May 19, 1973: Spoon & The House Rockers

 

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 with hair-dos and dry-cleaned clothes, barrel-chested bikers in hard leather jackets, wide-eyed college co-eds, shaggy rock musicians, guys in ties, a sprinkling of Blacks and some of the circus cast of pool hustlers and party-lovers and hangers-out that make up Buffalo’s West Side night scene.

* * *

THE COMMON denominator is, well, you really can’t see them, but your ears will tell you that somewhere in there is a magic coalition of uncommonly good rock musicians doing blues music for the night that never gets tired.

          Sweet, slinky, slow blues that cling to your senses; quick, tumbling blues that unlock the rhythms in your body. Holding the key is a 43-year-old Black singer named Elmo Weatherspoon, better known to everyone, including his family, as just “Spoon.”

          Spoon, who led a succession of well-remembered blues trios here in the ‘50s and early ‘60s, was coaxed out of semi-retirement last fall by guitarist Ernie Corallo and drummer Bradd Gray for Sunday afternoon sessions at Sunday’s, the most polite of the Elmwood Avenue bars. Just for an experiment.

          It succeeded so well that it may inspire a live-music revival in clubs that forsook bands for sound systems.

* * *

BESIDES SUNDAY’S, Spoon & The House Rockers pack Brink’s, a block down Elmwood Avenue, Saturday afternoons and Monday and Wednesday nights and the Belle Starr in Colden Friday and Saturday nights. Next Tuesday they’ll be in the Detroit Emeralds show in Memorial Auditorium.

          For Spoon, the band’s good fortunes have been almost as unsettling as they’ve been satisfying. It’s fanned up his inner conflict between family responsibilities and the free but uncertain life of a full-time musician, a battle he’s been fighting all 23 years he’s been singing blues.

          “I love this band so much,” he says one sunny afternoon in the plainly-furnished living room of the house he rents on Buffalo’s lower East Side. Pictures of the family are on the walls, along with portraits of Christ and Martin Luther King.

* * *

“THEY PLAY so good and they play so hard and I get along with ‘em so good it takes a lotta strength for me not to quit my job and go with ‘em full time,” he remarks.

          “I’d stopped playin’ for a while, just gave it up. Well, I got into trouble and it gave me time to think. So I just thought maybe I’ll quit playin’ and go back to the plant. You’ve got a completely different mood when you’re in music than when you’re in the plant.”

          The job – piloting a forklift on the evening shift in the big Chevrolet factory on River Road – helped bring him back from that low point, reunited his scattered family and settled him down with a new wife. Less than two months ago, they had their first child, Spoon’s 13th, a curly-headed little girl.

* * *

SPOON HADN’T SUNG in a club before he came to Buffalo in 1950. The aunt who raised him in Mississippi after his mother died (“I was so young I can’t remember her,” he says) had urged him into church singing at the age of seven and just as strongly opposed the blues he came to love in his teens.

          At 16, he left sharecropping to join a brother in Memphis, getting a job as a hospital busboy, still singing and playing guitar in churches with a five-man group.

          His next-door neighbor was one of his blues idols – B. B. King. “I was at 46 Avery,” Spoon says, “and he lived at 44.”

          Lured to Buffalo, where a sister lived, by the promise of better pay in the steel plants, he discovered that the blues returned a good dividend, too.

* * *

“I THOUGHT PLAYIN’ the blues was a bad thing till I found out I could make money at it. We played a little place in the Fruit Belt called D & M. We were makin’ a lot of money there,” he laughs. “$8 a man.”

          His best trio, one which lasted six years, had young Joe Madison on piano – he left to travel with several top jazz groups – and a drummer, Abe Blasingame, who ultimately went with Brother Jack MacDuff. Madison is back in town these days, playing St. George’s Table at Delaware and North.

          They played everywhere. Little clubs on the East Side, colleges, shows at the Town Casino and a three-year stint at a now-defunct Hertel Avenue place called The Towers.

          One night at The Towers, a teenaged Ernie Corallo told Spoon between sets: “I want to play guitar just like you.”

          “One day you will,” Spoon said.

* * *

EVEN IN RETIREMENT, Spoon played the blues. Early mornings would find him sitting in with James Peterson’s band at the Governor’s Inn on Sycamore. He spent so much time there his daughter Patti Ann calls it “my father’s home away from home.”

          “The blues,” Spoon says, “they come real easy. Sometimes I feel so bad, you know, and I think about some of the times I had to work real hard, like a ox, for a dollar a day, 50 cents a day half the time I be growin’ up. Sometimes havin’ only bread and water to eat. I’ll never forget them days.

          “And sometimes when my old lady makes me mad or things ain’t runnin’ right, hey man, I can pick up my guitar and it’ll bring me right out. I could be at home alone doin’ it and I’ll feel good. If I fall dead singin’ the blues, I wouldn’t mind dyin’ because I believe I’d be really happy.”

* * *

SPOON’S JOY is infectious. On nights when the band starts early, warming up the horde with tough, fast-stepping instrumentals, Spoon rolls in from the Chevy plant about 1 a.m. and the whole mood suddenly bounces like a drop of water in a hot pan.

          They strike up some of those old songs – Ray Charles’ “Sticks And Stones,” something by Elmore James, Bobby Blue Bland or maybe the heavily-requested “Caledonia” – quick blues, laid-back blues, ballads, rhythm and blues, Spoon singing strong and easy with that voice he got in church, his eyes closed to the squirming crowd.

          There’s talk of recording sometime this summer in the 16-track studio Larry Rizzuto is putting together on Englewood Avenue. Spoon’s not quite sure about doing it. He’ll have to write four new songs before they go in.

* * *

“I’VE HAD EVERYTHING I’ve dreamed of except one thing,” Spoon estimates. “I always told my brother I wanted a lotta kids and I wanted to be a guitar player.

          “Now, if I had money, the first thing I’d do is buy me a nice home and some nice furniture. Then I’d buy me a lotta pretty clothes. And shoes, good shoes.

          “The third thing would be a new car. I’ve never had a new car. Following that, I’d take whatever family I could round up and I’d go away for a while.

          “Maybe to New York. I’ve never been there in my life. Or go to the Bahamas or California for a month, see some things I’ve never seen before. And after that I’d come right on home and settle down. If I had a few dollars left, I think I’d put it in the bank.” 

The box/sidebar: 

House Rockers Don’t Rehearse 

          There’s probably no other band in Buffalo that can stand up to the towering level of musicianship in Spoon & The House Rockers. And the band has never had a rehearsal.

          “I don’t hardly see these fellas until we play,” Spoon says. “Whatever I wanta do, I’ll tell Ernie or tell Jimmy. If they never played this song before, I’ll hum a bit. A lot of blues come from the fifth down. I tell them and they just take it from there.”

* * *

EACH OF THEM can slice right through a blues structure – years of jamming and playing have honed their skill at that – but the balance, complexity and taste within their rhythm and power is an unexpected reward.

          There’s Jimmy Calire, rumbling out piano rhythms with his left hand and attacking his mini-Moog synthesizer like a mad scientist for an eerie-sounding syncopated melody.

          And cool Ernie Corallo, his unruffled manner belying the artfulness of his guitar, the unobtrusive rhythm strumming serving as a take-off point for tasty leads and blues filigree.

          “Sometimes I feel like playin’ guitar,” Spoon says, “but since I’ve been workin’ with Ernie, playin’ guitar don’t worry me any more.”

* * *

THE ONLY non-Buffalonian, saxman Jay Beckenstein, a UB senior from Long Island, adds guttural emphasis to the sound while bass player Joey Giarrano and drummer Bradd Gray push the rest of the band along firmly without calling attention to themselves.

          Spoon says guitarist Ralph J. Parker, who sits in regularly, is as good as the guy on the record in “Rainy Day.” Other notable visitors include bass guitarist Eric Ferguson, drummer Sandy Konikoff and singer Dolly Durante.

          All of the regulars are in their early to mid 20s and most of them hold down spots in other bands on the off-nights – Ernie and Ralph with Stan Szelest, Bradd with Gingerbread Express, Joe with Posse and Jay with UB’s Creative Associates. Jimmy formerly played with Raven.

* * * * *

IN THE PHOTO: From left, front, Joey Giarrano and Elmo Weatherspoon; rear, from left, Ralph J. Parker, Ernie Corallo, Bradd Gray, Jay Beckenstein and Jimmy Calire.

* * * * *

FOOTNOTE: Inducted into the Buffalo Music Hall of Fame in 2014, Spoon & The Houserockers had a rotating musical lineup that evolved and expanded as it went along. Singer Barbara St. Clair sometimes held forth until Spoon came in from the night shift at the Chevy engine plant. Jay Beckenstein brought in other first-class horn players (including the late great Phil DiRe) and, before Spoon died in 1975, drew from the band to start what became the hit jazz fusion group Spyro Gyra.

          Guitarist Mike Campagna, speaking to Gary Lee and Patti Meyer Lee for their book, “Don’t Bother Knockin’ … This Town’s a Rockin’,” recalled:

          “Spoon played a ’61 Stratocaster with half the tubes missing in his amp. He was never in tune, stretched his strings out all the time. When I asked him, ‘Are we going to rehearse?’ he said in his gruffy low voice, ‘If you got to rehearse the blues, you can’t play ‘em.’ Michael then asked, ‘What do we do?’ Spoon said, ‘You do what I do behind me.’”