FTV: Remembering Greek Week

 

     During my Junior High / Senior High years in Marquette, the frats and sororities at Northern Michigan University would have an annual spring bash called Greek Week.  I can’t say how long this went on or if it continues to this day, but I remember it mostly for the festival’s finale that was held at Hedgecock Fieldhouse.  It always had a carnival-like atmosphere and featured some great bands along with food, game booths, and other festive activities.  

     Included in this spring fling was a competition called the ‘Mud Bowl’ and I witnessed a couple before it was cancelled due to injuries and the general mayhem it created.  The Mud Bowl involved plowing up a big circle of lawn in front of the Quad One dining hall, putting up a snow fence around it, and then flooding it for a couple of days to make the ‘playing field’.  The Mud Bowl featured teams trying to navigate this muddy wallow while pushing an eight foot diameter ‘Earthball’ across the other team’s goal line.  At least one ambulance trip was made from the Mud Bowl every time it was held (I can verify this as it was held across the street from our house on Norway Avenue).   The MB always ended in a free-for-all where bystanders were heaved into the muddy pit – sometimes willingly, sometimes not.  One could avoid this fate if you kept your head on a swivel and could run faster than whoever got it into their head that you should be the next victim.  I always avoided the mud bath, but enough innocent spectators and passersby got hauled into the action that this portion of Greek Week was eventually banned.  I think the final straw was the poor young lady in the white spring dress who was dragged from the sidewalk on Lincoln Avenue (a good 500 yards away from the mud pit) and tossed in without any indication that she was a willing participant.  Perhaps it was her screaming bloody murder that gave me this impression?  Fortunately, the music part at Hedgecock did not get cancelled along with the Mud Bowl part of the Greek Week celebration. 

     Two of the more memorable GW concerts took place during my sophomore and senior years in high school.  The first was opened by local band The French Church and included the MacDonald brothers (Warren and Gordon) on drums and bass, Mike Spratto on guitar, and Mike Cleary on vocals.  I always made it a point to hang around stage side at these events because that usually gave me the best view of what the band was doing on stage.  Naturally, I was interested in what the drummer was doing, but also how the band communicated with each other on stage.  When TFC went up to do their set, Gordon grabbed my arm and said “hang around, when we are done we have to get our stuff off the stage quick so The McCoy’s can go on.”  Hang around I did, literally.  There were several people sitting on the first level of the three tiered PA tower next to the stage, so that is where I spent most of their set.  Times were different back then so when the kid sitting to my right offered me his bottle in a brown paper bag, I took a swig.  Whatever it was, it took my breath away and cleared my sinuses out in one gulp!  I managed to get to the ground and back to my station at the back corner of the stage before the security folks herded everyone else off the PA riser and back to the floor at the front of the stage.

     The French Church was playing on stage when I turned around and found myself face to face with The McCoy’s guitarist (and singer, songwriter, leader) Rick Derringer.  I wasn’t quite fully grown at that point, but I was a head taller than Derringer (we were more (his) face to (my) chest).   In my army shirt and jeans uniform (the standard 1960s cool look for musicians in training), I was extremely underdressed compared to him with his shag hair and stage clothes.  “What are you doing back here?” he demanded.  “I’m humping equipment for The French Church,” I replied above the din, nodding toward the stage.  “Oh, okay,” he said, “see if you can clear some of these other people out of here [back stage] so nothing gets broken or stolen.”  Playing roady I could handle but no one was going to take me very seriously as a security guy.  I kind of let that slide and went back to listening to The French Church finish their set.  I never even got to set foot on stage because as soon as they started slinging amps and drums to the edge of the stage, I ended up doing all my hoisting and hauling from there.  Mercifully, The McCoy’s backline and drums were already on the stage so after this flurry of activity, I got to settle in and watch the headliners from the same spot.

     With all of TFC’s stuff tucked up against the wall, The McCoy’s got their drums moved forward and made sure everything was in working order.  The Zerringer brothers (re-christened ‘Derringer’ in the McCoys) played drums and guitar in the band but I don’t have names for the bass and keyboard players.  They saved their biggest hit (Hang on Sloopy) for the encore.  They weren’t exactly playing dance music (this was billed as the Greek Week Festival Dance) but they did play a mix of heavy and experimental rock for the rest of their set.  My knowledge base about the band began and ended with Sloopy so it was kind of interesting to hear them do stuff by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, for instance.   Derringer had a little box on the stage rigged with draw bars like one would see on a Hammond organ and he was using them to make all kinds of strange sounds.  At one point, he took off his guitar and was kneeling on the stage, essentially playing some form of out there electronic music with his little box being the only instrument he was manipulating while the rest of the band thundered on behind him. 

     During that period of history, there was a lot of misinformation about hippies, young people with long hair, musicians, and such.  Cliches categorized guys with long hair as some form of ‘the great unwashed’ generation.  The keyboard player from The McCoys was my first encounter with someone who actually fit this description.  I gave him some benefit of the doubt figuring they were on tour and living out of a van, so perhaps it was the stage clothing that needed some care.  I also noticed that he was extremely ‘agitated’ with his eyes darting all over when engaged in conversation.  He could stand still and seemed to be in a constant state of ‘fidgeting’ all at the same time.  Being somewhat in awe of the whole ‘this is a famous touring band’ thing, I certainly wasn’t going to ask any dumb questions.  Someone else wandered backstage to talk to Derringer and came right out and asked, “What’s up with your keyboard player?”  Derringer was brutally honest and replied, “Some of us are having a hard time regulating our intake and taking care of our personal needs.  Some of us are going to be replaced as soon as we get home.  He is a good keyboard player but this is getting old.”  In three sentences I got a whole lesson in ‘how not to be when touring with a band’.  This was also my first glimpse that touring isn’t just about playing music – it is also about business and like any business, touring musicians are also employees with rules of conduct they need to follow. 

     Since this encounter with Rick Derringer, I have enjoyed following his career as a sideman (with the late Johnny Winter’s band (Johnny Winter And) and Johnny’s brother in Edgar Winter’s White Trash) as well as a songwriter, producer, solo artist and writer.  Who knew at that time he would end up producing and paying for Weird Al’s first album and end up being a featured player on a lot of hit records.  He had a high enough profile in the biz to be included in Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band.  Sadly, Derringer had health problems that sent him to the great gig in the sky in 2025.

     Two years after The McCoys were featured at the Greek Week Festival, the Greek Council  must have had a bigger entertainment budget to play with.  While both of the headliners at this show were still relatively unknown, both had lower Michigan connections.  One even had a Marquette history and both would go on to make it in the big time just down the road.

     The first name I spied on the poster was Bob Seger whose claim to fame up to then was the hit song Ramblin’, Gamblin’ Man (released by the Bob Seger System).  Imagine my surprise when a long haired, equally long bearded Seger opened the show solo.  I wasn’t expecting an acoustic Bob Seger and certainly not as the opener.  The highlight of his set was his rendition of John Lennon’s Imagine.  Seger pulled out a folded sheet of paper and said, “We heard this on the radio coming up here on the interstate so I wrote down the words so I could play it for you.”  Having just been released, I hadn’t even heard Lennon’s version of Imagine yet, but to this day,  when I hear the song, in my head it is Bob’s version.  Seger knew a good song when he heard it.

     Act number two on the bill was a drum/organ duo called Teegarden & Van Winkle.  Drummer Dave Teegarden and organist Skip Knape had formed in Tulsa, Oklahoma but eventually made a musical home in Detroit.  I knew nothing about them at the time but certainly enjoyed their music.  Both sang and with Knape/Van Winkle on keys and bass pedals, they produced a big sound.  They had a #22 single on the American Hot 100 chart (God, Love and Rock & Roll) in 1970, so they had some name recognition with the crowd, but I was not familiar with them at all.  After the second intermission, I got another surprise when Seger joined Teegarden & Van Winkle as a trio for the third set.

     With Seger now playing a Les Paul, the S,T & VW trio tore through some originals and a bunch of rock standards.  Seger proved to be a good guitar player and I remember thinking, “This is a band I would like to hear record an LP.”  The collaboration eventually did put out a CD (Smokin’ OP’s which is short for Smoking Other People’s Songs) which was not released until 2005.  As the name implies, it features them playing cover tunes and it is a pretty good record (pun intended) of what they were doing live in 1971.  Teegarden eventually played drums for Seger’s Silver Bullet Band (recording four albums with that group) while Knape toured with his own band that included two female vocalists and horns.  Teegarden & Van Winkle have gotten back together on a few occasions over the years.  Seger?  He ended up in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  

     I don’t remember much about the originals they played in 1971, but Seger’s Turn the Page recounts getting hassled on the road for having long hair.  Even though the lyrics place the event ‘east of Omaha’, he said the song came from an incident that happened on the road in Wisconsin while touring with T&VW.   He eventually recorded it for his Back in 1972 album but it did not become wildly popular until it appeared on 1976’s Live Bullet double album.  Indeed, Seger wrote a lot of the music that would get him noticed while still on the road with T&VW.

     The headliner on that night was none other than Brownsville Station.  I am having a little bit of a problem remembering the specifics of this gig because I saw them twice over a span of a couple of years.  I can place this show in 1971 because bassist Tony Driggins and drummer C.J. Cronly were in the band with both Cub Koda and Mike Lutz on guitars and vocals.  Driggins departed in 1972 and Cronly was replaced by Henry ‘H-Bomb’ Weck about the same time.  I must have seen them the second time before 1975 because Bruce Nazarian had not yet joined the band on second guitar.  By the second time I saw them, Mike Lutz had switched to bass and they played as a three piece with Weck already on drums.  A little detective work tells me that the Greek Week gig in 1971 was ahead of their 1973 release of Smoking in the Boy’s Room and the second concert was after the release of Smoking, but before Nazarian started touring with them.  If that seems a little convoluted to you, I will admit to looking at a lot of web pages and performing a bit of memory reconstruction to figure out the timeline here.  

     The official Brownsville Station site has a wonderful chronology of all their 1969 to 1979 concerts (and they played just about everywhere on bills with just about anyone who was big at that time), but sadly there are gaps.  No doubt the list covers the big places they played during that time period.  Back in those days, many  bands filled off days with one-off gigs that were arranged as their tours moved along.  Marquette was a great place to play, but it falls into that list of “one-off, added to the tour later”- places that don’t always show up on the ledger.

     I had gone to the first gig to see Seger with an added agenda: could this really be the same Michael Koda who had played in bands in the Marquette area when he was a student at NMU around 1968?  Before he became ‘Cub Koda’, he was plain old Michael Koda and he instantly lit the Marquette music scene on fire.  He went through a lot of musical combinations in a short period of time.  Some said he was hard to work with, while others said he knew what he wanted his band to sound like and if you couldn’t play up to that level, out you went.  He played with the best equipment.  When my band was scratching to buy one decent amp, Koda used a ‘y’ jack to plug his guitar into TWO Fender Twin Reverb amps at the same time.  He wrote his own songs, he played harp, and he also played slide guitar with abandon.  We really didn’t quite know what to make of this dynamo of a guitar player from Manchester (Michigan, not England).  The longest lasting backing group stayed together after Koda left for his rock ‘n’ roll PhD program in Las Vegas and they became the fabled Marquette area band Walrus. 

     Sure enough, Mike Koda was now Cub Koda.  His tenure in Las Vegas certainly earned Cub his stripes (another intended pun as he frequently performed in a striped ref’s jersey) and Brownsville Station put on quite a show.  Their stage attire was a little less flamboyant than Elvis in Vegas, but they weren’t in the tee-shirt and jeans category either.  They bounced around the stage, mugged for the crowd, and basically gave me the impression that they were having a great time.  Behind his now signature black framed round lens spectacles, there was no doubt that this was the same Mike Koda who several years before this was leaning on the fender of an Olds 88 parked outside of my house.  His bass player at that time, Kim French, had an annoying habit of blowing up speakers and then going on a last minute hunt to borrow a speaker bottom before their next gig.  Even before my high school band The Twig started playing paying gigs, we were fair game in the “hey, can I borrow your bass speaker cab for a gig tonight?” sweepstakes.  In the fraternity of musicians, it was hard to say ‘no’ to such a request.

     I was impressed with Koda and his work so I thought it was neat that his band was now parked in front of my house borrowing equipment.  Had I known he was going to be on the way up in the business soon after leaving Marquette, maybe I would have taken a picture of him.  A true band leader, he was watching Kim and the band’s rhythm guitar player lug out our bass  player Mike Kesti’s speaker cab.  The mental image of that moment will be one of the first ones I will have to download when they start implanting on board computer chips hard wired directly into our brains. 

 

Top Piece Video:  Rick Derringer playing a song he wrote for Johnny Winter but is shown here performing it with Johnny’s brother Edgar!