June 23, 1973: North Country Band
A band that aspires to expand the horizons of country music.
June 23, 1973
THERE’S THREE
Mil-Shers in the phone book. One’s a car wash, one’s a bowling alley and one’s
a restaurant. The uninitiated may well walk in on the bowlers at Mil-Sher lanes
looking for country music.
They’ll be steered right back down Military Road toward
Sheridan Drive to the restaurant, where on Friday and Saturday nights a
promising band called North Country pours out everything from old Hank Williams
ballads to “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia.”
The Mil-Sher reverts to its natural state on a weeknight –
large, lazy and Eisenhower Era anonymous, like an old pair of cordovan shoes.
The tables don’t even seem as tiny.
All of
The group itself has been together for only three months.
And for two of them, leader and singer Al Aiken had laryngitis, keeping him
from helping out much in once-weekly rehearsals.
“We’ve only worked hard for the past four weeks,” Al says.
As a result, North Country is still a collection of separate personalities,
though full of admiration for each other, for Al’s leadership, Kathy King’s
clowning and singing, the growing solidness of Earle Webber’s bass and Mike
Kozak’s drums, the clean understatement of Ben Shoni’s guitar.
But they still speak separately, each taking a turn telling
their story. The flirtatious Kathy, who works days in an
* * *
“I STUDIED
dramatics at the Studio Arena and voice at the Community School of Music,” she
says, “and I was just freelancing until I got together with Earle in a trio
called Celebration. We auditioned a lot.”
“We didn’t have enough instrumentation,” Earle puts in.
“But we had great harmonies,” Kathy adds.
“Yeah,” Earle frowns, “we had great potential for a
commercial group. All we needed was a band.”
The Social Martyr United Theater Co. brought them together
to do “The Drunkard” and “Little Mary Sunshine” at
* * *
KATHY, NOW
25, went to Frontier Central in
Earle’s 21 and grew up in West Seneca, where a couple years
back he helped organize a church group into a surprisingly
professional-sounding “Jesus Christ Superstar” company. Earle was director and
played Christ as well.
“He looked a lot more like Christ right after he came with
us,” Al says.
“That was before I cut my hair,” Earle explains.
It was Kathy who suggested he join
* * *
“I HAD a
heavy background in folk,” the professorial Earle remarks. He’s aided the band
on harmonies – he and Kathy do two-part backups for Al – and has steered them
into country-rock, The Byrds, Poco, The Band.
“There’s a lotta nuances you gotta pick up in country,” he
says. “I guess you’d call it the country feeling. I came in here expecting to
C-F-G it to death, but there’s a lot more to it than that.”
* * *
MIKE KOZAK’S
18 and taking chemical technology at
“Isn’t he a teddy bear?” she urges. Mike blushes. He’d
played with a couple high school rock bands and got into country for a simple
enough reason: “I needed money.”
Mike’s been with Al the longest, the sole survivor of last
fall’s
Al’s had groups locally under the name of Nashville Sounds
since 1969, but after dissention and six major personnel turnovers in four
years, he opted for a new name and a new band.
Soft-spoken and gently serious, he grew up in
They sang in churches and on the radio in
“We all didn’t stay with the same religious following,” he
says.
* * *
AFTER SCHOOL,
he became an assistant branch store manager, singing nights with a mid ‘50s
rock band called the Hi-Lites and led by his next-youngest brother. They became
known over a three-state area.
“They went on until I got on the road in May ’59,” Al says.
He drove horticultural trucks from
“I got listening to country music while I was goin’ down
the roads late at night,” he recalls. “The only thing I could get good on the
radio were those 50,000-watt country stations.”
* * *
BY 1967, he
was hanging out watching country bands in
“I was so fascinated with their group,” Al says. “They
played country, country-rock, commercial and jazz all in the same show,
everything from ‘Good Old Mountain Dew’ to ‘Satin Doll.’
“They invited me to guest with them and that was it. The
next Friday I was out with my own group.”
Just like his brother’s band, he mixed other styles with
country and found that many country fans welcomed the change.
“It seemed like they were almost anxious to see a variety,”
he says.
“I feel this group I have right now has the best potential
of any band I’ve had,” he says. “We haven’t even scratched the surface. Kathy’s
taken on a very good stage presence, Earle’s added a lot of songs and Mike’s
moved to where he’s getting comments from other drummers on how much he’s
progressed.
* * *
“MY AIMS,
and the band’s I hope, I’d like to become a dynamic force in our area – Western
New York and Southern Ontario – to be respected among other bands.
“I think I’ll be really content when I see more country
groups in the area start working some of the bigger clubs. If country music can
be played in plush clubs on the West Coast and the East Coast, there’s no reason
why it can’t be done here.
“You listen to some of your non-hard rock stations, half the songs are country. It isn’t guitar and fiddle any more. It’s a move to a very pop sound. Country now is ready. It’s ripe. I think it deserves a spot.”
The box/sidebar:
Band Leader, Editor
North Country Review is a magazine for country music fans –
Western New York and
There’s no such thing, however, as a Rolling Stone magazine
for these enthusiasts. For stories and pictures of their local and national
favorites, NCR or one of a host of other regional fanzines are the only source.
* * *
IT’S THE SECOND
Buffalo-area country music publication to surface in the last three years. The
first was Bobby Willard’s Frontear Country, which went under after about a
dozen issues.
If NCR looks a bit like the old Frontear Country, it’s no
accident. Some of the same personnel, notably photographer Bob Moore, are
helping out.
And founder Al Aiken, a bandleader and former truck driver,
studies Bobby Willard’s operation closely (he also took a job as a printer to
find out about that end) and hopes to improve on it.
* * *
THE THIRD ISSUE
of NCR is out in Al’s car and he brings it in, a photo of Donna Fargo on the
cover. It’s a printer’s proof, the only copy he’ll have until it hits the
public this weekend.
The first two NCRs sent slightly more than 2,000 copies to
various country nightspots and
“The main idea is to show people that country music isn’t
cornball and deserves a better place than it’s getting,” Al says.
* * * * *
IN THE PHOTO:
From left, Al Aiken, Kathy King, Earle Webber and Mike Kozak. Guitarist Ben
Shoni is missing.
* * * * *
FOOTNOTE: Bass guitarist Earle Webber first appeared
on the Pause page of TV Topics back in December 1970, after he put together
that outstanding church-based production of “Jesus Christ Superstar.” Nicknamed Bud, in the mid ‘70s he was a founding member
of the Stone Country Band, which was inducted into the
Stone
Country achieved what Al Aiken aspired to. As the Hall of Fame bio notes, it
was the only country band locally to work regularly in rock clubs and was the
last band to play in the legendary Belle Starr before it burned down in the
late 1970s.
Stone
Country still plays regularly at guitarist Dwane Hall’s honky-tonk tribute to
the Belle Starr, the Sportsmen’s Tavern in
Drummer
Mike Kozak also has left us. He passed away in January 2021 at age 66.
As
for Al Aiken, Kathy King and Ben Shoni, they don’t turn up in my Internet
searches.
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