Nov. 2, 1974: Pure Pleasure

 

An under-the-radar group of first-rate players, one with a connection to a raunchy local legend. 

Nov. 2, 1974

‘Pure Pleasure’ – A Happy Weekend Band 

“YOU CAN’T MAKE a decent living in music if you stay in one city,” a well-traveled Buffalo musician was saying. “You either gotta go on the road or get a day job.”

          But say you don’t want to travel. Hunkering down into the old 9 to 5 demands some adjustments in one’s musical bent.

          The primary quest now becomes not stardom, but time, enough time to eat and work and practice and maybe play Friday and Saturday nights and sleep – especially sleep.

          In other words, you become a weekend musician. Among full-time players, the term is like an ethnic joke. There’s a stigma attached: amateurism, lack of commitment, ineptitude.

          But it ain’t necessarily so, as even full-timers sometimes admit. A lot of good musicians settle down, acquire wives, kids and mortgage payments and still remain good musicians.

          For instance, Pure Pleasure, an unlikely and highly individualistic fivesome which merrily weekends at the Jolly Roger, Harlem near Clinton, Cheektowaga.

          They’ve all managed to get there this Saturday afternoon too. They sit and talk over soft drinks only in the long shadows halfway between the sunny front windows and preparations for the evening’s buffet in the back. Let’s meet them one by one:

* * *

SINCE THEY’VE been doing Wet Willie’s “Keep On Smilin’,” Pure Pleasure’s been after Bill Reynolds for his Southern drawl. Actually, it isn’t that Southern. Just southern Pennsylvania. He grew up in York, Pa.

          In Ithaca College, he was a trumpet major. Got a master’s degree from UB, married, had a couple of kids and teaches seventh grade instrumental music at Cheektowaga’s Alexander Avenue Middle School.

          Bill started with saxophone in fourth grade, but now rarely touches the thing. (“The sax affects my high register notes on the trumpet,” he explains.) Instead, he’ll switch off on flugelhorn, valve trombone and flute.

          Before he met bass guitarist Nick Favara in a music store in 1970 and sat in with Nick’s band, he’d never played rock.

          “I remember our first night at Bluemont ski lodge,” he says. “It was so loud I came home and my ears were still ringing. But I got used to it. Two months later, I was in the band.”

* * *

YOU MIGHT take Lynne Clark for an ingénue of some sort. She’s just 19, just out of Mount Mercy Academy and a freshman at UB. But she’s no kid on stage. She sings like she’s been doing it for years.

          “I’ve been singing since I was three,” she says. “My mother always sang along with me and both my parents always encouraged me. They’ve always wanted me to do this.

          “My big break came at Mount Mercy. Bishop Timon is our brother school and they have a musical every year which Kevin runs. I tried out and I was in it all four years.

          “The group here had girl singers before and Kevin mentioned if I’d be interested in singing with a band to go see them.

          “They called me up out of the audience to sing a couple songs the first time. That was in September of ’73. When they started at Jack’s Cellar in November, I was with them.”

* * *

KEVIN IS Kevin Kennedy, the group’s keyboard player and a music teacher at Bishop Timon High School since 1962. He’s more than twice Lynne’s age, but you’d never guess it.

          He was playing piano before he was big enough to reach the pedals, playing for a radio show his mother, a former professional singer, had in his native Elmira.

          Kevin majored in organ at Manhattanville College and philosophy at St. Bonaventure University. Until 1968, when he started playing for a Seneca Street lounge (“It was all ad lib,” he says), he’d only performed at church functions.

* * *

"THEN I got a call at Timon from a guy who couldn’t take a piano job,” he says. “It was at the Lackawanna Hotel. Then the group went to the Figurehead on Grand Island.

          “I was the only one who lasted the whole 14 months at the Figurehead. Everyone else changed. When we left, Nick and Bill were in the group. I guess that was the start of it.”

          Timon views Kevin’s musical excursions tolerantly, if not enthusiastically. A regular crew of Timonites comes around almost every week. “Timon’s rent-a-crowd,” the group calls them.

          “Actually,” Kevin puts in, “I don’t do the whole Timon musical. There’s two of us. Right now my biggest problem is finding enough time to do this and write arrangements for the musical. It’s coming up Nov. 23, 24 and 25.”

* * *

DRUMMER GREG Edwin’s father owns Edwin’s Music Store, “so I had no choice, you know?” He’s teaching drumming to kids this afternoon and popped in late just long enough to talk.

          “I started in groups when I was about nine,” he recalls. “Then I was in a polka band – the Bel-Aires. We were on the road for two years. Every weekend we were outa town.

          “It became very boring. Whenever there’s a holiday, you aren’t at home. It came down to the simple fact that I don’t wanta travel any more. Since then, I think I’ve played with almost every musician in Buffalo.”

          He’s been with Pure Pleasure nearly two years, along with working full time in the store. Through his brother Jim, who drums daily on “Dialing for Dollars,” he helped get the group into the Jolly Roger.

          “This group can really play,” he says. “You don’t have to hold back. And it’s not like the standard bass-guitar-piano setup. Billy’s playin’ horns instead and when he goes, the whole band goes.”

* * *

BASS GUITARIST Nick Favara, yawning from having to be up early Saturday for work as a sales representative, was part of an upstate rock ‘n roll legend in the early ‘60s.

          He was one-third of a band centered around a UB dental school student named Dick Jacobs, better know to rowdy college fraternity parties from here to Albany as Hermie the Sp—mie.

          “I was the straight man of the group,” Nick relates. “Playing with him almost ruined me at first. You’d never believe what went on. He’d break an electric piano every six weeks. We’d have to carry a spare.

          “He was just doing it to earn money to get through dental school. Now he’s a lifer in the Army.”

* * *

NICK WENT into the Army too, as a paramedic, then came back and tried to patch together a band.

          “It was like pullin’ teeth,” he says. “It was when the Beatles were popular and we weren’t into that. We played old rock ‘n roll and things Hermie did, then I laid low for a year.

          “Finally, I started playing with Paul Schmitz in Liberty Limited and that’s when I met Bill. We were Wakefield for a while. About the time Greg came in, we got the name Pure Pleasure.

          “We’re a weekend band, but my attitude is, hey, I want to get to the people every minute.”

          Kevin seconds that emotion: “I wouldn’t want to give up the weekend work. I look forward to it. It kinda levels out the rest of the week.”

* * * * *

IN THE PHOTO: From left, Bill Reynolds, Nick Favara and Lynne Clark. Missing are Greg Edwin and Kevin Kennedy.

* * * * *

FOOTNOTE: The key man in this group, keyboardist Kevin Kennedy, settled down further and got married in 1976. He earned a master’s degree from Berklee School of Music, spent a few years in Denver, then returned to Buffalo and gave private lessons. He moved to Florida two years before he died in 2003. Pure Pleasure was mentioned in his death notice.

Drummer Greg Edwin, actual name Grzankowski, became president of Edwin’s Music Store. He passed away in November 2002, just four months after his father.

Trumpeter Bill Reynolds kept teaching in the Cheektowaga Central School District. After he died in 1998, the Music Boosters established a memorial music scholarship in his name.

My computer doesn’t deliver any leads to singer Lynne Clark. It also strikes out on bassist Nick Favara. And then there's Hermie the Spermie. Not much luck there, either. He apparently lives on only in the bleary memories of drunken college students from the ‘60s.