Dec. 22, 1973: Salamanca favorites Rainbow Kitchen

 

A band still fondly remembered in Salamanca. In this incarnation, it included a couple of future Buffalo Music Hall of Famers. 

Dec. 22, 1973

Rainbow Kitchen Serves Rock, Country 

CALL IT EARLY Southern Tier Dilapidated, this all-but-abandoned farm in a hollow not far from the Village of Cattaraugus. Sort of Tobacco Road come North.

          Hay bales sun themselves through gaps in the broad side of the barn, half of the half-dozen aging cars in the front yard have coughed themselves into semi-retirement and the bitter wind flaps the tattered plastic storm-proofing on the farmhouse windows like hobo laundry.

          Bob Maas, one of Rainbow Kitchen’s two drummers, shouts down the dogs.

          “Want a puppy?” he asks. “We got nine.”

          He leads the way through a cave-like rear shed to the cave-like interior.

          Inside, there’s a Warm Room full of records, many of them old 45s salvaged from the Salamanca radio station’s trash barrels by a friend of the band who works there. A Cold Room full of amps and drums still in their cases. And an even colder kitchen, scene of a plumbing freeze two days earlier.

* * *

WE TAKE the Warm Room. All seven in the band, plus equipment man Rich LoCicero and Diane Zemia (“She’s the band nurse,” says Bob), nestle in amongst the mounds of 45s. Singer Mike DeBoy feeds more wood to the old iron stove, latching the hot door an instant before his fingertips sizzle.

          “We useta live in a much classier place down the road, but the owner sold it,” says bass guitarist Phil Hartman, one of the house’s two occupants. “We had a big barn for practicing and a house. With central heat.”

          The eviction scattered the group. Three of them have a trailer in Elkdale, outside Little Valley. Two others live in Salamanca. And drummer Bruce (Coffee) Monroe shares the house with Phil, drinking endless cups of coffee and punching out menthol cigarettes with a plastic machine.

          Phil, who’s from Catskill, near Albany, was brought here in May 1972 by three friends from the State University at Stony Brook to build a log cabin and get a band going. The cabin never got started, but the band did.

* * *

THEY PICKED up Bob, who’d just left the State University at Binghamton, and Bruce and Mike, both fresh out of the military. Country music, they figured, was what would go over best in Salamanca.

          They figured wrong. Landing in the miraculously unflooded River View Hotel on Route 353 (“The low-downest bar in Salamanca,” says Phil, “and that’s pretty low”), they learned that the magic that gets gigs and mystifies crowds is made of rock.

          At first it wasn’t easy. There were fights and people falling down. And guys like the one who fell asleep under the piano.

          But things improved as Rainbow Kitchen gathered a following. The fighters and the sleepers gave way to kids out to boogie and others wanting to plug into communal good times. Their fans include an Olean lawyer who’s volunteered to handle any contract hassles.

* * *

THE RIVER VIEW was not without other blessings. It was a place to practice, a home base to play whenever they didn’t have a better-paying gig, a cornucopia of macaroni salad left over from Friday night fish fries at the proprietor’s downtown restaurant. It even made them choose a name.

          “It was the second day we practiced there,” Phil says, “and the owner said if we wanted to work this weekend, we had to have a name before he closed. And he was closing in five minutes.

          “We got a list of names and everybody liked Devil’s Kitchen, except nobody liked that association with the Devil. So we picked Rainbow.”

          Rainbow Kitchen played nearly all the gigs that the area had to offer – Jamestown’s Melody Inn, the Belle Starr in Colden, St. Bonaventure University, Alfred’s colleges, Cuba Lake, high schools, Tullah Hanley’s former teen club in Bradford, Pa.

* * *

“TULLAH HAD the right idea,” Phil says, “but they were a strange bunch of kids there – so into downs. They’d play ping-pong in slow motion.”

          Then, within the past six months, Phil’s original cohorts dropped out.

          “We lost one to his wife, one to New York City and one to the Guru Maharaj Ji,” he says.

          In their place, there’s guitarists Bill Towle and Jim Whitford, both members of the 1968-69 Buffalo band Cherry Blend, and Fran Gilman, a Salamanca area folksinger, married and the mother of two, who has a way of making a Bonnie Bramlett song crackle and curl.

* * *

AT HAMBURG’S Poorhouse West, where the band has been appearing Sunday nights, she did it to “That’s What My Man Is For,” but the Poorhouse crowd, as usual, was more involved with personal scenes instead of the music.

          Except when Bill Towle brings out his pedal steel guitar for a couple quick ones with some clear, shiny rock licks. Then he packs it away before disapproval zaps him.

          It’s another matter at the River View, where they generally play Fridays and Saturdays (except next week, when they do a Cattaraugus High School senior prom on Friday and hit the River View Thursday, Saturday, Sunday and New Year’s Eve).

          The crowds there lap up Grateful Dead, Rolling Stones, Bonnie Raitt, latter-day progressive favorites, steel guitar, country rock and old country classics, and even a couple originals.

          “We have a sub-group,” Bob says, “the Kitchenettes, who get up and sing with us on ‘Sweet Virginia.’”

* * *

“WE HAVE a lot of friends in Salamanca,” Phil adds, “and a lot of people help us out. The best mechanic in Salamanca fixes our truck for us. There’s always people feeding us.

          “We’re probably the only rock band in the county to get a loan from the bank. And we’ll do things too, like play for free at the Methodist Church.”

          “The only disagreements we have,” Mike DeBoy notes, “is whether to do Top 40 or whether to wear our cooks’ hats or if somebody’s late for practice.”

* * *

“WE AREN’T rich enough to have problems yet,” says Bob.

          “We probably could stay indefinitely,” Mike says, “but by next fall we want be out of here: No more winters in Cattaraugus County.”

          A chill is beginning to creep into the Warm Room and the women are shivering. Mike feeds the stove a couple more chunks of wood and latches the hot door, escaping just an instant before his fingertips sizzle.

* * * * *

IN THE PHOTO: From left, bass guitarist Phil Hartman, drummer Bruce (Coffee) Monroe, drummer Bob Maas, guitarist Bill Towle, singer Fran Gilman, guitarist Jim Whitford and singer Mike DeBoy.

* * * * *

FOOTNOTE: Rainbow Kitchen didn’t leave Cattaraugus County right away. The group, in one form or another, kept performing in and around Salamanca until 1978.

Showing up for their 40th anniversary reunion concert in 2012 in the Salamanca American Legion were drummer Bob Maas, singer Fran Gillman (now Fran Pettit) and bassist Phil Hartman.

I ran into Bob Maas regularly in Austin, Texas, when I was making annual pilgrimages to the South by Southwest music conference in the 1990s and 2000s. He’s up in Cattaraugus County for the summer. To find out what happened to everybody, I called him up.

Bob says he moved to Austin in 1975 with guitarist Bill Towle, then returned to Cattaraugus County in the 1980s and worked for the Olean Times-Herald. Texas lured him back, though. He taught high school social studies in Elgin, a suburb of Austin, and continued to play drums. Now that he’s retired, he’s working with a couple bands in the Southwest and gets together with original Rainbow Kitchen members Dave Jones and Mike Benjamin for occasional old-time country swing gigs up here.

Bill Towle adopted a name that came to him in a dream when he was in high school and, while discretion and a lengthy friendship prompt me not to mention it here, suffice it to say that he’s become a highly regarded producer and multi-instrument session player in Austin, has released a dozen albums of his own since 2000 and was inducted into the Buffalo Music Hall of Fame in 2005. He usually comes North in the summer and does at least one night at the Sportsmen’s Tavern.

          Also a Buffalo Music Hall of Famer is Jim Whitford, who was inducted in 2006. He’s been a mainstay on the Buffalo music scene for 40-plus years, notably with The Pinedogs, the group he formed in the late 1980s. He released a solo album in 2000 and has recorded with the Steam Donkeys, Linda McCrae, Alison Pipitone and the Outlyers. He can be heard regularly at the Sportsmen’s Tavern playing bass for the Stone Country Band and pedal steel guitar for the Twang Gang.

          As for the rest of the RBK lineup, Bob says Phil Hartman was a deejay at WGGO in Salamanca and was the source of many of those 45s. He went to San Francisco and worked as a radio engineer there.

Bob says the other drummer, Bruce (Coffee) Monroe, played in a country band at the casino in Salamanca and now lives in Asheville, N.C., near his daughters. Bob adds that the singers, Mike DeBoy and Fran Gillman Pettit, are still in the Salamanca area.