Life In The Middle Lane

Copyright Jon Packer

Relatively few people get to realize the thrill of playing in a band.  I got to play in two bands.  I played in The Ship for two years and in Appaloosa for eight months during the 1970's while I lived in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.  I loved the feeling of going on stage or being recognized walking down the street, so some of it felt like life in the fast lane.  But in actuality the groups were never nationally popular, so it was more like life in the middle lane while it lasted.

My experiences in the two groups could not have been more different.  The types of songs, the gigs, the vocals, the instrumentation, the sound, the intensity, the friendships--it was all so different between the two bands that the separate stories bear telling before I consider the differences.

One little note of clarification.  Both Steve Melshenker (known as "Mel") and Steve Reinwand of The Ship changed their names over the years, so I will use the names I know them by now, Albert Melshenker and Billy Panda.

The Ship

Writing The Folk Opera

In November, 1970, Albert Melshenker told me about an idea he had for a folk opera.  We had only known each other only for a few weeks, having both performed in the Red Herring Fall Folk Festival.  Mel had written most of the first song, which he called "The Ship," and I liked it from the very beginning.  I was not only flattered that he asked me to join him in writing the folk opera, but I was excited by the possibilities.  Mel had been writing songs for years, while I had been at it for less than a year and was in my senior year at University of Illinois.  Still, I was immediately prepared to devote as much time as it needed.

From the start we agreed that the piece would be an allegory depicting a person's journey through some life-changing event.  We loosely associated it with the process of falling in love and then losing the person, but then we broadened our goal to include any major change one might face in life, where the evolution includes initial joy and innocence, calm, problems, loss, isolation, inspiration, return from the abyss, and recovery.  It really was quite an ambitious project, but somehow it wasn't daunting.  We never considered giving it up.

Albert Melshenker has always been an amazing songwriter, from the sheer volume and breadth of his work.  Not all his songs were gems, but many of them were quite good, with catchy melodies and surprisingly insightful lyrics.  While performing as a duo for a few months early in our relationship, I often sat on the stage and listened as he took songwriting requests from the audience and immediately produced verses to new songs.

What I brought to the partnership was a sense of poetics and unconventional chord structures.  My songs were more poetry than prose--at least the songs I was proud of.  I guess that's how I would compare our styles: Mel wrote in prose with occasional bursts of poetry, and I wrote in poetry with occasional attempts at prose.  Together, it worked.

We began meeting almost every day for a period of one to three hours.  Because we were working on a song cycle, where each song would flow musically into the next, we had to write the songs in order.  We didn't plan the whole project at the beginning; we worked on the current song and planned only for the next one.  We discussed the boundaries of the project and decided against having named characters, but only to have ambiguous, unnamed characters, such as "the man" and "the lady."  The intent was to have the listener become the main character.  I think that worked out better than we ever could have imagined.

We wrote the first six songs ("The Ship", "The Order", "Innocence", "The Man", "The Calm", and "The Storm") in a little over two months.   "Innocence" was the hardest to write, even though it was the shortest song.  We really agonized over the last two verses but finally got them right.  "Innocence" is also a good example of how Mel and I wrote together most of the time.  We both felt completely free to suggest any lyrics, but unless we both felt good about the words, we wouldn't keep them.  The second verse of "Innocence" is:

     Hey, for the younger days when the circus came to town
     You spent your afternoons fascinated by the clown
     Your circus days are gone; you should have known it then
     You traded youth away at a bargain for your innocence

Mel wrote the first line, I wrote the second line, and we collaborated on almost every word of the third and fourth lines.  Most importantly, it leaves the listener understanding the feeling without fully understanding the words--how does one trade youth for innocence?  That mystery must be taken in context of the entire journey.  We just loved writing verses like that, because they contributed to the tapestry of the whole folk opera.

Both Mel and I would have amazing inspirations during the writing of those first six songs.  Two particular moments jump to mind, although there were many in those two months.

At one point, singer/songwriter Dan Fogelberg eagerly agreed to join us in the project, so Mel and I met with Dan and played the first three songs for him.  He really liked them and even devised some lead guitar accompaniment.  When we were finished, Mel and Dan decided to walk down to the pizza place at the corner to buy cigarettes, and Dan turned to me as they walked out of my room and said, "By the time we get back, your assignment is to come up with the melody for the next song."  The door closed, I collapsed in a chair with my guitar for about ten seconds and then began playing the melody that we used for the next song, "The Man."  Not only did I play the music, which was totally different in feeling from the first three songs, but I began singing the first two lines of the song as if they'd already been written!  (Note: Dan soon bowed out and did not collaborate on any of the songs.)

Mel had a comparable inspiration while we were writing "The Calm," when he came up with the melody and most of the words to the bridge.  The feeling of it is not only so different from the rest of the song, but it links "The Calm" with other parts of the folk opera in a perfect way.  This bridge became the signature of the whole work:

     I'm a sailor of the waters and the sun
     I can fight the rains, but have no weapons for the calm

As we approached finishing "The Storm," which was the last of the six songs, we began talking with people about what we were doing, and our good friend, Rich Warren, asked if he could record what we already had.  Rich set up the mics in the sanctuary of Channing-Murray Foundation (which had originally been an old church), and, with a handful of people watching, we recorded those songs.  That was probably in late January of 1971.

We were greatly encouraged by Rich and our other C-M friends to continue the project, but the last five songs ("Lost", "The Island", "The Reason", "The Return" and a reprise of "The Ship") were much harder to write than the first six songs had been.  We were still devoted to the project, but I was just starting my final semester at University of Illinois and had less time to spend on writing.  At the same time, both of us had had relationship problems with the women we were dating, so we no longer were in the "calm" phase of our lives.

"Lost" proved to be a real problem for us, because we finished it and then realized that it didn't capture what we really wanted to say, so we scrapped it!  I took a day to write down a detailed outline of what the song should really say, and then we had a good laugh over how meticulous I'd been in what should be a free-form, creative process.  But we used the outline to write a very good song that was over eight minutes long.  That second effort captured exactly what we wanted to say, but it had taken almost a month to write!

When we finished writing "Lost," we went right into writing "The Island."  It turned out to be the best song in the second half of the folk opera.  Right after we finished the song, I took a weekend to visit my home in Rockford, Illinois, and, unexpectedly, broke up with my girlfriend that weekend.  Often emotional trauma will spark a fit of creativity, and this was no exception.  On Sunday morning of that weekend, I arose and wrote most of the ninth song, "The Reason."  The words just poured out of me.  Originally it had four long verses, which we did in concerts, but it was cut to three verses on the ensuing album.

At about the same time, Albert and I were seriously considering what we should do with the finished product, once it was completed.  He came up with the obvious solution of trying to form a group, with the intention of performing it in one or more concerts by the end of the semester in late May.  We knew a lot of musicians in Champaign-Urbana, but we quickly settled on the idea that we needed to add specific instrumentation--piano, lead guitar and bass--and more vocals.  Billy Panda and Mark Hamby were already a well-known, very popular duo on campus, so they were the first musicians we approached.  It was quite a coup for us when they accepted our invitation.  Remember, this was before the last two songs were completed!  Not only did Billy and Mark bring the sounds of five other instruments (piano, flute, lead guitar, dobro, and harmonica) into the mix, but they were both excellent lead and harmony singers.

Then we needed a bass player.  Since Albert, Billy, and I spent most of our free time at the Red Herring Coffeehouse, there was one obvious choice--a young kid who played bass and 12-string guitar around the coffeehouse, Todd Bradshaw.  He could even sing!  When the five of us got together and started talking about what we were tackling and what lay ahead, the whole mix just felt right.

I have always been a little disappointed, however, in how we rushed through writing the last two songs.  There was a lot of pressure in finishing the folk opera, so I think we hurried through those lyrics especially.  I always thought there should have been three songs, rather than two, because we jammed so much into "The Return," which is the tenth song.  I also didn't think that the end of the last song was our best writing, but the time constraints really ended the songwriting effort.

The First Set Of Concerts

We began practicing as a group even before Albert and I finished writing "The Return" and the reprise of "The Ship."  We held all our practices at Channing-Murray Foundation, usually a couple of hours a day.  Billy, Mark, and Todd did most of the instrumental arrangements, while Billy and Mark tackled the vocal arrangements.  Albert and I retained most of the lead vocal parts.  Not only was it easier that way, but there was that initial sense of ownership.  "Hey, it's my song, so I get to sing it."  In about six weeks, we went from a bare-bones minimum to a really wonderful first version.  I think we were all stunned by how well the arrangements worked out.

The folk opera was a guitar-based cycle of songs to which we added other instruments.  Piano was added to (and became a major part of) five of those songs, and flute was added to three songs.  In addition to playing a great acoustic lead guitar on most of the songs, Billy played harmonica on two of the songs and dobro on another.  Todd's fretless bass was the only electric instrument on any of the pieces.  (We added two other instruments to the subsequent Elektra recording--cello on three songs and autoharp on one song.)

But what really made "The Ship" set sail was the vocals.  Albert, Billy, Mark, and I could all sing lead and had fairly wide vocal ranges.  Billy and Mark, especially, could really hit the high notes.  Both of them were music majors at University of Illinois, so the parts they came up with were unusual and often extraordinary.  Albert and I were used to singing melody, 3rd, and 5th harmony parts, but Mark and Billy were coming up with uncommon vocal parts such as tonic, 5th, 7th, and 12th!  Albert probably had the most distinctive voice, and it really broadened the texture of the vocals.

One by one, the pieces were arranged.  I remember we all had the words and chords to songs written down on poster boards that we placed on music stands in front of us.  There was no way we could memorize all eleven songs and get all the parts right in six weeks.  Arranging the songs and hammering out the parts was really a lot of fun.  For Albert and me, it was overwhelmingly gratifying to hear our songs come alive.

Although the arrangements were well thought out, we did have our serendipitous moments.  At one point we were practicing the "I'm a sailor" bridge in "The Calm," and Mark suggested we sing it without the instruments to hear the parts.  The four-part harmony sounded so good sung a cappella that we all came to the immediate conclusion that it should remain in the finished arrangement.

We decided to debut "The Ship" in the sanctuary of Channing-Murray Foundation at University of Illinois, which would seat about 250 people.  We wanted to do it before students departed after finals, so we chose a weekend in mid- or late-May, 1971.  Initially we thought we'd do a couple of shows, but Red Herring manager, Peter Berkow, thought we should do five shows (two on Friday, two on Saturday and one on Sunday of that weekend).  All five of the shows sold out, to our great surprise and delight.

I think I made the initial suggestion that we should hand out programs with all the lyrics at each of our shows.  No one had done anything like that, and we thought it would be perfect for capturing the "concept" idea of the songs.  I remember staying up all night to type the lyrics, just a few days before the first concert, and the local printer produced several hundred programs on short notice.  I distinctly remember typing all night to get the lyrics to the printer’s office, because I was absolutely fried at a final exam the next morning.

Although all of us had played in front of large audiences before, we didn't know how we'd be received for a piece that was brand new and almost an hour long.  People loved it, and most people took the programs home to read the lyrics again.  We had a hit on our hands.

The Second Set Of Concerts

During the summer of 1971 we spent a lot of time rearranging all eleven songs.  We spent two full weekends in Crystal Lake at Mark Hamby's parents' home and had lots of discussions about how the songs should be reworked.  Mostly, we wanted to redistribute the lead vocal parts so that all the voices were more evenly heard throughout the songs.  We had a lot of three-part and four-part harmonies, but we also had six combinations of two-part harmonies, and we probably used all those combinations.

During that summer I came up with the idea of our writing an additional five songs for the folk opera, because I thought there were allegorical gaps in the story.  I remember that three of the proposed song titles were "Pirates", "The Sea", and "Treasure."  That idea didn't gain any support, so I abandoned it.

By the end of the summer, we had changed a lot of the vocal assignments, added or changed lots of the harmonies, and filled out all of the instrumental parts.  This second version of "The Ship" was much better than the first version, like adding vibrant color to a black and white film.  The words were the same, but the music was more developed and complete.  It had been a busy summer.

We asked our friend, Peter Berkow, if we could return to Channing-Murray in September to perform the revitalized work, and he suggested we schedule seven(!) concerts and do full advertising for it.  All seven shows sold out (on what I remember being a very warm weekend without air-conditioning).

During one of the Saturday night shows, in the middle of one of the songs, I looked at the standing-room-only crowd near the back of the room and spotted Peter standing next to Art Garfunkel!  He had somehow worked his way backstage at a Simon and Garfunkel show at the Assembly Hall and talked Garfunkel into coming to see us.

Those were some of our very best concerts together.

A Recording Contract

The group was fairly inactive during the fall of 1971, because Billy Panda left for the Chicago area to do his student teaching as a music teacher.  The rest of us continued writing songs, and Albert and I would sometimes do sets together as a duo at the Red Herring.  All five of us took part in the Red Herring Fall Folk Festival.

The summer and fall of 1971 was also a very creative songwriting period for me.  I wrote "Running," "Timepiece", and "White Wine" during that time, all of which were worked up by the group.

During the fall of 1971, we entered a contract with Roger Francisco to be our manager and to provide a publishing company for our songs.  Roger was the owner of Rofran Recording Studio, where we began to do all our rehearsing.  Peter Berkow also began working with Roger and taking on some of the management tasks.

Billy's student teaching must have only lasted six or eight weeks, because I remember performing the folk opera several times between the fall of 1971 and spring of 1972.  We also did a studio demo of the folk opera and pressed a hundred copies of that vinyl album, so it could be used for promotion and to obtain a possible recording contract.  It was our first recording effort--a fairly raw representation of our music.

We can really thank two people in our efforts to acquire that recording contract.  Rich Warren had connections at Elektra Records through his campus radio show, so he sent the recording to Bob Brownstein.  About the same time, Peter Berkow took off for New York City with an armful of those albums and, within a couple weeks, not only landed us a contract with the William Morris Agency to do national bookings, but also cemented the recording contract with Elektra Records.  Things were moving much faster than we had ever imagined they would.

Albert Melshenker and I flew to New York City with our managers, Roger and Pete, to meet the people at William Morris and Elektra.  As the writers of "The Ship," we were the default leaders of the group, a position in which I never felt comfortable.  All I wanted to do was perform and write songs, not get into the business side of it.  I remember meeting the people at Elektra Records, including Rich's friend, Bob Brownstein, at their offices on Columbus Circle near Central Park.  Oddly, I recall they were having recurring problems with the windows popping out of that tall building and flying into the Park, due to the wind vortex created around the Circle.  Despite the inherent danger for people inside and outside the building, Albert and I thought that was hilarious.  I also recall walking past Dustin Hoffman on our way to one of the meetings.  We were a couple of tongue-tied kids from Illinois, with fame all around us.

Back in Champaign-Urbana, we continued our performances of "The Ship" and began working on arrangements for other songs we'd written.  In the spring of 1972, there was no shortage of material, because all five of us had a stockpile of songs and were writing new songs.  We generally tried to give equal attention to each person's songs, although Albert and Mark had more songs in the hopper than Todd, Billy, and I had.  Our songwriting styles were so different that it was initially quite fun to see how each song could work up with all five of us contributing.

Also in that early spring, we found out that we'd be recording the album during late May and all of June in Los Angeles, and we heard that Elektra had hired Gary Usher to be the producer.  Gary had produced several Beach Boys and Byrds albums, and he'd co-written a few of the Beach Boys hits.  He was legendary in the music world, and we were pretty excited that he'd been chosen to do our album.

The culmination of that period was a concert of "The Ship" we gave in the Great Hall of Krannert Center for the Performing Arts.  Krannert has four different-sized performance halls under one roof, and events were planned for all four venues on that Saturday night.  The Studio, Playhouse and Festival Theaters seat around 200, 675 and 975 people, respectively, while the Great Hall seats over 2,000 people.  We were seated in the backstage green room prior to our concert and had no idea how many tickets had been sold for our appearance.  The green room had a small, unlabeled audio speaker from which we could hear the activity in each hall.  Three of the venues were relatively quiet, while the pre-concert audience noise in the fourth hall was much louder.  Was that our concert hall?

We only found out when we walked on stage and saw that the Great Hall was filled!  What an incredible sight that was.  I think we all agree that was the best we ever performed "The Ship" live.  It was really an amazing experience.  As we walked off the stage after the second half of the show, I remember that Todd threw his arm around me in a big hug.  We had come a long way in only one year.

Recording The Album In Los Angeles

In mid-May of 1972, four of us drove across the country from Illinois to Los Angeles (while Billy Panda and our two managers flew out) to spend six weeks in the Elektra recording studio.  Just getting there was quite an adventure.  My car pulled a U-Haul trailer across the country with all our guitars and other equipment, and we were very excited to start working after such a long trip.

The first night we were in L.A., we visited the home of our producer, Gary Usher, and Albert and I spent a memorable Saturday dinner and evening at Gary's home the next night.  We began working in the studio the following Monday, where we were to work from about 4:00 pm to midnight, five days a week for six weeks.  Singer/songwriter Harry Chapin was using the same studio during the day, and we invited his cellist, Tim Scott, to play on our album.  During part of those six weeks, the group Bread used the studio right next to ours to record their hit song, "Guitar Man."

What started as a wonderful experience, however, turned into a really difficult one for Albert and me.  We clearly were not as good recording artists as Billy, Mark and Todd were.  We spent the first week recording all the basic (non-lead) instruments, and that went fairly well, even with lots of retakes.  The next four weeks were spent on the vocals, and that was agonizingly slow work.  One of the things that made recording so difficult for Albert and me was that singing the same part exactly the same way, multiple times (a process called "multing") was a stretch of our experience and talents.  Both of us were used to doing our own songs in a unique fashion each time we performed them, probably never singing a song the same way twice.  Live performances are so much different than the performances on recordings.  In retrospect, we probably should have practiced the "multed" vocals in our home recording studio prior to our L.A. trip.

At the end of the fourth week, Albert's and my voices were stretched to the limit, and it was decided that Billy and Mark would do several of our vocals in the last two songs.  Albert and I were deeply disappointed that we couldn't finish our parts, but we saw no alternative, because we were running out of studio time.  The last week would be spent adding the lead instruments, so all the vocals had to be done by the end of the fifth week.

In the months leading up to our time at Elektra, I had been making mistakes frequently, especially in forgetting or transposing lyrics, and with each mistake I felt more pressure to not make further mistakes.  I also had little discipline for practicing alone.  It was difficult, tedious, and without any feedback.  I thought music and performing should be fun--and that my abilities would carry me through.  But I also realize now that practicing an original song, especially one written by someone else, is inherently tough, because you don't have an existing recording that you're trying to emulate or duplicate.  It was easy to practice the wrong part!  Billy and Mark had infinite patience trying to teach the parts to Albert and me.  Sometimes we got it; sometimes we didn't.

Albert and I also had opposing musical habits, which led to lots of conflicts.  He tended sometimes to sing slightly flat and slow down his guitar-playing tempo during a song, while I tended to sing slightly sharp and speed up the tempo.  Those habits can co-exist in live performances, if you're cognizant of pulling back to a norm set by others, but they are very difficult habits to break when you're working in a recording studio.

Besides feeling a bit estranged from the group musically, I was already pulling away from the group emotionally as well.  Much of my "day" time in Los Angeles was spent alone, either reading in a library I found near the studio or visiting my friend, Dan Fogelberg, at his place in Topanga Canyon.  When I did things with guys in the group, it was usually done over the weekends, such as visiting Disneyland, going to clubs, or driving up the coast to San Jose to see my brother.  Part of me was thrilled to be recording an album, while part of me was lost and distant from everyone.

Probably the most fun I had in Los Angeles was on the last Saturday we were there, when Elektra hired famous photographer, Frank Bez, to shoot photos for the album.  We drove up to Santa Barbara, embarked on a very large sailing ship (said to have been owned at one time by J. P. Morgan) and sailed out into the Pacific Ocean for several hours.  It was a blast!  At one point we were all posed around the wheel of the ship when, suddenly, everyone walked away and I was left to steer the ship.  I asked the captain what I should do, and he casually responded, "Oh, just steer for that island out there."

We left Los Angeles the next day to drive back to the Midwest.  I think we were all glad the experience was over.

Leaving The Band

When we returned to Champaign-Urbana from Los Angeles, the band worked on new, original material almost exclusively.  I don't think we played the Folk Music Journey more than a few times after the recording.  We were all pretty tired of it.  We took a few long trips together, places like Dayton (where we opened for rock group PG&E and were offered joints by security police!), New Orleans (where we played at Tulane University), St. Louis (where we filmed a public television show), and a couple weeks in Chicago (where we played at The Quiet Knight), but mostly we worked hard on our new songs at home.  Mark was writing more than the rest of us were, so we worked up several of his songs.  In fact, after doing the album in L.A., the group only worked up one more song of mine, called "Annie," even though I had created a demo tape (recorded by Peter Berkow) of ten of my newer songs for the band to review.  Consistent with my mood at the time, most of my new songs were suitable more for solo performances than for a group.  I didn't want to admit that initially, but it was true.

In August, 1972, we received the mix of "The Ship" that Gary Usher had done, and we were stunned in a not-so-good way.  Without telling us, he had arranged the songs to have strings and all sorts of vocal effects, ostensibly to make the songs sound fuller and cover up minor imperfections.  We didn't like it, because we wanted the mix to closely resemble what we actually sounded like in concert, so it was soon decided that Billy Panda and Roger Francisco would fly back to L.A. to remix the entire album.  They did a phenomenal job, and we were all so much more pleased with the result.  The album was officially released on October 2, 1972.

In late 1972 and early 1973, I was feeling more and more isolated from the group.  I was also physically run down, so I was constantly battling colds and bronchitis.  When the group had started in early 1971, I was already good friends with Billy Panda, and Albert and I were quite close from having spent five months together writing the Folk Music Journey.  Since that time, Billy and Albert had grown to be very good friends, and I was spending most of my free time with people outside the group.  Occasionally Todd and I would see a movie together, but most of the time I only saw the guys in The Ship when we met for rehearsal or performed on stage.

In early March, 1973, I visited my sister in Greenwich Village and went to see singer Steve Goodman at the Bitter End.  I talked with him at length backstage, and he had a terrible cold.  Within a couple days of returning to Urbana, I came down with the cold and lost my voice completely.  The timing was not good, for we were to appear at The Earl of Old Town in Chicago for several days that week.  I spent the entire week unable to sing but only play guitar on stage.  My vocal parts were either performed by the other guys or dropped entirely, and, of course, none of my songs were done.  It was a frustrating, embarrassing few days.

The day after we returned to Champaign-Urbana, all of us had a meeting, and I was asked to leave the group.  I was really stunned, but there was no denying that it was probably the best thing for everyone.  I was not contributing enough to the success of the band, and I had also drifted away from the guys on a personal level.  I have no doubt that it was difficult for them to suggest that I leave, but I didn't really understand that for a couple of years, until I was in their same position while in another band.  All I remember is that it was terribly hard for me at first, especially since it was followed one week later by a serious car accident.

Music was the furthest thing from my mind at that point.  I didn't touch my guitars for six months, as I transitioned into something completely different--my first computer software job.  On the evening of September 20, 1973, I took out my 6-string guitar and taught myself three Jim Croce songs.  I loved his music and had met him once at the Quiet Knight in Chicago.  The next morning I heard on the radio that Croce had been killed the night before in an airplane crash.  That was a signal to me that I wasn't ready to return to music.

The Ship Sails On

As it turned out, Albert Melshenker left The Ship in early summer, 1973, only three months after I left the group, to pursue an advertising career in Chicago.  A month or two later, Jim Barton joined Billy, Mark, and Todd to continue The Ship.  He not only brought a beautiful, strong singing voice to the group, but he had a stockpile of great songs they could work up.  At that point, Jim and Mark wrote most of the songs the group did.

The band acquired a drummer and became mostly electric in 1974 and went on to self-produce a second album called "Tornado" in 1975.  Different versions of the group continued until 1977.  After that, everyone went their separate ways to various parts of the country.

Thirty-one years later in early 2008, I heard from Rich Warren that the Red Herring Coffeehouse was organizing its 40th anniversary reunion festival to be held in April of that year.  (The Herring had opened on September 15, 1967, so it was past the actual 40th anniversary date.)  I sent an email to Mark Hamby (in Seattle) about the event, and he said that timing would work out well for him to stop by Champaign-Urbana to join me at the festival, and he contacted Jim Barton (in Philadelphia) and Billy Panda (in Nashville), who quickly agreed to a Ship reunion.  Billy contacted Albert Melshenker (in Los Angeles) and Rick Frank (in Chicago), while I contacted Todd Bradshaw (in Madison), and suddenly we were a band again, after 31 years.

After that reunion concert at Channing-Murray, we completed several other projects in the next couple of years.  Mark found reel-to-reel tapes of almost thirty of our old, unreleased songs, and we organized them and released two new albums, One More Night Like This and Left In The Wake.  Todd and I worked with a website developer to create a Ship website.  Todd did all the artwork and most of the design, and I must say it's one of the best band websites I've ever seen.  (This design was upgraded by Mark Hamby in 2021 to be more laptop- and smart phone-accommodating.)

We played our final concert together on Folkstage, a live concert stage hosted monthly by our old and dear friend, Rich Warren on WFMT in Chicago.  With a live studio audience of about a hundred people and many thousands of people listening on the airwaves, we put on a high-quality Ship show.  After more than three decades of not playing together, we were quite happy with our last dance.

Then we got the idea of doing a CD of all new songs that had been written in the previous couple of years, and we began working on that with a lot of excitement.  It was a joy to work with the guys again and, for the first time, to work with Jim and Rick, although we recorded the album entirely remotely from our own home studios.  I contributed two songs to the twelve-song CD, both written that year.  Jim and Billy did all the mixing and master recording, and our new All Come Home album was ready for Christmas of 2009.

You can read a full history of The Ship at www.theshipmusic.com, where you'll also find a lot of interesting old photos.

Appaloosa

Out Of Retirement

I played very little music in 1974.  I did attend two or three of The Ship's performances and was especially interested when they added a drummer and began playing electric guitars in mid-1974.  Frankly, it was odd to hear my old acoustic band mates play amplified, electric music, but the songs and vocals were still very good, with The Ship's sound.  Mark, Jim, and Billy could really sing well together.  Meanwhile, I was not yet interested in returning to the solo stage or in writing new songs.

Then at the beginning of 1975, my very good friend, Les Urban, knocked on my door with the sole purpose of bringing me out of my "retirement" to play a set at the Red Herring Coffeehouse.  I hadn't played in front of people for almost two years, even though Les had often tried to get me to sing again.  Finally that day, I agreed to come back, and we set a date for my return in late January, 1975, about three weeks later.

There was only one problem.  I knew I could get my voice and guitar licks back in shape, but I didn't have a new song to sing.  I had made it my habit to always sing at least one new song when I sang solo between 1970 and 1972, so I began to write again.  On the afternoon of the evening I was to sing at the coffeehouse, I was still not close to finishing the song, so I decided to take a bath, of all things, and accept my fate of doing old tunes that night.  And an amazing thing happened as I lay in the tub.  The rest of the lyrics started pouring out of me--four complete stanzas!  I rushed from the bath and, literally dripping wet, wrote them down before I could forget them.  Thus, "Flower In Bloom" was completed.

I did not know what to expect when I drove to the Red Herring that evening, but when I entered the building, I was stunned to see that the place was packed.  I really thought one or two dozen people would show up, but there were easily 150 people there.  I did a set of eight or ten songs, including four of my songs that The Ship had performed, and the old love for performing came back.  I ended the set with "Flower In Bloom," explaining that I had just completed the song that afternoon and had to read the chords and lyrics from a piece of paper.  When I finished singing, I experienced what maybe all songwriters live for--three or four seconds of dead silence followed by an overwhelming applause.  I thanked everyone, grabbed both guitars and left the stage.  I was back.

Joining A New Group

I started listening to a lot of music after my solo performance in January, 1975.  Even though I was working full-time at my computer job, I spent most of the evenings working up new tunes and really getting into the music of The Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, Jonathan Edwards, Poco, and Pure Prairie League.  At my office in the Illinois Natural History Survey, I often ran into a friend, Glenn Levinson, who was the lead singer in a group called Appaloosa.  I had met him through Les Urban, who was also in that group, playing lead guitar, pedal steel guitar, and singing harmony vocals.  Glenn and I would talk about music, and I told him I'd drop by and hear the band at a local club.  I had been telling the same thing to Les for a few months.

Soon after that I visited the club and stayed through all three sets of their music.  Immediately, I loved the high energy and the fact that they had two guys who could play lead guitar.  Randy Sabien was the other lead guitarist, but he also played an amazing electric fiddle.  What was missing from the group, in my opinion, was a strong third voice, a second rhythm guitar and the sound of a mandolin.  When their last set was done, I went to talk with Les and Glenn and, in parting, said, "Well, if you ever need someone to play mandolin and sing high harmony, give me a call."  I was half serious, half joking, so I was extremely surprised when I got a call from Glenn half an hour later (well past midnight) offering me a job with the band.  As it turned out, Les and Glenn had been talking with each other about inviting another person to join Appaloosa, and only that night did they realize they'd both been talking about the same person--me!

The next day I went out to buy a mandolin.  I had never played one in my life and asked the guy at the music store how to tune it!  I discovered the instrument was tuned the same way a violin is tuned (G-D-A-E), which is the reverse of the first four strings of a guitar (E-A-D-G).  To play a chord on the mandolin, I only needed to think of the fingering on a guitar and turn it upside down on the mandolin, so that's how I learned to play rhythm mandolin.  No one taught me anything else about it.

Appaloosa was in a period of transition.  Randy had just joined the group and was a tremendous addition, but they were also looking for a new bass player.  I started practicing with the group the week they were auditioning new guys to play bass, and I had been in the group all of three days when they auditioned a young kid who lived just outside of town on a farm.  As soon as everyone heard Ed Clem play, it was settled.  He was invited to join the group, because he was really good.

The task of joining a band is immense, because you have to learn all their songs as fast as you can.  Unlike The Ship, which had about twenty songs in their repertoire at any one time, Appaloosa had fifty songs.  None of them were original songs, which meant that I could listen to tapes and albums to learn them.  I was familiar with about half of them already, but half of them were completely new to me.  Les and I spent a lot of time together over the course of two weeks, as he taught me all the songs.  The parts were much simpler than the ones I typically would sing with The Ship.  I'd either sing a third or a fifth above the melody, although sometimes we put the fifth below the melody.  So the challenge was to learn the chords and the words to each song; my parts came quite easily.

Another change I had to make right away was to add Barcus-Berry pickups to my two guitars and mandolin, because Appaloosa was an all-electric band.  The local guitar-maker was able to add the pick-ups to my guitars without damaging the wood.  The amp cord would plug into a connection on the guitar that had replaced the peg holding the guitar strap.  Pretty cool, I thought, because I didn't want to have to buy an electric guitar.  I loved the electrified sound of my acoustic guitars.

The First Gigs

I believe my first gig with Appaloosa was on Sunday, April 6, 1975, at a Champaign club called Ruby Gulch.  I had been in the group for six days and had learned enough songs to play one set with the band.  All the words and chords were written on cheat sheets and taped to the sides of my guitars.  Glenn called me up to the stage for the third set of the evening, and I was quite happy about the reception I got.  Appaloosa was more or less the house band at Ruby Gulch, because we played there once or twice a week.  It was a rowdy, beer and snack club--well, okay, a campus bar--that was usually filled to the rafters.

During the second week, I learned the rest of the band's songs, and on Friday, April 11, I did my first full gig with the group when we played at a dance marathon in a campus gymnasium.  They liked us so much that night that we were invited to come back the following Sunday afternoon to play a second time at the same marathon.

Those two venues--Ruby Gulch and a gymnasium with hundreds of college kids--typified the scope of gigs Appaloosa would play, and I absolutely loved the variety.  Playing in an electric band for the first time in my life was way more fun than I'd dreamed, and I very much liked the stage arrangement we had.  Unlike playing in The Ship, where I often sat in the center of a semi-circle of musicians and was, by default and to my dismay, the focal point for the audience, I was one of four standing musicians in front for Appaloosa (our bass player and drummer were just behind the four of us in front).  Glenn was the leader on stage, and he introduced most of the songs, so I could stand next to him without garnering much attention.

So, right away I felt comfortable on stage with Appaloosa.  The monitor speakers were better, so I could usually hear the entire band, unlike when I played with The Ship, where I could often not hear Todd on bass or Mark on piano, based on where I was sitting.  I also didn't feel a stranger to the stage, even when there were hundreds of people in the audience.

The Appaloosa Sound and Image

Another thing about my early days in Appaloosa was that I was totally unprepared for how much people liked our music.  I added to the vocals, so they sounded fuller, and I worked very hard to become a more solid rhythm guitar and mandolin player, but I had also stepped into an established group that was well-known and had its own sound and following.  What I liked most about the group was that it just had a spark and energy that was uncommon.  Randy Sabien was a virtuoso on the violin, Les could play very good pedal steel, and the two of them did some great lead guitar duets.  We were high energy and specialized in fast tempos.  Our drummer, Larry Jacobs, always seemed to start songs faster than we'd practiced them, so we were faster on stage than we were in rehearsals.

Our songs spanned the range from traditional country (Buck Owens, Merle Haggard) to country swing (Dan Hicks and The Hot Licks, Commander Cody), from folk rock (Buffalo Springfield, Eagles, John Phillips) to bluegrass (Doc Watson, Bill Monroe).  Our vocals usually included three voices but could be as many as five, including Ed Clem, our bass player.  We always used standard harmonies, and Glenn (later David Wright) was our lead singer.  Both of those guys were very good singers, so singing harmony was usually a piece of cake for me.

We had about twenty songs that were very high-energy showstoppers.  Sometimes we'd slide right from one fast song, like Buffalo Springfield's "Go And Say Goodbye," into a loud rocker, like Commander Cody's "Riot In Cell Block #9," and the crowds loved it.  My two favorite Appaloosa songs were "Me and My Uncle," by the Mamas and the Papas' John Phillips, and "Orange Blossom Special," known as the fiddlers' national anthem.  "Me and My Uncle" was fun because it built steadily in instrumentation and intensity through six verses.  Each of us sang one of the first five verses, and then all five of us (Glenn, Randy, Les, Ed, and I) sang the last verse together.  We always finished our shows with "Orange Blossom Special," an instrumental that we'd do insanely fast.  It's supposed to start off at a moderate tempo and build speed to the end, but Larry would start too fast, maybe just to see if we could keep up.  Randy not only kept up on his violin, but he dragged us with him.  It was a good encore tune.

When I joined Appaloosa, I went out and bought five western shirts, all with snaps rather than buttons.  Everyone wore western shirts, and several of the guys wore western hats and boots.  To many people we were simply a country rock band, so fitting that image was pretty easy.  I even noticed once that all our voices would change slightly as we drove out of the college town to some country bar or party.  We'd all speak more slowly with a slight drawl, and we'd dial up the local country station on the radio.  There was certainly a side of me that loved that easy-going, slow country life.

The Long, Hot Summer

I really did not know what kind of performance schedule to expect when I joined Appaloosa.  In The Ship we were lucky to play two or three concerts a month, but Appaloosa started booking an average of two gigs a week.  In less than eight months with the group, I played 67 dates with them.  We played all sorts of venues--bars and clubs, private parties, street dances, and larger events.  All of them were in Illinois or western Indiana, so there was not a lot of traveling.  We rehearsed only once or twice a week, and much of that rehearsal time was in learning new songs.  We played so often that a new song would quickly become second nature to us within a couple of weeks.

Our favorite place to play was Ruby Gulch.  We always got a full house, and we could interact easily with the crowd and try out new songs for the first time.  This was a club very close to the University of Illinois campus, so it was always filled with rowdy students.  And, it was not air-conditioned!  The stage temperature, under glaring lights and no ventilation, was often over 90 degrees.  I remember one night was so hot, we all wore cutoff shorts, and each of us carried our own pitcher of beer onto the stage.  It was not uncommon to get shocks off the microphones as the sweat dripped from our faces.  And we loved it!  There was nothing like the rush of being on stage in front of a couple hundred people, doing music you loved.

There were many other memorable venues from that summer, and I guess you could say we'd play almost anywhere.  We played all one Saturday afternoon on a farm for a large party, paid only with a hundred Appaloosa tee-shirts.  During the week that the university welcomed its students back from summer break, we played a street dance on the main thoroughfare through campus, where there must have been 8,000-10,000 people.  Our amps were at full volume so people could easily hear us from a block away.  Then over Labor Day weekend we were the headline act at a festival in a nearby state park, where there were also several thousand people in a huge natural amphitheater.  All of those were tremendously fun times.

There were awful gigs as well.  Why we played The Alibi Lounge in East Moline, Illinois, over three separate weekends is a real mystery.  It must have been for the money.  The setup was ridiculous, where the six of us had to fit on a very small stage that faced a very large club with a center wall running down the length of the club (and stopping about five feet from the front of the stage).  In effect, we were playing to two separate rooms of people who couldn't see each other.  The left room was dimly lit and set up for dancing, while the right room was brightly lit and had the bar and a bunch of tiny tables.  Both rooms had jukeboxes, which made tuning on stage a real chore.  (Luckily, they pulled the plugs on the jukeboxes while we played.)  It was customary to play three or four sets a night in any club, where a set contained eight or nine songs, but at the Alibi we had to play six sets between 9:00 pm and 3:00 am.  Our sixth set was mostly a repeat of songs we'd done earlier in the evening, but by then all the patrons were so drunk they didn't know.  It was not a little ironic that the most popular song on one of the jukeboxes was Freddie Fender's "Wasted Days and Wasted Nights."

Changes In The Band

Our lead singer, Glenn, and drummer, Larry, were always at odds with each other about the tempos in songs.  Glenn was the undisputed leader of the group, and he really didn't appreciate Larry showing up late for practices or being under the influence of some drug.  Larry really disliked Glenn's streak of authority and refused to be told what to do.  One night the tension between them erupted into a fistfight after a gig.  Les, Ed, and I were willing to let it slide, but the stress really didn't sit well with Randy, and after a couple weeks of discussion among the four of us, it was decided that we had to ask Glenn to leave the group.  I seem to remember that Glenn also had some health issues and wanted to do fewer gigs anyway.  I did not want to see him leave, but Randy refused to continue with the group unless one of them left, and Glenn was easier to replace.

Ed and Les asked David Wright, an incredible singer who had been in Appaloosa at one time, to take Glenn's place, and he agreed.  David and Larry were old friends, so we knew the chemistry in the group would improve.  We agonized over the decision process.  It was especially difficult for me, I believe, because I'd been in Glenn's position with The Ship.  To be asked to leave the group that you founded is really hard, but suddenly I saw both sides of the situation.  We planned to announce our decision to Glenn at the Labor Day festival, but before we could broach the subject, he announced to the group that he was resigning.  Although it made life easier for us, it certainly didn't make it easier for him, because he so identified with Appaloosa.  I'll always regret that things worked out that way, but that's life in almost every successful band.

As soon as David joined the group, the other guys decided that I would be the de facto leader of the band, which meant that I was in charge of doing the bookings and arranging details for the gigs.  I was happy to do all of that, and Les helped to a great extent.  David quickly learned the songs, because he had sung many of them at one time or another, and the band became tighter than ever.  I introduced three or four new songs to broaden our appeal, and I was quite happy with how things were going.  I was also singing lead on more songs, such as "Lyin' Eyes" by the Eagles and "Don't Cry Blue" by Jonathan Edwards.

Without a doubt, David Wright was the best singer I ever sang with.  He had an extremely strong, clear voice, and he was always on pitch, so I could lock my harmony vocal onto his lead without even thinking about it.  Singing on key was always easier than singing off key.  One of my fondest memories of performing with Appaloosa was a moment on stage with David, when, after just nailing a chorus together, he looked over at me and yelled, "Yeah!"

The End Of The Ride With Appaloosa

We played a lot of gigs in October and November, 1975, but it soon became clear that my days in Appaloosa were numbered.  On a personal note, I was exhausted from working full-time in a day job and doing rehearsals and gigs with Appaloosa.  If we played on a weekday night, I would get five hours of sleep at most, since I would begin my computer software job at 8:00 the next morning.  I was also very tired of the exposure to cigarette smoke in the clubs, since I did not smoke, and my health was suffering.

But finally my decision was clear when the guys started to discuss going on the road for long periods of time.  I was the only one with a full-time job, and I could understand why everyone else would want to work more, so I announced that I'd be leaving the group in late November, or whenever they were able to replace me with someone else.  That worked out very well, because they soon found another guitar player/singer, and the parting was completely amicable, which is unusual for a band.

During those last two months there were a couple of very memorable gigs, which demonstrated the incredible range of experiences I had in the group.

Soon after David joined the band, we drove across the state of Illinois to the little town of Industry to play in a club.  After we finished the setup and sound check, we still had half an hour before the gig was to begin, so I went to talk with the teenage ticket girl to find out more about the place.  Thence began one of the strangest exchanges I've ever had with anyone.

     Girl:  I'm surprised they let you guys play here tonight.
      Me:  Why?
     Girl:  Because of what happened here last night.
      Me:  What happened?
     Girl:  Someone requested a song and the band didn't know it, so a person in the audience pulled out a gun and shot the singer.
      Me (after a long pause):  What was the song?

I told the other guys about that event, and we decided that if there was any sign of trouble, we'd leave right away.  Sure enough, in the middle of our second set, someone set off an M-80 firecracker right in front of the stage, and we shut it down immediately.  Someone could have been killed.  We had a couple of big equipment managers with us, so no one hassled the eight of us while we packed up and got in the van, but then the guys looked at me and said, "Okay.  You're the leader, so go get our money."  I marched into the club's office and demanded our money, and they handed it over.

On the other end of the spectrum of experiences was one of the last gigs (and only formal concert) I played with Appaloosa.  We shared the bill with The Ship and one other solo performer at the University of Illinois' Foellinger Auditorium.  I only remember the order in which we appeared based on a silly, self-serving comment the solo performer made during her lead-off set.  She said that she was just back from a tour of the United States, and she got little reaction from the crowd.  Billy Panda introduced The Ship by saying they were just back from a tour of the state of Illinois, and it got a good laugh from the audience.  Well, I couldn't resist.  When Appaloosa took the stage, I spoke out that we were just back from a tour of Champaign-Urbana, which was basically true.

Both bands played stellar sets that night, and the audience was really into the music.  It was somehow most gratifying for me, because my band days had begun with The Ship and ended with Appaloosa.  It was a really fun night for all of us.  We even got together the next day for a friendly game of touch football--not the greatest show of athleticism, but still unusual for two bands to do.

My last gig with Appaloosa came a couple weeks later, ironically at the same club where I had suggested to Glenn and Les the idea of me joining the group as a mandolin player.  Things do come full circle sometimes.

Appaloosa disbanded at the end of 1975, only to resurrect in the spring of 1976 and continue playing several more years.  By 1977, they were playing over 300 dates and traveling more than 100,000 miles a year.  Les Urban left the group in late 1978, and Ed Clem--my final connection with the group--left within a year after that.

The Differences

There were so many differences between the two bands that it's hard to know where to start.  For many reasons, it's fortunate that there were few similarities, because I really didn't want to feel as if I were playing in Appaloosa to recapture what I had done in The Ship.  They were two very different experiences for me.

• The Ship was an acoustic group, except for the electric bass and occasional pedal-steel guitar, and Appaloosa was all electric.  I had never played an electrified instrument before joining Appaloosa, much less had to deal with amps and power cords.

• The Ship only did original music during the time I was in the group, while Appaloosa only did covers of songs written by other people.  Except for the sheer joy of hearing your own songs played by a band, I felt Appaloosa's approach had several advantages.  First, it's easier to learn songs you've already heard and are familiar with than it is to learn an original song.  Usually, divvying up parts is much harder with an original tune, because it also requires that you arrange the song as you're learning it.  Second, playing an original song asks more of the audience; they have to listen more closely to determine whether they like it.  When you choose to cover a song that people are already familiar with, most of the time you choose songs that you know the audience will like.  With an original song, you don't know that until you present the song.

• The Ship relied on precision and artistry; Appaloosa relied on high energy, volume and lead instrumental solos.  The Ship's arrangements were so precise and intricate that we literally had every note worked out before we would present a song.  When Appaloosa worked out a new song, it was very rare that we'd run through the song more than half a dozen times.  Parts were assigned quickly, and we'd perhaps discuss tempo variations and the coloring of instrumental parts ("Steve and Glenn should stop strumming at the start of the third verse," for instance.)  The guys were very good at what they did, so we pretty much let each person determine what he was going to play on a song.  Although we would make revisions after a performance, Appaloosa didn't rely on precision to the degree that The Ship did.  It's also important to recognize that Appaloosa's songs were always better when played on stage than they were in rehearsal, because of the added energy we'd feel on stage.

• The energy levels were much different between the two bands.  While I was in The Ship, we always sat in chairs or on stools to perform.  That was certainly the appropriate way to present a folk-rock group, but it didn't lend itself to high energy.  In Appaloosa we always performed standing up, and we were constantly moving with the music.

• Both bands had excellent vocals and at least four voices to mix and match, but the vocal parts in The Ship were much more complicated and intricate.  Mark and Billy were masters in coming up with vocal arrangements, but those creative arrangements also made the parts harder to learn--at least for me and Albert.  Vocal parts were much more standard and easier to learn with Appaloosa.  Of course, we were copying the vocals from existing recordings, and most songs generally have vocal parts that are easy to duplicate.  Appaloosa usually worked with a lead vocalist and supporting vocals, while no two consecutive songs had the same lead vocalist with The Ship.  One other difference in vocals stands out between the two bands--Appaloosa often doubled vocal parts, such as having two people sing a third harmony, while The Ship almost never doubled vocal parts.

• I came to The Ship as a real novice in everything--guitar playing, songwriting, performing, and singing harmony parts, but I started with Appaloosa having a lot of experience.  Billy and Mark had to teach me a lot of things when I was in The Ship.  I would rely on Les for help with pitch and volume, but generally I knew what I was doing when I joined Appaloosa.  Part of being a novice is being undisciplined in your rehearsal habits.  In Appaloosa, I was quite disciplined and made sure I knew my parts completely.  Les was always available for extra practice if I requested it.

• As I mentioned above, the venues were much different between the two bands.  The Ship played in places where you'd find acoustic music--auditoriums, high-end clubs, coffeehouses, while Appaloosa played in places where you'd find dance music--bars, private parties, campus events.  In The Ship's venues, we expected all attention to be on us, but in Appaloosa's venues, the attention of the audience would often stray and could be anywhere.  Certainly in The Ship we felt more pressure that every song should be a winner, but we could hit some clunkers in Appaloosa (for any reason) and not worry about losing the audience's attention.  We would think, "Well, if you didn't like that song, you'll love the next one."

• Our stage demeanor was much different between the two bands, and not all that difference came from the types of songs we played.  Both bands primarily had one person introduce the songs--Albert Melshenker for The Ship and Glenn Levinson for Appaloosa.  Albert could be very entertaining and funny in his introductions, but he also didn't interact naturally with the rest of us on stage, so we were quiet most of the time.  Glenn wanted to project that we were all having a good time, so Les, Randy, and I felt at ease contributing to the banter on stage.  It wasn't our personality in The Ship for one of us to suddenly yell, "Y'all having a good time?"  It was our personality in Appaloosa, and any one of us could interact with the audience that way.

• With The Ship, the instrumental sound was primarily controlled by an off-stage sound person (usually our manager, Roger), while Appaloosa controlled most of its sound on-stage.  If we couldn't hear the pedal steel guitar well enough, we'd just ask Les to play louder.  You can do that with electric instruments, but you can't with acoustic.  It's also true that our performances would gradually get louder in Appaloosa as the evening wore on.  We didn't crank up the volume in The Ship; it was steady throughout the concert.

• The music "business" was much different between the two bands.  We didn't play just for the joy of playing music in The Ship, because we were concerned about the recording contract and getting enough bookings to become better known.  In Appaloosa gigs were fairly easy to book during the time I was in the group.  We never mentioned getting a recording contract, nor were we at all interested in getting well-known outside our area.  I think we had a demo tape that we could give a prospective client, but we really did very little to promote the group.

• There was also a very different feeling for me in being part of the two groups.  After the first few months, I felt more and more stressed out and isolated in The Ship, mostly because I felt that I was not contributing my share--instrumentally, vocally, or in writing songs.  I don't recall ever arguing about things in the group, but it wasn't especially fun in the last year.  I never felt stressed or isolated in Appaloosa, because I always felt like I was an equal part of the group. 

Some Final Thoughts

I find it especially noteworthy that I am still in touch with several of the guys from both The Ship and Appaloosa, after more than 45 years.  They are still good friends of mine.  All bands go through their ups and downs, their highs from performing and lows from internal conflicts and struggles to make a living.  I was lucky that I could play in two bands while I was a young man, while I still had big dreams and no commitments.  It wasn't life in the fast lane by any means, but the middle lane was plenty fast and exciting for me.  Whether it was with The Ship or Appaloosa, there was nothing like the feeling of performing on stage to an audience.  That feeling will be with me forever.