the RB Laurence Band gave to our show in the THS auditorium. How it is that we were given the run of the place is hard to fathom; Russ (the drummer and keyboard player) just seems to have been awfully good at talking the school administration into letting us have our way with their facilities.

Long thought (mercifully) lost to history, the evidence of this show has finally resurfaced.

It's probably true that we all need a myth or a legend of the self to survive high school. Because the selves we actually have, though immensely preoccupying, don't amount to very much in anyone else's eyes but our own. And we don't even amount to that much in our own eyes either when we're 16 or 17 or 18. So, you have to start working on your own legend or walk around in the raw.

Which is one way to answer the question that this RB Laurence show from 1986 is bound to raise. What were we thinking? Just who did we think we were?

When we took the Tenafly High School Auditorium stage in January 1986, the RB Laurence Band had played exactly once in public, at the THS talent show some months earlier. Yet, somehow we managed to finagle our own showcase, our own "concert" in front of our peers. I remember that we set about doing this in the most ambitious way possible. We spent endless hours in Russ's basement working up songs. Jason, Dave, Russ, me, and also Andy Markham (since then become the renowned Andy Action). (oh, and Franklin Parlamis on keyboards too). Zeppelin songs, which we felt were our strong suit, made up the core of the set, but we also drew from a number of artists, classic rock staples of the time: Van Halen, Billy Squier (he sounded very Zeppelin-ish to our ears back then), Rush, Deep Purple. The Who. Triumph (good God, why Triumph? you ask. There really isn't a good answer to that one, but  to this day, even listening to my out-of-tune guitar and thinking about how hokey the lyrics are, I love hearing Russ's falsetto harmony with Dave on this one, and I suspect that the lyrics--with their exhortation to, well, follow your heart, actually meant something important to 18 year old me.)

As we found out, not all of these bands' songs suited us. But at this point, not yet fully committed to an identity as "the band that does Zeppelin" we were determined to give them a try. So, after many hours of rehearsal, which still didn't feel quite like enough, we hit the THS auditorium stage and did our best to emulate the kinds of concerts we'd been to, complete with extended guitar and drum solos and various bizarre antics. From a personal standpoint, watching this show again, I'm struck by the fact that it catches me at a moment when I was still trying to split the difference between Van Halen-inspired shredding and a looser, bluesier (ok, sloppier) Jimmy Page imitation.

This certainly wasn't our best performance as a band, though parts of it still seem quite good to me. I would say you can almost feel us tiptoeing through some of these, trying our best not to mess them up, rather than just going for it and confidently playing our hearts out, as we did a few months later at the Battle of the Bands, or as we also did later in the Tomassi's parking lot at Matt Hermann's birthday party. But we learned a lot from doing this, not least of which was that it wasn't that hard to cast a tall shadow if you could just talk someone into letting you on the stage.

A sampling of the songs we played that night, first the Zep songs:

Whole Lotta Love:

Black Dog:

Communication Breakdown:

Rock and Roll:

Celebration Day:

No Quarter:

Heartbreaker Solo:

Stairway to Heaven:

A sampling of the non-Zep material:

Lonely is the Night (Billy Squier):

Smoke on the Water:

Limelight:

The whole show can be heard in more or less its original order here. One Night Only
(and yes, the audio and video are slightly out of sync, but this was the eighties and out of sync was pretty much how things were).

-JBK.

Drums in the Deep

Drums in the Deep

Something's brewing in that old abandoned factory on the outskirts of town. Mysterious noises have been heard thumping and banging away at strange hours. Livestock have gone missing or have turned up with strange haircuts and unusual appetites.

What rough beast now slouches toward New Jersey, its hour come round at last?

RBL reunion: coming somewhere in Summer 2013

Bring It On Home:

The Lemon Song:

The Rover:

Ramble On:

In the Before Time (part 2)

Face Down

It was more than just a band name, it was an attitude, a likely way of landing after a night out chasing the dream. . .

In a previous post I mentioned that McKenna and Koslow were in separate bands in high school. Koslow played with Reilly in the RB Laurence Band. And McKenna played in Face Down. If RBL were like a cult, performing ritualized re-enactments of the great gods of Zeppelin, Face Down captured something more of the contemporary sense of what classic rock was in 1986. They performed Blue Oyster Cult and Bad Company, Pat Benatar and The Who, Dire Straits and The Eagles. Where RBL chose a band of brazen rock icons to imitate, Face Down chose songs to fit their strong suits as musicians and as people. Well rehearsed, tight as a drum, they showed how well a bunch of kids could take the sounds of the radio and turn them into something at once raw and polished, fierce and poised.

With sharp two-guitar work from McKenna and Salman Ahmed, solid bass playing from teen heart-throb, John Devlin, fierce drumming from Gerry White (currently the drummer in three different bands, Baby Teardops, Labretta Suede and the Motel 6, Sleep to Death), Face Down featured strong vocals from both Ahmed and Marissa Nashel, who came to belt, wearing a fringed leather jacket and stalking the stage during her featured Benatar song like she was looking for the guy who did her wrong somewhere in the audience so she could tell him off to his sad little face.

But the showstopper of the night, the song that really blew the roof off was Hotel California. The idea of pulling this off was, in its way, every bit as audacious as RBL doing live Dazed and Confused. Because it's a long song, with lots of parts. Because it's got a lot of strange lyrics that can be a tough sell. Because it's got a whole bunch of very recognizable guitar licks and if someone hits a clam or gets lost in the middle of those harmony guitar parts at the end, forget it, you can stick your steely knife and a fork in this beast because it's done. It's one long tightrope this band chose to walk, all together, balanced up on each other's shoulders. But they came through with grace and power, a bunch of kids doing the work of grownups, owning the whole thing like they made it themselves.

Here is the version they performed at the soundcheck the day of the Battle of the Bands, paired with a picture of them in all their teen heart-throb glory. Feast your eyes, feast your ears. Brace yourself for the  coming reunion gig. . .


Face Down's set list at the BOB (not in original order):

Burnin' For You (Blue Oyster Cult)
Rock and Roll Fantasy (Bad Company)
Sultans of Swing (Dire Straits)
Behind Blue Eyes (The Who)
Take It Any Way You Want It (Pat Benatar)
Hotel California (Eagles)

In the Before Time (Part 1)

Land of the Lost (and Found)

Before there was Mrs Henry, there was high school.

Not high school like today, where the guys all have their hair cut like Justin Bieber and the girls all think Madonna’s old and the eighties are just a bunch of John Hughes movies that their parents insist are funny even though they’re so, like, not. Not like today when everyone zombie-walks through the halls with eyes fixed on their social-life-in-a-box, too busy twiddling  away with their thumbs to scan the halls ahead for some beautiful face to hope will say hello or some scary dude to hope is not in the mood to noogie.  Not like today when MTV is showing “Drunk People Eating Each Other’s Faces and Talking Shit” 24 hours a day. Not like today when you no longer have to sit through Girls Just Wanna Have Fun for the hundredth time in hope that Hot For Teacher or Unchained will be up next.

Back then, in the before time, if we knew one thing about music, we knew we had missed the chance to see the greatest band of all time by mere inches.

Zeppelin was gone.

They were just the other side of a fissure in time that separated us irrevocably from the golden-age of rocking. We were like Dark Age villagers scavenging in the ruins of an ancient fallen city, once glowing magnificently with incomparable vitality and power. Or like Charlton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes, on the beach way out in the Forbidden Zone, knee deep in the surf, angrily pounding sand and cursing the bastards who had blown it all up, there in the shadow of the broken torso of the Statue of Liberty washed ashore in an utterly irremediable future. All that was left to us were posters, records, and midnight showings of Song Remains the Same. 

The Song of What Remains

Before you could watch anything you wanted whenever you wanted, courtesy of the intertubes, there was only one way to see Zep in their glory days, and that was to go to the little movie theater in Fort Lee at midnight, pay three bucks or whatever it was and plop yourself down in a seat, and stare at the screen, waiting for the past to live again.

The movie starts out weird: a Prohibition-era fantasy sequence in which pinstriped gangsters with Tommy guns (played by Zep’s management team) mow down some baddies, whose heads pop off, shooting vari-colored liquid into the air, like decapitated soda fountains. (I am not making that part up. Check the internets if you don’t believe me). Then telegrams go out to all the band members, each seen in his “home.” Jimmy Page sits with his back to us by a peaceful lake, turns when he hears us coming and shoots glowing beams from his eyes like a battery-powered Godzilla. Robert Plant frolicks with his beautiful family on a lush Welsh hillside, looks up from the telegram he’s just received and says, “but that’s tomorrow….tomorrow…tomorrow” and off we go, rushing with the band into Manhattan, into the bowels of Madison Square Garden.

Then we’re in a vast, pitch-black space. It’s incredibly disorienting, like trying to find your way around a big dark room, feeling with your arms in front of you for some landmark or light switch. There are occasional whistles and shouts, which give you the sense that there are people out there in the distance whom you can’t see. Someone says “let’s go” and the drums bash into that great open-hi-hat beginning from Rock and Roll, the lights go on and bam, there they are. Led Zeppelin, live and in color.

The four of them on a tiny, bare stage, right up on top of each other like they’re playing in someone’s basement.

Plant bare-chested and golden-haired, with a cucumber stuffed down the front of his jeans, Bonham, pure Barbarian Drummer, Jones with the Carol Channing hairdo, and Page, wearing his wizardy dragon-suit, more full of wiry, agitated motion than we could have suspected from studying his frozen rock-god gestures in our posters. It was as if Michelangelo’s David had shook-off his marble-calm, leaped down from his pedestal and gone gyrating into battle with Goliath right before our eyes.

From this point on we sat with jaws dropped, the past momentarily a living, breathing, peerlessly highly-rocking thing.

To the Battle of the Bands

In high school, the members of Mrs Henry played in separate bands. McKenna played in Face Down, about which I will say more in a separate post. But Koslow and Reilly played together in the RB Laurence Band (named for a classmate who was not, in fact, part of the band, a fact which seemed to confuse literal-minded teachers and classmates who puzzled as to why he wasn’t going to be onstage with the band that bore his name. To his credit, he shouldered this burden with equanimity and even a kind of perverse pride--the best kind, really).

While Face Down pursued a more varied repertoire (Blue Oyster Cult, The Eagles, Pat Benatar, Bad Company), The RB Laurence Band focused increasingly over the year or so of its existence on one thing: playing Led Zeppelin. The reason for this was simple enough. Its singer sounded amazingly like Robert Plant. A sophomore when his bandmates were seniors, David Simon had the lungs of a rock-god. His friend, fellow sophomore, Jason Reilly, rounded out the lineup on bass with dependable groove and a bass-player’s poker-faced calm in the face of the perpetual chaos that seemed always to surround the RB Laurence Band, truly a band that never quite knew what it was doing until it was done.

If you played in a band at Tenafly High School in 1986, there was one major event which dominated your existence as a band, and that was the Battle of the Bands, held in the spring, though the precise date now escapes memory. Usually, there were four bands. There was an ongoing jazz-fusion ensemble, Anonymous, which endured like a guild or a secret society, older members choosing new members each year as if they were Skull and Bones or Masons. The initiation rites were shrouded in secrecy but we were all pretty sure that bonghits and Spyro Gyra were crucial elements. Apart from Anonymous, in 1986 the bands that year were Face Down, The Shade (playing Genesis, Duran Duran, Phil Collins) and Couleur, who played Talking Heads and some other stuff your chronicler can no longer recall.  The RB Laurence Band came to play Zeppelin (and one song by The Firm, the band Jimmy Page formed with Paul Rodgers the lead singer from Bad Company, our one concession to the fact that it was, in fact, no longer 1975).

And what Zeppelin songs did the RB Laurence Band play? Well, in a nod to sanity, we did play a couple of short and tight ones, Immigrant Song and Rock and Roll (with an intro lifted from a bit of live noodling between Plant and Page in Song Remains the Same). But in a nod to obsession, and in a characteristic embrace of projects that were at most a nail’s breadth either within or beyond our capability, we performed our own version of the monstrous live Dazed and Confused that we’d spent hours watching on the big screen in that seedy theater in Fort Lee, hours more listening to in our rooms.

Koslow bought a violin bow and an orange satin footman’s coat, in an effort to be as Jimmy-Page like as possible.

Everyone else in the band stood up at his full height and agreed to imagine for a half hour that he was, in fact, Led Zeppelin. The results were, to judge by the feeling the band had themselves and the reaction of others, both plausible and raucous.

There was video taken of the show (of the entire 1986 BOB, in fact), which this blogger would be happy to once again get hold of. Inquiries have been made and I continue to hope that it will turn up. In the meantime, however, here is another kind of document. Audio from the soundcheck done the day of the BOB paired with photos from the BOB itself.

The videos are crude, but hey, it was the eighties, when it wasn’t perceived as a particularly weird or antisocial thing to perform a fifteen-minute live Dazed and Confused complete with violin bow solo, when in fact an audience of high-schoolers knew exactly why you were waving that bow around. Because in 1986 Zeppelin were six-years and a world ago gone, but, for a few minutes in that high-school auditorium we kinda sorta made it seem they weren’t. 

The Set:

1. Immigrant Song

Simon wails like he's come to loot and plunder. What else can you say?

2. Rock and Roll

Acapella Simon to start, then a little call and response lifted from live Zeppelin antics. Abrupt beginning to the song which is then played like a stampede. Koslow plays the solo like someone is giving him a hotfoot.

3. Closer

Believe it or not this was an actual hit in the eighties (The Firm's version, I mean. We used to go see Firm concerts in the desperate hope that somehow Page would finally play some Zeppelin songs. Everyone would get horribly drunk in anticipation, then drunker still in disappointment). This one has a sax solo by a freshman named Marco Schnabel (yes, the guy who went on to direct Love Guru.) His friend and fellow freshman, Andy Markham also sometimes played drums for us when we'd do No Quarter or Stairway and Russ played the keys. Now he's an actual real-live drummer. Apparently we did not stunt his growth as a musician, only perhaps, as a human being. Matter for a future post.

4. Dazed and Confused

Here's where it all. . . ends. . .

Violin bow solo, the works. Listen for the way the band comes tumbling out of the guitar solo at about 10:18, Simon wailing like a banshee. Nuts.

Mrs. Henry "Alive" at Foxwood Drive

Mrs Henry: Alive at Foxwood Drive, front cover

A genuninely "live"album probably only in the sense that at the time when it was recorded all band members were in fact breathing and their brain waves were (for the most part) not flat, Mrs Henry's Alive at Foxwood Drive nevertheless continues in the grand tradition of not-quite-live live albums represented by such landmarks as KISS's Alive, Ted Nugent's Double Live Gonzo, Frampton Comes Alive, Cheap Trick's Live at Budokan, Aerosmith's Live Bootleg, and Rush's All the World's a Stage, to name just a few.  These were albums designed to bring the concert experience home for the poor saps who couldn't score a ticket or a ride to the show when it came through town. The music was typically awash in stadium size reverb, embellished with added bullfight-cheer style crowd noise and epic stage banter. Notoriously, the music was often also "improved" in the studio.

Mrs. Henry: Alive at Foxwood Drive, back cover

So, presented here is Mrs Henry in fair simulation of its brutal live glory (actually recorded on the technological equivalent of an etch-a-sketch in a basement during rehearsal) playing to an enthusiastic crowd (bullfight cheers added later). And yes, we admit it, some songs have had a little help here and there (a fuckup or two deleted through the magic of the computer-thingy). But all in all, we hope you'll enjoy this little piece of lost eighties music history, presented as it almost, nearly, possibly could have happened. Feel free to roll a j on it.


From a Buick 6

The Roots

Night Train

Down Home Girl

The Wasp

The Wicked Messenger

To download Mrs Henry's Alive at Foxwood Drive just click on the links below.

From a Buick 6
The Roots
Night Train
Down Home Girl
The Wasp
The Wicked Messenger

Sidewalk Santa, The Video

Thrill to the exciting new video from our defunct band.  Mrs. Henry and Friends presents Sidewalk Santa: The Video, featuring exciting dance performances from Santas all over the world, plus the music of Mrs. Henry.  Ho Ho Ho!

Please do not attempt these moves at home without the assistance (or at least the nearby presence) of trained medical personnel.

The song, Sidewalk Santa can be downloaded here:
Sidewalk Santa