Oct. 4, 1975: A band called Coalition

 

Nine years before “This Is Spinal Tap,” this young band was living the movie. 

Oct. 4, 1975 

Coalition Kept Trying and Earned Success 

THE EVENING’S BARELY BEGUN, but the Trivet House, corner of Genesee and Transit, is all packed and steamy as if the night were well along.

          Looks like the Coalition regulars are here, but it’s hard to tell how many since they aren’t allowed to dance on the tables any more.

          Party Paul is here for sure – Coalition on the front of his T-shirt, Party on the back – doing his own little muscular number in the middle of the tiny dance floor.

          “We don’t want you to wait until 1 o’clock to party,” announces singer Pat Duggan, who’s given to playing riffs on invisible guitars. “We want you all to party now.”

* * *

WITH THAT, keyboard man Al Stanford steps forward and the rest of the band rocks into David Bowie’s “Suffragette City,” with everyone doing ecstatic little jumps on the chorus.

          Ordinarily they finish it off with a blast of flash powder, but they don’t this time. There isn’t enough room.

          Such caution is born of experience. One time, Pat Duggan will tell you, he lost his balance and got caught in the explosion. He couldn’t hear for the rest of the night.

          That was the way Coalition lived until recently. More misadventures than success. Reviewing the history of the band is kind of like taking stock of the Little Rascals or the Keystone Kops.

* * *

IT ALL STARTED four years ago, when rhythm guitarist Alan Hastings was a sophomore at Canisius High School and decided to get up a band. Most people ask their friends. Alan asked the bulletin board.

          “I was just looking for a bass, drums, a singer, another guitar and maybe an organ,” he says.

          “I remember Denny walking up to him at the bottom of the marble stairs,” says Dave Sroka, the soundman.

          “We were supposed to meet him there and we didn’t even know what he looked like. We asked three other guys before we got to him.”

          They practiced backstage at Canisius High and built themselves an enormous PA out of plywood. “The Voice of God speakers,” they called them.

          “It weighed 800 pounds,” Alan says, “and it sounded awful.” With that, they went to play their first CYO gig.

          “It took us two auditions to get it,” Dave Sroka recalls. “We practically had to bribe our way into it.

          “Then halfway through the night we noticed the backs of the PA speakers were tipping, tipping, tipping, and then crash! We stripped the screws.”

* * *

IT WENT ON like this for three years – smoke bombs, firecrackers, broken-down cars, rentals that cost more than they earned, weird electronic disasters and personnel changes that would make your head spin.

          This group, they say, is the seventh Coalition.

          The climax of the slapstick stage of their career came a summer ago when they convinced the owner of Dirty Dick’s Bath House – one of their primary venues – to put them in his fancy nightspot in the suburbs.

          They celebrated by buying $50 worth of loud cap guns and shooting Pat on stage for the windup of an Alice Cooper number.

          As an encore, they played cops and robbers in Clarence Town Park, getting home grass-stained and mosquito-bitten at 9:30 in the morning.

          At one point, they were thinking of putting off college so they could make music. But Denny Klee, once their instrumental wizard, went off to Notre Dame University and the rest of the group hit the local colleges.

* * *

“BY THIS SUMMER,” says Duggan, “we had been through so many transitions that all we wanted to get was six guys who were going to get serious and do something with it. We couldn’t afford to keep the band as it was.”

          With the addition of bassist Kevin Gonlag and drummer Tom Tobia in June, the group entered its current phase as a go-for-broke, good-time band that’s young enough (they’re all 18 and 19) to let it all come out.

* * *

GUITARIST Tom Hyzy and keyboard man Stanford will send up a lyrical Emerson, Lake & Palmer “From the Beginning,” then follow it heavy with Bad Company’s “Movin’ On” and a pair of ZZ Top blues before drifting back to Fleetwood Mac’s “Hypnotize.”

          No wonder manager Mark Schuller has an easy time getting them gigs. They will be at the Trivet House tonight and at Shire’s in East Aurora in late October and November.

          With Hastings and Stanford at Buff State, Hyzy at UB and Tobia working and attending ECC North, they’re having to limit their appearances. Practices in the Hastings basement in North Buffalo are rare at the moment.

          Their main problem is vocals. Duggan is a fine, energetic singer, but the harmonies behind him get funny sometimes. Their main ambition is to get into more difficult material.

          “People are getting more critical,” Sanford says. “When the Beatles came out, you could get away with the same three chords all the time. Now when somebody says a band’s good or bad, they’ve got all these reasons for it.”

* * * * *

IN THE PHOTO: From left, front, Alan Hastings, Pat Duggan and Tom Hyzy; back row, Tom Tobia, Kevin Gonlag and Al Stanford.

* * * * *

FOOTNOTE: If you ever wonder how I heard about these bands, this time it was probably because guitarist Alan Hastings’ mom Helen was one of my newsroom colleagues. She was a writer in what was then the Women’s Department and went up to the fourth floor to become one of the first women advertising executives at The Buffalo News.

Alan inherited her gene for sales work. In his case, it’s been real estate. He’s been one of the leading commercial real estate brokers in the city for the past quarter century through his agency Hastings Cohn, now the Hastings Group since a merger in 2019 with Hunt Commercial Real Estate.

Alan is a past president of the Western New York Chapter of the New York State Commercial Association of Realtors and the next time you lift a mug of beer at the Pearl Street Grill & Brewery in downtown Buffalo, give him a toast. He’s the guy who made the place happen by sending a brochure about the brick building at Pearl and Seneca streets to John Hickenlooper, the man who brought brew pubs to Denver and now is U.S. senator from Colorado.

Other guitarist Tom Hyzy became a certified public accountant and for 20 years was a partner in Feeley, Bonaventura & Hyzy CPAs. Since October, he’s been a partner in the Small Business Department at Tronconi Segarra & Associates, specializing in tax planning. He’s also been treasurer of Meals on Wheels of Erie County.

Singer Pat Duggan has had a long career in the bath and kitchen business. He became a designer at Artisan Kitchens and Baths here in 2013.

Soundman Dave Sroka probably is the guy I found on LinkedIn who’s spent nearly 40 years with Ricoh USA, where he works as a senior solutions analyst.