Blackfoot

Them Changes
1972-1978

    Friday, August 25, 1972: Blackfoot has been disbanded for a little more than a year. I stayed up North all that time and am living in Hackettstown, N.J. with the Loret Family (thank you, Ma, Pa, Alan & Paul!), playing with rock band Max Rush (Tony Granito, guitar & vocal; Bill Chambers, bass; Sandy Slavin, drums; and myself on lead guitar).
    That Friday afternoon, out of the blue, my old friend (and ex-Blackfoot roadie) John Vassiliou shows up at my door with Reidsville, N.C. bassist Lenny Stadler. John was now a roadie with Lenny's band Blackberry Hill, and when their guitar player quit, John and Lenny drove up to New Jersey and tracked me down.
     I left for North Carolina with them the next day, at first to play with Lenny's band, but I really had other motives.

    In the weeks before John and Lenny showed up in New Jersey, I had been talking to Jakson and Medlocke about playing together again; Rick had left Lynyrd Skynyrd after playing drums on what would become "Skynyrd's First-and Last" album. By the end of November, '72, Blackfoot had re-formed in North Carolina, with Medlocke, Spires, myself, and Lenny Stadler on bass.
     For a while, Rickey thought that he would enjoy being strictly a lead singer, without playing guitar, so we invited Danny Johnson, an excellent guitarist from the Louisiana band Axis, to join us. He did a great job, and it was a real pleasure to play with him.
     After a few weeks Rick missed playing guitar, so we decided to go back to the original line-up, and we parted company with Danny with no hard feelings. He had quit Axis to play with us, and still he wasn't mad! What a great guy! Good thing for us! As it turns out later, we'd be seeing him again.

Spring, 1973: We played in Greensboro, N.C. a lot, at a club called The Blue Max, and in Charlotte at The Cellar, and had also been getting gigs throughout the Southeast opening for bands like Black Oak Arkansas, Edgar and Johnny Winter, and Poco. We were starting to get on a roll.

    Summer, 1973: Lenny got very sick, and when he finally went to a doctor, x-rays showed a spot on his heart. The doctor looked at some of Lenny's old x-rays and, sure enough, there was the same spot, somehow previously overlooked. Lenny checked into Duke University Hospital for testing and exploratory surgery. His grandfather had told him that he had had a vision that the Lord was going to heal him, and that everything would be fine. Minutes before the surgery was to begin, they took one last set of x-rays to be sure of the exact location of the suspected tumor, and the spot was GONE, healed without medical intervention. Subsequent x-rays looked fine.
     Lenny quit Blackfoot immediately and gave his life to the Lord. He spent the next few years traveling with gospel group The Sammy Hall Singers.
    He is now serving as a pastor in the United Methodist Church, with a congregation in Weddington, North Carolina, and is President of John Wesley Creative Ministries, Inc.

    The rest of us worked on and off at Burlington Industries' Chemical Division in High Point, and a couple of carpet mills, through "PartTime", a temporary manpower agency in Greensboro.

    Fall, 1973: We called Greg T. Walker in Florida, and he agreed to re-join the band. The original 4-piece band was back together, complete with old roadies John Vassiliou and Ricky Reynolds, and new roadie Gary Dalton (Gary had been a roadie for Lenny's band, "Blackberry Hill", the band I had come to North Carolina to join). After a month or so rehearsing in N.C., we moved back to the countryside in Morris County, N.J., where the legal drinking age had been lowered and the club scene had finally opened up. The band did well in the area, and had made a lot of friends, so we decided to stay for a while.

    Spring, 1974: We begin working with West Orange, N.J. booking agent Lou Manganiello, who takes over management of the band.

    Summer, 1974: Rick gets nodes on his vocal cords and loses his voice. When the doctors tell him he will not be able to sing again, we add theatrical singer Patrick Jude to the band. Although he was an excellent vocalist, his delivery was nothing like Medlocke's, and a few weeks later, in the middle of a gig at Dodd's in Orange, New Jersey, Rick could stand it no longer, took the microphone away from Patrick, and finished the night. That was Patrick's last appearance with Blackfoot.

    Fall, 1974: We had been living all together for a year now at the Sokol Camp, a Polish summer camp near Boonton, New Jersey. We were playing a lot (click to hear an MP3), and had worked up a lot of original songs.
     While recording what would later be known as the "First (and Last)" album with Lynyrd Skynyrd at Muscle Shoals Sound Studios (in Sheffield, Alabama), Rick and Greg T. had worked with producers/session players Jimmy Johnson and David Hood. We sent Jimmy and David a tape of our material, and they made us an offer we couldn't refuse: if we could get from New Jersey to Alabama and back, they would house us and produce and record an album on speculation, at no cost to us, recouping their money only when they got a record deal for us.

    Winter/Spring, 1975: We recorded the album "No Reservations", which was released on Island Records that year. Although the album was not commercially successful in general, it enabled us to go out on our first real tours and got us live exposure in some new parts of the country, especially in Texas and parts of Virginia and Tennessee.

    December, 1975: The band moves back to Florida. The cold New Jersey winters were making Rick's fragile health worse (he has had chronic lung problems since infancy, and, as a child, actually had a lung removed), and his doctor had strongly suggested moving back to a warmer climate. We all move into a band house in Gainesville, and prepare for our next album.

    1976: We returned to Muscle Shoals Sound again, to record our second album, "Flying High". Island Records, not having made money on the first album, passed on a second one, so "Flying High" was released on Epic Records later that year. We were playing a lot more of the major concert venues now, with bands including Peter Frampton (on some of his "Frampton Comes Alive" tour), Gary Wright, Kiss, and Ted Nugent.
    Unfortunately, "Flying High" also became a commercial Frisbee, and we were eventually dropped by Epic as well.

    1977: By Fall of this year, we were once again out of gigs and low on hope, close to breaking up. In hopes of getting new management, we contacted Black Oak Arkansas' manager, Butch Stone. Although not able to take on a new project, he was already representing Ruby Starr (of "Jim Dandy to the Rescue" backup vocal fame), whose band had just quit, and SHE had DATES. We arranged to meet Ruby and her road manager, Molly Brumfield, at the Days Inn in Jacksonville; Ruby showed up laughing, proudly waving a recent copy of Hustler Magazine featuring a fan letter about her with an "up-the-skirt" shot of her on stage, leg raised high, in panty hose, (without panties) taken from the front row at one of her concerts.
     She was a real ball of fire, about five feet tall with flaming red hair and ATTITUDE! She fit right in. We figured this could be a fun gig. Back to Gainesville to rehearse for a few days, and then, off we went.

    October 20th, 1977: It's several weeks into the tour, and we've been having a good time playing with Ruby. We are in a Greenville, North Carolina motel that night, getting ready to leave for the club to play our set, when the news comes on the television: Lynyrd Skynyrd's airplane has crashed; there is no word yet on survivors or the extent of their injuries. We rode to the club in stunned silence, hoping for the best, but fearing the worst.

    Early 1978: By the end of January, Ruby Starr & Blackfoot, as it was called, were fed up with each other. Blackfoot road manager John Vassiliou had quit several weeks earlier, and on January 31st, in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, Ruby said that she, too, had had enough. On the morning of Feb. 1st, we parted ways. As crazy as things got towards the end, I really liked Ruby and Molly.
    We were happy to be on our own again, but were once again without gigs. Over the next few weeks, we limped back to Florida, where we discovered that the rental truck bills, in OUR name, had not been paid as we thought, and our equipment had been impounded with the truck. Rick and I took out personal loans to bail out the gear.

    June, 1978: We are contacted by Brownsville Station ("Smokin' in the Boys' Room") manager Al Nalli and his partner Jay Frey. On one of our more recent tours through Texas, we had been booked with Brownsville Station, and Nalli, who had never heard of us, didn't understand why radio stations and promoters were saying that Brownsville should open for US on some of the shows. B.S. frontman Cub Koda called Nalli with a report after the shows, and Nalli's interest was piqued.
    He bought our contract from our old manager, Lou Manganiello, and by July 5th, we were back in Hackettstown, New Jersey, living at "Ralph's King Size Motel" and rehearsing at a friend's hang gliding school, writing some of the songs that would soon be released on "Blackfoot Strikes".
    We work up around 20 songs or so, including a strong version of a song called "Train, Train", written by Rickey's grandfather, Shorty Medlock. We had covered another of Shorty's songs, "Railroad Man", on our first album, "No Reservations", in 1975.

    Fall, 1978: We go to Ann Arbor, Michigan, the Nalli stronghold, to finish the pre-production stage of the record. Al's sister, Rene Nalli, is a vice-president at Atco Records, and she and Atco exec Doug Morris are VERY involved in the project, spending a lot of time with us at the final pre-recording rehearsals in Brownsville Station's warehouse. We fine-tuned the songs in a way that satisfied management, record company, and the band.
     "Blackfoot Strikes" is finally recorded in the basement studio below the Nalli Music Store Annex, 312 S. Ashley St., Ann Arbor, (produced by Al Nalli and engineered by Brownsville Station drummer Henry Weck) and was completed by Jan., 1979, an example of true collaboration, and destined to be the band's most commercially successful effort.