Archival Buffalo News feature articles

After Raven in 1970, there was The Road. They also had just played Kleinhans Music Hall . They, too, had a record contract. They were pop stars, adored by throngs of teens. Then they wanted to be taken seriously …   Saturday, April 18, 1970   The Road – Upward   New Understanding, Contract, Music   You had to be at that concert in Kleinhans Music Hall March 17 to see how tough things really are for The Road. It should have been beautiful. There they were, playing opposite the Grateful Dead, playing under Lukas Foss, playing a well-polished set of their own. But did the crowd go crazy for them? Did these kids, kids their own age, a serious rock crowd, did these people even care? * * * THE OTHER side of the story was The Buffalo Evening News fashion show a week later. The Road was there, brought back by popular demand, for the third year in a row. For 11,000 teenage girls over three days. Last year the crowd stormed the stage and the group wound up bumped

  Raven was the first band I wrote up in April 1970 for the Pause section of TV Topics in what was then The Buffalo Evening News. For me, it was the obvious choice. Me and my Lavender Hill bandmates didn’t necessarily worship Raven, but we certainly wanted to follow in their footsteps. They seemed to have achieved everything we were aspiring to. As players, they were towering talents. They were writing their own songs. And on top of it all, they had a contract with a major record company. They were signed to Columbia . Couldn’t get much better than that. It wasn’t, however, as good as it appeared. Columbia didn’t promote their two albums – the label still holds the rights to them and won’t re-release them. And then there were internal tensions. Not long after this article appeared, they broke up and wended their separate ways to California . All except the bass player, Tommy Calandra. But that’s another story.   Saturday, April 11, 1970   The Raven Has a Foot In the Do

  Spot the major typo (Hint: It's the date)   This being Buffalo , there’s always a connection, sometimes an unlikely one. For instance, the city’s legendary jazz deejay, Joe Rico, who just died, and the city’s legendary country deejay, Ramblin’ Lou Schriver. The connection, as retired Buffalo News columnist Jeff Simon noted in his Facebook tribute to Rico, came at a radio station in Niagara Falls , where Rico had a jazz program. Schriver was the engineer who ran the board. In my first chat with Rico’s widow – there will be a full-fledged obit for him soon – she mentioned that they attended the same church as the Schrivers. After worship services, the jazzman and the country cat would hang out together at the back of the sanctuary, talking. Further coincidence – while searching for the first column I wrote for the Pause section in TV Topics in the spring of 1970, I stumbled upon a story about Schriver. By then he had a radio station of his own.   Mr. Country Music Ramblin

               The turning point for me at what was then The Buffalo Evening News came 50 years ago. The editors, in their neverending quest to reach readers under 30, set me up on the opening page of Pause, a special section of lifestyle features tucked into the back of the Saturday TV Topics magazine. My assignment – write an article every week about the vibrant local music scene. This proved pivotal. I was playing in a band when I arrived at The News in 1968, figuring the day job would be temporary, just until we became rich and famous. But we weren’t. We were still poor and obscure – a second-tier bar band. Here was a chance to seize the day as a writer. Before the summer was over, I was no longer a working musician. I thought this all began in June 1970 with a story about the Road – a group so enormously popular that it was touted as Buffalo ’s answer to the Beatles. When I spooled into the microfilm in The News’ library, however, I discovered that the debut actually came two