June 20, 1970: Barbara St. Clair and the Pin-Kooshins

 

On the morning that I started at The Buffalo News in September 1968, I woke up to the radio saying that a huge fire overnight had destroyed The Inferno in the Glen Park Casino in Williamsville. This was doubly bad news. Not only was The Inferno a big-deal venue for rock bands, but now it was gone before the group I was in got good enough to play it.

The subjects of this story had the chops and the status to play there on a regular basis. They also were unlucky enough to have left all their equipment in the place on the night it went up in flames.

Their fabulous vocalist, Barbara St. Clair, went on to renown as Buffalo’s “Queen of Soul.” She didn’t reveal her age for this article, but when she died in 2013, I finally learned the answer. She was born in 1941.

June 20, 1970

Originality Their Bag

Pin-Kooshins Try

To Write Their Own Hits

Barbara St. Clair and the Pin-Kooshins, carefully bearing cups of lunch-counter coffee, pick their way into the littered, beat-up store area next to The Mug (that) John and Frank Sansone’s groups use for a practice room.

        It’s the middle of the night – 11 a.m. And that miserable morning sun hurts, it’s so bright. This group played until 2 last night.

        Obviously this is another hard time. What do you do with a hard time? Make it into a funny game or something. Right?

        “Hey, you better watch out for The Grauser,” warns Ron (Jake) Jakubowski, the organist. “He’s mean.”

* * *

SANDY-HAIRED, mustached Ron Zalewski, the drummer, noodles on a flute and peers at you from behind his wire-rimmed glasses. Mean? You can’t be sure he isn’t.

        The Grauser’s finest super-human moment, they say, was in a Vero Beach, Fla., restaurant. The group all orders except Ron, who sits there going Snee-e-e-orrrkkk. Just tomato soup and raw meat for The Grauser, they tell the waitress. She didn’t know WHAT to think.

        Or, get this, they’re teeing off at the golf club and all these people are making fun of Ron, he had his beard then, because he looks so strange.

        Well, Jake starts this rumor that Ron is the eccentric son of a brewery owner – worth $15 million – and the crowd is buzzing as Ron painstakingly lines up his drive.

        So what happens? The ball bounces about 15 feet and dies. Nobody dares say a word.

* * *

EVEN BASS player Carmen Castiglione got it. Right after he joined last July, the group was down in New York City for recording sessions and he stayed in a hotel with Jake and John (Moe) Mahoney, the guitarist.

        “They spent the whole trip trying to drive me crazy,” Carm says. “I find out later they’re just teasing me.”

* * *

THE HOTEL may have been a lot of laughs, but the recording sessions weren’t. They had just signed with a well-known independent producer, a guy Moe knew from 1965, a guy who, along with Bob Crewe, produced a group Moe was in.

        “It was a classic case of a Buffalo group going to New York and getting taken,” Jake says. “‘Oh, you’re from Buffalo,’ they said and they took a big hook and led us in and out of studios. Remember that practice studio? Hottest day of the year and no air conditioning.”

* * *

THE PRODUCER wanted to take the group’s original songs and gave them four other tunes to learn and record in four days. The contract, which expires soon, provided for recording four songs, but nothing about releasing them. So no records.

        “I’d like to nail that guy,” Moe says. “With a spike.”

        This was barely 18 months after the group’s other setback – the fire at The Inferno in September 1968. $10,000 worth of their equipment burned. No insurance.

        Jake still has the burned-out amplifier section from his Hammond B-3. He was in New York when he heard about it, sitting in with The Road to do the organ part in the recording of “She’s Not There.”

        “After that, we were playing with borrowed equipment,” Jake says, “mismatched equipment …”

        “And determination,” Barbara injects.

        “All it means is that it’s taking us longer to make it,” Moe says. “I wanna make it so I can just sit back and take it easy. I want a yacht. A place in the country.”

        When the group began, it was natural to use Barbara’s voice for soul songs. And maybe the guys would do a couple of light jazz-like numbers. Now, although people think of them as a soul group, things have changed.

        “Right now,” Carm explains, “we’re trying to be one group. It used to be we’d do some tunes, then Barb’d come up. People would say we were two different groups.”

        “Now we’re writing all these things,” Jake adds. Most of the songs are his or Moe’s, with arrangement help from everybody. “We probably play more original material than any group in Buffalo. Outside of The Raven.”

        “And,” Carm says, “we’re trying to work on harmonies …”

* * *

BARBARA throws her coffee stirrer at him. “I thought those harmonies were good. He says TRY-ing.”

        “We’re almost like a new group,” Jake says. “We’re even thinking of changing our name.”

        “Originals run us into hassles, though,” Ron says. “This one owner says: ‘Chart tunes, chart tunes.’”

        “This place tonight, it’s the same way,” manager Frank Sansone says from over on a battered couch.

        “One of our favorite sayings,” Jake says, “is when somebody says: ‘Did you hear that group, how they do Chicago?’ And we say: ‘Yeah, throw a quarter in their mouth and they’ll play anything.’ We don’t want to copy. We want to write our own Top 40. We’ve got six songs right now that could be hits.”

* * *

DESPITE THIS, they’ve worked up things like “Love on a Two-Way Street,” the new Delfonics song, and “Into the Mystic.” And they don’t turn down club dates.

        Tonight they’re at the Cove in Long Beach, Ont. June 24, 26 and 27 at Fredonia’s Caboose. And July 1-5 at the Brass Rail in Rochester. Plus every Monday at Page One in Williamsville and every Tuesday at the Landmark in Sloan.

        “It’s hard,” Ron says, “to get your music across and find your own groove. You have to find a balance to make the owner happy and make the kids happy and make yourself happy.”

        “I can’t say we’re that popular,” Carm adds, “but as far as group-wise musically thinking together we’re probably one of the tightest groups in the city. We all have basically the same ideas.”

        “They can’t bag us,” Jake says. “We just like to play good music. We wouldn’t do ‘Sugar Sugar’ because that’s not our thing. We like good music and that’s it.” 

And now the box/sidebar

Some pertinent and impertinent information about Barbara St. Clair and the Pin-Kooshins:

        Barbara St. Clair, vocalist, “Don’t put in my age,” a Libra, East High School graduate, married.

        Don (Jake) Jakubowski, 23, organist, born on the Scorpio-Sagittarius line, Depew High School graduate, graduate this month of UB, anthropology major, single.

        Ron Zalewski, 23, drummer, Capricorn, Kensington High School graduate, a year at Buffalo State, single.

        John (Moe) Mahoney, 23, guitarist, Aquarius, South Park High graduate, single.

        Carmen Castiglione, 21, bass guitarist, Scorpio, North Tonawanda High graduate, married, one son.

* * *

FIRST, about three years ago, they were The Jay-Ron Duo. Jake, who learned organ from his mother and played three years with The Rat Pack, and Ron, part-time drummer and bartender at Dave Lang’s. They were recruited by Lang to play in his newly-remodeled club.

        Lang also recruited Barbara, who had sung five years with a Black group, The Sessions, and had worked with Joey Reynolds and Tommy Shannon on a Saturday afternoon television dance party.

* * *

JOHN JOINED three years ago, jumping from The Group in Niagara Falls. He previously was with The KB Buddies, backing the dance party and people like Dionne Warwick, Gene Pitney and Neil Darrow.

        Carmen came last July after “too many differences of opinion” in The Caravans after seven years. “Music’s been my whole life,” he says.

        Pin-Kooshins? Seems Jake came back from the doctor one day in 1968, arm full of vaccinations. Felt like a … you guessed it.