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| Towne Cryers Nov. '66 - June '67
Original members:
Danny Orlino, '68 Guitar
John Chambers, '68 (CVHS) Keyboard
Richie Heinz, '69 Bass
Charlie Wilhoit, '69 Drums
Robert Mansueto, '70 Guitar
After Cubic Feet Nov.'66. June '67 Became the West Coast Iron Works
w/Art Battson and Gary Maltpy from the 'The BACHS'
From Eric Macknight: My second group, the
Towne Cryers, included two guitars, keyboards, bass, and drums. I think the
name came from a Paul Revere and the Raiders song title. 1965 was a huge
year: “Satisfaction”, “Wooly Bully”. We could play anything we heard
on the radio. In our heyday we played at least once every weekend, often
twice—school dances, the Yacht Club, the enlisted men’s club on North
Island. I remember making $15 for a 3-hour gig and thinking, “I’m
getting paid to have fun!” For a long time that $5/hour tax-free was the
best money I ever made.
The Cryers
were a very talented group. Richie Heinz, our bass player, has been playing
music around San Diego ever since. Robert Mansueto, rhythm guitar, became a
dentist but has remained an amateur musician whose interests moved towards
jazz as he grew older. John Chambers was from Chula Vista. As I recall he
first came into the Coronado scene with Dugan Richardson. Soon thereafter
the Cryers got together, and as I understand John has been playing music for
many years now as well. John started out playing the accordion but then
bought a Vox organ, and adding the keyboard really changed what we could do,
compared to other bands that only had guitars. By far the greatest talent in
the band, however, was Danny Orlino, our Guamanian lead guitarist: a genius,
as you will see. All four of them could sing, too.
My mother was very strict, and I needed a car
to carry my drums to and from gigs, so early on she would drop me off and
then pick me up. Later I would get a drive from somebody who had a car and a
license, but I didn’t turn 16 until the summer before Gr. 11, and by then
my professional career was over, so I was pretty out of it socially. I
played the gigs, then I went home.
We got together for mid-week practices to
learn new songs. As soon as a new song hit the charts we would learn it and
add it to our repertoire. In those days, no one wanted to hear original
music: they wanted to hear their favorite songs from the radio, and they
wanted them to sound exactly like the radio. That’s what we did. I
remember that we got along fine except at practices, where there was always
some kind of argument that resulted in somebody quitting the band. By the
weekend, though, they would have cooled off and we kept playing.
It was with the Towne Cryers that I reached my
peak as a musician. I remember one night playing a school dance in the high
school quad when I was ‘in the zone’. I sort of woke up at the end of a
complicated fill and thought, “Wow, how did I do that?” Years later I
saw the great be-bop vibist Bobby Hutcherson play in a small club in
Portland, Oregon. At the end of a long, scorching number that left him
gasping for air, somebody called out, “Hey Bobby, what key was that?”
“I don’t know, man,” he said, “I was playin’ all of ‘em.” When
the technique disappears and you just play what you feel, that’s when
it’s magic.
By the age of 15 I had seen a lot of drunks
and smoke-filled rooms. We played many times at the EM (“Enlisted
Men’s”) club on North Island, where every sailor in the Navy, it seemed,
was from Oklahoma. We played “Wipeout”, and for a laugh the rest of the
band just left the stage when my solo started, leaving me up there pounding
away for what seemed like hours. Afterwards one of the drunken swabbies
expressed his overflowing admiration. “You shor’ can play the hell outta
them drums, kid!” Good times.
I can’t remember why we did finally break
up, but sometime after that I was riffling through albums in a record shop
and found the first Jimi Hendrix release, “Are You Experienced?” I had
never heard of these guys but the album cover intrigued me so I bought it.
After one listen at home I called Richie Heinz: get over here right now!
When he heard it, he said something appreciative like “Holy sxxx!” and
we decided we had to play this music.
Here’s where you get a glimpse of Danny
Orlino’s talent. We got together at school for one practice. Danny had
never heard Hendrix before, but within an hour he had figured out “Purple
Haze” and we had it down note-for-note. It was awesome! We got permission
to perform at lunchtime, and set up against the wall of the auditorium
inside the concrete-and-stucco quad. The lunch bell rang, hundreds of
students poured out of classrooms, and at full volume we launched into
“Purple Haze”. The crowd went wild, as they say. We played it four or
five times in a row. I never had so much fun in my life. And I never got
over how quickly Danny learned to play Hendrix.
The Cryers had a coda, however: one last gig,
at a cowboy bar in Imperial Beach. Strictly for the money. We entertained
ourselves by playing Jimi Hendrix tunes and watching the cowboys’
reactions, and then fooled around playing requests like “Lonesome Me”
that we had never played before (this was before the Neil Young cover that
made the song hip). Our first break lasted about an hour. We had fun, but as
the conclusion to what had been a really impressive run, it was less than
glorious.
Jimi Hendrix was one of the great transformers
who changed the music forever. By then I was a bit bored with the straight
2-and-4 of most rock songs, so playing like Mitch Mitchell was glorious,
almost a non-stop drum solo. But of course just as Charlie Parker spawned
thousands of boring, endless sax solos by untalented imitators, so
Hendrix’s pyrotechnics led to a whole lot of really bad music. But Hendrix
also helped me to recognize that a musical career was not in my future.
Somehow I got smuggled into the junior
officers’ club on North Island to hear the Centaurs, who were to me
legendary superstars. They had a new drummer, Carl Spiron. He was 4-5 years
older than I, but he had only been playing for a couple of years, whereas I
had started in the school band program when I was 8. He had good time, but
didn’t do much that really impressed me. During one of the breaks we got
chatting and I showed him the Mitch Mitchell lick from “Little Miss
Lover” that I’d been working on for 2-3 weeks. “Do that again”, he
said. In less than five minutes Carl had it down pat and could play it
faster than I could. I knew I was done. Not too long after that Carl was
playing with unbelievable chops in the power trio, Framework.
I believe it was that same night when I heard
Drew Gallahar, the Centaurs’ bassist, say that Big Brother and the Holding
Company played ‘trashy’ music. The remark stuck with me because I had
such respect for Drew and the rest of the Centaurs as musicians. They were
well-trained, and highly skilled; they read and composed music, and more
than one of them played multiple instruments. So Drew’s passing remark
really made me think about popularity vs. quality, about the importance of
musicianship, and about the way a ‘trashy’ song like “Louie Louie”,
recorded as a demo in one take by the The Kingsmen, could become a classic
and could have an energy that made its obvious shortcomings as a piece of
music irrelevant. Trashy can sometimes be great. Meanwhile, really superb
musicians might never reach such success. And then, of course, people like
Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix might combine musical genius with great
popularity and musical success.
One more Hendrix-related story: Dave Vaughan
was a couple of years older than I, a very talented drummer blessed with
good looks and a great drum kit. He could play circles around me. One night
there was some kind of gig with lots of musicians jumping in and out, and
for some reason both Dave and I played on “Purple Haze”, more or less
back-to-back. Somebody came up and told me I had played it better than
Vaughan, which was flattering in a wishful sort of way, but I knew the
truth: I played it exactly like Mitch Mitchell, while David played it his
way.
A lot of these talented musicians got their
start in the school band program. When I was in Gr. 4 Mr. Granzer, the
junior high band teacher, visited our class with a bunch of instruments and
gave us the pitch. I took the form home and showed it to my mother, who
figured that whatever I chose, it would last no more than two weeks, so
better to choose the cheapest option, which turned out to be drums: a pair
of sticks and a practice pad. Five years later the poor woman was living
with a rock ‘n roll drummer.
After that I had regular lessons with Mr.
Granzer until Gr. 7, when I joined the junior high band. The man who
inspired us all, however, was Lauren Sanders, the high school band teacher,
who created a jazz band in addition to the regular school band. His senior
groups amazed the whole community in their concerts, won competitions all
over Southern California, and even recorded albums. Many, many people
benefited enormously from his work. In band class, we rushed to arrive
early so that we could ‘rock out’ playing Mancini’s “Peter Gunn”
theme before Mr. Sanders called us to order. The drummers in the back were
always raising havoc, practicing twirls and bouncing sticks off the floor
while waiting for the woodwinds to get their act together. We had weekly
challenges in which the younger players got to challenge for the ‘first
chairs’; it was very hierarchical, and we loved it.
I ‘retired’ sometime late in 1967 when I
was in Gr. 11. I had realized the limits of my musical gifts, and at the
same time the music changed. Hendrix changed it one way, and the Beatles
changed it in another with “Sgt. Pepper”, which was so heavily produced
that even they couldn’t perform most of those songs live. The Doors
changed it, too, injecting a European expressionist sensibility with themes
of murder, incest, and despair. The common denominator for all these shifts?
LSD, of course. The early acid fantasies of the Summer of Love and Peter Max
and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” quickly turned into the mayhem of
Altamont, the Manson murders, and Kent State. Jimi asked us, “Are You
Experienced?” and the answer was no, we were pretty innocent, actually,
and in retrospect we were a lot better off that way. The acid trip, like the
Vietnam War and the politics that went with it, was a bummer. That madness
also had a coda when John Lennon was shot down for no reason at all.
The musicians’ attitudes about playing music
changed, too, around the same time. Before, we were just out to have fun.
Now everyone wanted to find an agent and sign a contract and hit it
big—which I thought extremely unlikely.
I got a taste of this in the one gig I played
with the West Coast Iron Works. They were looking for a new drummer, and I
was interested enough to give it a try. The gig was a San Diego State frat
party in a private home up in the hills somewhere. These guys were
giants—swimmers and football players—and were consuming oceans of beer
along with a toxic mix of “192” and grapefruit juice. I spent the night
literally pouring out the booze that was pooling inside my drum rims and
fighting off drunken Cyclopses who wanted to play my drums ‘just for a
minute’. “Hey, man, I’d love to let you play, but my insurance policy
strictly forbids anyone but me playing on this equipment. I’m really
sorry.” When we finally finished I couldn’t believe I’d made it
through the evening in one piece. I started carrying my drums out to the
truck and found utter chaos: scores of cars sliding down slopes in various
directions. Gridlock + total inebriation + total darkness + steep inclines:
yikes! Somehow we got out onto the freeway and I thought my troubles were
over, but then we blew a tire. It was a long, long night. Gary Carter wanted
me to join the group and contribute all my earnings to the band’s purchase
of a new sound system. They were looking for an agent, or had one, and had
big plans. I, however, had no interest in owning one-seventh of a P.A.
system. Finally he gave me my cut, and that was the last time I played music
for money. Sometime after that they recruited David Vaughan to play drums
for them.
At least, that’s how I remember it. I’d be happy
to be corrected.
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