SDMHF Im not fooling around here; April is looking to be a great musical month as four of my old band mates are getting inducted into the South Dakota Music Hall of Fame. SD is a great place to learn music and you can also use your guitar to shovel snow which they get a lot of (See: yesterdays blizzard.) Rocke Grace is receiving a lifetime achievement award. Rocke was in my high school band called Trees (no The). We werent hung up on that article thing back then. We were sort of hung up on the Byrds however as most of the songs we did were Byrd covers and as you can well imagine that type of folk rock music--as they used to call it -- wasnt that well received in most of those left over from WWII dance halls that are sprinkled throughout the state. Our claim to fame was scoring very highly in the Sioux Falls Battle of the Bands as we won a recording contract and a 45 (See: ancient recording methods pre 8 track cassette). We recorded our still yet to become a runaway hit song Find Somebody at the IGL Studios in Great Lakes (?) Iowa. The flip side (See: what happens when you turn your yet to be hit song 45 upside down) was recorded at a radio station under the guiding hand of DJ Lord Douglas. The only thing I remember from that session was the lack of headphones -- I had to stand on two boxes to overdub so I could hear the monitor speaker on the ceiling. Rocke and I went through other musical configurations including the band Rushmore with Mark Craney, Dan Danohoe and others. If financial success can be measured by body weight, I weighed 128 pounds that summer while playing in Rushmore (the band, not the monument.) Rocke joined the Young Raiders out of Lawrence KS and got me an audition. We traveled around from Texas to ND for a year with our hippe horn band in a converted school bus doing one nighters. Soon after that Rocke joined Joe Walshs Barnstorm and that tinkling piano roll you hear on the song Rocky Mountain Way, that was him. (I dont remember him getting me an audition to play guitar in that band for some reason.) Later on we wrote songs together in LA. Congrats Rocke! Doug Owen from Watertown SD is also getting nominated. He was the lead singer in the fore mentioned Young Raiders. Doug was famous for his dead on Johnny Cash imitation while playing his Buck Owens Fender guitar. I still have a cassette (See: the worst sounding musical transference device ever invented) of Doug practicing holding a note for two minutes. An amazing singer and the crowds loved him. Mike McCormick and Mike Miller. The two Mikes used to play in the Zero Ted Band whose claim to fame was the not ready for prime time music of YES, Gentle Giant and Zappa. Mike Miller is receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award and is currently on tour with Boz Scaggs. Also getting inducted is Cheryl Ladd who sang in lounge act with a bass player I later went on to play with so...close enough. Cheryl had some success in LA after her lounge act broke up. They used to perform at the Elks Club in my little town and my father used to have the band over for brunch on Sunday mornings. If there is a better way of starting off your Sunday as a teenager with raging hormones than sitting across the breakfast table from Cheryl Ladd, I dont want to know about it. southdakotarockandrollmusicassociation/inductees.htm
Posted on: Tue, 01 Apr 2014 14:18:31 +0000
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