Archival Buffalo News feature articles

  Summer’s here! Time for another visit to a lakeside club outside Angola .   June 16, 1973   One-Way Street: Happy Musical Tour   DICK VASILE has rules. Not that he’s against people having a good time in his club, but he gets an older crowd and when your place sits almost shoulder to shoebuckle with the youthful watering spots on Old Lake Shore Road outside Angola, well, you need a regulation or two.           For instance, the sign at the door of the South Shore : “You Must Be 21 And Prove It.” Or the stipulation about no motorcycles. There may be two or three dozen mean, gleaming two-wheelers elsewhere at The Lake on a warm Friday night, but there’s none in Dick’s lot.           Not even Paul Ferguson, organist with the band there, can pull an exception. If he’d roll in on a bike, Dick wouldn’t let him in either. Paul’s asked. * * * AND THE RULES work out. “O...

  One of the best local bands of the early 1970s and a springboard for a bunch of guys who would become even more illustrious. See the Footnote.   June 9, 1973   Posse Survives With a Buffalo Shuffle   “YOU KNOW , it sure has changed,” the photographer asides.           He hasn’t been to what was a once-grander Miller’s – excuse me, Bill Miller’s Riviera – on Old Lake Shore Road, this side of Angola, in maybe 20 years.           Of course he’s caught it at a bad moment, what with guys knocking out an old restroom and putting in a replacement so there’s more room to dance.           And owner Pete Chudzik hasn’t gotten that old furniture yet he says was thrown out when they re-filigreed Cole’s on Elmwood. So it may be hard to tell, but things are looking up for this faded jewel.        ...

  An in-house relationship here. Guitarist Darrell Miller was working in the composing room at The News. Until we moved from the newspaper’s old building at Main and Seneca streets in the spring of 1973, I ran into a lot of the guys from the composing room. I was a regular customer at their coffee urn.   May 26, 1973   Peppermill Satisfies Variety of Tastes   IT’S A MIRACLE . Guitarist Darrell Miller calls at noon to say the fair-weather plan is still on and the first Peppermill group picnic will be held, yes, outdoors.           A month of rain, however, is enough to inspire caution in even the most intrepid hearts and so Neal Davis, bass guitarist, vocalist and first of the band to muster into Akron Falls Park, has taken care to claim a table under a thick maple tree – the kind that takes a flash flood to moisten the ground beneath it.           The picnic has a fam...

  If I had a time machine, one of the first places I’d visit is Sunday’s, that delightful long-gone boutique bistro in an old house on the  Elmwood Strip , on any Sunday afternoon in early 1973. Tucked informally into the front of the tiny bar area was an assembly of enormous musical talent – at least one nascent Grammy nominee and almost all of them future Buffalo Music Hall of Famers. Packed in front of them was a crowd of fans that sprawled into the little dining room in the back and up the Victorian oak stairway. It was heaven.   May 19, 1973   Spoon Is Happy Just Singing the Blues   IT’S LATE and the floor has become a soup they’d never put in cans, lost beer and unwanted cigarettes stirred by a mob of bobbing bodies so dense you need to summon up every bit of swamp fox in your blood before you make a plunge at the bar.           Rarely does a room surge with such an improbable swarm – perfect ladies w...

  May 12, 1973   Teenage Bass Player Keeps Titanic Afloat   ARIC SIGMAN , like a lot of kids who grow up well-to-do, is routinely unintimidated by sumptuous best-of-everything settings like his grandmother’s Delaware District living room.           He’s made his home here with Dr. and Mrs. Nathaniel Kutzman, 20 New Amsterdam Ave. , before taking off for Europe .           His immediate instinct is simply to be comfortable and he satisfies it by snatching an antique French chair, turning it around and sitting on it backwards, his arms propped against its dark wooden back.           In less than 48 hours, he has to be back in Paris for a concert somewhere, he’s not sure where, and in the few days he’s been here he hasn’t completed his one musical objective, that being to buy a Stratocaster guitar (they’re four times as costly in Fr...