Dec. 30, 1972: Four-Um with singer Diane Taber
Another visit with songbird Diane Taber, who makes her third appearance in these pages, this time with a new band and a change in direction.
Dec. 30, 1972
Four-Um Is Only a Solid Break
Away From the Big Time
ON TOP of
this stack of color prints Joe Bongi Jr. hands you is a night-time shot of a
popular motel sign in
Perfectly normal, you know, green sign with the little
message in red letters at the bottom, like they are all over the world. Then
you read the red letters: Tonight – Betty Golub Topless Revue.”
* * *
JOE, A professional
photographer when he isn’t managing and promoting his singing wife, Diane
Taber, and her group, Four-Um, discovered a new talent during the band’s six
months of touring this year – practical joking. He’s the one who put up the
topless sign, unbeknownst to the motel folks.
“We don’t do anything vicious on the road,” Joe laughs. “We
just do fun things. Mostly tourist things, like when we were in
“And Frank got caught in the secret passageway,” drummer
Buddy Hinds puts in. “I did NOT!” Frank Campanella, the organist, protests.
There’s no end to the touring stories that pour out over tea
around the Bongi’s downtown
“I closed my eyes,” Buddy says. “I couldn’t bear to look.”
They’re back now for the holidays, only their second stop at
home since May. “It’s nice to have my own room again,” remarks singer and
guitarist Denny Schooley, 24.
While they’re here, they’re doing a show for Amherst
Cablevision (it’ll be on next Tuesday), picking up a few songs from the upcoming
Studio Arena musical “Ring-A-Levio.”
* * *
“WE FIGURE
we have a hit with one song, ‘Nothing Can Stand in the Way of Love,’” Joe says.
“We’re going to record it the end of February, when the play gets to
Also they’re working out a local distribution deal on their
independently produced album. And playing The Pillow Talk Lounge on
“Direct from
This is Diane’s second stint of serious touring – the first
was some seven years ago when she was 19. The rest of the time her career’s
stuck close to home, except for a glimpse on the Virginia Graham Show in 1970
and the first version of “Theme from ‘Summer of ‘42’,” which unfortunately
wasn’t the hit version.
* * *
ON STAGE in
those days Diane was sort of a girl-next-door doing a fair number of old
standards she loved and sang along with as a child. Her backup trios generally
were jazz players turned commercial. To her, they were the pros, she was the
beginner.
And those backup players were generally older, married,
settled down with day jobs, unwilling to go on the road, unable to play more
than two or three nights a week. Last January Diane decided it was time for a
change.
“We were looking for a keyboard man to start with,” Diane
says. “Frank came over and we talked, then Denny came over with Frank and we
talked. Then we were all waiting for Buddy.”
The three of them were part of a local commercial rock group
called Penny Farthing, which had just spent a disastrous autumn playing two
* * *
BUDDY, WHO’S
20, joined the group two weeks before its demise. When Denny and Frank said they
wanted to talk to him, he was expecting bad news.
“I said to myself: ‘Oh-oh, they’re gonna throw me out,’”
Buddy says. Instead, they made him an offer that was too good to refuse.
“I’d gotten to the point where I wanted to do more
musically,” Diane says. “That’s why we talked so much at first. Because none of
us wanted to make a mistake again. We ALL wanted to travel.”
That meant getting Buddy out of his food service classes at
* * *
“I MADE a
list of the songs I knew,” Diane says. “and Frank made a list of the songs he
knew and we started with the ones we could do together.”
The agents were impressed. With Denny carrying half the emcee
load and providing vocal counterpoint, Diane became more relaxed and more
entertaining.
Her spirit of the ‘50s is less in evidence too. Most of the
material is recent hits, medleys of Carole King, Elton John tunes and the like,
with only an occasional peek into the distant past. And that’s likely to be
highly jazz-colored and stylized.
Buddy, who shows a relish for jazz drumming, does a Tommy
Smothers bit with Denny, refusing to play unless he can sing HIS song.
For all that, Buddy’s the group’s unofficial accountant. He’s
got it figured out how much everyone’s making per hour, per song, per drumbeat.
“You gotta know where you stand,” he reasons.
As for the future, there’s a new single off the group’s album
– “What the World Needs Now” and “Daydreamin’” – and a new tour, starting in
Later on they’ll be hitting
The box/sidebar
A Prison Concert
It isn’t some posh nightclub that Four-Um remembers best
about their six months of touring so far. Nor is it any elegant crowd.
What they consider the
* * *
“WE JUST CALLED
‘em and said sure,” says the group’s manager, Joe Bongi Jr. “We didn’t realize
the entertainment director was one of the prisoners. We called and asked for
him and they told us there weren’t any phones in the cells.”
“It was about the best thing we ever did,” drummer Buddy
Hinds says. “When we did ‘Higher,’ the guys all had their arms around each
other.”
“The guards were really sweating it,” Joe says. “The
black-white thing there is really intense. I mean, it’s unheard of for them to
do that kind of thing.”
“The prisoners themselves mentioned it,” Diane says. “Nobody
else had done that to them.”
* * *
“WE’VE GOTTEN
letters and flowers and Christmas cards,” Joe says. “One guy made this painting
of us with a round-edged knife. The warden told me we got letters from guys who
hadn’t even written their families in 15, 20 years.
“The second time we went there it was even better. They felt
like they really knew us. We’re gonna go there again after Cincy. This time do
two shows – one for the regular prison and one for the honor farm. The honor
farm never gets to see the shows the rest of the prisoners get.”
* * * * *
IN THE PHOTO:
Diane Taber, center. From left, Dennis Schooley, Frank Campanella and Buddy
Hinds.
* * * * *
FOOTNOTE: Singer Diane Taber started writing her own
songs and has released two albums during the past couple decades. After several
years in
Organist
Frank Campanella’s brother, Paul X. Campanella, a Hollywood actor and producer
who long ago sang with Junction West, reports that Frank is still in
In fact,
drummer Buddy Hinds played with Frank Campanella over Memorial Day weekend in The
I’d like to
imagine that guitarist Dennis Schooley is the guy who founded Schooley
Mitchell, the big telecommunications franchising firm, but it’s more likely
that he’s living in
As for “Ring-a-Levio,” it had its world premiere at
the Studio Arena on Jan. 4, 1973. A few days before that, The New York Times
took notice of it in its “News of the
“The campaign to unliberate the liberated apparently
has begun. Up in
“In the musical, as Darrow was saying the other day, ‘an
unliberated liberator meets the liberated woman who wants to be unliberated. In
other words, boy meets girl and they spend the rest of an evening battling for
control, for domination. What we’re trying to do is comment, comically, I hope,
on the insanity of too much liberation.’ There are hopes, too, that ‘Ring-a-Levio’
will prove a good prospect for Broadway.”
It ran for 30 performances at the Studio Arena and disappeared without a trace.
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