Category: Field Recordings of the Future

Cheryl Laurro was the queen of Monroe Avenue back in the day. She ran Godiva’s and The Mission by day and at night she blew the doors off the house when she fronted her band, Lilly’s Buffet, sort of a precursor to Anonymous Willpower. She left town years ago but she will always be a dear friend. After dinner with her last night we watched every Pete LaBonne video we could find online and then she called up a this video of her father’s 1956 song “Jive Train.”

The 45 was recorded at at Fine Recording Studios in Rochester when Jim Laurro was still in high school. In fact he was only sixteen and the sax player, Pee Wee Ellis, who went on to write “Cold Sweat” for James Brown, was living with Jim in Cheryl’s grandmother’s house. He lived with them for two years before joining James Browns’s band. Cheryl’s cousin put the A-side up. We’re waiting for the B-side, “I Woke Up This Morning.”

JIM LAURRO AND HIS ORCHESTRA – Jive Train / Woke Up This Morning – Fine F8-2157 A-side instrumental, b-side vocals
“Pee Wee” Ellis – tenor sax, Joe Personte – trumpet, Willie Bryant – trombone, Jim Laurro – piano, Dick Sampson – bass, Val Colombo – drums, sung by King George
500 copies ordered, 21st August 1957. Masters sold to the Adora Recording Co., May 1958

Peggi and I were in a band in the very early eighties. I think it was actually 1979 when we put the band together with Martin Edic, a friend we had met behind the counter at Record Theater in Midtown Plaza. We were asked to record a track for an album that Tom Kohn and Marty Duda were putting out called “From the City That Brought You Absolutely Nothing.” Needless to say I never cared for that title.

We recorded in Robert Marsala’s house. He was the bass player in my previous band, “New Math.” Duane Sherwood played synthesizer swooshes. Martin was an active bass player. Peggi played sax. We all liked dance music and pop. Ned Hoskin joined on guitar, not lead, rhythm. We were Hi-Techs, an already dated concept, no “The”  in the moniker and we insisted on the dash. We played fast. We had our own sound, kinda like a toy band.

We played around town and quite a bit in Buffalo where we met Paper Faces and Tony Biloni. Tony played sax too and did this poster. Archive Records released two of our singles. One of them, “Screamin’ You Head by Hi-Techs” got pretty popular at Danceteria, a New York club. We played a gig in a TV studio with Ozzie Osbourne that was broadcast on the old Channel 31.

I rounded up the digital bits and pieces from that era and created a one page website dedicated to Hi-Techs. There’s seven songs on the site and “Subscription” is my favorite.

Listen to Hi-Techs – Subscriptions Are My Prescription

Margaret Explosion returns to the Little Theater tonight for four straight months of performances on Wednesday nights. We have not played together since our last gig during Jazz Fest. This particular detail guarantees an interesting night. If anything, the gig is a great excuse to use a great Philip Guston painting as a graphic.

I ran a light that turned red while I was in the intersection on Webster Avenue. I know there was camera above but it was more than a week ago and I have not received a summons.

Bob Henrie and the Goners played Marge’s Lakeside Inn last night. They performed outside on the deck while the sun set over Lake Ontario. This was a picture perfect, unofficial sendoff to summer and sure enough a drone was flying above the crowd snapping shots for Marge’s fb page while the band cranked out a killer version of Elvis’s “Burnin’ Love.”

Because it is now or never there is a wealth of fabulous music documentaries out there, “The Girls In The Band,” “Six Feet From Stardom” and “The Agony & Ecstasy of Phil Spector,” all of which we saw on the big screen at the Little Theater. Last night’s screening of “The Wrecking Crew” may be the best of them all. 99 minutes long with 100 hit songs, all played by the amazing Wrecking Crew.

Denny Tedesco is making the movie and talked about his film after the screening. Denny is Tommy Tedesco’s son and he started the movie while his father, the guitar player on thousands of songs from the sixties, was dying of lung cancer. He told us he had recently interviewed Leon Russell and would have him in the next cut. He reunited his father, a Buffalo native, with the great Carol Kaye and Hal Blaine and they talked about creating parts for the soundtrack of our lives. Great interviews with Cher and Glen Campbell. Brian Wilson deservedly gets more movie space than anyone else and local resident, Gary Lewis joined the discussion in person.

Rochester became a boom town with the the success of the flour mills that capitalized on the river’s force. That same force cut a pretty impressive north/south gorge through the state creating the “Grand Canyon of the East” in Letchworth before it cut through the center of the city on its way to Lake Ontario. And all that flour was shipped via the Erie Canal to points east and west.

The canal still crosses the river in Genesee Valley Park. They fill the canal in the Spring by opening that connection. But years ago the canal crossed the city on Broad Street, a waterway bridge that was built over the river. This marvel is still there and if it was up to me the city would reopen the intersection. Rochester would again be a boom town just because this thing would be so cool.

Boom Boom Town / Violince 05:39 Written, performed and produced by Peggi Fournier, Paul Dodd, Bob Martin and Martin Edic with Kevin Vicalvi. ©1988 Earring Records. From Personal Effects’ Cassette “90 Days In The Planetarium.”

My favorite part of a baseball game is when they play a refrain from the Ramones or the White Stripes. And my favorite part of a bullfight is the ragtag band that sits in the stands near where they let the bulls out. These two guys, a father and son team sitting in the top row of Sahlen Stadium, are giving Abby Wambach and the Flash and a run for their money.

Terry Adams, with his new band, sounded better than ever last night at the George Eastman House garden. He is the Thelonious Monk of rock n’ roll. If fact he puts more roll in rock than anyone out there. Bernie Hirsch turned me on to them in his dorm room in 1969 and we’ve seen them a dozen times since and we always get as close to the band as possible, behind the PA, and always on Terry’s side.

NRBQ plays without a set list and covers ground from a Tijuana Brass song they had heard on the radio on the way to the gig to George Jones’ White Lightning and Tonight You Belong to Me. Last night they did a Chuck Berry meets Herman’s Hermits version of Something Tells Me I’m In To Something Good and a rousing Cielito Lindo. They’re own material is just as rich, Flat Foot Floozie and Howard Johnson from their second lp and Drivin’ In My Car.

Terry cannot sit still. He darts from one keyboard to the next even reaching over one from behind to play it upside down but he would prefer his antics not be documented. He told me to “document it in my mind” when I took this shot. Great advice. Long live Terry Adams!

Certainly one viable option to purchasing a Club Pass for the Rochester International Jazz Fest would be to just hang out on the streets for nine. The outliers surround the official sites and are scattered about between venues. I loved this group that was just getting going on East Avenue as we scurried by to our next event.

If you’ve been around as long as we have you know you can always find a free parking space in downtown Rochester regardless if a festival is going on. We usually find one near the Mens Fashion House on East Main.

We helped ourselves to three full sets of jazz last night, all performers we had never heard of and all sensational.

To cleanse the palette we’ve been listening to our nephew‘s new mixtape. Got his “Ridin” track stuck in my head.

I put a short video online of our nephew on his skateboard. It was taken a while ago but I sent him the link when he graduated from High School last week. He is more of a Warp Fest kinda guy but I dropped an obscure Archie Shepp track on the one minute video without giving credit to Mr. Shepp and got a warning from YouTube within minutes that my video would not be available in Germany because of copyright on “The Magic of JuJu” track. Next time I’ll drop a Margaret Explosion track.

I’ve been taking notes on the Jazz Fest