Oct. 23, 1971: Straight outta Starpoint -- a band called Bags
Straight outta Starpoint, Timothy McVeigh’s alma mater
– a
Oct. 23, 1971
Aggression Is Their Bag
They’d Be Actors If Not Musicians
If somebody could tap into all the stray teenybopper energy
kicking around this particular night in the C. E. M. Center on Buffalo’s
But don’t think it’s easy. Ask those five guys up on the
proscenium arch stage of the old second-floor church hall, overlooking this sea
of joking, poking, cruising and chasing.
“These kids!” one says. “Play a couple hot numbers and
bleah-h-h, nothing!”
* * *
AT FRUSTRATING
times like this, most rock musicians start thinking of how they can punish the
crowd with sound.
But this group – Bags is their name – is plenty loud already
and besides, they’ve got this one number that lets EVERYTHING loose.
It doesn’t happen every night. Just to show this bunch
tonight, they weren’t going to do it. Except there’s a couple people here they
really want to play it for.
So they start their final set with a couple Rolling Stones
things. Heavy, bluesy stuff that they obviously enjoy. Touches of
well-organized solo riffs and guitarist Ron Lombardo in his white-fringed suit
jumping high and kicking like an apprentice to The Who’s Peter Townshend.
And there’s a sinewy “Nobody Loves You When You’re Down and
Out,” a high-powered “Johnny B. Goode” and a minor-key thing called “Lately,”
where Scott Case sings an ironic line about taking 18 years to get here. Time
for one more number.
* * *
THE FAME of
“There Was a Lady” has grown not from the beauty of the words (hard to hear),
melody (nothing extra) or instrumentals (poorer this night than other numbers).
It’s because the group turns it into a show of spontaneous and unexpected
aggression.
After the first couple verses, the band drops back to almost
straight rhythm and begins stuff that reminds you of what some of the British
groups were doing a couple years back.
Scott begins pounding a cymbal until it falls off the stand.
Another cymbal tips over. Lead guitarist Pete Venezia tosses his guitar in the
air, finally lets it fall with an electronic crash and pries at the strings
with a drumstick until they break.
Then he takes an axe, shows it to the crowd and begins
chopping at the instrument. Finally, he picks up a microphone and rams it into
the front of his amplifier, disabling one of the speakers.
* * *
“A
The group points to a chop mark in the hollow-body guitar.
They’re asked if it wouldn’t be easier to break up something that didn’t cost
as much.
“I really think every musician wants to do it some time or
other,” Ron says. “You know, you play for nobody for so long and you just wanta
take it out on something.”
“And if they know it’s expensive stuff,” Pete says, “they
know you’re serious. It’s no joke to see a $500 Gibson 335 go flyin’ across the
stage.”
* * *
FAR FROM
inspiring audiences to further aggression, the group says “There Was a Lady”
seems to drain all the fight right out of them.
“You see big guys out looking for trouble,” Scott explains,
“and then afterwards they just walk around stunned. It’s weird. They don’t want
to hassle anybody.”
The group says the whole thing is an extension of their
desire to put on a show. From the first few self-conscious leaps and grimaces,
they’ve gotten to where they’re planning to have a couple big equipment handlers
grab Pete and carry him offstage during the song.
“The whole point is the theatrics,” singer Scott Case says
later. “I guess we’d be actors if we weren’t musicians.”
The group calls the show aggression rather than destruction.
It all began one night when they were playing
* * *
THOSE WERE
dark days. After getting started with a three-month stint last winter at the
Pine Bowl in Niagara Falls, they came to a club north of Buffalo which, they
were told, had so much business that they jumped at he chance to play for door
receipts.
“There weren’t more than 30 people there the first night,”
Ron recalls. “We didn’t know that the kids had stopped hanging out there. We
got $6 each and the guy paid us in Canadian money.”
Bass guitarist John McIntyre quit for a few days and
everybody was generally depressed and picking at each other.
* * *
ASIDE FROM
the fateful cymbal, their other break was three months ago when Ron brought a
tape of original material to (booking agent) Frank Sansone’s apartment. Frank
and his brother John have had Bags working steadily ever since.
Next Friday they’re at
Their most memorable gigs have been freshman orientation at
the State University of Buffalo, when the crowd rushed the stage and wouldn’t
let them leave until they’d played a couple encores. And the night at Keystone
90s.
“That’s when the axe came in,” Pete says. “We were gonna burn
our old conga drum, but we couldn’t because of the fire ordinance, so I chopped
it up. You should have seen it afterwards. Nobody would even come near me.”
“They were all trying to guess how many thousands of dollars
of stuff we ruined,” Scott says, “and it wasn’t anything like that at all.”
“We seem to reach out to people who like to get into things,”
says drummer Glenn Bowen. “They’re the ones who crowd around up front. At the
Zodiac, we had people jumping up on the stage.”
* * *
THE OTHER
effect is that it makes people talk about Bags. The group concedes it may be a
hype, but they argue that it’s no different from what big-time groups do. And
the word spreads fast.
“Art Kubera,” Pete says, “I called him up Saturday to tell
him I’m gonna bring the broken amp in. I didn’t think he’d dig what happened,
so I said one of the equipment men dropped it.
“He said: ‘You liar. Bring it in. I’ve had 10 kids in here this morning telling me about this nut who rammed a mike stand through his speaker cabinet.’”
The box/sidebar:
School Friends
Pertinent information about
Bags:
Scott Case, 18, vocals,
Ron Lombardo, 20, vocals and rhythm guitar, Starpoint
Central, single.
Pete (Locomotive) Venezia, 19, lead guitar, axe and vocals,
Starpoint Central, single.
John McIntyre, 22, bass player,
Glenn Bowen, 20, drums, Starpoint Central,
* * *
“WE NEEDED
some money last December,” Ron says, “so we just got together. All we wanted to
play was New Year’s Eve, but this club owner in
All except John had known each other in Pendleton and even
played in little high school groups together. One thrown-together band included
Scott, Glenn and Ron and it won a Ramblin’ Lou Talent Show by playing
“Cottonfields.”
“You wrote about some other band who said they won it,” Glenn
says, “but we got the trophy at home.”
* * *
ALL OF THEM
live at home in
“It’s a non-identity thing,” he says. “Like everyone’s a bag.
Like that lunch in the refrigerator. You don’t know what’s inside, but that’s
how you’ve gotta judge it. By what’s inside it.”
PHOTO CAPTION:
From left, front: Singer Scott Case, lead guitarist Pete Venezia and bass
guitarist John McIntyre; rear, rhythm guitarist Ron Lombardo and drummer Glenn
Bowen.
FOOTNOTE: After Bags, singer and guitarist Ron
Lombardo hooked up with The Road. He wrote several songs on the group’s
“Cognition” album and joined with remnants of that band after it broke up,
notably keyboardist and songwriter Ken Kaufman, in a group called Waves. Glenn
Bowen was the drummer.
In the 1990s, Ron was one of the singers on the
original Cellino and Barnes commercial jingle, which Ken wrote.
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