Jan. 6, 1978 Sunday feature: Summing up '77

 

1977 was more memorable than most years in the rock music realm. Here’s a summing up. 

Jan. 6, 1978 Sunday feature

1977: From the Critics’ View 

          Rock and popular music was full of ferment here during the previous year. The event that loomed largest, however, was the Blizzard of ’77. Virtually every performer who took the local stage paused somewhere to say something like: “You folks sure had a lot of snow, didn’t you?”

          Inevitably, they’d get applause for that. The only one who got to see just how much snow we really had was Bruce Springsteen, who trekked through the driving ban into Kleinhans Music Hall Feb. 9 with his E Street Band for a rousing couple of hours that probably hastened the spring thaw.

          Springsteen was the first entertainer to slide in after the Blizzard. Harvey & Corky had to cancel dates with the Outlaws and Boston in the Century Theater. UB lost shows by bluesman Robert Junior Lockwood and instrumentalists Stuff.

          Local musicians lost up to two weeks worth of gigs, a setback that cost hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars. Federal disaster relief officials, unfortunately, did not consider that a reimbursable calamity.

          Hard times hit the Record Runner store in the University Plaza, but it wasn’t the weather that did it. It was the competition.

          The Record Runner closed, ending the bitterest price war in the area. The winner was neighboring Cavage’s, which expanded its network of stores this year and completed its new warehouse in Cheektowaga.

          Record buyers, meantime, felt the bite of inflation as they watched the industry’s new $7.98 list price raise albums from the old discount price (around $5) to the current level of $6 or more.

          Progressive rock fans had still another worry – the potential sale last spring of their cherished WBUF-FM to a young Michigan lawyer named Robert Liggett. Protests to the Federal Communications Commission and a unionization vote put off the planned purchase.

          Owner Al Wertheimer continues to look for a buyer – it’s rumored that Liggett is still interested – while the station carries on without Cal Brady and Robert Allen, the two enthusiasts who turned it progressive in 1975.

          The impending sale of WBUF is one omen that foreshadows years of change coming up ahead in Buffalo rock radio. Another is the sale of WBEN-AM and its automated rock FM.

          Elsewhere on the airwaves, WYSL changed its FM outlet’s call letters back to WPHD – recalling its once-progressive days in the early ‘70s. The fastest wit in the East, Sandy Beach, returned to WKBW, this time as program director. And at WGRQ-FM, program director John McGhan, the city’s most frequent concert emcee, departed for Pittsburgh.

          The radio could scarcely be turned on last summer without summoning Donna McDaniel’s “Save Me.” The young Town of Tonawanda singer broke into the Billboard Hot 100 charts, recorded a follow-up single and continues to enjoy enthusiastic local acclaim.

          A similar round of praise greeted the debut album by the city’s most popular jazz-rock group, Spyro Gyra. Stations played it in its entirety. Listeners marveled at how well-crafted a made-in-Buffalo album could be.

          The group released the record in November on their own Cross-Eyed Bear label, sold 3,000 copies here within two months and at year’s end were negotiating to sell the album to a record company for nationwide distribution.

          While Spyro Gyra’s Jay Beckenstein labored over the control board at Mark Recording Studios in Clarence, Buffalo’s other 16-track studio – Trackmaster Audio – was moving into new quarters in a reconditioned century-old house at Franklin and North streets.

          The move was slow and complicated. Plans called for a switchover last winter, but the grand opening didn’t come until October. Despite the delays, Trackmaster emerged with an impressive facility. What it needs now is a hit record.

          Johnny (Guitar) Watson had to wait 20 years for his records to start turning gold. When it finally happened in June, he got not one, but two – one for each of his albums on DJM Records, distributed in America by locally-based Amherst Records.

          Watson came to town for the presentation at a concert in Shea’s Buffalo and basked in the limelight as he received the full star treatment – Rolls-Royce limousines, police escorts, autograph seekers and his handprints in cement at the Record Theater.

          Buffalo may have been good to the stars in 1977, but not all of the stars reciprocated. The year saw a staggering number of concert cancellations.

          The biggest was the Led Zeppelin engagement Aug. 6 in Rich Stadium. The death of singer Robert Plant’s son in England stopped the group’s tour and left 66,000 fans asking for $10 refunds.

          The bitterest was Rod Stewart’s summary no-show Oct. 17 in Memorial Auditorium. Rod the Mod, having partied late in Washington, D.C., the night before, simply took the day off, leaving promoter Cedric Cushner in the lurch. About 10,000 ticketholders were stood up too.

          Occasionally promoters ran into nicer problems. Harvey & Corky found themselves with more Billy Joel fans than they could fit into the Century Theater. The solution? A move to the Aud, which would be curtained off for the first time into a 9,200-seat concert bowl.

          Getting a curtain, however, proved to be a monumental headache. Toronto Maple Leaf Gardens went back on a promise to lend theirs. Arenas all over the Northeast were contacted, but no luck.

          Finally, crews wound up working around the clock to improvise a series of cloth panels on poles. It worked. The concert Nov. 29 was a smashing success.

          Harvey & Corky also became rock film distributors this year. After tremendous Century Theater response to “Sensasia” (a ’76 Winter Olympics documentary with music by Rick Wakeman, back-to-back with a Genesis concert film), the package went on to play first-run houses around the nation.

          The arrival of New Wave or punk-rock in Buffalo was greeted by small, but passionate, crowds. They wore red T-shirts at Buffalo State College March 25 as they cheered and threw beer at the Ramones and the Dictators, two groups which never had appeared on the same bill together in their native New York City.

          Buff State concert director Steve Ralbovsky followed that up with an even more ambitious program Oct. 12 called “Vinyl Raps and Talking Heads,” where the crowd of about 600 was divided between record execs in double-knits and punk fans wearing safety pins.         

          The session began with a talk by Arista Records president Clive Davis, whose reign at Columbia in the late ‘60s helped usher in modern rock. Next came a high-powered panel of New York City rock critics, who nipped at Davis and each other like wolves.

          For a climax, there was the angular power of New York’s arty, understated Talking Heads, who eloquently blew away all the contending voices with their strange and wonderful music. It as the perfect ending for 1977’s most memorable rock evening.

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IN THE PHOTO: Turns out Bruce Springsteen likes the snow. Here he is on a wintry picture disc for “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.”

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FOOTNOTE: What a year! This certainly reads like a greatest-hits package from the misty memories I’ve previously posted, but what caught my attention were the additional details about things like the Memorial Auditorium curtain caper.