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)