Sept. 15, 1973: A farewell visit with J. R. Weitz

 

It happened all too often in the 1970s – Buffalo’s brightest and best packing up and heading for California. 

Sept. 15, 1973 

John Weitz, Buffalo’s

Leading Jazz-Rock

Guitarist, Moves West 

“SEE MY CARRIER?” John Weitz nods at the white-painted box in his living room. “I just finished it. That’s going on top of the truck.”

          The rest of Weitz’s apartment in the North Buffalo housing project has that kind of doomed look things get just before moving day. The battered couch, the old kitchen table, their days are numbered. Everything’s been sold.

          Weitz, the city’s foremost jazz-rock guitarist, and his cohorts, bass guitarist Gary (Red) White and drummer John Opat, will pack it in next week and drive off into the sunset.

          White and Opat will be going first, towing White’s three-wheeled Volkswagen-powered motorcycle (“I tried to sell it,” White notes), then Weitz with his wife and two kids in a new white van.

* * *

“SAN FRANCISCO? I don’t know. I’m just going,” Weitz says. “The truck will be outfitted for living. I’m going to travel for about a month, see friends in Denver, Boulder, go to L.A., look up Gary Mallaber and Jimmy Calire. They’re playing with Ned Doheny now.”

          All things considered, it makes sense for Weitz and company to move at this point, to see whether the grass is greener on the other side of the nation, just like it made sense for Rocky Marciano to quit while he was still undefeated.

          “Things are going well,” Weitz remarks, “as it usually follows when we decide to make a move. Work and opportunities are just pourin’ in at us. But if we decided to stay, within a week we’d be outta work.

          “We were going to move to Toronto last year and then we got offers to do concerts and we decided to stay. We didn’t work all winter.”

* * *

THE BAND’S LUCK changed in the spring. They landed a regular gig at the Bona Vista on Hertel near Colvin (where they’ll make their final local appearances tonight and tomorrow night) and they cemented an album production deal.

          Weitz’s band (named, partnership style, after its three members, J. for John Opat, R. for Red White, Weitz for Weitz) proved to be the foundation for the Bona Vista’s growing reputation as a showcase for the city’s more musically serious rock groups, J. R. Weitz being the most progressive of them.

          During the spring and summer, the group evolved from a heavily aggressive artfulness that sometimes drove listeners away to a more cosmic kind of music, kind of like the Buffalo shuffle crossed with John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra.

          To hear the group is to go on an electronic trip, traveling from heavy density one moment to dancing rhythms the next. Lyric passages dissolve into dark dissonance which may melt into oddly syncopated blues. There’s nothing ordinary about it and there’s certainly nothing dull.

          Weitz, admired locally since his work with Raven in the late ‘60s, is delving deeper into electronic effects these days.

          “We don’t play just our instruments,” he says, “we play our equipment.”

          Hooked to Weitz’s guitars are a ring modulator, the basic element of musical synthesizers, and not one but three tape echo units.

          “The people at the Bona Vista are receptive to it,” says Weitz, “but it took six months to get ‘em past the boogie beat. Our music keeps getting lighter and quicker.”

          That’s one reason why they want to re-record an album’s worth of material they taped and mixed on three July nights in Electric Lady Studios in New York.

          If their production company, Windfall Music, a branch of Windfall Records, makes a deal with one company, it’ll be released as is. If it goes to a second company, it’s back to the studio with more time and more freedom.

          “The producer they gave us, Bob D’Orleans, was one of those guys with rapport,” Weitz says. “You know how you have instrumental chops? Well, he had people chops. He knew how to handle people. Red hassled the life outa him, though.”

          “I wanted him to record the bass off both amp and the mike for just one song,” White says, “just one song so I could get all the highs out of one and all the lows out of the other when we remixed it, but he wouldn’t do it.”

          “The whole thing was really pressed for time,” Opat says. “We finished it exactly on time. If we’d done what Red wanted, we’d’ve gone over.”

          The production deal began almost a year ago, with Opat following up on some names in New York Weitz gave him. (“I found out the way to get to see someone down there,” Opat says, “is to jive the secretaries.”), getting a showcase night at Max’s Kansas City.

          “It was favorable,” Weitz says, “but most of the people there weren’t strong enough in their record companies to influence anything.”

          “Brothers of the secretaries,” White laughs.

          “Windfall,” Weitz continues, “was the most interested. They brought us down for another showcase at the Mercer Arts Center and they paid for the recording session.”

* * *

SAXOPHONIST Eric Traub, who joined the group this summer, is on the tape. He won’t be making the move West quite yet, however. He’s in Miami finishing up work on a master’s degree. He’ll head west in December.

          The group’s recent Buffalo successes haven’t made leaving any easier, but the decision has hardened under the questioning and pleas of friends and fans.

          “Well,” Weitz concedes, “you can’t exactly turn around and walk away from 100 of your friends without getting something.”

          “People get so defensive,” White says. Then a mock falsetto: “Why are you leaving? Didn’t I give you the best years of my life?”

* * *

“I’VE DRAWN CREATIVITY from all the people around me here as much as I can,” Weitz explains. “Now I want to go someplace that’ll give me the most creative surrounds, whether it’s San Francisco, L.A., Sausalito or Boulder, Colorado. We’re gonna find a place that suits our creativity.”

          “The group leaving is not like a heavy thing,” White says. “It’s like going to the store. It’s ‘cause we need somethin’. Like you go to the neighborhood grocery all week, but if you need somethin’ they haven’t got, you go to the big supermarket, that’s all.”

* * *

No box/sidebar

* * * * *

IN THE PHOTO: J. R. Weitz in the California-bound truck-top carrier, from left, John Opat, Gary (Red) White and John Weitz.

* * * * *

FOOTNOTE: As related in the footnote to my first story about J. R. Weitz in December 1971, when the band settled in San Francisco, it was for keeps. Billy Cobham produced the album they put out on Fantasy Records. They played for 10 years and rarely came back home.

One of those visits was in the winter of 1975-76. The February 1976 issue of the Buffalo Jazz Report noted: “J. R. Weitz, back from 2½ years in California, packed the Bona Vista for eight days. Obviously enjoying the warm audience, guitarist Weitz responded with some amazing work, while John Opat ‘fried’ drums and Gary White showed improvement on bass. The final night had Jim Calire (another Raven refugee) on keyboards and sax. Hope they come back again!”

Weitz returned again in 1993, not with the trio, but for a reunion with all the members of Raven at the Tralf. Reviewer Jim Santella noted that he hadn’t performed in public in almost 13 years. His last appearance in a Raven reunion came in 2011.

How good was he? When he died in 2012, the obituary I wrote for him in The Buffalo News included an observation from none other than Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page after Raven opened for them on their debut American date in Boston in 1969: "John Weitz is one of the best guitar players in the world."

He was inducted twice into the Buffalo Music Hall of Fame in 1999, as an individual and with Raven as a band. His HOF bio refreshes my memory about his second career in electronics design: “His first clients were Billy Sheehan and Santana. He has created many professional studio products, widely in use today, and has half a dozen patents …”

Meanwhile, John Opat’s Facebook page says he was a record producer at International Musician and was living in San Rafael before he passed away in 2017. A couple citations on Google note that he worked with Etta James. Gary “Red” White, who kept in contact with him, also stayed in the Bay Area, in Alameda.

I don’t know if I ever talked with saxophonist Eric Traub, but he went on to work with Maynard Ferguson in the late 1970s and moved in the early 1980s to New Orleans, where he became a longtime member of Dr. John’s band. Jay Mazza, in a tribute to him in thevinyldistrict.com after he died in February 2019, declared, “He could blow down the walls, but he also had a subtle touch on a ballad we are unlikely to ever hear again.”