Archival Buffalo News feature articles

  Superstar alert!!!   July 13, 1974   Black Sheep Intends to ‘Stick Around’   BLACK SHEEP has the right to sing the our-first-record-didn’t-make-it blues, but no, that’s one lament they aren’t bothering to work up.           “There was just a lack of communication with radio stations on a national level,” says Stuart Alan Love, the young sun-tanned Long Islander who produced it. “The record wasn’t brought in by hand and followed up. It was just sent in.           “We’re with a small record company – Chrysalis has only four people in the whole U.S. – and this is a new act. It needs promotion. ‘Stick Around’ was a good record. It could still make it. Look at ‘Smoke on the Water.’ It was released three times before it was a hit.”           Black Sheep is a heavy band and an impressively talented one as well. Which is what ...

  Meet a relentless charmer from Hungary  by way of Gowanda, where his father was a shrink at the Psychiatric Center .   June 15, 1974 Gabriel Steps into the Mecca of Country Music   GABRIEL FARAGO’S mother shushes the dog. Gabriel’s out in the sun, she says in her lilting Hungarian accent. She’ll call him. A country music station plays softly from the kitchen.           He emerges from the back of the new house just outside Gowanda taller and somehow thinner than I recall him from the last time we met eight years ago in Dunkirk .           It was me and three others in a just-born rock band buying our first amp from Gabriel, who was playing the Top 40 of the day and old rock in the CYO down the street with a band he called Gabriel & The Angels.           Gabriel’s the sort of person you don’t forget. Not just for ...

  An up-from-the-roots ensemble that provided a springboard for not one, but two jazz singers.   May 4, 1974 From Community Choir to Commercial Band   SETTING THE SCENE is one of those things Imani has held onto a sense of in their two-year evolution from community choir to commercially viable band.           Even when it’s something like opening the show for the O’Jays in the steamy Buffalo State University College gym last weekend, they take the time to lay down a mood, coming on with a sweet, tantalizing stick of musical incense – the lazy, jazzy “Theme from M. A. S. H.” It hangs there in the air.           “We want the people to be able to relax and feel good,” pianist and musical director Ann Harris was saying earlier in the week.           “We try to set a pleasant tone ‘cause there’s so many unpleasant things happ...

  These two super-talented guys were doing everything right, but the star-making machinery behind them was grinding its gears.   April 20, 1974 There’s Gold in Original Tunes, Clear Voices   DAVID NEHRBOSS AND BOB BRANDON , collectively known as Gold, poke at their afternoon breakfasts in the 24-hour restaurant they frequent not far from David’s house in Snyder. They are a studied contrast to their personal manager, Richard (Doc) D’Amato, who’s talking intently across the table.           “You gotta be a crooked thief to be a promotion man,” he’s saying while his eggs grow cold. “Everybody I meet asks me how’s the record doin’ and what can I tell them?”           Object of Doc’s frustration is WGRQ, which won’t put Gold’s single, “Rain Man,” on its playlist. They said they’d do it, Doc relates, if the record won the battle of the bands five nights in a row. So it did and th...

  All across the nation, underground FM rock radio started coming above ground as the mid ‘70s approached. Here’s a look at what was happening in Buffalo .   March 23, 1974 WPHD – A Station Rises From Ashes   FOR MORE than six months last year, listening to WPHD was like running into an old friend who was going through a personality crisis.           This was in the wake of that sudden coup d’etat by the rating-sensitive McLendon corporate powers in Dallas . The old identities went a-packing. Trauma set in.           So what was once this city’s most musically adventurous signal emerged from the purge re-dressed as a pristine vision of the sound-alike programming that clutters up radio dials from here to Tierra del Fuego . * * * THIS, DEFENDERS of the new faith pontificated, is the wave of the future. FM shall become AM. AM shall become heaven-knows-what. I started ha...

  Spyro Gyra’s Jay Beckenstein wasn’t the only top-notch jazz player in the UB Music Department in the 1970s.   March 9, 1974   Trigger Happy Fires Variety of Themes   THE THEORIES that clear the way for new musical express routes don’t always drop down from on high like John McLaughlin and his new Mahavishnu Orchestra descending from 25,000 feet for a concert with the Buffalo Philharmonic.           More often than not, they bubble up from below, from basements stuffed with equipment much like this curtained-off one nearly Humboldt Parkway on Buffalo’s East Side, from the practice sessions of intense, open-ended bands like this sextet called Trigger Happy.           Aside from having one of the more evocative group names around, Trigger Happy is loaded with theory, as only a band with five UB junior and senior music majors could be. But first let us define our terms....