Archival Buffalo News feature articles

  The man who gave us “Shake, Rattle and Roll” in the twilight of a career that began in the speakeasies of Kansas City . May 28, 1977 Blues Man Big Joe Turner Makes a Legend Come Alive            Big Joe Turner, the legendary blues shouter, wears a coat and a satiny shirt and he sits at a table by the stage, a red drink in his hand. Bloody Marys. It’s about his fifth.           Big Joe Turner doesn’t so much sit at the table as lean. His right elbow is down and he’s planted at an angle, massive in his chair. Big Joe Turner is big, all right.           It’s his first night of three at the Tralfamadore Café, 2610½ Main at Fillmore. His first night in at least 10 years in Buffalo . WBFO-FM, the publicly supported radio station, brought him back Friday for a benefit. He’s on again tonight and tomorrow at 9:30.           With him is a man who hasn’t been in Buffalo in 41 years. One of the guys in C. Q. Price’s Big Band remembered him. Played the old Vendome on Clinton Stree

  Not every night can be a winner. May 21, 1977 Two Bands Search For a Real Headliner             As a rock concert billing, the combination of the Outlaws and the Stanky Brown Group seems like two warm-up bands in search of a headliner.           The Outlaws are a Tampa , Fla. , quintet with a touch of Allman Brothers in their guitars and a Top 40 hit to their credit – “There Goes Another Love Song” in 1975.           There’s prospects for more now in their tuneful third album, “Hurry Sundown,” which was produced by the man who produces the Eagles. In other words, the Outlaws have reached that precarious point between the minor leagues and the majors.           The deciding factor is radio airplay. The show sold out for Harvey & Corky in Pittsburgh , where stations are playing the new album.           Here they aren’t yet. There were just about enough empty seats in the Century Theater’s orchestra Friday night to hold all the kids in the balcony.           The Ou

  Even though I hadn’t moved into the Features Department just quite yet, I was already assimilating into the corps of critics. May 20, 1977 Satire on Conventions, Group Strikes Nerve              Mrs. Watchanna Scruggs, having already established herself on the side of style and progress, has more on her mind than just telling her sister delegates that the treasury contains the grand total of $2.           “It cost me $3.75,” she says amid righteous sniffs, “to get here and report this $2.”           She’s answered by a solemn chorus of “Amens.”           The scene: A Black Baptist convention – deepwater Baptist – sometime in the early years of this century. What makes it so familiar is that the jostling for power, the gossip, the speeches and the complaints are a rite as ageless and inexplicable as conventions themselves.           “And of course it says something about organizations,” director George W. Freeman says after the final gavel goes down in “On Their Way to

  Underneath it all, Chuck Mangione was still a guy from the neighborhood. April 14, 1977 Mangione Orchestra, Quartet at Home Here             It’s all in the family Wednesday night in sold-out Kleinhans Music Hall for Chuck Mangione.           Brother Gap, his Fender Rhodes piano and his synthesizer sit smack in the center of Chuck’s 16-member wind orchestra.           Out in the lobby is Chuck’s father, the words Papa Mangione embroidered on his Chuck Mangione T-shirt. The shirts are $4. The albums are $5. And Chuck will sign them for you after the show.           Which means that many spiffily-dressed couples inundate Chuck for autographs when the lights finally come up. Chuck doesn’t mind. Buffalo gave him his break.           “Unless it happens somewhere else,” he says at the start of his encore, “then it doesn’t happen at home.”           What Chuck is doing is taking home with him. Brother Gap says they’re touring a little more than a week with the orchestr

  The last local band to be featured in the Pause section of TV Topics. After years of lobbying by us artsy types, The Buffalo News launched its weekend entertainment magazine, Gusto, on the first Friday in June and TV Topics went back to being about ... television.   May 14, 1977 Boot Hill Boys Plan Bluegrass Version Of ‘Jimmy Who?’ for President Carter THE BOOT HILL BOYS SCRAWL the tunes for their 25-minute set on strips of paper that they’ll tape to their instruments as the Folk Extravaganza begins in the Tralfmadore Café, little realizing how much bluegrass they’ll go through.           Lately they haven’t been playing out much. Things have tapered off after a high point six weeks ago, when they were up in front of crowds three nights a week.           Now it’s down to once a week – Charley Brown’s in Clarence Mall every Thursday. The group shares the same problem every other ground-level folk performer in Buffalo complains of.           There are few places t

  Every once in a while, my reviewing assignments took me to jazz shows. This one was a plum. May 13, 1977 Gary Burton: Sound Experience              There are a lot of fine jazz people in town this week – Elvin Jones at Eduardo’s, Charlie Byrd at the Statler Hilton, Dave Brubeck tonight at Shea’s Buffalo, Flora Purim tomorrow at UB and the all-star jam session tomorrow at the Statler – and there’s one rarified experience.           That’s Gary Burton, whose shimmering vibraharp and blinding agility with his mallets positively delighted a spiffed-up crowd of slightly more than 300 in the Statler Hilton’s Terrace Room Thursday night for a show sponsored by Buffalo Jazz Report magazine.           One can’t admire the pillars of jazz-rock – Return to Forever, Weather Report and Keith Jarrett – without crediting Burton as one of the architects. It’s a shame more of last Saturday’s Return to Forever concert crowd didn’t show up.           The half-capacity turnout leaves Jazz R

  May 1977 had no shortage of peak concert experiences. Just one night after the Grateful Dead came to the Aud at the top of their game, we got this stunning, elaborately staged show at Shea’s. May 11, 1977 Rundgren’s Utopia Now Arrives With Flash, Fog, Melting Guitar             For years Todd Rundgren has described his group Utopia as a performing concept, but it’s taken until this tour to get the best of all possible results.           Given the 28-year-old Philadelphia whiz kid’s capacity for self-indulgence, the general idea is a fat helping of technological magic and the freedom to be as outrageous as he sees fit.           So no longer does he dye his hair green and purple. Instead, he sets off more fog and incense, lights and flash pots in Shea’s Buffalo Tuesday night than any local rock audience has ever experienced in one evening.           All this is expressed via Rundgren’s fascination with Eastern mysticism. The quarter-million-dollar stage set caters to w

  Of all the times I’ve seen the Grateful Dead, this just might be the best one. Plus I got a chat with Jerry Garcia backstage before the show. The interview appeared in the first issue of our new weekend entertainment magazine Gusto a few weeks later.   May 10, 1977 Audience Is Grateful For Return of ‘Dead’             The little luminous sticker on Jerry Garcia’s solid-bodied electric guitar says, “The enemy is listening.” It must be Garcia’s strategy, then, to win them over by rocking their socks off.           That’s the little surprise tucked into the current edition of the Grateful Dead, and it took nearly four hours for all its rhythmic delights to unfold Monday night in Memorial Auditorium before 9,000 generally ecstatic witnesses.           With former mate Bill Kreutzmann having returned to work beside Mickey Hart, there are two drummers now. And what a fine beat they lay down. It’s like instant power. No waiting.           So forget about that old half-hour war

  Guess which one of these bands got inducted first into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. See the Footnote.   April 30, 1977   Boston ’s Rocket Ascent Marks Newest Heroes             “Welcome the hottest new band in America ,” emcee John McGahn announces Friday night. “ Boston !”           The spotlight picks out rock’s freshest sensation – a tall, cool, lank-haired, 29-year-old named Tom Scholz. He wears a black jacket with big zippers and launches into the sound of a rocket ascent with his blond guitar.           Once he achieves liftoff, they’re all into it – a big, electronically-enriched, pulsating flow that rings as massively as must the music of the spheres.           Boston is proof that each new rock generation finds its own heroes. The recognition has been almost instantaneous.           A year ago, this quintet of Massachusetts bar band veterans was finishing its first album. Since its August release, that album has sold upwards of 3 million copies.