Paddy's Wanderings

Shaved Fish

Back when I was really getting into music and trying to be a rock star at the tender age of thirteen, I discovered the Beatles. I ended up playing bass so it would be natural to say I became a big fan of Paul McCartney. Well...not exactly. Don't get me wrong I love all the Beatles music and their solo stuff as well and have always been a huge fan, but the one guy who inspired me was John Lennon.

Just as I was discovering this, Lennon was shot. It was just stunning to me. I had just started down the path and it ended. Well that didn't stop me and I have always devoured all that I could find.As such, I have been reading all I can about the exhibit Yoko Ono has opened at the New York Rock Hall of Fame.

Trying to catch a glimpse of a white feather in the corner of my eye...

Blue Suede to Rhinestones

I was eleven when I went to my first concert. I was hopping up and down excited. My Aunt got four tickets to go see Elvis in Saginaw. Now, it was gonna be the four 'old' ladies going(they ranged in age from 32 to 36 at the time), my mom and her friend, and my two aunts, there was no room for the kid to go. But fortune smiled and my mom's friend got sick and could not go.

I will admit, I begged, I pleaded, I did everything in my power to go. I was willing to do whatever it took to go to that concert. I was a huge, I mean huge fan of Elvis. I loved watching all of his movies. There was an independent station out of Detroit that we could pick up on a regular basis with the rabbit ears and they showed tons of movies all the time. So I got to see Elvis at the movies. My parents had a Magnavox Stereo Console and a bunch of albums, most notably, Elvis Albums!

So I go off with the ladies to the concert and its loud and noisy. I saw a couple guys being dragged by their wives into the arena, but I dont remember seeing any kids. It was unreal for a kid. The warm up band comes on and they play a few songs, the choir comes out and do a few songs, then the show starts.

The noise level went through the roof and there he was, Elvis. We were in the upper level toward the back but Elvis was huge! And yeah it was the heavy rhinestone Elvis, but his presence was huge. He sang Heartbreak Hotel, one of my all time favorites, and the women were rushing the stage! It was crazy to see women throwing underwear, screaming like little girls. Every time he threw a silk scarf into the crowd those women fought for it! It was bedlam I tell ya, pure pandemonium.

I was sitting on the aisle and looked over and there was my mom and aunts, screaming and carrying on just like everyone else. Now I was in awe of Elvis, the show was awesome, but to see these grown women carrying on like that was...stunning. I had to stand on my seat to see!

Elvis did an encore and then those famous words came over the loudspeaker...Elvis has left the building. I was overwhelmed. That was the single most electrifying experience I have ever had at any concert, even to this day. I have been to many concerts since, even did security at a bunch of shows in the nineties, but I have never seen the like again. It was magical.

The Rumours

The Rumours lineup started with Jim and Dave1 on guitar with myself on bass. We added Jon on keyboards and Mike on drums a little later to become a full sized band. Until Jim and Dave1 and myself graduated from high school, this was the band. Although our music changed radically from basic rock and roll to some pretty far out stuff, the group was solid.

When Jon and Mike joined, we were your basic young teen basement band who thought they were gonna be the Next Big Thing. We strived to make ourselves the best we could at our instruments, and really took the whole idea very seriously. We studied musical composition and could read and write music. We devoured books, harrassed instructors and teachers and devoured as much music as we could find. Jon and Mike fit right into that and encouraged us even more with their jazz and clasical background. At this point, as we got into the summer of eighty-one, we were changing in a lot of ways.

The group of young guys playing love songs, trying to pick up girls and emulating sixties groups like the Beatles, Stones, and Who, was slipping away. We went so far as to design our name, The Rumours around albums(not CD's) and artwork and songs. Mike was a photo and video nut, Jon was an artist and we were gonna use all of that as a supplement to the music. I still have the album list...

1. Have you heard The Rumours? - We made flyers and a poster(dont know where that went) and that was the catch phrase. Good basic songs we were writing.

2. Spreading Rumours - Of course the follow up had more of the same, but we wanted the cover to have a young lady, face down with long black hair and legs spread wearing only Clavin Klein jeans

3. Rumours on the Wind - now we're cooking along and the art and videos get better

4. Rumours for Sale - Our sell out album, cashing in on the success

5. Dirty Rumours - our version of the 'butcher' album and rebellion

6. Innuendo - now to the creative side,musically and away from love me do songs

7. Turnstile - a 'bridge' album into the more, shall we say, influenced side of music

8-11. Grapevines, Hearsay Heresy, White Lies and Talebearers were the funky, avant garde stuff

12. Borton Road - four of us lived on borton road, and of course its an obvious take off from Abbey Road(I think you see a lot of the Beatles, Stones, and Who in our band here...

13. Whispers - the last hurrah

And of course it never happend that way. Our biggest downfall was we never really got out of the basement and spent too much time experimenting with sound and music and never just got out and played. Dave1 and I had the 2Daves as an outlet, but with the Rumours it was always what cool new stuff can we play, write, and experiment on. We even did a twelve tone piece, played around with atonal styles and just went out there. We stopped being a rock band my sophomore year and just became a group of guys screwing around with music. It was a lot of fun and I would give real money for some of the tapes we made, but we grew up and grew apart. We had fun, and that was the important part.

2Daves

Dave2, Dave1 and myself had to always find drummers, which were in short supply, at least good ones. For awhile we were 2Daves & 2Pats, not much original in that name but we had three different drummers, all named Pat. One left for a punk/new wave band, and the other two left for good old seventies hard rock style bands and we were back to looking again. That was the biggest problem we had with 2Daves, no consistent drummer. But with splitting time with The Rumours and everything else we did, we had a drummer often enough to practice and occasionaly play a one shot gig.

We never really went beyond playing songs from the fifties and sixties, with a pinch of seventies thrown in now and then. We played for fun and for Dave1 and myself, it was a chance to get out and do some playing in front of people and just having a good time. Dave2 just wanted to play and act cool for the girls. That was ok, we knew we were never going to be the Next Big Thing.

My one great moment on a personal note with 2Daves was when we were trying out new drummers and after three hours of the Daves singing, their voices were raw and we had one more drummer to go. We were in Dave2’s basement and we were whipped and was just gonna blow off the last guy but he said he wanted a shot, he was better then anyone…yeah…ok.

So I volunteered to sing. The Daves looked at me and said, no, that’s ok. I was ticked, and told them, hey we have a half assed band cause I got us playing together, I got us a couple play dates, our only good play dates, I want to friggin sing! So they said ok. I said to this guy Jimmy, you know the play list and he says….yeah…I said ok, lets start.

I belted out I Saw Her Standing There. The Daves were stunned and just looked at me…I guess I did ok. Then we shifted into Secret Agent Man and finished that off rather well. Dave2’s mom(who was very, very supportive of us, we could always play in the basement, she fed us, and we got to listen to her vast collection of 45’s, original 45’s of Buddy Holly, Elvis, the whole rock era pre-Beatles, it was awesome) came down stairs and said who is singing?

The two Daves point at me and say Paddy is singing, why ma? She looks at me and hops up on the washer and says keep going. So we did. I sang every song we knew from the fifties and sixties from Heartbreak Hotel to Peggy Sue to If I fell and Eight Miles High. We played and played and I had the time of my life just belting em out for about an hour. Then I said one more, and did the Beatles version of Twist and Shout.

She looked at Dave2 and said, well you found a drummer and you finally found a rock singer, good job Paddy, you should sing more often and walked upstairs. You could have knocked me over with a feather. Dave2’s mom was cool, an original teeny bopper and probably the coolest parent of my group of friends. Its too bad she wasn’t about twenty years younger(I have to laugh when I write that cause she was all of about forty at the time-twenty five years ago- and at that time, when I was 18 she was ‘old’). Yeah we all had a bit of a crush on her. Come on, she was cool, fed us, drove us all over town, helped us get gigs(our first gig was Dave2’s little sisters tenth birthday, we got paid in cake), man she was a ‘fun’ parent. Our parents were not fun , and if not against us, at least never really supportive. But we had a fan and that’s what I remember and that’s what was cool.

My high school days with 2Daves was a blast. The summer of eighty-four, we called it quits and went our seperate ways. Dave1 went off to college to get a music degree. Dave2 went to college and became a chemical engineer. The multiple drummers just did whatever drummers do. And I went of to college chasing dreams.

A Tale of Two Bands

When I was in eighth grade, I got this bright idea to start a band, and I talked two of my buddies into going out and buying guitars and giving it a go. I of course had to get a bass. I am not sure why, but that’s how it ended up and my affair of the bass was started. I played sax in the school band(my first bass was a Mustang), Dave was in the choir(and got a Stratocaster), and Jim was just Jim(he got a Telecaster), a D&D buddy who was way cool and wanted in on the deal. I found my bass in a newspaper ad, the previous owner having got a fancy schmancy new bass and amp. Jim and Dave rummaged in the back of a pawnshop and got those two beauties for a song. So off we go with said instruments, but no drummer. That was ok, we needed to learn what the heck we were doing first.

The summer of nineteen eighty we played D&D and played music until our fingers were raw, and even on occasion, bleeding raw. We could still chuck dice, so all was good. We started playing good old fifties rock and tried our hand at early Beatles and the Mersey Sound. We played and played and started to sound ok, but still no drummer. Our musical education was really just getting started going into that fall and into high school. Then John Lennon was killed right when we were starting to get into later Beatles and playing around with an old 4 track recorder we found in that timeless musical vault of a pawnshop.

That was a seminal moment for us in a lot of ways because it focused us onto Lennon and into the pyschedelic side of music, into the concept stuff and a little away from the singles. Then we wanted to experiment and play around with sound and music and expand our horizons. We listenend to everything we could get our hands on, from Motown and Elvis, to Punk and New Wave, to Classical, Jazz and New Age. We went into overdrive in our desire to learn music. And yeah, we were still learning how to play even the most basic love me do songs, but what we were listening too was the next level. We tried some Stones, the Who and into current stuff like The Police.

It was a weird time cause a friend of ours, another Dave, got an old Harmony guitar right from the fifties with the purest, sweetest sound you can imagine. Dave2(a D&D and Choir buddy) got the guitar from his uncle for shoveling his driveway that winter. He sunk right into that guitar and learned so fast it was unreal. He loved fifties music, Ritchie Valens, Buddy Holly and that whole sound, then he discovered Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and he was blown away. So now we had a three guitar, one bass, no drummer band.

And the first fissure showed.

The two Daves got along, Dave1 and Jim got along, but Dave2 seemed to be in conflict with Jim more often then not. Which was in some ways just fine, cause Dave1 and myself expanded our musical abilities by leaps and bounds with Jim. With Dave2, we played a lot of fun music and actually played in front of people eventualy, and not just in the basement or garage. Jim and I played our instruments and on occasion sang backing vocals. The two Daves were the singers, always. As we got into that next summer, we hooked up with Jim’s older brother, Mike and his buddy Jon. Mike was a drummer(he always claimed percussionists) and Jon played keyboards. They were two years older and knew girls and could drive, we were homeward bound! At this point it became Jim, Jon, Mike, Dave1 and myself in one band and we proudly called ourselves The Rumours. On the other side of the coin it became Dave1, Dave2 and myself in the other group, more often then not, known as 2Daves.

So it became a tale of two bands.