April 15, 1972: The great Stan Szelest

 

        On this Good Friday, let us pay a visit to one of the greatest of Buffalo’s rock ‘n roll deities:   

April 15, 1972

New Beginning for Area Rock Pianist

Boogie Woogie Beat Fits Stan’s Two Styles 

ONE MASSACHUSETTS night in 1961 after the lights came up and the kids were leaving the hall, Chuck Berry turned to the piano player for that gig and told him: “You just keep right on playin’ that boogie woogie. That’s what people like.”

        That advice wasn’t lost on Stan Szelest. The boogie already was doing him right.

        Just 19, he was, and it had gotten him into Toronto rock king Ronnie Hawkins’ band with Robbie Robertson and Levon Helm. And onto a brief surreal tour with former Presley bass player Bill Black’s Combo (Chips Moman on guitar and Ace Cannon on sax) during the height of its popularity.

        Stan met up with the boogie woogie when he was in Bishop Fallon High School. It was laid right out in black and white on the first piece of sheet music he ever bought, Clarence (Pinetop) Smith’s 1929 “Original Boogie Woogie.”

        “It’s the basis of rock ‘n roll music,” Stan says.

* * *

HE STILL has the thing – the left-hand chords shifting and punching like sledgehammers, the slithery dance of the right hand, the dotted notes spelling out that soul-shaking syncopation.

        He’d had a few piano lessons when he was six or so, but what really started him picking out tunes was the stuff he heard on George (Hound Dog) Lorenz’s pioneer rock show. Fats Domino. Jerry Lee Lewis. Ray Charles.

        His less-shy friends soon were badgering the deejays to let him play the concert grand piano that sat quiet on stage during record hops in the old Commodore Ballroom on Genesee Street.

        “I’d just sit there and play and sing,” Stan says. “The following weeks I got a drummer and a guitar player. We got it built up so we’d get $3 apiece a night. We used to back different people. Frankie Avalon used to come in and play drums.

        “Nobody was playin’ rock ‘n roll around here at that time. Guys around my age, what they were playin’ was bop. Joe Madison, I used to go down to Apollo Junior and watch him. He was into good blues music.

        “I saw Ronnie Hawkins around the house on the Dick Clark Show. His music was like rock ‘n roll from a different PLACE, like Memphis sound rock. It was very fast music, pulsing with a strong backbeat. It just burned from one end to the other.

“When I saw that, I had an inclination. I’d be smokin’ cigarettes after school with the guys and I’d say: ‘Yea, I’d like to work with him, yeah.’”

        After he graduated from high school in 1959, he got a call from Chuck McCormick, a guitarist he knew from the former Hot Toddies, to join Jerry Ward’s band in Hamilton, Ont.

* * *

“RONNIE Hawkins was big around Toronto and I called him on the phone. I’d never talked to him before. I just said: ‘Want a piano player?’ And he said: ‘Yeah.’ He came down with Robertson and Levon and they sat in and played.”

        They made a rollicking tour of Arkansas and Oklahoma, bumping into Leon Russell’s band in Tulsa.

        “It was really wide open,” Stan says. “You get thrown into the world for the first time and you try to keep yourself together. I mean with no organization. You had to grab it while you could ‘cause there was no tomorrow.

        “I quit for the first time right after that. Something wasn’t right, bein’ away from home at an early age (he was 17), the coldness of it, it was pretty funky. I told them I didn’t think the band was hot enough. Levon asked me: ‘You want more money?’”

* * *

YOU DON’T HEAR IT as well next to the band, but when you stand in front of one of those big sound system speakers in Granny Goodness on Hertel Avenue, Stan’s voice stirs up echoes of Ray Charles or Joe Cocker. There’s that same ease in the phrasing, the same throaty lilt.

        It started out a few weeks ago with Granny partner Marty Angelo inviting Stan to do a couple solo sets Monday and Tuesday nights between the discotheque records.

        Sitting at a battered upright in the middle of the floor, shaggy with a two-week-old beard (“Whenever I start growin’ a beard,” he says, “that means things are gonna change.”), he looks like the house pianist for some mining camp bordello. A streak of the cavalier and a touch of the low-down, the eternal piano player punching bittersweet ecstacies into a millennium of smoke and booze and cruising.

        “It’s physical playing,” he says. “You’re playin’ what you call beat music. With the piano, you always want to be louder.

        “You have to hang in there, keep the left hand pushin’ and get the right clean. It’s pretty hard. Your hands have to be constantly playing.

        “You had guitar players that had amplifiers. To get sound out of a piano, you start hitting a little harder.”

* * *

HE’S STILL PLAYING that boogie woogie in those two self-gratifying styles – rockabilly and rhythm and blues, both of them with that same little snap that makes your whole body want to move.

        “Ronnie’s got a saying," he relates, “that you gotta imitate it, then you gotta duplicate it, then you’re ready to originate it. When you get to the point where you can originate it, you can breathe your own thing into it.”

        The guys playing with him last Monday haven’t practiced together in six or eight months – all of them being members of Stan’s last band, the one that played the Astra Lite in Lackawanna last fall. Now they’re just sitting in.

Stan says they were twice as good before, but you can bet that 99 percent of the bands anywhere would give their left arms to sound as tight as they do. And there’s at least a dozen musicians standing around, admiring, listening.

* * *

THIS PARTICULAR LAY-OFF from Ronnie Hawkins’ band began in February, right after Stan finished the Nashville sessions for Ronnie’s new album. Now Ronnie’s talking about going to England and Germany with Kris Kristofferson, so it’s uncertain when his band will get back together.

        Right after Stan got back to his wife Carolyn and their four kids, he put in what must’ve been his fifth return to country bandleader Ed Bentley within the past year. They’re at Al Bemiller’s Turfside Lounge in Hamburg Wednesdays through Saturdays.

        “The first time I called, Eddie brought his guitar over and we played some things that were really good,” Stan says. “My wife flipped out over them.”

        Eddie, like Stan, is 30 and has been a part of Buffalo music for 15 years also, starting out singing Everly Brothers stuff with Gerry Ralston.

        At the Granny Goodness gig, there’ll be a pause while Stan outlines the next song to the others. Then he starts a riff which leads to something like Jimmy Reed’s “Big Boss Man” with Sandy Konikoff ramming home the backbeat with the simplicity of a karate chop.

        There’s guitarist Ernie Corallo, a regular in Stan’s bands since the mid ‘60s; guitarist Ralph J. Parker of the Pin-Kooshins and bass guitarist Eric Ferguson.

        And Sandy with a beret over his short hair, the only Kenmore kid in musical Hollywood’s Hot 100 (Rolling Stone, Feb. 3), a veteran of Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs & Englishmen. He’s been with Stan in Buffalo and in Ronnie Hawkins’ bands on and off for 12 years.

        Sandy was on stage with Chuck Berry that night. He was with Stan & The Ravens in the early ‘60s when they ruled Buffalo rock from Lulubelle’s on Best Street. He went with Stan on one of his innumerable returns to Ronnie Hawkins.

        “Lulubelle’s, they took care of us,” Stan says. “The guys were makin’ $80 apiece a week, which was a lot back then. We did a lotta business in that place. One time Bird reached over the bar and just gave us a bottle and said: ‘Enjoy yourselves!’”

        Around 1967, Stan hit hard times. People said he was washed up, that he only knew three chords. He did six months in the steel plant, then went to L.A. for computer school and found Sandy hanging out there. Sandy introduced him to Jesse Ed Davis, a connection which ultimately meant a couple recording dates.

* * *

HIS CAREER nearly ended a couple years later when his band went berserk on stage at a ski lodge New Year’s Eve party and Stan wound up with his right hand broken in six places.

        “The doctor said: ‘You don’t want to play piano any more, do you?’ He had to operated on it and put some wires in and some pins,” he says.

* * *

AFTER THAT, Stan called Ronnie Hawkins for the first time in a few years and since then he’s been with the band regularly, caught a few West Coast recording sessions and was the only member of the Hawkins band to go for the Nashville taping. It looks now like everything’s beginning again for him.

        “The thing that saves it now is with rock ‘n roll, people are paying attention to the roots of it,” he says. “People are starting to listen.”

* * * * *

IN THE PHOTO: Stan Szelest at Granny Goodness.

* * * * *

FOOTNOTE: In the estimation of a certain segment of the Buffalo’s music community 50 years ago, myself included, Stan was the keeper of the Holy Grail.  He could rock like nobody else.

His Wikipedia page tells us he did a lot of session work in the 1970s and 1980s, went back to Ronnie Hawkins’ band many times and stayed connected with Levon Helm, playing in his Woodstock All-Stars. At the same time, as I recall, his devotion to his family kept him firmly based in Buffalo.

Stan was recording with Levon and two other members of The Band in Woodstock in 1991 and had started to write a song called “Too Soon Gone” when he was stricken with a fatal heart attack. He was just 49.