<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0When searching for ideas for these written ramblings called \u2018FTV\u2019, I periodically feel the cosmic wheels spinning when inspiration pops an idea into my brain.\u00a0 The way my mind works, a tune, a fragment of a memory, a photograph, or a bit of stray conversation can plant the seed of a topic for consideration.\u00a0 At times, the ideas arrive fully formed while others need to grow roots and branches before there is enough information to write about.\u00a0 If I don\u2019t jot some of these inspirational snippets down, they can be set aside and forgotten until something blows the dust off them for further consideration.\u00a0 It is amazing to me that one thread of an idea will often attach itself to or combine itself with other people, places, and things thus pivoting the idea in a\u00a0 different direction.\u00a0 The theme song that runs through my brain for this last scenario is \u201c<\/span>It\u2019s a Small World, After All,\u201d <\/span><\/i>especially when an idea connects me with people I haven\u2019t seen or thought of in ages.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0When I finished writing about my old Twig guitarist Gene Betts in late 2019 (FTV:\u00a0 Geno 1-1-2020), the article dusted off a bunch of music topics from the olden days.\u00a0 Writing about Gene got me thinking about a lot of the bands and people we knew in the late 1960s – early 1970s Marquette music scene.\u00a0 One of those bands I had not thought of in quite a while was Walrus.\u00a0 I remember thinking, \u201cWith all of the stuff people have posted on the internet in the last couple of decades, there must be some reference to Walrus floating around out there by now.\u201d\u00a0 Right up to the end of 2019 I had searched for information about them off and on with little luck.\u00a0 The only band by that name I remember finding was from Canada.\u00a0 I even wrote the name Walrus down on my scratch pad so I could take a later stab at finding some new information about them.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0As I was writing the Geno article, I got a Christmas card from an old classmate named June<\/span>(Derocher) Swanson.\u00a0 When my mother first moved into Brookridge Heights in Marquette, June worked there.\u00a0 June had been a good friend of Twig bass player Mike Kesti and was at more of our gigs than I can remember.\u00a0 She had been at my house for rehearsals from time to time so she and my mother bonded at Brookridge over the common thread of The Twig.\u00a0 Both were bummed when life intervened and June left her job at BH a couple of years after mom moved there.\u00a0 The first time my wife and I ran into June at Brookridge in 2013, we had not talked face to face since one of our class reunions (either the 20th or 30th in 1991 or 2001, I can\u2019t remember exactly which one).\u00a0 June said she wasn\u2019t sure that I would remember her, but she had been part of a small circle of Twig fans that would be hard to forget (I would call them \u2018friends of the band\u2019 and not \u2018groupies\u2019).\u00a0 Band gigs are always a lot less nerve racking when one looks out and sees some familiar friendly faces and for The Twig, June was one of our \u20183Fs\u2019 many times over.\u00a0 In her Christmas 2019 card, she said she found our address while sorting stuff and decided to send us a \u2018catch up\u2019 note.\u00a0 In it she mentioned how shocked she was to hear of Gene\u2019s passing.\u00a0 When we sent a card in return, I asked June to get me her email address so I could fire her a draft of the \u2018Geno\u2019 article.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The back and forth exchanges we have had since that Christmas were fun and informative.\u00a0 June told me that not only were she and Mike close friends, but also Gene had been her first boyfriend back in the fifth grade.\u00a0 She went on to say she always thought that I only \u2018tolerated her\u2019 hanging around The Twig so much, not that I was ever unfriendly.\u00a0 I can see where she may have gotten that impression of me.\u00a0 As I explained it to her, my high school dating life can be summed up in a nutshell: \u00a0 after a short time of \u2018going together,\u2019 I got dumped by the same girl – twice (my sophomore and junior years).\u00a0 It was my intention, therefore, to take The Twig seriously and not worry about other distractions (in other words, dating) my senior year.\u00a0 The band, I resolved, would be the one thing I would occupy the majority of my non-school time.\u00a0 One may have a hard time believing it, but I was shy around new people.\u00a0 Once I got to know someone, I could talk their ear off and it always took me longer to get better acquainted with females.\u00a0 In one band story mom had shared with June, she mentioned worrying about the knicknacks vibrating off her dresser during our band rehearsals in the basement.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Early in the new year, I sent June a copy of a <\/span>ZITS<\/span><\/i> cartoon from the Sunday newspaper.\u00a0 There were several panels showing an upstairs landing leading to a door.\u00a0 There were large \u2018THUMPS\u2019 and \u2018BOOMS\u2019 coming out of the door to the room where the teenage son\u2019s band was practicing.\u00a0 The last panel showed the strip\u2019s mother holding on to a bunch of figurines as her son Jeremy asks, \u201cWell, what do you think of Pierce\u2019s new drum set?\u201d\u00a0 Now if you are wondering how any of this relates to Walrus, let me connect a few of the dots.\u00a0 The next snail mail correspondence I received from June was an article from the <\/span>Marquette Mining Journal Arts and Entertainment <\/span><\/i>page from January 27, 2020.\u00a0 The subject of the article?\u00a0 The band Walrus.\u00a0 Thanks to June, I can now put a check mark next to the \u2018Walrus\u2019 entry on my 2021 scratch pad under \u2018articles to research.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Marquette was no different than hundreds of other college towns in the late 1960s.\u00a0 There were always bands forming and disbanding in college towns.\u00a0 It was not at all uncommon for the members of defunct bands to rearrange and regroup into new bands on a regular basis.\u00a0 The best description I can provide about Walrus is this:\u00a0 they were the \u2018supergroup\u2019 of the Marquette music scene.\u00a0 Walrus was a collection of some of the best musicians who had played in various bands over the years.\u00a0 Some of the members had backed up future legend Cub Koda (back when he was just plain old Mike Koda) who attended NMU for a year.\u00a0 After a year spent in college, Koda headed west to earn his rock and roll degree playing in Las Vegas.\u00a0 Eventually, he hit the big time with his band Brownsville Station, a band most identified by the original version of the Top Forty hit <\/span>Smokin\u2019 in the Boy\u2019s Room <\/span><\/i>(later covered by Motley Crue).\u00a0 I can not say for sure what prompted this particular grouping to remain together, but the sound they created was loud, racious, and undeniably tight.\u00a0 The tightness\u00a0 came from playing together a long time before they met Koda and continued long after he departed NMU.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The nucleus of the band consisted of Mike McKelvey on guitar and piano, Kim French on bass and vocalist Bill Etten.\u00a0 When I was attending high school dances, they were a band in demand (they weren\u2019t Walrus yet, but I can not remember what they called themselves then).\u00a0 One of their original drummers was Randy Seppala.\u00a0 Randy owned the exact silver sparkle Ludwig Classic drum set I play and it was this version of the band that introduced Marquette to Jimi Hendrix.\u00a0 A later version of the band featured Les Ross, Jr. on drums.\u00a0 Les had just returned to the area after a stint in the Army and he would later occupy the drum throne for two other fabled Marquette bands, East of Orange and Conga se Mena.\u00a0 I can\u2019t conjure up the name they played under in those days, either,\u00a0 but by the time my buddies Mike and Gene were putting together The Twig, they had become the back up band for a new NMU student by the name of Michael Koda.\u00a0 Fronting bands like the Mike Koda Blues Band and later Mike Koda and the Blue Flames, Koda introduced a brand of rocking blues unlike anything else that was being played at teen dances, frat parties, and in the local bars.\u00a0 Koda would leave NMU after a year to pursue his rock and roll dreams.\u00a0 We have chronicled his return to Marquette with his best known band Brownsville Station in previous FTV articles ( What ever happened to . . . 3-25-15).\u00a0 When Cub Koda left town, his last band became Walrus.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The drummer in the band during the Mike Koda years was Don Kuhlie whose name has also been bandied about in past FTVs (Don Kuhlie 8-31-16).\u00a0 Watching Kuhlie perform with both the NMU Jazz Band and the Blue Flames was instructive for me as I absorbed lessons that helped me become a better drummer.\u00a0 Kuhlie had unbelievably fast hands and his bass drum workouts sounded like he was playing with both feet, but this was years before they began marketing double beater drum pedals.\u00a0 My description of Kuhlie\u2019s drumming (to other drummers) always got nods of agreement:\u00a0 \u201cDon Kuhlie can play more with one hand than I can with two arms and two legs.\u201d\u00a0 It is my biased assessment that a band is only as good as their drummer, and with Kuhlie behind the kit, Walrus was a very good band indeed.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Bass player Kim French was one of those musicians who always seemed to have been part of the Marquette scene.\u00a0 His father was the treasurer of the local music union.\u00a0 We sent our band gig contract dues to him but I don\u2019t remember exactly whom he played with.\u00a0 Kim was a solid bass player in more ways than one.\u00a0 Not only did he keep a rock solid bass line going, he also tended to stand in one place like he himself was made of rock.\u00a0 I recall one gig when the rhythm guitar player leaned over to tell him his speaker cabinet was making the ungodly noise one hears when the speaker is blown out.\u00a0 The only reaction Kim gave (that anything was wrong) was a slight persing of his lips and a quick glance toward the offending cabinet.\u00a0 Kim was forever borrowing speaker cabinets for gigs.\u00a0 Even with the danger his volume posed to equipment in general, no one ever said no!\u00a0 I still have a vivid mental picture of Mike Koda leaning on the fender of a black Olds 88 while Kim and Mike Kesti carried a loner bass cabinet down our sidewalk.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Singer Bill Etten I do not know that much about.\u00a0 If memory serves me correctly, his wife worked in the office at the high school.\u00a0 When we were first married, my wife would often stop at the recreation building of the Tourville Apartments (where we lived) for a swim and a sauna after her midnight shift at the hospital.\u00a0 Some mornings we would see a couple of guards from the Marquette Branch Prison doing the same routine after their midnight shift.\u00a0 If one of them wasn\u2019t Bill Etten, then it was Bill Etten\u2019s doppelganger.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Guitarist Mike McKelvey I knew a little more about for a couple of reasons.\u00a0 His brother Alan was in my class in high school,\u00a0 He had shown me where his brother\u2019s band (one of the pre-Walrus versions) practiced the day I thought our meeting up was supposed to be an audition.\u00a0 Al and a couple of buddies had approached me about drumming in a band they were forming.\u00a0 They never got around to calling me to actually play any music, so that was that.\u00a0 The summer between eighth and ninth grade, I got to be a rehearsal drummer with a group of my sister\u2019s recently graduated classmates (they would later gig as The Self Winding Grapefruit).\u00a0 It was at one of these rehearsals that Mike McKelvy stopped by with a new copy of The Jimi Hendrix Experience\u2019s album <\/span>Are You Experienced<\/span><\/i> he had brought back on a trip to California.\u00a0 It was no surprise to me that McKevy\u2019s band was playing <\/span>Purple Haze <\/span><\/i>at teen dances that fall.\u00a0 Beyond his wire rimmed glasses and bushy beard, McKevey wasn\u2019t overly expressive on stage and in my mind, I just assumed he was a quiet, studious musician and the leader of his bands.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Walrus was good enough to be hired as an opening act for a few of the bigger artists that came though Marquette.\u00a0 I watched them do a sound check at an empty Hedgecock Fieldhouse prior to a Richie Havens concert.\u00a0 I had my own gig that night so I missed the show, but it was still a thrill to<\/span><\/p>\n see Walrus on a big stage.\u00a0 Once they departed for Ann Arbor, I heard snippets about the album they were recording, but I never heard them play after they left town.\u00a0 I know that guitarist\/bassist Randy Tessmer and Kuhlie played in the band Trees after our friend Lindsay Tomasic had transplanted from Houghton to Ann Arbor.\u00a0 Occasional Walrus reunions happened in Marquette over the years, but it seems like I always heard about them after the fact.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The article June sent me about Walrus was a nice round up about the band.\u00a0 It was also exciting because 45 years after they ceased to exist, their music is now being put out by Fervor Records out of Phoenix, Arizona.\u00a0 I encourage anyone looking for more information to look up Jackie Jahfetson\u2019s article at miningjournal.net.\u00a0 The band Walrus doesn\u2019t exist as a performing unit any more, but according to McKelvy, \u201cI just hope [people] enjoy the music and realize that the band was more than a rock band.\u00a0 We\u2019re known locally as a hard rock band, (but) the album shows our variety of our interests.\u201d\u00a0 WOAS-FM listeners can be sure that we will be spinning the long overdue Walrus album just as soon as we can lay hands on it!<\/span><\/p>\n Top Piece Video – here is one of the Walrus reunion gigs at Marquette’s Harbor Fest in 2013 – the tune is Savoy Brown’s ‘I’m Tired’ – I recognize drummer Don Kuhli’s blond hair but the rest, not so much…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0When searching for ideas for these written ramblings called \u2018FTV\u2019, I periodically feel the cosmic wheels spinning when inspiration pops an idea into my brain.\u00a0 The way my mind works, a tune, a fragment of a memory, a photograph, or a bit of stray conversation can plant the seed of a topic for consideration.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,8,7,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bands-musicians","category-from-the-vaults","category-local-music-news","category-woas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2075"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2075\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2097,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2075\/revisions\/2097"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}