June 16, 1973: A trio called One-Way Street
Summer’s here! Time for another visit to a lakeside
club outside
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
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. “One thing about the place,” Paul says. “There’s a good mixture of
younger and older people and there’s never any hostility.”
So instead of getting a milling throng like its neighbors,
the
“My parents haven’t come out for any other band I’ve been in,”
he says. “But at the
For a trio with just an organ, drums and vocals, One-Way
Street musters a surprisingly full sound in a light, jazzy night-club vein. It’s
a challenge, the group says, on those highly-orchestrated middle-of-the-road
hits that make the listeners happy, but a year of willingness to work it out
together has given them a grasp of it.
* * *
“I THINK the
greatest thing’s the way we get along,” singer Geri LaBelle says. “Other
groups, you make a mistake, they get on you.”
“With us, we really drive each other,” Paul adds. “It’s
just so natural. We do anything the people want to hear and they enjoy it and
we enjoy it.”
“It’s like the people are part of it,” Geri says. “Last
night we had some of them up on stage, playing maracas and tambourines.”
“One time,” Paul recalls, “we did ‘Battle Hymn of the
Republic’ and everybody in the place was singing along. They really got it on.”
Though the South Shore has become their base, a Thursday to
Sunday night home for most of the past year, One-Way Street wonders now whether
they’d fit into the clubs in Buffalo, the big leagues, so to speak.
“I wonder if we’d go over in the city,” Paul ponders.
“Why not?” Geri inquires.
“Where are you getting the majority of people at The Lake
from?” drummer Sonny DiMaria asks rhetorically. “The city.”
* * *
“I THINK one
of the hardest things we have to face,” Paul says, “is what to do because of
our instrumentation. We’re backing Geri and doing harmony and it’s like we’re
doing sound to make up for not being a five- or six-piece group.
“It’s different from what people think of organ, drums and
a girl singer, that’s for sure. They think it’s going to be wedding music.”
It’s the organ that fills it out basically, though Sonny is
equally busy on drums. The bonus is Paul’s custom set of bass pedals.
“They’re made by a local guy from
“It works on a photo cell and it’s very complex and
painstaking to install, but it’s helped my foot 50 percent. It sounds just like
a bass. You get that sustain and that big bass-y depth.”
* * *
THE OTHER SIDE
of the foot matter is shoes, for which Paul picks up used ones, supple and
broken in by some guy who wears the same size.
“I used to play in church and it was so quiet all you could
hear was my shoes hitting the pedals,” he says. “So I went barefoot for a
while. But down at the
“Remember the night I hid Paul’s shoes?” Sonny chuckles. “I
got up to Woodlawn and thought, my gosh, I forgot to tell him. It was the
middle of winter too.”
“He forgets everything,” Geri says.
“I wound up wearing baggies home,” Paul says.
Geri is a strong, perky singer with the kind of brashness
that practically dares you not to like her. She’s adaptable too, handling
everything from “You’re So Vain” to that raging Ike and Tina Turner version of
“Proud Mary.”
* * *
PAUL HOLDS HIS OWN on lead, not bad considering he’d only sung harmony before he joined
the group last year. And Sonny, who’d only done lead singing, handles harmonies
in good form, even Four Seasons falsetto.
He gets the piece de
resistance in “Playground in My Mind,” which the band puts an extra effort
into since Clint Holmes comes from nearby Farnham. One night his parents were
in.
“Yeah, I get to do ‘My name is Michael, I got a nickel,’”
Sonny squeaks.
“We try to keep up on the tunes,” he adds.
“Just for ourselves,” says Geri. “The people’d be happy to
hear ‘Green, Green Grass of Home’ week after week.”
Their offstage friendship (Sonny, a barber, even cuts hair
for everyone) and fooling around carries onto the stage, putting each other in
verses of “What’d I Say” or jokes about noses and nicknames.
* * *
“WE PUT EACH OTHER down,” Geri says. “People’ll come up and ask don’t you like each
other?”
It doesn’t stop there.
“I told this one girl my bass pedals were computerized,”
Paul says. “I said I put a computer card in for the song I’m playing and just
move my foot around. She believed it.”
The group feels now it has a solid base on which to build.
Paul, now that he’s out of school, wants to write songs, add an electric piano
on top of the organ and perhaps work a guitar into his repertoire. They even
talk of recording.
“Sonny was a weekend musician having a good time when we got together,” Paul says. “Now we’ve got something. You never would’ve thought of closing your barber shop to go into music a year ago.”
The box/sidebar:
Building Their Way Together
One-Way Street settled into its present formation last
September after a personnel shift that brought singer Geri LaBelle in first
from a group called Gallery, then organist Paul Ferguson from the same group.
Drummer Francis (Sonny) DiMaria was calling his band
Changing Tymes at that point, the name he’d chosen for a trio he’d had with two
young rock players who chafed at doing softer music.
* * *
“WE CALLED
ourselves Deuce for a while when Geri was out having her baby,” Sonny says,
“but when she came back, I didn’t want to go back to Changing Tymes. It’d
changed too many times for me.”
Sonny, a 30-year-old barber with a shop on
Geri, who’s 28, went to
“I was going with one of the Rebels, the group which did
‘Wild Weekend,’” she says. “I used to sing with Brenda Lee records and people
said I sounded like her, then I met a band that needed a singer.
* * *
“I DID
country-western shows with Ramblin’ Lou, he used to enjoy it when I sang ‘Long
Tall Sally.’ And then I worked in
* * *
PAUL’S 22, a
native of Springville with two daughters. His wife Judy works as a nurse while
he’s taken classes at
* * * * *
IN THE PHOTO:
From left, Sonny DiMaria, Geri LaBelle and Paul Ferguson.
* * * * *
FOOTNOTE: Organist Paul Ferguson, who first appeared
in this series of articles in 1971 when he was with the group called Bridge,
teamed up with Andy Taylor in 1974 in a music and comedy duo that played hotels,
resorts and casinos across the country, including the 1980 Winter Olympics in
He
found a new partner in 1990, did studio and stage work out of
Drummer Sonny DiMaria kept cutting hair at Sonny
As for singer Geri LaBelle, poof! Vanished. I
can’t find her online.
Comments
Post a Comment