Dec. 5, 1970: The South Happiness Street Society Skiffle Band

 

The member of this band we’ve come to know best is Brian Bauer. As “Dr. Jazz,” he is Buffalo’s prime exponent of music from the 1920s and always a delight.

Herb Feuerstein is hard to trace. He seems to have kept working with bluegrass bands and settled in Houston.

As for restaurant owner Milton “Mickey” Lenzner, he was a graduate of the Wharton School and a Life Master bridge player. He died in 2004 at the age of 80. 

Dec. 5, 1970

Joining the Folk-Music Circuit

Skiffle Band Helps Open Coffee House 

Two miles down Sheridan Drive we spotted it. A floodlight. Who could be pumping all that candlepower at the Thanksgiving night skies?

Do you suppose it’s …? Why, here’s the parking lot and there it is, an honest-to-God, grand-opening floodlight. Milton Lenzner wasn’t leaving out a single effect.

Lenzner had planned weeks for this, the official opening of The Coffee House in The Sizzle Steak House, Sheridan Drive just east of Niagara Falls Boulevard. Planning it all. From the stage lighting to the teacups.

The idea was born when he and his wife, Rosalyn, joined friends for a trip to the Rue Franklin West after a Thursday night at the Buffalo Philharmonic.

Now here it was. A family steak house until 8 p.m. and a first-class coffeehouse by night. The first suburban stop on Buffalo’s revitalized folk-music circuit.

* * *

OPENING NIGHT attained that same air of supercharged consciousness you get at theater openings.

The dim lighting was perfect, the refreshments were precise, the fondue dishes were adored, all the right people were there (“Would you like to meet the man from the Coffee Institute?”) and The South Happiness Street Society Skiffle Band was scared stiff.

Scaredest stiffest was Herb Feuerstein, guitar player, singer and leader of the band. He’d even helped design the stage. And those huge Voice of the Theater speakers up there, they’re his.

With all that invested, the band was missing its brightest weird talent – 20-year-old electric mandolinist Alan Kornhauser, who Herb says has a voice like Howlin’ Wolf. Somehow he didn’t come in from Boston, Mass. He didn’t arrive all weekend.

* * *

THE BAND’S rich down-home zaniness, which won unscheduled acclaim at the Mariposa Folk Festival in Toronto for two years, turned uptight. Herb bounced grimly as he sang the first set and the coffeehouse openers talked loudly at their tables.

“We’re not together,” Herb said anxiously in the kitchen area between sets. “We’ve got to get together.”

Tensions slackened somewhat for the second set. There was Donovan’s “I Like My Shirt” and “Flaming Mamie,” straight from 1926 and still roaring. And “Coney Island Washboard Rag.”

Over one of those slow 50-year-old four-four jug band rhythms, banjoist John Lanford sang “I Want to Count Sheep Until the Cows Come Home,” his voice soft and his mouth more elastic than Mick Jagger’s.

Brian Bauer played with incredible ease and occasionally showed off a trick that made his clarinet sound like plucked strings. He was equally at home on saw, jug and washboard.

Hugh Robertson, indifferent to authenticity, boomed with his electric bass stronger than any washtub bass could boom.

* * *

“WHY DO WE play this music?” Herb said back in the kitchen area again. “We like it. And nobody does it, you know? I think there’s an audience for this just like there’s an audience for folk.”

When the third set arrived, Brian and Hugh disappeared and out came Herb and John as the band’s alter ego, Cold Salmon – which Herb thinks has more possibilities now than the Skiffle Band.

The Skiffle Band plays tonight at the State University College at Oswego and will appear every Sunday night at The Coffee House in The Sizzle Steak House. Cold Salmon will appear at The Coffee House next Friday and Saturday and Dec. 25 and 26.

* * *

ONE THING Cold Salmon does is show how well John can play lead guitar licks on the banjo. Another thing it does is provide a performing outlet for Herb’s Hippie Opera, which has been growing since April.

The Hippie Opera, unlike rock operas, is a disconnected series of songs about hippie life, mostly. It includes such tunes as “There Ain’t No Instant Replay in the Football Game of Life,” “High School Hippies,” “Lady McDonald (French Fries at Your Feet),” “Hippie Soup” and “Every Day’s a Saturday When You’re a Hippie.”

“High School Hippies” asks you to suppose that Abe Lincoln was a hippie. “Every Day’s a Saturday” tells about a disgruntled truck driver who is “converted” by the longhairs down the block and moves into the commune.

* * *

AND THERE’S “Hippie Soup,” actually homemade chicken-with-rice soup, which Herb explains:

“You make hippie soup when you get up in the mornin’, see, and there’s these five hippies in your pad, three of whom you’ve never seen before. And they’re all hungry. So you look into the refrigerator and there’s one teensy piece of cold fried chicken left over from the night before.

“You put on a big pot of boiling water and throw in the chicken and bouillon cubes and bay leaves and rice and instead of one person hoggin’ all the chicken, you can feed as many as you want to, except you have to use a lot of bouillon cubes to get a decent taste out of it.”

For a while, “Hippie Soup” was followed with dishes of real chicken soup. “The major reason we discontinued it,” Herb notes, “is because it spilled all over the car one night on the way home.”

* * *

OTHER HIPPIE OPERA songs express what seem to be conflicting opinions on drugs. “It’s all how you take ‘em,” Herb says.

“Some of the hippie songs we’ve actually lived through,” Herb says. “Like ‘Cigarettes, Ammo, Guns and Beer’ is about the South. And some are just inspired by what everyone else is going through in the line of hippiedom.

“The trouble with hippies is that they get into the same kind of contradictions that the Establishment does,” he adds. “What would be really best would be to live by the best parts of The System and the hippie world.”

* * *

BEFORE THE hippie songs, Herb and John do a hokey “Arkansas Traveler,” afterward a beautiful thing written by Mondo Galla of the Mondo Bizarro rock band.

Herb will call later to say that the music and the crowd got downright together as the weekend progressed. Meanwhile, the floodlight searched the sky and Lenzner bid good night. 

The box/sidebar:

Winning Ways 

Pertinent and impertinent information about The South Happiness Street Society Skiffle Band:

Herb Feuerstein, 24, guitar and vocals, Riverside High School, UB graduate (philosophy), taught one year at East High School, single.

John Lanford, 19, banjo and guitar, from Tulsa, Okla., single.

Brian Bauer, 23, clarinet, saw and jug, Kenmore West High, “almost graduated” from UB, married.

Hugh Robertson, 25, electric bass guitar, Kenmore East High, attended University of Rochester, recently graduated from blacksmith school in Phoenix, N.Y., single.

* * *

HERB, THE leader, started out in a folk group called The Old Post Road, which included former Buffalo disc jockey Tim Kelly. Later he moved into bluegrass and other traditional country music.

Herb met Brian when South Happiness Street used to play in and around UB’s Norton Hall. “All of a sudden Brian comes in,” Herb says. “Nobody knew him from Adam.”

Herb ran into John at Toronto’s Mariposa Folk Festival in 1968 and called him here from Tulsa a year later after another banjo player quit. Hugh joined last summer. 

* * *

SOUTH Happiness Street, on the strength of their impromptu workshop playing, was invited to play in a formal evening program at the 1969 Mariposa and was the hit of the show.

Told that Mariposa didn’t stage unknown groups two years in a row, the band took acoustic instruments back under the trees this summer and wound up surrounded by folk fans.

Cold Salmon – Herb and John as a duet – was born this fall in reply to Jefferson Airplane’s Hot Tuna. “We’re sort of the Hot Tuna of the Skiffle Band,” Herb says.