July 13, 1974: Black Sheep

 

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 made them the first American group to sign with Chrysalis – the British label that’s home for such biggies as Jethro Tull, Procol Harum and Robin Trower.

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LOVE WAS a producer for Columbia Records (he’d come from Warner Bros. and he produced the Batteaux brothers album) when a Black Sheep cassette tape captivated him and everyone within earshot on the 11th floor of the CBS building last summer.

          “I judge a band by the ballads they write,” Love explains. “Anybody can write a rock song, but the ballad is the real test. As soon as I heard their ballad, I told my secretary to get me a plane to Rochester.

          “After I saw them, I didn’t want to give them to Columbia. They would be just one of 50 million groups there. They’re a Class A act and they need a sensitive record company. After the Clive Davis thing, I was thinking of leaving Columbia anyway and Black Sheep inspired me to leave that much earlier.”

          Love, unswerving in his belief in the group, has been running the sound board controls for Black Sheep ever since. For concerts and for the sessions in the Record Plant in New York City that set down “Stick Around.”

* * *

THE SONG, which was played on WPHD here and WCMF in Rochester, rides on the kind of tough, liberating sensation you get from breaking a bottle, a bit like Stories’ “Brother Louie.”

          Taking their time is Black Sheep’s strategy for this summer. Right now they’re writing new songs (Three Dog Night, Grand Funk and Robin Trower all are interested in their tunes) and working them up in a dilapidated barn in Wheatland, west of Rochester, that belongs to bass player Bruce Turgon.

          “It’s a funky, comfortable setting,” lead singer Lou Gramm says. “We’re supposed to start at noon. Everybody gets there by about 11:45 and we rap for a while, then we get into a jam. When we’ve got about an hour and a half to go, everybody’s usually in a good head and that’s when we really get some work done.”

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SESSIONS FOR the first Black Sheep album should start in a month or so, Love estimates. He’d like to have it released by late October, but a more realistic target is January, he concedes.

          “The band is making such strides in their writing,” he says, “that we’re waiting until we feel everything is right. We want this first album to be something that’ll stand up for years to come.”

          As a result, Black Sheep is doing few live dates. They’re scheduled for McVan’s on Niagara Street July 27 and that’s all. It’ll be their first gig since the free concert with Todd Rundgren June 29 in Chestnut Ridge Park.

          “I was doing sound,” Love says, “and when Black Sheep came on after Todd, I heard comments like: ‘It’s about time we had some good rockin’ music.’ We hadn’t planned on playing ‘Stick Around’ – WGRQ, which sponsored the concert, hadn’t played it – but after a couple songs the kids were screamin’ for it.”

* * *

THE NOTICES in the music industry trade papers alternately list Black Sheep as a Buffalo band and a Rochester band. For good reason.

          Although all five in the band come from Rochester’s suburban Greece-Gates-Chili area, Buffalo’s where they’ve found the greatest acceptance.

          And Buffalo’s the home of their manager, Jim Taylor, who left his job as promo man for A&M Records when they signed for Chrysalis.

          Taylor picked them up more than two years ago, not long after Gramm, a drummer until he came out front to sing lead, and organist Larry Crozier left a relatively successful Top 40 club band called Poor Heart so they could play what they wanted to.

* * *

“WE PLAYED the Orange Monkey in Rochester one Monday night and had a big crowd all sitting on the floor like a concert,” Gramm says. “The owner threw us out. It got so the owners ask us for a list of our songs first.

          “We have a local cultish following in Rochester, but we’re more popular in Buffalo. There are no rooms in Rochester for what we do. When we couldn’t get gigs anyplace, WCMF had us come in and do live concerts. We owe them as much as we do anyone.”

          “They’ve had a lot of hard luck,” Taylor puts in. “That’s how the name came up. Louie was sitting around saying: ‘Ahhh, we’re black sheep, the black sheep of the family.’ And I told him: ‘Hey, you oughta call yourself Black Sheep.’”

          Despite the hardships, Black Sheep cling to an insistence on playing in their own style, finally getting a break from the owner of McVan’s and building up an enthusiastic group of fans there.

          “We’re the best draw he’s had since the topless girls,” Gramm chuckles.

* * *

THE RESULTS of their determination can be heard in tapes Love made of the ten tour dates they did this spring with Ten Years After and Procol Harum.

          Gramm sings like a man possessed, 19-year-old Don Mancuso drives and coaxes his guitar into places others haven’t touched, drummer Ron Rocco seizes just the right embellishments and Crozier’s organ acts as a deep pivot on which the entire sound revolves.

          Whatever confidence they didn’t develop in McVan’s, they picked up on that tour. By the time they reached Chicago, it didn’t shake up Gramm too much when some kids told him the last three lead-off groups there had been booed from the stage. One of them was the Raspberries. Another was Electric Light Orchestra.

          Although their equipment had been lost and they were playing through rented amps, they wound up with an ovation and compliments from Alvin Lee.

          “I actually was more scared when we played our first gig with Procol in front of 2,500 people,” Gramm says. “By the time we got to those 20,000 kids in Chicago, it was all a routine.”

* * * * *

IN THE PHOTO: Black Sheep, from left, Larry Crozier, Don Mancuso, Lou Gramm, Bruce Turgon and Ron Rocco.

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FOOTNOTE: Black Sheep has an entry in Wikipedia. It notes that the band got to release two albums on Capitol Records in 1975, but their trajectory was cut short later that year. On the way home from starting a tour with Kiss in Boston, Mass., their equipment truck skidded on the icy Thruway just west of Albany on Christmas Eve, left the highway and tipped over. Without money to replace their broken instruments and sound gear in time for the next date in Cleveland, they lost their opening slot on the tour. A couple weeks later, Capitol yanked their recording contract.

First on the rebound was singer Lou Gramm. Born Grammatico, he had already shortened his name when this article was written – the Wikipedia entry suggests that didn’t happen until later. The Wikipedia page also says Gramm had given a Black Sheep tape to Mike Jones of the British band Spooky Tooth when they played Rochester in 1974. By early 1976, Jones was putting together a new band, which became Foreigner. According to the Wikipedia page, Jones listened to the tape, invited Gramm to New York City to audition and the rest is rock ‘n roll history.

Guitarist Richard Gramm, Lou’s brother and a member of the first version of Black Sheep, recounts a somewhat different story on his Facebook page. He says that manager Jim Taylor was brother Lou’s link to Mick Jones through his work with A&M Records, which was Spooky Tooth’s label, and that Taylor made the arrangements that got Lou his audition for Foreigner.

Gramm sheds more light on it in his memoir, "Juke Box Hero: My Five Decades in Rock 'N Roll." He recalls that Capitol Records connections got him a backstage pass to the Spooky Tooth concert in Rochester's Auditorium Theater in the summer of 1975 and that he gave copies of both Black Sheep albums to Mike Jones. He recounts how in the months after the truck crash, while the band was pondering its next moves, he was on welfare. He was cleaning toilets in the Monroe County Court House on a work detail when his father fielded a phone call from "some guy by the name of Mick Jones." 

Gramm wrote that he didn't accept the offer to audition right away. He was loyal to Black Sheep. When he brought it up at a rehearsal, the rest of band told him go. After hearing him do a few songs, Jones and his sidemen, who had rejected about 50 other singers, asked Gramm to stay rehearse for another day and then another day after that. He recounts that keyboardist Al Greenwood finally told him: "We knew you were the one after the first two lines you sang the first day you were here." 

          Guitarist Don Mancuso and drummer Ron Rocco went on to become the core of Cheater, a mainstay of the Rochester rock scene in the late 1970s. Mancuso and bassist Bruce Turgon show up on Lou Gramm’s solo albums and since 2004 they’ve played in the Lou Gramm Band, which does Foreigner hits and Lou’s Christian rock material, Lou having turned from drugs to religion in the early 1990s.

Turgon, who split for L.A. after the crash, led his own bands there and worked with people like Billy Thorpe and Nick Gilder, contributed songs to Gramm’s solo albums and got to do a stint with Foreigner itself in the 1990s when Gramm rejoined the group. Lately he’s done a bunch of film soundtrack work.

Drummer Ron Rocco worked with Buffalo bass legend Billy Sheehan in his group Light Years and in 1986 became the only member of Black Sheep to be inducted into the Buffalo Music Hall of Fame.

Organist Larry Crozier was part of the Black Sheep reunion concert in Rochester in 2011, along with Don Mancuso and, of course, Lou Gramm.

As for Stuart Alan Love, he produced both Black Sheep albums and went on to work with numerous other rock and jazz groups, notably Nick Gilder, who’s best remembered for “Hot Child in the City.” Some of the others – Wayne Henderson, Ronnie Laws and Michael Quatro, older brother of Suzi. He died at age 64 in 2011.

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FURTHER NOTE: All of these transcripts of old feature articles about the Buffalo music scene can be found in a somewhat more legible and searchable form on my Blogspot site: https://www.blogger.com/blog/posts/4731437129543258237.