June 19, 1971: Flash

They had the chops. They had the songs. They had the connections. They shoulda made it. See the footnote way down below. 

June 19, 1971 

‘Flash’ Is Right on Target

Group Has a Record and a New Name Coming Up 

        “We’ve never played anything but original music,” Jimmy Ralston says. “We knew from the beginning that it was going to have to be that way.”

        Now, after an 11-month trip from early determination into some kind of destiny, Jimmy and the rest of the group, temporarily named Flash, slip on stage for another Friday night at Aliotta’s on Hertel Avenue, secure in knowing that so far they’ve been right.

        They’ve contracted with Janus Records. Their first single, “Next Time Around,” should be out within a month. They’re about to record an album for a late summer release and it looks like what every musician dreams of is going to happen to them.

        And they’ve done it without playing for people outside Aliotta’s more than half a dozen times. They’ve done it with a few good contacts. But mostly they’ve done it with the songs they’ve written and the way they play them.

* * *

FIRST OFF this Friday is “Closer Every Day.” Halfway through it, there’s no more doubt about Flash. They’re heavy, the way Mountain or Bloodrock or The Zep are heavy. Heavy like a bronco ride with you hanging on to see what happens next.

        Phil Dillon sings the complaint of a guy who can’t make his chick understand, while Rich Pidanick drums like thunder and lightning and guitarist Ralston, bassist Larry Swist and organist Dean Mooney sweep the air with power chord changes.

        Catch the elements of their style now in “Fly” and “33 and Up.” Phil’s acoustic guitar sets a quick, silky intro, broken wide open by Rich, who’s beating his drums as if they were copperhead snakes while the rest of the band slides in, one by one, heavier and deeper.

* * *

MALEVOLENT melodies fade into serene middle sections and then come back again. Rhythms change, textures go from heavy to light to heavy. Solos are neatly integrated, no grandstanding. Phil’s voice makes you think of the guy in the Guess Who and the whole set is like something you’d find on a good record.

        The crowd grows, but it doesn’t dance. Just listens. During “Find What You’re After,” two modish-looking chicks pull chairs up on the empty dance floor about five feet from the stage.

* * *

KEY MAN in Flash’s destiny is clubowner Joey Aliotta, who used to manage Jimmy, Larry and Rich in their old band. Not only did he give them a steady gig when they wanted it, but he also brought Gene Jacobs around to listen.

        Gene is the guy who took Three Dog Night’s Cory Wells from Buffalo to California, the guy who found Bonnie Bramlett singing in honky tonks, a guy who watched the Byrds and Zappa happen in L.A. before he got sick of the music business and returned home, resolving to forget about it and spend more time with his wife and three children.

* * *

IT’S A FEW days later in Gene’s neat living room beyond the Bailey-Walden area. Gene, partner and brother-in-law Mike Lustan and all the group except Larry talk about how it began last fall.

        “From July to November,” Phil says, “we were seven nights a week rehearsing in Larry’s cottage behind his folks’ house in Kenmore. His father’s an Erie County jailer and not really into us, but he lets us do it and we appreciate it.”

        “Those first practices we had hassles,” Rich says, “but now we get along really good.”

        “How do they get along?” Jimmy jokes.

        “Really good,” Rich croons.

* * *

“WE GOT this job at Aliotta’s and Jerry Ralston was building us up in his newspaper,” Phil recalls. “It was the big thing. ‘Flash is coming.’

        “Actually, our first job was in the Fillmore Room at UB. It was the first time we used our A-7 speakers, our equipment wasn’t working right and we were scared stiff. They gave us a standing ovation and we didn’t know what to do.”

        Rich adds: “At Aliotta’s we were hiding in the basement before it started and when we went up, there were more than 300 people there.”

        “I remember my knees didn’t stop shaking until the middle of the first song,” Phil says. “That’s when Rick Sargent apologized for calling us ‘Tommy Roe’s backup band.’”

        “We were scared,” Jimmy says, “because there are so many people who won’t accept original music. If you’ve got a typical bar group, you work out a Joe Cocker tune or a Beatles tune and you know people are going to like it. But it’s not like that with new stuff.”

        “I saw ‘em on a Thursday night,” Gene Jacobs says, “and we started recording the following Tuesday with Chuck Mangione’s engineer Mick. We went up there with the idea of cutting a demo album.”

        The recording took three days. “It seemed like three years,” Rich says. “We learned how to drink coffee and stay up late.”

* * *

SINCE THEN, Gene’s been hassling record companies (“In California, they’re into music,” he says, “but in New York, they’re a bunch of business heads”) and the group has been writing new songs, rearranging old ones and staying broke, thin and hungry.

        “We’re all starving,” says Rich. “If it wasn’t for Gene and Mike, we wouldn’t have nothin’.”

        “This Wednesday,” Jimmy says, “all the equipment will be paid for. We haven’t made any money except for $5 at the end of the week. And there’s no place for us to play right now. Could you see us at The Mug?”

        But the present schedule – Aliotta’s Fridays and Saturdays and The Club in downtown Niagara Falls Wednesdays – will hold until the group changes its name to Kitty Hawk and “Next Time Around” becomes the hoped-for Top 40 hit.

* * *

TAPED three weeks ago in Act-One Studios here, it’s waiting final mixing in New York. Jimmy wrote it, plus the music to Phil’s words on the heavier flip side, “Long Way to Go.”

        The album, “First Flight,” will have the band posing around a replica of the Wright Brothers’ pioneer aircraft, Gene says.

        Recording in Rochester and here will take about four weeks and among the songs will be “Together We’ll Grow Old,” with a lengthy flute intro by Dean and words by Larry (the group philosopher) which the band says expresses where they’re at:

        “Sitting here scratching my head from day to day

        Strumming a new tune and searching for something to say

        For yesterday’s thoughts appear stale and overused

        Tomorrow’s a new day and I won’t be quite as confused …

        Things that surround me continue to drag me down

        The answers I don’t have, but surely new ways must be found,

        So I’ll sing my songs, but only in hopes that you’ll hear,

        I’m not condemning. I’m just trying to open your ears.”

* * * * *

The box/sidebar

Name Has to Go; They’ll Become ‘Kitty Hawk’ 

Pertinent information about Flash:

        Phil Dillon, 19, vocals and acoustic guitar, Riverside High School, single.

        Jimmy Ralston, 21, lead guitar, Amherst High, attended UB, single.

        Larry Swist, 19, bass guitar, Kenmore West High, attended UB, single.

        Dean Mooney, 22, organ and flute, Riverside High, computer school, former computer operator for five years, single.

        Rich Pidanick, 18, drums, attended Kenmore West, single.

        Jimmy, Larry and Rich are the group’s heavy music nucleus. Deciding to stick together after the breakup last July of their old band, Cold Soup, which mainly played Aliotta’s, they went looking for an organist and singer.

        They looked a long time before they found Dean, a soft-spoken jazz trio veteran who learned organ from a Juilliard grad and learned what to do with it from Dick Kermode, who later played for Janis Joplin.

        Not long after, listening to The Raven in Aliotta’s, Jimmy met Phil, who had been folksinging solo, and invited him to practice. “I knew he sang,” Jimmy says, “but I didn’t know he played guitar.” Phil and Dean give the group its softer, folkier influences.

        The name Flash was Jimmy’s idea, but there’s a West Coast group with the same name, so it has to go. Searching for a new one recently, Rich thumbed through a thesaurus. “I saw hawk and thought of Kitty Hawk,” he says. “That was it.”

* * * * * 

THE PHOTOS: From left, Rich Pidanick, Dean Mooney, Phil Dillon, Larry Swist and Jimmy Ralston. 

* * * * * 

FOOTNOTE: Flash had the momentum to launch out of Buffalo, but the going got rocky after they landed in L.A. and started doing showcase gigs. As guitarist Phil Dillon writes in their Buffalo Music Hall of Fame bio, “… after just a few months, the band was encouraged to learn Top 40 tunes, play local gigs and incorporate just a few of their originals. … After just a few months and with no offers from record labels, the band broke up. All but Mooney eventually returned to Buffalo.”

        The four remaining members coalesced around Act-One Recording Studio, where Larry Swist was working an engineer. They wrote more songs, enough to fill an album, with Swist playing bass and running the control board.  

        Phil Dillon notes in the band’s Hall of Fame bio: “The four-piece version of Flash never left the studio. Two years later and without much flash at all, it was over – but only for the band itself, not the band members.”

        All four of them entered the Buffalo Music Hall of Fame on their own before the entire band was inducted in 2015.

Jimmy Ralston went back to L.A. and worked for 30 years as guitar player and bandleader for Tina Turner.

Phil Dillon played locally until 1994, when he moved to Nashville. He’s written hundreds more songs and has worked with country singer T. Graham Brown and rock guitarist Jimmy Nalls of Sea Level.

Larry Swist achieved renown as an engineer of considerable brilliance, notching nine No. 1 records. He died in 2013 and still is  missed.

Rich Pidanick played drums in former Road singer Jerry Hudson’s group with Jim Ralston, then toured and recorded with the likes of Paul Williams and Mike Love of the Beach Boys. He went on to become a key executive in the Guitar Center chain of musical instrument stores. He died in 2016.