Jan. 19, 1974: Hernandez, Hernandez, Hernandez

 

An early incarnation of one of Buffalo’s most popular nightclub bands of the 1970s and 1980s. Some of these guys became even more famous in later life. See the Footnote. 

Jan. 19, 1974

Hernandez Serves a Special Latin Spice 

HERNANDEZ. You wonder if David Hernandez didn’t maybe think of Carlos Santana when he christened the group. Santana. Hernandez.

          As it turns out, fully half the band is Hernandez. David on guitar, brothers Ralph and Robert on congas and drums, respectively.

          Together the three of them give Hernandez a special Latin spice that distinguishes them, even though their selections aren’t that much different from other bands that do plush little clubs like St. George’s Table, Delaware and North, where Hernandez holds forth until Feb. 9.

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IT PERKS UP songs like “The Love I Lost” (“By Harold Bluenote and the Melvins,” jokes singer Chuck Toarmino), that subtly insistent rhythmic drive. It flavors the Doobie Brothers’ “Long Train Running” too.

          What makes it work so well is that Hernandez is one tight band musically, tighter than most 14-week-old bands by virtue of spending 72 nights in the past 12 weeks on the stage at St. George’s.

          But while their music is tight, their mood is loose and cheerful, helping dispel that formal chill you might expect to find at a dressy club on a Saturday night. As for Hernandez, they gave up tuxedos a few weeks ago.

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“IT WAS RUNNING into a lot of money,” David explains, “$72 a week just to look nice to people. That’s not counting if you lost a cufflink. And every night you’d feel like the President’s press secretary.”

          As Presidential press secretaries go, Chuck Toarmino comes in with the heft of Pierre Salinger. And a lot more fanfare.

          The band appears first for a song by David, bass guitarist Joey Biondo or organist Sam Iraci, then David proclaims: “Now it’s star time. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Chuckie T.”

          Chuck is a personable smoothie with considerable range and expression despite a frog in his throat, purring a Barry White purr on “Never Gonna Give You Up,” working out on Edgar Winter’s “Free Ride” with Joey and David on harmonies.

          Chuck, 28, came to Hernandez after David’s nine-piece group from last summer broke up. He hit it big not long after he started singing 13 years ago in his native Niagara Falls with Humphrey & The Palookas.

* * *

“WE DID A RECORD called ‘Careless Love,’” he relates, “that got played all over. Then we went to California. We were the backup group for the Shirelles, the Coasters, the Platters.”

          He played Reno, Las Vegas and San Francisco with a trio after the Palookas scattered, then spent about four years in the Chicago area before returning to the Falls (“I just wanted to come back home,” he says), where he worked with Odds & Ends.

          Chuck has a wide-open show club manner and he rides the band’s Latin-rock precision like a trainer on a dolphin. It’s this combination that makes Hernandez succeed at St. George’s.

          “We’re basically the same as last summer,” David says, “but more commercialized. There’s a lotta different tunes we’d like to do, but it’s not the commercial bag we’re into.”

* * *

LAST SUMMER’S BAND numbered nine pieces – three horns, a fourth Hernandez brother playing, an extraordinary Black singer named Barbara Ross who David says was offered a recording contract by a major record company.

          “She got married and quit,” David says. “I guess she wanted to spend more time with her kids.”

          They played Gabriel’s Gate, did one of the Delaware Park rock concerts and appeared on the Open Rap program on Channel 2 after Bob Shields picked up on them at the Gate.

          After divergent musical directions did in that group, David called on the easygoing Joey, who was newly free after three years off and on with National Trust, and Sam, who works with David’s brother Robert repairing streets for the city. Brother Ralph attends Bryant & Stratton Business School.

          Though David’s father was a guitarist with a band in Puerto Rico and New York City, it was neighbor Joey who got David started seriously on guitar eight years ago when both were 14 and the Hernandez family had just moved to Buffalo’s West Side.

          Sam’s 23, a Niagara University graduate with a black beard that gives him an imposing earnestness. This is his first group after playing for three years as a pastime.

          His father, like David’s, is a musician, a guitarist who goes by Sam Stewart and was guitarist at the Jolly Roger for 11 years and now plays Chulagi’s on Union at Walden.

          Sam’s blonde wife, Raynee, is at a table beside the stage this particular night. “He’s working so much,” she says, “this is about the only chance I get to see him.”

* * *

DAVID LURED HIS BROTHERS into music a couple years ago. Ralph, who David praises as the best conga player in the city, aspired once to be a lead singer, then settled into timbales and the drums.

          Ralph sends out for the pizzas that sustain the group through their final sets.

          Looking to the future, Hernandez would like to establish itself in a couple other clubs before returning to St. George’s. David says they hope to get to a recording studio too within a month to put down some of Joey’s original songs.

          “The record will help,” David says. “We’re going to send it to Latin stations too. I think we’re the only group based on Latin music that’s come out of Buffalo.”

* * * * *

IN THE PHOTO: From left, conga drummer Ralph Hernandez, organist Sam Iraci, guitarist David Hernandez, singer Chuck Toarmino, bass guitarist Joe Biondo and drummer Robert Hernandez.

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FOOTNOTE: Hernandez went on to become a fixture on the Buffalo area’s nightclub scene through the 1970s and 1980s, playing regularly at the Three Coins, the Executive and Club 747, and the McKinley Park Inn.

Inducted into the Buffalo Music Hall of Fame in 1999 as the Hernandez Brothers, their bio there lists more than two dozen people who were band members. (Note to the keepers of the BMHOF: Many of their names are misspelled, including all three of the non-Hernandez members of this version of the group).

I wrote about David and Robert again in 1989. Having dissolved Hernandez and settled into social services jobs, they revived their musical endeavors with a new band called Buffalo Town Express. A song they entered into a national song contest, the Budweiser Showdown, took first place in the local preliminaries. Later, in 2010, David and Robert were part of the band that backed the legendary Lance Diamond at his long-running gig in the Elmwood Lounge. 

In the meantime, brother Ralph got a bachelor’s degree in 1990 from Medaille College, where he studied political science, and became a political leader in Buffalo’s Hispanic community, organizing the independent Latino Popular Party. He went on to become president of the Buffalo School Board and president of the Buffalo Music Hall of Fame.

Sam Iraci went into politics too. He moved up from filling potholes to filling out grant applications for the city, then ran for the state Assembly in 1978, losing to incumbent William B. Hoyt by about 700 votes. He became the city’s director of labor relations in 1980, worked briefly in government in Clark County, Nev., then returned.

He was deputy mayor under Jimmy Griffin from 1986 to 1993 and served as city manager in Elmira from 1994 to 2005. He then spent six years as a municipal consultant, four of them as an administrative assistant to the mayor of the City of Tonawanda, before becoming director of the Buffalo Civic Auto Ramps in 2012. He announced that he was retiring in September 2020, but was still on the job last February.  

Singer Chuck Toarmino went on to lead his own band of Niagara Falls guys, which included Peter Paonessa, the drummer with Humphrey and the Palookas. He died in 1992 at the age of 47 and was inducted into the Niagara Falls Music Hall of Fame posthumously in the inaugural Class of 2017.

Bassist Joe Biondo is still in Buffalo and still can play the bass, as evidenced in a 2020 posting on YouTube by his trumpet-playing son Eric. Eric, a professional musician living in Brooklyn, goes by the name Beyondo and has performed with a gang of notables, including TV on the Radio, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Charlie Hunter and Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats. He also toured with the Monkees in the early 2000s as part of “the widely popular dancing horn section.”