FTV: Sledgehammer Gigs

     Our business cards actually said ‘Sledgehammer – we don’t do polkas’.  Sledgehammer was my third working band and when Barry Seymour and I started jamming together in the fall of 1974, he had some very definite ideas of where he wanted us to go.  At first, it was just the two of us doing an early version of The Black Keys’ schtick:  guitar, vocals, and drums.  The guitar/drums band concept had been done in Marquette by a group called Stan and Jeff six years earlier, but they eventually morphed into a four piece leading us to believe we too would need to expand our ranks.

     Coming out of a large band with a horn section patterned after Chicago, Barry was interested in doing more guitar based music which put him very much into The Doobie Brothers and Bachman Turner Overdrive (BTO).  Barry’s vision for our as yet un-named endeavor was ‘big guitars and vocal harmonies’ so right off the bat, he started teaching me Doobie Brothers tunes as fast as he could figure them out.  We had both been lead vocalists so we found it easy to split the singing duties.  With Barry’s keen ear and knack for arranging two part (and later three and four part) harmonies, we knew this was going to be a lot of fun.  

     The bass player from my last band called out of the blue and announced that the band he had been trying to put together since Knockdown folded wasn’t happening.  We invited him over to see if he might be the next piece of the puzzle.  He was a good bass player, but I reminded Barry that over the two years I had played with the guy, he proved to be a bit of a ‘scammer’.  He couldn’t bum cigarettes from me as I didn’t smoke (as he did from anyone else who did).  Lee’s habit of always borrowing money against the next gig’s wages for this or that also wore thin.  

    Lee  came to jam with us one day with a toothache.  While making repeated visits to the bathroom upstairs, he decided to self medicate his pain from my father’s liqueur cabinet.  This became apparent when his playing deteriorated.  Then he made things worse by backing into my dad’s car while leaving in a drunken haze.   My dad wouldn’t let him remove his bass or amp  from the house until the car was paid for.  My detective father knew a scammer when he saw one and he was going to hang on to a little collateral.  The day he delivered the money needed to fix the car, I let Lee know that Barry and I were ‘going in a different direction’.   Lee departed with his equipment and a disappointed look on his face;  apparently he did not realize dad let him settle his debt without getting a drunk driving ticket to boot.  Now all we had to do is figure out what that direction would be.   Bass players most definitely do NOT grow on trees.

     Barry and I had hatched the plan for our new band at the Marquette Mountain Ski Lodge bar (then called The Back Door) the night his old band Sunstone played their last gig.  Barry and I were there checking out a different band a couple of days after dismissing our first bass player.  Lo and behold, who should walk in but my old Twig bass player Mike Kesti.  Mike had gone to Michigan Tech to study electronics, joined a band, and then followed them to Toledo, Ohio.  Mike felt things were not working out in Ohio so he had taken a job working the control board at Northern Michigan University’s Public Television outlet (WNMU TV13). 

     Mike had arrived back in town the week we let Lee go and boy, were we happy to pitch him the idea of joining us.  Mike was an electronics geek so we were thrilled when he not only jumped on our new band wagon, he also said, “If I had a workshop, I could build us a new PA.”  Mike had not been to my folk’s new house yet, so imagine his surprise to find our rehearsal space situated half a basement away from my dad’s table saw and work bench!  As soon as we began working with Mike, our new PA and stage monitors started to take shape.

     I do not remember the connection between Barry and our second guitarist Lindsey but he was brought into the mix for a jam one day and never left.  Lindsey was very much into Joe Walsh and Jethro Tull.  Mike brought in his love for ZZ Top and Savoy Brown.  Barry added  Steely Dan to the Doobie Brothers and BTO songs we were already working on.  For my part, I liked to recycle titles I had performed in The Twig and Knockdown.  

     Barry arrived at rehearsal one day and said, “I got the perfect name for us.”  He started playing the riff from the title track from the BTO album Not Fragile.  We all joined in and Barry sang ‘You ask if we play heavy music / Well, are thunderheads just another cloud? / We do, not fragile, straight at you’.  ‘You want to call the band ‘Not Fragile?’ Mike inquired?  Barry smiled as he repeated, “You ask if we play heavy music?” and added “No, Sledgehammer!   What is heavier than a Sledgehammer?”  To this day, I hear the riff for Not Fragile and I still want to call it Sledgehammer.  There was no debate – Sledgehammer was a great choice given our play list (and strangely enough, we never did learn our title song – probably because Fred Turner’s vocals would have been tough to match).

     We had good chemistry from the start and now we had a name.  Our first gig was actually a freebie school dance at St. Michael’s gym (for which we gave Barry a little guff:  “Gee Barry, couldn’t you find us a paying gig?”) but the truth be told, after three months of playing in the basement, it felt great to play a gig.  It was also a good feeling to see how Sledgehammer was received by a live audience.  We were playing music we all loved and one gig led to another.  As for our business cards (Sledgehammer:  We don’t do polkas!), that statement was also inspired  from the BTO lyrics that lead us to the name Sledgehammer (‘You ask if we play heavy music, we do’).  We wanted to let anyone hiring us know exactly what to expect so Mike put it there, front and center for all to see.  Being in a band in the Upper Peninsula that played for the occasional wedding reception, we did have to fake our way through Roll Out the Barrel a couple of times, but we kept our hard rockin’ side intact 99 percent of the time.

     As far as memorable gigs are concerned, we had our share.  After playing our one freebie gig, our calendar started to fill up.  We did a rare afternoon show in the commons area of the Hunt / Van Antwerp residents hall at Northern Michigan University.  These gigs are always a bit strange because the crowd that gathers out of curiosity are not usually there to party or dance.  It was meant to be a ‘mixer’ kind of thing, but a gig is a gig.  It is quite possible that my future wife at least passed through while we were playing (as she was a resident of Hunt Hall), but we would not actually meet for another three years.

     I have written previously about the three road trip gigs we took in our ten months together.  The first was an epic trip to a one off gig in Coldwater, Michigan (replete with a blizzard on the return trip).  The second was a two night stand at a hotel / restaurant catering to skiers in Wakefield.  Both of those trips were fun but the two night stand we played in Iron River, Michigan was probably the best of the three.  It was at a bar whose main purpose was to provide great music for an appreciative crowd so it was a lot of fun for us and for them.

     After playing at the NCO Club at KI Sawyer Air Force Base a lot with Knockdown, it was kind of strange to come back and play there one more time after more than a year away.   The gig was so-so but the floor show was awesome – Barry and Mike both took a shine to a girl who was obviously there with her parents.  I guess Mike won this round as he ended up marrying her not too long after Sledgehammer called it a day.  Unfortunately, it didn’t last and once the breakup was complete, Mike packed his motorcycle and headed to northern California where he has been ever since.  Barry also landed in California after serving in the Navy, eventually settling in the Los Angeles area.  Counting the late Gene Betts (who ended up in San Francisco after The Twig), that made three of my former bandmates residents of the Golden State.

     The only gig we played at the National Guard Armory in Marquette was a wedding reception.  Things were going along fine until the dreaded polka request arrived so we dug out our one and only (and as I recall, we ended up playing it twice that night).  What I really liked about the Armory set up was the stage.  They had a low stage with a three foot high drum riser in the back.  Almost all of the gigs I have played put me on the floor looking at the backside of the guys in front of me.  In this case, it was a lot of fun to actually be able to see over them and watch the action out on the floor.  

     All told, we played about 30 band jobs in 1974-75.  Some of the most interesting ones actually came near the end of the band.  With graduation behind me, I made it known that if a job came calling, I wouldn’t be able to play past the end of June.  I also planned an after graduation trip to Oregon to visit my old buddies Mitch and Jack which took care of the last week of May and the first week of June.  When I got back to town, Barry told me we had two or three more gigs to finish but Lindsay had headed for Florida as soon as he got out of school.  This meant the last few jobs we did as a trio.

     Playing as a trio was different and interesting but I still feel bad that I chewed Barry out for lowering our fee for jobs that had been booked well in advance.  “Well,” he said, “they did hire a four piece and we only brought three.”  Years down the line when we reconnected (after Barry had been in California for many years,) I told him, “You were right, I was wrong.”  He took it in stride and we had a little fun ribbing each other about it on one of my West Coast Bureau inspection trips to Los Angeles.  We had lunch at the King’s Head in Santa Monica and regaled Elizabeth and Todd with stories of our musical exploits.

     I don’t think Barry took the disagreement about the last couple of gigs personally.  I hadn’t even been in Ontonagon more than a couple of months in the fall of 1975 when he called me out of the blue.  “How would you like to play at a fraternity party next Saturday night?”  He explained there was an older bass player named Gordon Coleman who booked jobs like this all the time.  Gordon was the only permanent member of The Gordon Coleman Trio and he would simply recruit available musicians for each job.  I said, “Sure, do we get a set list or rehearse ahead of time?”  Barry laughed and said, “Nope, it is all off the cuff and everybody pitches in with songs they know.”

     The staging area for this frat house gig was on the wide landing between the first and second floor of a massive old home in the ritzy neighborhood just above the lower harbor.  The ‘trio’ that night included Gordon, Barry, a keyboard player, and myself.  We plaued cheek to jowl in a space no larger than 15 by 20 feet.  I was in one corner of this landing and the keyboard occupied the space to my right.  Barry and Gordon were in front of us.  Barry and I were essentially performing to the stairs that went up to the second floor while Gordon and the keyboard guy were looking down the stairs toward the first floor.  We could hear the party going on and occasionally someone would trot past us on the stairs going up or down.  I never saw more than two or three people pass by so I have no idea how many were actually there.

     As weird as the set up was, we had a great time.  Barry and I, having just spent the last year playing in Sledgehammer, suggested at least half the songs we played.  Keyboard guy tossed in a few of his favorites like Nights in White Satin, a song I liked a lot but had never played in a band before.  I had learned Nights noodling around on my electronic keyboard (and later got to play it on the Hammond B-3 we used in my pre-Sledgehammer band, Knockdown).  Keyboard guy was tickled how well we put it together on the spot.  Gordon tossed in a few of his favorite songs but he seemed perfectly happy to let the three of us drive the song list.

     A week before Christmas break, Barry called me about doing another Gordon Coleman Trio gig, this one on New Year’s Eve.  This was a more traditional setting (in other words, not in a stairwell) and was held at the Marquette Golf and Country Club.  Barry and I again provided a lot of the songs played but we had a different keyboard player this time.  Being NYE, we also got the standard $100 per man fee the Musician’s Union dictated for that one night of the year when everyone and their brother wants live music at their establishment.  At the end of the night, I told Gordon, “You have my number and it is no problem for me to scoot back to Marquette for any Friday or Saturday night.”  He seemed happy to hear this, thanked me for being there, but he  never called me again.  Barry ended up reforming his old band so my playing days in the Marquette area came to an end.

     The one ‘rock star’ moment we had in Sledgehammer came at Lakeview Arena.  We were doing a teen dance and with their very large Altec-Lansing Voice of Theater PA speakers on hand, Mike decided to use our equally large home-made PA cabinets in our backline of amps.  We drove right into the arena in the afternoon to unload and set up.  When we did a quick sound check, we found Lakeview’s PA speakers were shot and sounded like a bunch of angry bees were trapped inside.  Mike swapped them out with our PA speakers so we still had a ‘wall of amps’ on stage.  Our PA handled that large area just fine and although the Altec-Lansing Voice of Theater speakers looked impressive when stacked with our regular amps, they were just for show (we didn’t even plug them in).  I wish we had taken a picture because it sure looked like we had hit the big time.  

     In April of 1975, we were booked for two nights at the Four Season’s Lanes and Lounge.  Mike arranged to have a friend of his record the first night on cassette tape which he copied for the rest of us.  Fearing the tapes would degrade over time, I transferred my copy to CD and labeled it “Sledgehammer Live at the Four Seasons”.  From time to time I will spin a few tracks for old time sake and it takes me right back to that night.  I wish I had thought of this for The Twig and Knockdown, but I will have to be content to just replay those days in my head.

Top Piece Video:  This is the BTO line up I saw at NMU with Blair Thornton stepping in at second guitar – this version of Not Fragile is a little fast, but it was recorded live at Cobo Hall in 1974 – probably adrenaline kicking in!   Sledgehammer did perform the song and the ‘You ask do we play heavy music’ was the kicker that got us to name our band after something heavy – Sledgehammer!