<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0There has been a suggestion that I spend too much of my time \u2018living in the past\u2019.\u00a0 If one considers last week\u2019s article about the Marquette band Walrus, then the verdict would have to be \u2018guilty as charged\u2019.\u00a0 My wife lets me know when I stray too deep into my musical history growing up in Marquette.\u00a0 She reminds me that when I talk about people and places from back in my day, I just assume she knows who, what, and where I am talking about.\u00a0 As I said in the introduction to the wonderful history Walrus guitarist Mike McKelvy let us reprint last week, \u201c Even if you are not familiar with the band, it [the history] is a fascinating journey from Mike\u2019s life as a high school rock and roller up to now.\u201d\u00a0 The purpose of this week\u2019s <\/span>FTV<\/span><\/i> is to simply tie up some of the loose ends of which there are many.\u00a0 I must remind myself, \u201cThese are my memories.\u00a0 A lot of people have no idea who I am talking about.\u201d\u00a0 I will try to not jump all over the place, but the spider web of connections here will definitely NOT be made up of linear threads!\u00a0 Memory being what it is, those mentioned may have slightly different recall of the events than yours truly – but isn\u2019t that always the way it is when \u2018living in the past\u2019?<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0This round of Walrus-mania started when Al Jacquez sent me a picture from the Michigan Rock and Roll Legends Museum.\u00a0 Al and his wife had been invited to attend his induction into this hallowed hall in Bay City, Michigan.\u00a0 In his email, he mentioned that a news feature about the Geezer\u2019s Happy Hour had won a Murrow award.\u00a0 Until he sent me a link to the item he mentioned, I had no idea that he was involved in weekly shows at the LIVE bar in Ann Arbor.\u00a0 As the name suggests, it is an event with an age limit – only those 65 years of age or older may attend!\u00a0 Watching the clip (which is easily found with a simple search), another name caught my eye.\u00a0 The organizer and bass player at these sessions was none other than the former Walrus guitarist \/ vocalist \/ bass player, Randy Tessier.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Beyond seeing Walrus numerous times in Marquette, I had talked to Randy exactly once.\u00a0 Back in 1970, he called our house where The Twig rehearsed.\u00a0 When we ended a run through of Christie\u2019s <\/span>Yellow River, <\/span><\/i>my mother called down and said there was a phone call.\u00a0 I picked up the downstairs extension and Randy said, \u201cHey, this is Randy.\u00a0 That was cool.\u00a0 Can I talk to Mike?\u201d\u00a0 Mike, as in our bass player Mike Kesti, got on the horn and Randy asked if they could borrow his bass speaker cabinet for a gig.\u00a0 The bass player in Walrus, Kim French, had a tendency to blow up speaker bottoms and when a gig was on the line, no stone would be left unturned to find a unit to borrow.\u00a0 It was kind of a badge of honor for a band in the making to be included in the \u2018borrowing chain\u2019 for a more established band.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In spite of my lack of interaction with Randy back in the day, I sent him an email congratulating him on the Geezer Happy Hour piece.\u00a0 Randy had recounted the passing of his\u00a0 son during the interview so it seemed appropriate to send him my condolences.\u00a0 When he thanked me for the contact, I sent him a previous <\/span>FTV <\/span><\/i>about the old Marquette music scene and left it at that.\u00a0 I knew Randy was teaching at U of M because our good friend Lindsay Tomasic had both Tessier and Walrus drummer Don Kuhli in her band (Trees) when they were based in Ann Arbor.\u00a0 In fact, an internet search for Don Kuhli mentioned Datolite Records and Lindsay by name.\u00a0 Datolite is often found by those searching for copper specimens in the Copper Country so on a hunch, I contacted Lindsay who was now in Los Angeles.\u00a0 One thing led to another and we were able to get Trees booked at the Ontonagon Theater for a couple of shows and a matinee for the Ontonagon Area Schools student body.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0A couple of weeks after emailing Tessier, I got another email blast from the past.\u00a0 I assume Randy had posted my article when Mike McKelvy sent me the Walrus History we printed last week.\u00a0 When I was in eighth grade, I got drafted into playing the drums with some of my older sister\u2019s classmates at a Christmas party she hosted in our basement.\u00a0 The next summer, Rick Leppanen, the bass player from the group, called and asked if I would be available to play the drums at their rehearsals.\u00a0 Apparently their drummer was not always available so I got tabbed as their practice drummer.\u00a0 Any time Rick would call, I would drop everything, hop on my bike and hustle the four blocks to his house on Fair Avenue.\u00a0 It was going great and I had a feeling I might be in line to become their regular drummer until he showed up in mid-rehearsal one day.\u00a0 There he found me playing his drums.\u00a0 I think he got the hint and the phone calls about rehearsing with the Self Winding Grapefruit stopped as quickly as they had started.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In one of his recent emails, Mike asked if I remembered the red sparkle drum set from those rehearsals.\u00a0 It turned out he brought them with him from California in 1965.\u00a0 He said he had first joined a band as the drummer with Ron Phillips and he was nervous at the first gig they did.\u00a0 Drummer Les Ross was in attendance (more on him will be covered in a bit). \u00a0 Phillips had to play the bass lines on his guitar as they did not have a bass player at that point.\u00a0 Eventually, McKelvy sold this Crest kit to the drummer I was filling in for with TSWG..\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0McKelvy also said that in the summer of 1967, he went to California and saw Cream perform in their first American show at the Fillmore in San Francisco.\u00a0 He returned to Marquette with new albums by The Doors, Paul Butterfield, Country Joe and the Fish, Janis Joplin, Electric Flag, and The Jimi Hendrix Experience.\u00a0 The last one was noteworthy because Mike stopped by at a Grapefruit rehearsal one day and said, \u201cYou have got to hear this.\u201d\u00a0 When he set the needle down on <\/span>Purple Haze<\/span><\/i>, our collective mouths dropped open.\u00a0 As soon as the album became available, I had it in heavy rotation for my practice sessions.\u00a0 With Experience drummer Mitch Mitchel added to my roster of great teachers, my learning curve turned upwards in a big way.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0When I was still in eighth grade, my sister used to sneak me into the high school gym so I could watch the drummers for the various dance bands.\u00a0 I can not recall if Mike McKelvy was in one of those bands, but after being introduced to Hendrix by him, I do vividly recall the first time I heard his band, The Public Nuisance, play <\/span>Purple Haze<\/span><\/i> at my first legal high school dance in the fall of 1967.\u00a0 As soon as the familiar (to me, anyway) opening guitar riff started, I told my buddies, \u201cOh man, wait until you hear this!\u201d\u00a0 Mike\u2019s recent email filled in some of the holes I had in my memories about The Public Nuisance (like the name which I could not recall).\u00a0 The band included John Metz on guitar, Rob Neuman on bass, McKelvy on guitar, and drummer Randy Seppala on drums.\u00a0 I knew Rob Neuman from church and Randy\u2019s sister had joined my class when they moved to Marquette when we were in sixth grade.\u00a0 Rob would go on to play bass in radio personality Lane Dawson\u2019s Buck Owens tribute band.\u00a0 Owens had franchise bands all over the country (right down to the iconic red-white & blue acoustic guitar he played).\u00a0 Rob would spread the Buck Owens gospel for many years playing bass and providing background vocals with Dawson\u2019s band.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I was particularly focused on Seppala for a couple of reasons.\u00a0 First, his drum kit was identical to the silver sparkle Ludwig Classic kit (aka:\u00a0 The Ringo Kit) I had been playing since April of 1966.\u00a0 Secondly, I had been playing the <\/span>Are You Experienced? <\/span><\/i>album a lot since learning about Hendrix and I was very interested how Randy would handle the drum parts.\u00a0 I never had a chance to talk to Randy but his sister Janice and Mike\u2019s younger brother Alan were both in my class in\u00a0 high school.\u00a0 I was saddened when I found out Al had passed away in 2022.\u00a0 Al had talked to me about drumming in a band he was working on before The Twig was formed, but it never got off the ground.\u00a0 Mike said his brother was a gifted songwriter and musician and they briefly had a band together in 1975-76 that included Les Ross on drums and Kim French on bass.\u00a0 Mike said, \u201cIt was a good band with great potential but Alan didn\u2019t want to make a career out of music.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Less Ross was the drummer in the backing band Mike (Cub) Koda formed during his one year attending NMU.\u00a0 Les had a family and didn\u2019t want to be on the road too much so he left that line up.\u00a0 Eventually, he would become the drummer of the popular Marquette band East of Orange and the founding drummer of the Finnish Reggae band Conga Se Mena.\u00a0 Les was also my supervisor during an internship I had at the Marquette County Planning Office when I returned to NMU for the 1979-80 school year.\u00a0 During coffee breaks he filled me in on how Conga was born out of a need to play something other than the same wedding reception songs over and over.\u00a0 Conga Se Mena is still around but sadly, Les Ross passed away much too soon.\u00a0 I did talk to Randy Seppala at the Porcupine Mountain Music Festival a few years back.\u00a0 As a resident of Covington, I recognized his bearded figure from a newspaper article about him playing \u2018the bones\u2019 at a music workshop.\u00a0 I introduced myself and told him I am still playing the identical Ludwig set he had in high school.\u00a0 Randy said, \u201cGeez, I wish I still had mine!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Mike also mentioned The Public Nuisance doing a show featuring Jefferson Airplane tunes at the high school with Tret Fure.\u00a0 Tret Fure was to the Marquette music scene what Joan Baez was to the rest of the country.\u00a0 She was an excellent singer \/ songwriter and went on to bigger things in later years.\u00a0 I had not known until now that she and Mike had been an item and he had followed her to Berkeley.\u00a0 McKelvy also mentioned that when he was in California, circa 1977-78, he had traveled to Santa Barbara and jammed with my old Twig bandmate Gene Betts.\u00a0 Mike recalled, \u201cI knew Geno.\u00a0 He was a good guitarist and singer and we used to jam on acoustic guitars.\u201d\u00a0 I was glad to hear Geno started singing.\u00a0 He was never afraid to join in gang vocals (like the chorus of a song), but try as we might, he would never take a lead vocal in The Twig.\u00a0 He would always defer, saying, \u201cI am too shy!\u201d but anybody who knew him would have disputed this notion.\u00a0 Too shy to sing in public, maybe, but not too shy in the social sense!<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0As far as the Mike (Cub) Koda connection, McKelvy covered this whole part of the Walrus story in his history.\u00a0 My connections were a little more scattered at this time.\u00a0 I have often lamented that I never took a picture of Koda leaning on the fender of a black Olds 88 in front of our house.\u00a0 On an earlier \u2018can I borrow a bass bottom\u2019 adventure, Kim and our Mike (Kesti) were wrestling a speaker cabinet made out of an ancient wooden TV enclosure out our front door while \u2018the other Mike\u2019 (Koda) waited outside. \u00a0 Had we had any idea how far Cub would go once he left Marquette, we probably would have taken a picture of the occasion..\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0When I was first managing WOAS in the late 1990s, I had written to Koda\u2019s then label, Blue Wave Records, weeking some complimentary copies from their catalog.\u00a0 When requesting Cub\u2019s <\/span>Welcome to My Job<\/span><\/i> compilation, I mentioned the \u2018borrowing equipment\u2019 story.\u00a0 A short while later, I got a copy of the CD and a very nice note from Cub thanking me for the support and for remembering his time in college (and a nicely inscribed photo).\u00a0 The owner of the label sent me another note with a shipment of CDs in which he said he was touched by the lasting effect Mike Koda had on others.\u00a0 He said he shared my note about Cub with his own kids as evidence that how things they are experiencing now will still be with them twenty years later.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In my e-mail conversations with Randy Tessier, I sent him an article about the old Marquette scene and apologized for not catching my mishandling of his last name when it was published.\u00a0 He went on to post it on his Facebook page which brought another voice from the past into the mix.\u00a0 Cinda Pettys (nee:\u00a0 Cindy Weeson) was an acquaintance of ours (\u2018ours\u2019 including another of my old pre-driving age friends, Nick Gorski).\u00a0 I vividly remember hearing Jefferson Airplane\u2019s <\/span>Surrealistic Pillow<\/span><\/i> at her house when we wandered there on the way to the beach one summer day.\u00a0 I often kid that I always felt my destiny lay somewhere to the west.\u00a0 Ending up in Ontonagon more or less made that idea come true even though it is only 120 miles west of Marquette.\u00a0 Cinda sent me a fact filled catch up note in which she detailed how she and her husband had moved to California in 1979.\u00a0 From there, they migrated to Florida, North Caroline and the finally landed back in Marquette around 2011.\u00a0 She has definitely out moved me!<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0During their stay in Santa Barbara, CA, the Pettys opened their home to an old friend and her daughter for a time.\u00a0 One day, she brought home her new boyfriend who happened to be my old Twig bandmate Geno Betts.\u00a0 Geno and his girlfriend lived in an apartment in the same building for a while but Gene would end up marrying another woman.\u00a0 Cinda mentioned Geno had been back to Marquette with his son and played guitar at his family reunion at the Villa Capri the year before his untimely passing in 2019.\u00a0 She said he played in numerous garage bands in California and at Cinda\u2019s 1982 wedding.\u00a0 From 1982 to 1995, Cinda and her husband, \u201cWere part of the Grateful Dead scene and spent those years going to concerts wherever we could.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Cinda\u2019s passion for all things Walrus also came through when she informed me that Randy Tessier, Don Kuhli and friends would be doing two nights at Big Bay\u2019s historic Lumberjack Tavern this summer.\u00a0 It will be a joyful, crowded affair.\u00a0 In my three summers working at the Huron Mountain Club, we spent a little time (ahem) at the LT so I know the layout well.\u00a0 It is the bar where the real <\/span>Anatomy of a Murder<\/span><\/i> shooting took place, not the version that was built onto the motel in Big Bay for the movie.\u00a0 In the same note, she said Tret Fury would also be in Marquette this summer performing as part of the Music on Third Street concerts that are held on the third Thursday of each month.\u00a0 If Cinda was a Dead Head, then she is also more than qualified to refer to herself as a \u2018Walrus Groupie\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Have I now exhausted you with this \u2018who\u2019s who\u2019 from my early Marquette music scene years?\u00a0 Unfortunately, I have only scratched the surface but if one has the patience to wade through some of the past <\/span>FTV <\/span><\/i>archives (see www.woas-fm.org), you will find isolated tales about many of the people and places mentioned here.\u00a0 Rest assured, every time I take a little trip to the past like this, it shakes the cobwebs in my brain enough to dislodge even more memories.\u00a0 I promise to try and be a little more clear about the who, what, when, where, and why of these thoughts in the future!<\/span><\/p>\n Top Piece Video:\u00a0 Michael ‘Cub’ Koda – a common thread in the Marquette \/ Walrus story.\u00a0 R.I.P. Cub!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0There has been a suggestion that I spend too much of my time \u2018living in the past\u2019.\u00a0 If one considers last week\u2019s article about the Marquette band Walrus, then the verdict would have to be \u2018guilty as charged\u2019.\u00a0 My wife lets me know when I stray too deep into my musical history growing up […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,11,8,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bands-musicians","category-education","category-from-the-vaults","category-woas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3232","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=3232"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3232\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3235,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3232\/revisions\/3235"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}