I’m on the stage in my grade school auditorium/gymnasium, the place where I attended my first record hop nearly four decades earlier. The audience has been gathering, like bees to the hive just before dusk. The buzz subsides. There are sometimes hundreds of them, standing shoulder-to-shoulder and looking up at me and the other members of the band, but mostly at me. The silence goes on too long, and yet they don’t stir or turn away or make a sound. It’s as if everyone in the room has stopped breathing and, if we don’t start making music soon, they could all drop from asphyxia. So I grip the neck of my Stratocaster and step to the mic. That’s when I realize that we have nothing to perform — we've never rehearsed or performed together as a group, and, worse yet, I don't remember how to play the guitar.
Since I finally formed a rock band in my mid-fifties, I've stopped having the recurring nightmare about facing an audience unprepared. I play bass and sing in a group called Reprise 60s (briefly known as BackTracks). Nowadays, the humiliations are real. I can no longer wake up after a bad on-stage performance and thank God it was only a dream.
Our first public performance was eerily similar to the one I have experienced so many times in my dreams. It was also nearly our last. A few days after it happened, I went home and started a “band journal.” The following is my initial entry:
Almost With The Band
A Rock and Roll Journal
by Gary Ingraham
The stage that night belonged to the Guidici Family. I grew up with Jim Guidici, one of the most musically gifted people I’ve ever known. In our 20’s, we often got together with acoustic guitars to play and sing Beatles’ songs, especially those which featured complex harmonies. Jim comes from a musical background. His father, Angelo, is a singer, and at 86 he still loves to put on a show, performing the old standards made popular by Sinatra, Tony Bennett, and others from their era. Jim’s sister Shauna is an accomplished jazz singer and keyboard player. Brother Larry plays drums and sings, and younger sister Liz sings, too. Then there’s Phil, the “middle” brother, who plays rhythm guitar and shares vocals in my band, BackTracks.
The Guidici family members assemble twice a year to perform in the Upstate New York town where they were raised and where most of them still live, and they always draw a huge crowd. Jim drives in from Chapel Hill , North Carolina Boston
Despite my delight in getting to pretend I was a Beatle for a few minutes, I left that night reminded of something I’d learned many years ago—the music and entertainment industries will continue to survive without my contributions.
But my memory is selective when it comes to less than spectacular performances. So here I was again, 14 months later, sitting in Jonathon’s and waiting for my latest lesson in humility. Already on stage were Jim and his four siblings, Phil, Larry, Shauna and Liz. Liz’s son Jamie was on drums. Bob, lead guitarist for BackTracks, had been asked to sit in with the Guidici Family that night. He was joined by the only other non-Guidici, a bass guitar player who has been a regular on the local music scene since the 1960’s. We had arranged for BackTracks to play a few songs when the Guidicis took their first break. Just over an hour into their first set, Jim stepped up to the microphone and introduced a “new band” featuring his brother Phil, his nephew Jamie on drums, Bob on lead guitar, and, on bass, Gary Ingraham. My hand was shaking as I grabbed my instrument—an off-brand replica of Paul McCartney’s violin-shaped Hofner 500/1—and approached the front of the room. I plugged in and turned to face the audience.
Bob, Phil, Jamie, and I had known for weeks that this moment was coming. We had decided to play just four songs—our best four—and we rehearsed them every Tuesday night until our fingers cramped and our throats went hoarse. We were to start with two early Beatles’ hits: All My Loving featuring me on lead vocal, followed by This Boy with three-part harmony. Next, we planned to play the Byrds’ classic, I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better (my lead vocal, again) which would lead immediately into When You Walk in the Room (Phil singing lead this time), a song that was recorded by a British Invasion band called the Searchers. We had worked for hours on backup harmonies, timing and pacing of each song, the intros and the outros, and a seamless transition from the Byrds’ number into the Searchers’. I was still trying to master the very tricky art of playing bass lines and singing at the same time.
I was wound tighter than my guitar strings. I plucked one softly to make sure my amp was hot. I looked out into the dimly-lighted room, to the booths along the wall to my right and the line of tables to my left, starting just a couple of feet from the stage area and continuing to the other end of the room. Every chair, bench and barstool was occupied. A few people lingered near the front door, others leaned against the three-foot-high wall that divided the bar from the dining area. The room had gone quiet. Drinks were lowered. All faces were turned toward us.
There was nothing left to do but to trudge onward and hope that, through some miracle, we would play better than we had ever played before.
Bob was to my far left. Phil was between us and Jamie was behind me on the drums. The rest of the Guidicis had left the stage. I began the count into the first song, All My Loving, when I noticed something large and dark moving fast between Phil and me. Someone else was on the stage with us. The other bass player was dressed in black so I hadn’t noticed him standing behind us in the shadows. He had grabbed an acoustic guitar and was actually lunging forward toward a vacant mic. “No, no,” I heard him shout at Bob. “We’re doing Feel a Whole Lot Better.” Phil had shared our mini-set list with his brother, Jim, who in turn must have shared it with his bass player. I heard Bob protest mildly, saying something about the arrangements we planned and the way we had rehearsed our transition between songs. “No, no,” the intruder repeated, “We’re doing this one.” And he began madly strumming the guitar intro to the Byrds song that was to have been the third of our four numbers. Phil scowled in my direction, as if to say, What the hell is going on here? Damned if I knew. Bob shrugged and began playing along. I started singing and trying to keep up with the bass line. We had been taken completely by surprise, and it came across in our sound. I was having difficulty finding the rhythm that had been established during the opening chords. Half way into the second verse, I realized that the man in black was singing the lead part along with me. During the guitar solo, he turned to me and said, “Don’t sing the next verse.” Fine with me. I was having enough trouble keeping up on the bass.
As the song ended and the last note rung through the room, he set down his guitar and left us standing there, stunned by the three-minute ambush we’d just endured. Later, my wife, Patricia, told me that she expected me to drop my own guitar and storm off. Instead, I nodded to the others and began my count … Two, three …
And we made it through the rest of our songs with only a few glaring mistakes. I blew part of the bass line on All My Loving, but later Jim congratulated me on that song, commenting that I hit every note “dead on,” so I guess my flubs weren’t as noticeable as I’d feared. Patricia said she loved This Boy because she thought I was singing directly to her (I was). And Phil claimed he had received positive feedback on our last song, When You Walk in the Room. I have to agree that we nailed that one as a group, probably because by then we’d had time to recover from our initial shock and awe.
My experience on that night left my mind’s door open to that familiar prowler, self doubt. The questions dogged me. Am I too old for this? Do I suck at it? Does anyone really want to listen to a grandfather singing rock and roll music?
But then comes the most important question of all: Who am I doing this for?
Is it for the Guidicis?
No.
Is it for the people out there who may just be too polite to get up and walk out in the middle of our performance?
No again.
Is it for my wife who never fails to encourage me, for my band mates who consistently praise my on-going progress on the bass, or for the member of The Family who reportedly told Phil that we never should have gotten up on stage that night at Jonathon’s because we just aren’t good enough?
No, no, and hell no!
I’m doing this for me.
And I’m not ready to give up just yet.
Just a few days after our introductory performance, we learned from Phil that his nephew, Jamie was quitting the band. Although we didn’t know it at the time, that night at Jonathon’s Restaurant we had lost our drummer along with a significant but redeemable measure of dignity.
Bob, Phil and I continued to rehearse Tuesday nights at the church where Bob is a member and the former musical director. Sometimes, on Saturday mornings, we would meet at my house to work specifically on our two and three-part vocal harmonies, trying our best to duplicate the sounds of the sixties’ British Invasion groups that included the Beatles, the Searchers, Herman’s Hermits, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas . We changed our name, becoming Reprise 60s, to better reflect the musical niche we were creating for our band.
We considered billing ourselves as a three-piece vocal group, but we always knew that the right drummer would be crucial to the mix we were seeking. One night, as we were setting up for rehearsal, Bob mentioned a friend, Mike, who might be interested in joining us on the drums. We agreed to give Mike a try. A few minutes into his audition, we knew that he was a perfect fit for our band. He had just the skills we were looking for in our percussionist. And Mike continued to sound better with every rehearsal. As we got to know him, we realized that he takes the time to listen to each song as it was originally recorded, picking up on nuances that a lesser drummer would surely miss. A few weeks after Mike joined the band, we added an equally important element – our sound engineer, Kevin. (Although he doesn’t play an instrument or sing, Kevin is as much a member of Reprise 60s as any of the four musicians.)
At Mike’s request, we began rehearsing at his father’s house. Here I was, a fifty-something-year-old grandfather, playing rock and roll every Tuesday in my friend’s parents’ garage. Give me an old Mercury station wagon to drive, a 10 o’clock curfew, plus a thicker head of hair and it would be 1967 all over again.
As October arrived and the temperatures began to drop, the unheated garage was no longer an option, so we moved back to the church. Another dozen Tuesday nights would go by before we would make our first public appearance as Reprise 60s.
NEXT UP: The First Jobs
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