Feb. 9, 1974: The improbable residency of Ray Blumenfeld at the Belle Starr

 

One of my transformative experiences in the late 1960s was a Blues Project concert in Floral Hall on the Chautauqua County Fairgrounds in Dunkirk. If I’m not mistaken, Eric Andersen was the opening act. Imagine my excitement at running into one of those Blues Project guys in 1974, right in my back yard, so to speak. 

Feb. 9, 1974

Co-Co Morgen Plays as if Born to Boogie Beat 

THE WORD sifted up from Colden Valley much as the word does when the snow has finally blessed the ski slopes and the city is still cold and dry.

          It usually went like this: You remember Roy Blumenfeld, the drummer from the Blues Project? He’s got a band down at the Belle Starr. Last week the crowd wouldn’t let him stop playing until 3:30.

          And the Coldenites weren’t just telling tales. It was indeed Blumenfeld. A little stockier, a little happier perhaps and more patriarchal than on the “Projections” album, but that was seven years ago. He was only 22 then.

          Blumenfeld may look like a patriarch, but he’s a modest one. As if to discourage the temptation to talk of the band as his, the group’s name is Co-Co Morgen. Nor is there any Blues Project material in their sets. They simply play like they were born to boogie.

          Their music is like a Mack truck driven flat out, riding on the sheer brawn of Blumenfeld’s drumming and the bass guitar of Ray Barrickman. Guitarists Kim Ritchie and John Burgard toss on some style and grace and all but Ritchie take a turn at singing.

          The selections are something of a best-of-boogie, going from Chuck Berry’s “Memphis” to Frankie Cannon’s “Sea Cruise” to such latter-day standards as Eric Clapton’s “Tell the Truth,” the Stones’ “Live With Me,” Ron Davies’ “It Ain’t Easy” and Little Feat’s “Dixie Chicken.”

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BY THEIR third week in the former dairy barn on Holland-Glenwood Road, the place was like home. Ritchie’s emcee raps were an easy amalgam of hospitable Southern and wacked-out Firesign Theatre, of which he’s an avid fan.

          And Ange, Buffalo’s graying gypsy tambourine player, the guy who always winds up sitting in with the area’s best rock bands, he’s up there giving them a hand.

          Only one unanswered question remained. Why was the drummer from one of the pioneer underground rock groups in a Western New York ski-country bar, doing essentially the same trip as Buffalo-area bands?

          While snow filled the snapping cold afternoon, the answers emerged as Blumenfeld traced his life since the end of the Blues Project in one of the tiny skiers’ apartments where the band lived upstairs at the Belle Starr.

          He recounted how just as the Blues Project was achieving nationwide acclaim in 1968, it was beset by interior disagreements.

* * *

“AL KOOPER wanted to add horns to the group,” he said, “and we’d always had a thing about overdubbing, putting something on a record that we couldn’t do live. Looking back on it now, it was just silly, that’s all.”

          Kooper and Steve Katz went on to form Blood, Sweat & Tears, incorporating the horns that Kooper craved, while the rest of the Blues Project drifted apart. Blumenfeld spent a year in California, another year in Colorado, then wound up in Louisville, Ky.

          “I met a lady in Louisville when we played there once,” he said, “and after that every time we’d get near there, like Indianapolis or Cincinnati, I’d just wind up in Louisville.”

          Otherwise, Louisville is no Shangri-La for former rock stars. Making a living from music there is just as tough a struggle as it is in Buffalo. When Blumenfeld wasn’t playing, he and Kim Ritchie installed carpeting and linoleum floors.

          “We were about the slowest carpet layers you ever saw,” Ritchie offered.

* * *

RITCHIE, Barrickman and Burgard, all in their early and mid 20s, had worked together in a couple of Louisville’s more underground groups, one called The Water, the other Mouse Knees, before they banded with Blumenfeld last year.

          Their start was delayed when Blumenfeld got a call to join in last summer’s reunion of the Blues Project in Central Park. The reunion, however, was short-lived.

          “We might have done something, picked up some gigs, if the album (“Reunion in Central Park”) had sold 50 million,” Blumenthal opined, “but it didn’t even sell 50,000.”

          So it was back to Louisville for Blumenfeld and Co-Co Morgen started building up a repertoire of boogie. “It’s something we all felt and agreed on,” Blumenfeld explained.

          Where underground rock did not succeed before, boogie did. After a stint at one of Louisville’s lower bars on the riverfront, they approached an agent who had nixed Ritchie’s and Burgard’s previous bands. This time he said yes.

          Which is how Co-Co Morgen came to play McKeesport, Pa., this week after finishing in Colden. How they got to the Belle Starr was the work of the club’s talent manager, bearded Bob (Obie) Obenauer.

* * *

OBENAUER GOT to know Blumenfeld when he helped book bands, among them the Blues Project, for a day-long festival at War Memorial Stadium a few years back. When another Louisville musician told him of the new band, he phoned, and since they were coming to McKeesport anyway, a detour north wasn’t that much out of the way.

          Their stay at the Belle Starr both amazed and gratified the group. Amazed at the intensity of the partying – “I thought people were wild in Louisville,” Ritchie observed, “but here they’re just incredible” – and gratified at the applause and acclaim they’ve gotten.

          As a result, Co-Co Morgen will return to the Belle Starr around Easter, picking up a few gigs in Buffalo on the side, much as they did this time around with their Sunday afternoon shows at the Locker Room at Delaware and Delavan.

          And they’ll be back in the summer to play for the new management at Miller’s on the lake in Angola. There’s talk too of staging an outdoor concert. Perhaps in Delaware Park.

* * *

WHEN CONCERT hall concerts or recordings of the band’s original songs are mentioned, they seem a long way in the future, maybe a year. For now, the band wants to play clubs and get off on the crowds. Blumenfeld would like to play Toronto too next time around.

          But for the moment the important thing is to move about, play the Northeast, keep fresh. And at a time when last year’s hot local boogie bands have slipped either into the Stevie Wonder syndrome or plain tiredness, Co-Co Morgen has stopped by just long enough to remind Buffalo exactly how well the good times can roll.

* * * * *

IN THE PHOTO: From left, Kim Ritchie, Ray Barrickman, John Burgard and Roy Blumenfeld.

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FOOTNOTE: Roy Blumenfeld went on to play with Nick Gravenites’ Animal Mind band in the 1970s and with Robert Hunter in the ‘80s and ‘90s. In the early 2000s, he drummed with the Barry Melton Band, Melton being one of the Fish in Country Joe and the Fish.

But actually, he’s never really left the Blues Project. Since 2012, he’s been with the latest version of the band, which includes one other original member, guitarist Steve Katz. They’re playing half a dozen dates in the Northeast in November.

          Guitarist Kim Ritchie went back to Louisville and has played with a succession of blues bands there. Same with John Burgard, the other guitarist. If you’re in Louisville, you just might run into the John Burgard Band in one of the blues clubs.

Meanwhile, bass guitarist Ray Barrickman became part of the Bama Band in 1983, which had a few low-charting country singles in the late 1980s, and has done a lot of work with Hank Williams Jr.

As for the man who booked them into the Belle Starr, Bob Obenauer, he went further into ski country. He's longtime proprietor of the Ellicottville Trading Company, an antique store just a schuss away from the slopes at Holiday Valley.