memories page 4

This page will recall the Witch's Brew members and equipment through Larry Bastien and also get more info on Dave and the Essex through drummer Tom Brodeur. Tom has played drums for my band Thundertrain and the British Yankees and I play bass for their band Larry Bee and the Buzz when they are in Florida playing for the Red Sox. Check out the Larry Bee website and CD releases. Also, I have been lucky to have connected with the great Natick/Weston band Simon Pure bassist Dave James of the late 60s-early 70s. What a great career he has had. It's interesting the way we crossed paths inadvertently. Hopefully he will release his original material for an up coming album soon! He sent me a copy and I continually listen and every time I hear something more. He is also a hell of a mixing and sound engineer as well as a great bass player.

  Back to the late 60s.

In the 1967 photo l to r: Tim West roadie; [at the wheel] Larry Bastien drums and vocals;  [on ground] Mike Capobianco guitar; Mark Ragozzino bass; Rick Danahy lead guitar; [on ladder] Ric Provost roadie; Gene Provost tambourine and vocals 

  I forgot to mention one of the most popular Marian High bands in the late 60s early 70s was Tom Kelly and the Night Flight. Night Flight was one of our Marian required summer reading books, figured that's where that name came from. Tom was very charismatic and he also had a charismatic younger brother named Dan who I believe also joined the band to have 2 lead singers for awhile. I met Dan some 25 years ago when my band the British Yankees was playing a local haunt in Framingham, Ma. Always great to meet up with these guys of my past.

  In the meantime when all this was taking place, through Larry Bastien, since he was from Framingham he knew all these different people from the many catholic elementary schools and the 2 big high schools in Framingham, North and South. Larry would introduce Gene, Tim and I to all these different budding rock musicians and music lovers as we cruised through all our favorite music stops. There were several music stores we'd frequent. Our flagship store was Framingham Music Center on Concord St because it was jammed with 1st rate equipment. For drummers it was Eli Rabkin's Drum Studio in Framingham Centre which is now Corbett's Centre Music House. Many drummers would take lessons and order their 1st top flight drum kit from Rabkin's, no discounts but only name brands. Eli seemed to me to be the quintessential older Jewish business man. Not much patience for kid's hanging around. Get what you came for and go is the way it felt. I'm sure Eli Rabkin was a top professional big band drummer in his day playing all the big dinner theatre shows locally and across the country. There was another music store, in the early 70s it was called Liberty Music with the owner George Eade. I'm not sure whether it was Liberty Music when we would go there but I imagine George Eade was somehow involved. This store was at the corner on rt 126 and rt 135 near the major railroad crossing that divided Framingham. It's location abutted the parking lot of what later became the Store 24.He was on the right hand side going toward Holliston where Hollis St joined rt 126. But the reason I loved this location was because while standing in front of Liberty Music, looking directly across the street you would see a majestic building with a big wrap around 2nd floor window and that is where the magic was created. Right there in our own home town was a real recording studio that ran it's own record company. That 2nd floor housed the Continental Recording Studio and Continental Record Company. The reason I mention that is because Liberty Music sold records as well all sorts of musical equipment but they had what was known as a cut out bin. In this bin George would have all these demo 45s from Continental Records. He also had many different demo 45s from all the other major companies. He would sell these 45s for $0.09. The reason I believe George was involved because I later found out he had an incredible early 60s history of rock n' roll prominence, somehow involved with the early Beatles management and or tours. He was a very gifted guitarist, when I heard him pick up a guitar..WOW. It was like listening to the recorded groups! Because of this history he would have all the connections to the major radio stations and recording studios and that is why he had all these demo 45s. I'm sure they either dumped them on him or he paid them by the bulk but whatever happened thank god they weren't just disposed of because Larry Bastien and I still have this eclectic collection of the 45s we bought back then. I still have demo 45s of 'Blues for Cookie', 'Bright Lit Blue Skies' by the undeniably, locally famous band the Rockin' Ramrods, openers for a New England tour for the Rolling Stones. The Ramrod's drummer Jesse Henderson later in the late 70s and 80s was my engineer for several recordings at Long View Farms Recording Studios.

 //SIDEBAR//  David James, bass player for Simon Pure of Natick/Weston was responsible for designing and building the mixing boards that were used to record my Thundertrain and Mag 4 sessions at Long View Farms Recording Studios in N. Brookfield and Northern Studios in Maynard, Ma for our very successful releases. In fact I believe just about every Ma. studio mixing board has David James' signature on them somewhere. Small world.

   When Larry, Gene, Tim West and I were collecting these demo records there were some other break through bands with a local origin such as Bruce Patch's 'Teddy and the Pandas'. I saw them live at Framingham's Loring Arena playing all the recent hits including their own local hit, Once Upon a Time( I still have 2 of their 45s). Their hit was the encore but the place was only 1/2 full by then. I could only dream of being on that stage as their opening act. I forgot who the local openers were. 

  Meanwhile Larry and Gene's band Witch's Brew were beginning to play out. The coolest gig I recall was the band playing a church outing for Rick Danahy's church parish in Hopkinton. It was 2 bus caravan for an outing to Lincoln Park, a major amusement park in New Bedford. I remember helping the band pack their equipment into the back of one of the school buses and sitting in the back of the bus with my friend Tim West and the band. So Exciting!!!! Tim and I dressed up wearing suede boots, tight striped pants, flowered white collar shirts, wide belts and big flashy buckles to the side the way we always did, like we were in a band. I remember the commotion the band created when set up on a real stage like you'd see at Palisades Park with Freddy 'Boom Boom' Cannon performing! I remember as the sun went down and all the rides with bright flashing lights and screaming kids, the smell of pop corn, hamburgers and the midway lights shooting up into the sky as the band began playing the hits, Gloria, Wipeout, Lil Latin Lupe Lu Stepping Stone, Guantanamera. I felt like they hit the big time! Seems the big time was right around the corner for them and now I knew what I had to do! I was paying close attention to equipment. Witch's Brew's Rick Danahy had a 4 pick up dark red sunburst electric guitar. I saw the same one at Lafayette Radio in Framingham. Mike Capobianco had the Diamond Aria 12 string semi hollow body. Mark Ragozinno had a 2 pick up bass possibly from Sears or one of the electronics stores. I do remember he had a Silvertone head that would have been a match for a 2-12" cabinet. Later on he bought a Fender Precision bass and a black Kustom 3-15" bass cabinet. Larry had a 3 piece Kent blue sparkle drum set. Through this period I got to know Mark really well and I considered him to be one of my closest friends. He was super witty and a great mimic. He would have me on the floor laughing. His command of the English language and his use of it was hysterical. As one got to know Mark, you'd recognized he was brilliant and had a great comedic sense of timing. I missed him went he went college. Through Mark I decided to play bass guitar. He showed me how to play Gloria, Stepping Stone, Lil Latin Lupe Lu and Louie Louie and many more. I thought Witch's Brew were all really good players. I thought Rick Danahy was well skilled as a lead guitarist. He was the most reserved. I attended all the rehearsals at Larry's on Saturday. Gene's job was to be up front with a tambourine and look good because girls always had crushes on him...kind of like Davy Jones of the Monkees. Gene had bigger plans for music and so did I!

  In my 8th grade when all this was happening, the spring of that year. My mother promised to give me $60 if I would pass my algebra final exam with a 'B' or better. My grades were so atrocious, she was trying anything! Well lo and behold I was shocked to receive a 'B'. Turns out the whole class did so poorly that they had to scale the marks and my score was in the top percentile. I was approx. 3rd highest mark in the class! What went wrong with this class?! I got the $60 and began immediately perusing my bible The Want AD Magazine out of Sudbury which had a great used musical instrument section. I found a 2 pick up Tiesco DelRay bass with cord and an Aristocrat Amp with about an 8" spkr. for $60 in Hopkinton, Ma.  Now gene would play guitar and I would play bass and that's what we did. We were playing the same simple songs as Witch's Brew. I remember listening to Eric Burden and the Animals greatest hits for hours while trying to play along with Chas. Chandler's bass lines to Bring It On Home, Boom Boom Boom Boom, House Of The Rising Sun and all the rest. I always played along with Stepping Stone and many other great pop rock tunes too. Chas Chandler was always my favorite. His runs made sense.

   By now Gene and I are playing actual songs with Gene singing lead. Tim West began taking organ lessons at Framingham Music Center and rented an Ace Tone electric organ and a Magnatone rental amp. Our friend and neighbor Billy Barber, his father bought him a red sparkle 22" bass 5 pc drum kit with real Paiste(never heard of them at the time) crash and ride cymbals and hi-hat from the Sears catalogue. This drum set was an actual Japanese Pearl drum set before the company broke the USA market. It looked great and sounded good too. Billy practiced all the time. He was a natural. Never had a lesson. On Saturday's we would lug our equipment to Billy's garage, hang a tiny tape recorder microphone from a beam and plug in. We would play our very limited set list over and over again. We'd play continuous passages so Gene could practice playing leads. Our poor neighbors!!! We continued through the summer since Witch's Brew had come to an end. The members lived too far away to have parents continually drive back and forth to Larry's with equipment. Through out the summer, Gene, Tim and I would try to attend any function featuring live music with a reasonable cover charge. We would constantly hustle my parents or Tim's parents to take us to events. Too young for driver's licenses. I remember 4 of us decided to go to Lake View Park in Mendon because we heard there was live music there. WE didn't know it was a hot bed for local rock bands at the time. When we got there the ballroom was closed but there was a an outdoor stage with a live band playing- the band's name was 'Colby's Pythons'. Never heard of them before but they had 2 drummers and real name brand Fender equipment. They were really good in my estimation and this just reinforced that I too could be doing this easily. 

Cont. past the update.

      UPDATE!!!!!   Just connected with ANDY SHIFF, a fine guitarist and top flight artist. Andy was in a band from Framingham in the late 60s and early 70s by the name of LATE WINDSOR MOULTON. One of the coolest names of all the local bands. I remember walking down a street, I believe Union Ave walking toward Framingham Centre and there it was, WINDSOR MOULTON, etched in stone on a small mausoleum in a old grave yard near the roundabout. OR, maybe I had just smoked something powerful! Late Windsor Moulton was Framingham's answer to the great jam bands of the time such as Alvin Lee's 10 Years After, San Francisco's Grateful Dead. Late W Moulton had 2 competent guitarists who could both play lead so that gave them the edge! More on them later. 

        Just a side note. Andy's father was a really righteous man. Without his awareness he was responsible for much of the success of my later band of the 70s Thundertrain because he provided a private, easy access, affordable, large rehearsal hall, repair shop and our recording studio for preproduction for many of our radio hits of the 70s. He was also responsible for giving employment to a past dear friend of mine from Marian, Jack Nichols. Jack was a drummer who I worked with who had a change of mind. He decided living on peanuts collected at the door of gigs wasn't his cup of tea so he decided to go back to college after beating a deadly bout with cancer. Jack Nichols is now Dr. Jack Nichols, PhD of psychology somewhere around Cambridge Ma. Mr Dick Shiff, Andy's father was inadvertently responsible for his success by employing him through the lean years. KUDOS to Jack!!!!

   Back to the 60s and early 70s.

    If you are interested in Mendon, Ma as a hotbed for up and coming bands, read parts of my dear friend MACH BELL's new book "ONCE A ROCKER ALWAYS A ROCKER"  "A DIARY", he lived in Holliston so he paid more attention to the Worcester side of things which were producing The Jones' and 'Aerosmith', 2 bands vying for the top spot in the Worcester area. We know who won! In Mach's book he mentions following those bands. Since I lived in Natick I was focused on the the rockers from Boston such as The SIDEWINDERS featuring Andy Paley and Billy Squire, The MODERN LOVERS featuring you know them all, GNP featuring Johnny Press and other notables. I was also paying attention to the clubs in Boston and started attending Sunday rock shows on Cambridge Common and attending the early Tea Party venue, the Psychedelic Supermarket, the Unicorn Coffee House, the Ark which became the later Tea Party. I started reading B.A.D. which was Boston After Dark, Avatar, then the Phoenix and the Real Paper after I believe B.A.D. broke up and I was also a fanatical devotee of WBCN. 'BCN would play 2-3 versions of the same song and that's where I began to understand the history of the fusion of blues, rock and country influences. I would put on head phones and listen to 'BCN until the wee hours of the morning and then go to school the next day. I learned so much from them. They always played tapes and records of local and obscure bands with full descriptions and names of the bands .This began my further education in music. 'BCN would promote local shows and list who was playing and where.

BACK TO MENDON, Ma.

That evening after the rock show, we didn't care about swimming and going on rides, we decided it was time to go home. We were too young for licenses and there was nobody to come get us. We walked from Mendon to Holliston. Wish we knew Mach Bell at the time, we could've dropped in for a jam session but we did finally get a ride from Walter's Dairy in Holliston back to Natick that night. This is how important live rock bands and music was to us. A hell of a night for walking on a hot summer night but a great learning experience always with any new exposure to rock. That was our typical adventure to see live bands.  I wish I could remember all the local Framingham, Natick, Wayland bands we'd see at the local battles and dances. This is what I do remember. The Squires, The Fourteens, Frenzy[ I lost a battle at the Framingham Armory to these guys with my band Indigo Blues], The Mystics[I think Thomm Moore was the singer front man], Dave and the Essex, Tony Soul and the Midnight hours, Midnight Riders, 12th  of Never, Sound Rebellion, the Missing Links[ big battle winners], Fujiama Pajama from possibly Franklin[ they used all Teneyck Amps], the Fragments to name a few. Music was changing

TO BE CONT. Started this site while on my Covid vacation, now it's fulltime work, weekends playing classic rock and learning new material during the week as well as rehearsing...but...I've got more to report. Hang in.