Jan. 4, 1975: Phil Dillon and the Dillon-McMatyus Quartet

 

So why didn’t this candidate for the spotlight space on the “Pause” page wind up there? Because it was occupied by another year-end wrap-up from one of the other record reviewers, probably scheduled for that spot weeks in advance. This story most likely popped up at the last minute during the holidays. Thankfully, due to the time element, the TV Topics editor found a place to shoehorn it in. 

Jan. 4, 1975 

Phil Dillon – ‘Light and Breezy’

In Marquee Musical on Ch. 17 

FRESH SNOW OUTSIDE the Channel 17 studios, but it’s not half as cold as the way I feel about the videotape I’ve just seen. So much for that prospect.

          But there’s still some time left before we have to give up the control room and Don Williams, producer of WNED-TV’s homegrown shows, says how about looking at some other “Marquee” programs.

          “This is Phil Dillon’s group,” he notes as the “Marquee” logo explodes and fades to reveal the checkered tablecloths of a coffeehouse setting and a four-man band flanked by a modest pile of equipment.

          Phil Dillon. Of course. Used to play with Flash, an original material heavy band that made a shot at the big time in 1971 and missed. One-time solo Sunday guitarist at Binky Brown’s. Led off the Joe Cocker concert in Niagara Falls. Phil Dillon. Of course.

          And the music is good. Light and breezy, vaguely Latin. I compliment Williams on the camera work, which is as fluid and tasteful as the sound. You could put this on the network and be proud. When will it run?

          “Sixth of January,” he says. “Monday night. It’s on at 10:30.”

* * *

GARY MATYUS’ mother answers the door in her apron. The boys are upstairs, she says. She buzzes their buzzer.

          The second set of stairs, steep as the Matterhorn, takes you three stories above the side street in Buffalo’s Riverside district to the paneled attic, complete with refrigerator and Gary’s piano, the birthplace and continuing home of the Dillon McMatyus Quartet.

* * *

THE TV SHOW, taped in early December, was about the sixth time the quartet had played publicly, though the lack of seasoning doesn’t show up on the film. They’ve been working up material since last summer.

          “Everything was all peaches and cream until the guy went like this,” Phil Dillon points his finger as if to zap.

          “When that camera’s on you, you can’t help getting a little nervous. But when we saw the tapes, I could tell that they were really pleased. It was like they put something extra into it.”

          Phil’s been doing solo gigs since the breakup of Flash, even though he’d prefer to play only with the group.

          Now it’s the one-man shows that keep him working steadily, like his weekend nights at the Steak & Brew in the Delaware Park Plaza.

          “I enjoy that,” he says, “but the quartet is much more exciting. I keep hearing all these things that the quartet’s got happening when I’m playing solo. Except they’re not there with me.”  

          Phil wanted to take the quartet into the Cocker concert in September after he got a last-minute call to fill in for Little Feat, who canceled.

          “Then,” he says, “I thought: ‘These guys haven’t played out.’ They said: ‘Joe Cocker gig? Well, all right.’ But we all got there and they only wanted me.

          “It was like no sound checks and they tell me: ‘You’re going on for 20 minutes and then get off quick because we’re paying people overtime.’

          “Me and John McGahn and Hank Ball from, well, it was WPHD then, we were standing around backstage when Cocker was on. He was bad off. They had to walk him up to the stage.”

* * *

THERE ARE two Dillons in the Dillon-McMatyus Quartet. Phil, who’s 23, and his 19-year-old brother Mark, who plays conga drums and works days in a wholesale plumbing warehouse.

          “I’ve never played in a band before,” Mark says. “Wait, I played trumpet in the grade school band. Yeah, that was my musical career. Three years of trumpet.”

          The “Mc” is Mick Novits, 27, who plays bass. And the Matyus, of course, is Phil’s old friend, Gary, on piano. The two of them shared an apartment in Allentown before Gary moved back home last spring.

          “Mick and Gary and me were in our first band together here in Riverside when I was 12 years old,” Phil says. “Mick was always the older guy.”

          Mick got a degree from UB, got a job as a lab technician and played with Gary Maida in a local rock band called the Country Gentlemen, which suffered chronic changes in personnel.

          Gary quit playing for a while, joined the Coast Guard, went to Erie Community College, did a stint as a supervisor for a soft contact lens maker.

          “Lately I’ve spent a lotta time playin’ in the attic,” Gary says, “bein’ my own audience. I don’t want to go back to a 40-hour week. Here I’m my own boss.”

* * *

“OUR MUSIC is a little different from what you usually hear around here,” Phil says. “It’s not the Buffalo Blues, it’s not Top 40, it’s not soul and it’s not jazz really, but for the layman I guess it’s jazz.

          “We do only two original songs. Flash burnt me out on writing for a while. We’re still hitting some blues – the Sandy Konikoff shuffle kinda sticks in your head.

          “What I hear from people who like us is that it’s refreshing. It’s not like the blues and it doesn’t blast you out of your seat.”

* * *

THEIR TASTES are reflected on the record player this particular afternoon.

          Laura Nyro, Chick Corea, Mandrill, blind ex-Buffalo guitarist Charlie Starr, a tape of their first gig – a live WPHD taping from the Bona Vista on Hertel Avenue, the night Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt stopped in.

          But they’ve learned their tastes aren’t for everyone. Fresh in their minds are two Saturday nights at a West Side disco they describe as “the Bump scene.”

          “One girl came up,” Phil says, “after we got done with Van Morrison’s ‘I’ve Been Working,’ which I figured was pretty Bumpable, and asked us to play something she could Bump to. I said, ‘What about that last song,’ and she said, ‘Well, I never heard that before.’”

* * * * *

IN THE PHOTO: The Dillon-McMatyus Quartet, from left, Phil Dillon, Mark Dillon, Mick Novits and Gary Matyus.

* * * * *

FOOTNOTE: This group morphed into one of the great club bands of the mid 1970s. As Phil Dillon recounts in his Buffalo Music Hall of Fame bio, he began subbing regularly with Debbie Ash and Mike Campagna at the Bona Vista, which led to a hookup with singer Polla Milligan and singer-songwriter John Brady. The Dillon-McMatyus Quartet lived on as a backup group for Phil, Polla and John when Ash and Campagna decamped for Los Angeles.

Eventually, that pared down to the duo of Dillon and Brady, which attracted backup from members of Spyro Gyra and other notables. They released an album in 1977. Phil continued playing locally until 1994, most memorably with a group called the Saints, then moved to Nashville. He’s written hundreds of songs there and worked with country singer T. Graham Brown and rock guitarist Jimmy Nalls of Sea Level.

Phil tells me that his brother Mark is in Lansing, Mich., where he’s stage manager at the Breslin Arena at Michigan State. He also says Mick Novits is still here in Buffalo. Perhaps he’s the Mick Novits who went to working in the chemical industry with Lucidol Division of Pennwalt Corp. If so, he holds a patent for “tack free surface cures of polymers by organic peroxides in the presence of air.” Gary Matyus passed away in 2017.