Oct. 16, 1976: Rochester singer-songwriter Bat McGrath

 

Bat McGrath is part of a special memory for me. He was one of the featured artists at a 97 Rock concert in Delaware Park in August 1976 and, in my secret radio identity as Dempster Bucks, the meanest music critic in town, I was there. So was the station’s morning deejay, Jim Santella, who introduced me to his then-girlfriend’s roommate, a UB senior with dark hair down to her butt. I gave her a ride home later in my Volkswagen Thing and we’ve been together ever since.

Oct. 16, 1976

Bat McGrath’s ‘Blue Eagle’

Is Filled With Local Flavor 

BAT McGRATH TAKES A BITE of tuna fish sandwich – he doesn’t eat meat – and surveys the radio and record promotion people around the table.

          “I never saw this end of the business before,” he grins through his beard. “Usually I’m back on the hill, being your basic reclusive songwriter.”

          He doesn’t have to look too far from the hill – Italy Hill, outside Naples, 60 miles south of Rochester and not too far from Canandaigua Lake – to find things to write about.

          His first solo album, “From the Blue Eagle,” just released on Buffalo-based Amherst Records, is full of local characters and local color.

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“THE BLUE EAGLE really exists,” he says. “So does Big John McCloud. Ninety percent of the album is based for sure on fact.”

          Conesus Lake near Geneseo is where the flying saucer hovered, inspiring the first tune on the album, “Spaced Out”:

          On the deck, we were sittin’ there getting’ half-crocked

          When a silver tube came cruisin’ across the lake.

          Knowles passed out

          But ol’ Tomcat held his left palm out

          And said, ‘Baby, what you say’ …”

          Another song, “Wegmans,” takes place in a huge all-night supermarket in Rochester, which McGrath says is a well-known hangout.

          “If you’ve ever spent time in Rochester,” he acknowledges, “then you know that there’s not a lot to do after midnight.”

          McGrath, a native of Glens Falls who’ll turn 31 tomorrow, has spent quite a bit of time in Rochester himself.

          He and former singing partner Don Potter were the toast of the town in the late ‘60s, fronting one of its most popular rock bands, the Showstoppers, then switching to folk music and opening a highly successful coffeehouse.

          But somehow they could never extend their fortunes beyond Rochester.

          The Showstoppers had been signed to Columbia Records by John Hammond, but unlike other Hammond discoveries such as Bob Dylan, they put out two singles and went nowhere.

          McGrath and Potter later recorded a folk album for the label. It sold well in Rochester, but died from promotional neglect everywhere else.

          Then they met Chuck Mangione.

          “At that time, we were bigger than Chuck was,” McGrath recalls. “He was teachin’ at the Eastman School of Music and playin’ at some jet set bar downtown.

          “After a while, he started comin’ to the coffeehouse after hours and bringin’ his horn. Then we got involved in this concert he was doin’ with the Philharmonic.”

* * *

McGRATH AND POTTER and Stanley Watson joined Mangione in plotting it out. The two folksingers wrote words to the songs.

          One of Potter’s ideas was to have a chorus of 200 in the audience. Their grandiose collaboration became “Friends & Love.”

          “We didn’t know it was going to become a Chuck Mangione concert,” McGrath says. “It made us look like his sidemen. But I don’t blame him. It’s totally what he should do.

* * *

“AS FAR AS playing it live, it was an unequalled experience. Everybody that was there agreed that it was a magical night.”

          “Friends & Love” made Mangione famous, but it left McGrath and Potter still looking for their break. They toured colleges and folk clubs and eventually went their separate ways.

          So McGrath retreated to his hillside and his minstrelry, indulging what he calls his gift for blarney. His songwriting flourished.

          “I think it’s because it’s a real spiritual region,” he says. “There’s a lot of wild ginseng around. Somebody told me the Finger Lakes are one of three power sources in the world.

          “Maybe that’s why there so many UFOs around there,” he speculates. “I never wrote so much until I moved down there and I never met so many characters.”

          Local gossip introduced the Blue Eagle and Big John McCloud to him. And the songs he wrote introduced him to them.

          “The Blue Eagle is a rough, tough, redneck hunters’ bar,” he declares. “I’d written about it and they heard about the song. So when I finally went in there one Sunday for a beer, they all started buyin’ me drinks.”

          Big John is a regular at the Blue Eagle. Jailed three times for assault in his younger years, he’s notoriously fearsome, McGrath says, but actually he’s quite gentle.

          “He’s startin’ to hang around with all the younger weirdos,” he says, “‘cause all the older people are afraid of him.”

          When McGrath went looking for a new recording contract, he continued to play his local option. His reward was total artistic freedom on “From the Blue Eagle.”

          “Why did I record in Toronto? I think it’s going to be one of the hot spots in the future,” he explains. “Besides, I’ve seen the terrible things they did to Don (Potter) in Nashville.

          “The album came out kind of jazz and folk and rock. I didn’t wanta make a quote folkie album as such. I really believe in 1976. And I like the challenge of getting things down in short songs.

          “I’m getting into this thing now where I want every verse to say something, every line. And I like humor. That’s the way I judge people, by their sense of humor. I admire people who have a good sense of humor.”

* * * * *

IN THE PHOTO: 1976 Amherst Records promotional photo of Bat McGrath.

* * * * *

FOOTNOTE: Bat McGrath would put out one more album for Amherst Records, “The Spy” in 1978, and eventually wound up in Nashville. He spent his final days in 2019 on an even more rustic hillside in Tennessee, succumbing nine months after he got a diagnosis of colon cancer.

According to tributes by Rochester writer Jeff Spevak for WXXI, he had enough time to rejoin Don Potter to record a new version of “Let It Be Me,” the Everly Brothers song they first sang together as teens in Glens Falls. That led to a compilation of his songs for a full-fledged farewell album.

          Spevak notes that McGrath quit performing for a while and worked as a bodyguard and chauffeur for Van Halen until he got slashed across the forehead. In 2000, he married an actress he met in L.A., Tricia Cast, a veteran of 14 years in the daytime drama “The Young and the Restless,” and moved to Tennessee.

For a couple years, he collaborated with Nashville Songwriters Hall of Famer Harlan Howard, the man behind “Heartaches by the Number,” the Ray Price and Guy Mitchell hit, and Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces.”

Although he still had no taste for the business side of the music business, one of his tunes, “Come Some Rainy Day,” became a country hit after it was embraced by Wynonna Judd, thanks to Don Potter, who had become musical director for the Judds. His songs also were recorded by Kenny Rogers, Chely Wright and Earl Thomas Conley. Along the way, he put out an album called “Mr. Right” on the Rochester-based House of Guitars Mirror Records label.

          Spevak goes on to report that McGrath came back to Rochester for the “Friends & Love” reunion concerts in 2007 and 2011, then returned a couple times a year to play clubs and festivals, drawing big crowds of fans. In 2013, he and Potter were inducted into the Rochester Music Hall of Fame.