Aug. 5, 1972: The irrepressible Gerry Ralston

 

An example of journalistic impartiality and letting bygones be bygones. The band I was in, Lavender Hill, had a bit of history with the irrepressible subject of this article. 

Aug. 5, 1972 

Simple, Original Songs Equal ‘Good-Time Music’ 

Gerry Ralston, Donna Dudzic

Fight Pollution Along the Way 

“EVERYTHING JUST seems to work out for us,” Gerry Ralston is saying. “It’s amazing, but it happens every time.”

        For example, this little tree-shaded lakeside cottage he’s living in down beyond Angola. Not too long ago, Gerry was musing about how nice it would be to have a place on the lake for the summer.

        Then he and his singing partner, Donna Dudzic, were walking on the beach, strumming guitar, singing, and somebody in the crowd that gathered offered to rent it to him.

        There’s other things around the place that came the same way. The movie camera, that little Super 8 they wanted to start the film-making part of their ecology drive – they got that in place of getting paid at one performance.

        All this bounty may be a little unexpected to anyone who’s followed the ups and downs of Gerry’s musical career since the late ‘50s.

        Gerry has never been at a loss for projects or promotions. Among them have been music-oriented newspapers which doubled as advertising sheets (Generation Gap, Voice of the City), various clubs, concerts, even a small communal art center.

* * *

TROUBLE IS, most of them collapsed not long after they started. No follow-through. And that left an aftertaste of disappointment, even anger, among musicians and others hungering for the breaks or the money Gerry’s projects seemed to offer.

        As a result, most have dismissed him as erratic, avoided him like an eccentric, without trying to find out what Gerry’s really doing.

        Like the newspapers: “I used them for promotion for the things we were doing.”

        Promotion is the secret. Gerry’s a tireless self-promoter. And his partner Donna proves to be devoted to his general visit while holding a quiet but humorous mirror to his unfettered enthusiasm.

        “How much good rapport you have with people is gonna tell how much they want to do for you,” he says from the couch in the cottage’s tiny living room.

        “Promotion and music are the same thing. Right now, we’re sitting here – the guitar, me and Donna. If we sit in this house for four years, nothing’ll happen.

        “But if we go to the Toronto Carnival like we did last weekend and sit down and play for 1,000 people, it adds up. It’s like a Fuller Brush salesman. You stop in 30 places, two of ‘em gotta pay off.

        “It’s also good to have God on your side. We’re no Jesus freaks, but we very much believe in Christianity. We believe what we do and what we give is what we receive.”

* * *

THE LATEST phase of his career began a couple weeks ago when he quit his job as a record promotion man for Best & Gold, a division of Buffalo One-Stop, upstate New York’s biggest record distributor, to concentrate on three other projects.

        There’s he and Donna, singing under the name Nebula, there’s his independent record promotion and his record on the Scepter label (Gamma in Canada) – “Mariposa” and “Rockin’ Mole.”

        On its first release last winter, a reviewer in the January issue of Creem magazine called it “the best record so far of 1972.” Both tunes are catchy child-like chants, accompanied by acoustic guitars and random rhythm instruments, unfettered by production tricks.

        It sounds gentler but not much different otherwise from the newest John Lennon-Yoko Ono album. Its recording was another one of those unplanned blessings. Gerry explains:

        “A guy named Ollie Britton who used to be an advance man for Woody Herman and Nat King Cole called me up last year before Mariposa and said: ‘Gerry, I think it’s the kinda thing you’re into.’

        “He kept encouraging me to play all weekend. I was sitting there outside playing guitar.

        “I’ve gotta have the guitar to do this right. I was sitting there strumming like this, you know, and I’m going, ‘We want rock ‘n roll, we don’t want no soul,’ and all of a sudden people are joining in, clapping.

* * *

“THAT NIGHT, waiting to come back, the crowd just all got into it. I looked up and there musta been 2,000 people around me. I was on the front page of the Toronto Star the next day.

        “And this guy comes up and says he owns Gamma Records in Montreal and says would I like to make a record. He said get the names of everybody that’s here and have ‘em meet Wednesday at the recording studio.

        “I stayed over at a tent city at the University of Toronto and on Wednesday we marched down the streets to the studio singing ‘Mariposa’ and ‘We want rock ‘n roll.’ It actually reproduced the feeling of the Mariposa Festival.”

        To promote it, Gerry plans to kill two birds with one stone. First he’ll come to town to push the record, then he’ll set up a concert for Nebula, which in turn will get more interest for both the group and the record.

* * *

NEBULA stands for Natural Environment Bureau for Unclean Land & Air. Through it, Gerry hopes to rally other musicians and artists to give multi-media outdoor concerts to raise money to fight pollution.

        For the moment, however, they’re just doing appearances by themselves. Tonight and every other Saturday they aren’t engaged elsewhere, they entertain at an auction on Old Lake Shore Road, Angola.

        On Sunday afternoon, they’ll be at John Barleycorn, Tonawanda Street and Hertel Avenue; Monday they share the bill with Pat Boone at the Chemung County Fair in Elmira and Wednesday they’ll be in Erie, Pa., for WJET Day.

        “Don’t call us folksingers,” Gerry cautions. “We aren’t like Joan Baez or Joni Mitchell. Our music is good-time music.”

* * *

IT’S A MIXTURE of Gerry’s disarmingly simple original songs (like in “It’s a Comic Book World,” where he urges Superman: ‘Don’t let Dr. Doom take over the land.”), children’s tunes and loose versions of golden oldies like “Teen Angel,” “Bye Bye Love,” “Louie Louie” and “Has Anybody Seen My Gal.”

        Like Gerry’s previous group, Instant Ralston, it sounds as free-spirited as a hootenanny. “People really get into the free-will type of thing,” he says.

        His record promoting deal came through as we talked. David Kacz, a tall 15-year-old from Angola who Gerry’s befriended, knocked and told Gerry there was a call for him next door from Los Angeles.

        A few minutes later, Gerry’s back, beaming a smile: “They said pick up a rent-a-car in Buffalo and they’re going to give me a couple weeks’ expense money to get started on. You’re going back to the city? Good, can we have a ride?”

        “See what I mean?” he says as he and Donna climb into the car. “Everything we need just seems to happen for us.” 

The box/sidebar 

Like Sonny and Cher 

        For most of Gerry Ralston’s 31 years, he’s been involved in music. It began early in his Kenmore childhood, winning “more cameras than I knew what to do with” on amateur talent shows like Uncle Jerry’s Club.

        As a teenager at Kenmore East, he was president of the Hi-Teen Greeters Club, which used to meet rock stars at the airport. Later on, he teamed up with Eddie Bentley, now a local country singer, to form the Hot Shots, playing record hops for $2 a night and boxes of 45 rpm records.

* * *

HE WAS PROMOTION manager for a Navy show group, brought the Twist to Buffalo in the Old Peppermint Lounge on Main Street (it was Jerry G. and The Travelers) and later played with The Cyclones and promoted the old Boulevard Bandstand on Falls Boulevard.

        Going to California, he out-belted the fabled Sky Saxon of The Seeds and that got him into the American Beatles, who were stranded in Mexico when their manager absconded with their money.

        Later he ran a ballroom south of San Francisco and came back to Buffalo in late 1967 with a band which broke up after it got here.

        Aside from his personal promotions locally, he’s worked for an advertising agency and in record promotion. “I got the record job hitchhiking,” he says. “Steve Brody of Best & Gold picked me up.”

* * *

THE MOST STUNNING coincidence, however, came at an Instant Ralston show at Villa Maria College last Jan. 30, when one of the three girl singers who preceded him came over and said: “You’re a Gemini. Let me read your palm.”

        That was Donna Dudzic and she saw “a very strange instance that’s going to bring us very close together.” It happened that night. As Gerry stopped in front of her Cheektowaga home, another car hit them.

        They wound up going to the chiropractor to cure their aches and Gerry brought his guitar along and they started harmonizing.

        It’s a perfect match,” Gerry says. “I’m a Gemini, she’s an Aquarius. She so much younger than I am that I kinda see us like another Sonny and Cher.”

* * * * *

IN THE PHOTO: Donna Dudzic and Jerry Ralston.

* * * * *

FOOTNOTE: Gerry is still in Buffalo, he’s still performing in coffeehouse settings and he’s still writing songs. Last May he reported on Facebook that he had a new one called “Good Bye Corona.”

        He also is making promotional buttons at sayanythingbuttons.com. In an article in the Niagara Falls Reporter, he noted that he made a lot of money making Donald Trump campaign buttons in 2016.

        As for Donna, who’s very much in the background here, she hardly turns up anywhere on Google either. Someone making an online comment about the “Comic Book World” record thinks that she was Gerry’s wife.