I tried three times to learn a musical instrument. Firstly drums at 10 but the teacher was not too patient with my progress and I came to dislike him. Secondly with guitar, with my brother teaching me but that fell by the wayside as I had to memorize, by ear, the position of my hand on the fret board. My hand wouldn't cooperate. And lastly piano, and again you have to have coordination to pull that off. What my problem was....propioception. It's the ability to know where and what your body is doing at all time. Sports figures have this in abundance. I however, was a complete klutz and could never get my arms or legs to do those finer movements w/o it looking like spasticity. No ballerina was I.
At my brother's funeral, his best friend, T.M., Esquire (a lawyer) spoke of Ken's highlight of his life, when he was in a garage band called the Felbs. The real name of the band was "The Paul Felber Mutha Fuck Yo' Ass Brown Bitch Biscuit Blues Band." However, even for the 70s which allowed anything, this was going too far. So they shortened it to The Felbs. For the late Boomer generation, being a rock star was a dream as the 60's proved to be so incredibly prolific with creativity. You were adored and girls flung themselves at you. After playing local colleges and nightclubs, they slowly moved up to larger venues like Rocky Point and the Arena in Providence. Instead of playing in front of a few hundred people, it was creeping into the low thousands.
Where was I in this? A tagalong who humped equipment at times. A basic roadie and some tutoring from Mr Felber about acoustics and how to run a mixing board. Being a part of this and the ability to get into clubs, bars and colleges at 15 was fun. If lugging a cabinet and head into a venue, night as well stay as I looked semi official and could say...”I'm with the band.” In truth, no one really cared back then.
It was as close as I could get to rock stardom or near any musical talent. OK. Good enough I thought. I was part of it somehow.
It was at the Rathskellar at RIC in '79 when I saw my first A&R people from what I found out later was Capitol Records. Record companies had “talent scouts” crawling all over to find the next hit band aka: The Gravy Train Money Making Monster Profit Bonanza Hope. I was ordered by my brother not to fuck around nor get too drunk as the band had to put their best foot forward. He also suggested I sit near them to hopefully overhear any conversation. There was a man and women in their late 20's. She looked normal but the guy looked like he stepped off a Hollywood game show set. He had perfect hair, ala Deney Terrio, a perfect tan and the first silk suit I had ever seen. He also never took off his Raybans the entire time he was in the bar.
So I sat there and the band played. The two A&Rs didn't say much at all during the first set till the end when I overheard. “God...they play too loud!” They got up, shook the hands of the guys in the band with an excuse they had to check out a band in Boston. Well, maybe they did, maybe not. Anyways I quietly tell the band what they said and Mr Grzych, the singer, gets back on stage to apologize to the audience for playing too loud. A general shout of “NO! Play LOUDER!” rose up.
Still for a 15 year old me, it was cool to have witnessed this.
So the band keeps plugging away, playing and trying to get noticed by say, WBRU's Rock Hunt where The Schemers beat them out. Oh well.
But then...
The band managed to to gain some notoriety and get a song played in the Boston radio market, WBCN, WVBF,WBZ and WAAF. “Stop & Go World” was the song. It was a combined style of the Young Adults and David Byrne. How anyone in the Boston area knew of this band or this song was a mystery to us all, but there you have it. There was some rotation of the song on the play lists of those stations.
And...two weeks later it was as if the song never occurred. Poof! Another regional one hit weekly wonder disappears.
Hoop Dreams. Only the very, very few ever get to hit it. Thousands start out and the top 5% perhaps makes it, even less have any staying power.
Still at my age now I can still be enthralled by it all. The ability to 1: Play an instrument and 2: Be able to write well crafted songs is amazing to me. Some people really do have this innate talent but not I. Oh well, I did have as small part in it at one time. What happened to the Felbs band? They all graduated college and got “real” jobs. Today they are all eligible for Social Security. I bet they, like I, hark back.
That's them. That's my brother covered in envelopes, aping the New Wave style then.
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