THE HOME OF PUNMASTER MUSICWIRE
* THE HARDEST WORKING NEWSLETTER IN SHOW BUSINESS *
THE PUNMASTER
A twisted comic strip
by David Gross
Rockabilly Roadhouse
with Big Dave
Saturdays 9am-11am on the KRUSH 95.9 FM, Sonoma County Wine Country
Welcome to the Rockabilly Roadhouse….your amped-up headquarters for the some of the greatest music ever recorded. For the best in high-octane roots music, from the legendary kingpins to today’s torch bearers. Early rockabilly, rock & roll legends and rarities, jump blues, doo-wop, surf and novelty records plus TV classics, movie trailers, vintage commercials and fun retro flashbacks to jog the memory banks! Tune into the Rockabilly Roadhouse as I take you through the high seas of big fun. From Carl Perkins to the Reverend Horton Heat…and beyond. From the sound of Marlon Brando cranking up his hog and Shorty Rogers signature arrangement of The Wild One to stir things up, you know you’re in store for big fun when I amp up the Rockabilly Roadhouse for another adventure in rock ‘n roll hijinks! Get down to the Main Gazane! Remember, they called it Rockabilly long before they called it Rock and Roll.
YOW! BIG DAVE
Rebroadcast Sat. 7pm-9pm & streaming live at KRSH.com
Big Dave Presents:
The Saturday Night Album Trax
Saturdays 9-10pm Pacific on the KRUSH 95.9 FM
BREAK OUT THE HEADPHONES!
Hosted by Big Dave, the Saturday Night Album Trax features some of the greatest albums ever recorded. Deep cuts, live albums, extended tracks, rarities and themes. Plus get the background and inside stories on these classic albums.
These are the good old days!
STREAM IT LIVE at KRSH.com
GREG ERRICO
ROCK & ROLL HALL OF FAME DRUMMER
Greg Errico
The Pulse Behind the Revolution
If you’ve ever felt your spine snap to attention on the downbeat of “Sing a Simple Song” or been swept up in the chaotic funk of “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” you’ve felt the work of Greg Errico. As the original drummer for Sly and the Family Stone, Errico helped define the sound of late ’60s America—genre-defiant, deeply grooving, and impossible to ignore.
A founding member at just 18, Errico was on the kit at Woodstock and on almost every Family Stone hit that matters. His drumming—precise yet explosive, swinging yet syncopated—became a foundational rhythm for future generations. Hip hop producers have sampled him endlessly. Jazz heads name-check him with reverence. And rock historians place him right where he belongs: in the DNA of modern music.
After leaving the band in 1971, Errico didn’t fade—he evolved. From touring with Weather Report and David Bowie to recording with Santana, the Jerry Garcia Band, and Betty Davis (yep, he produced and played on her debut), Errico’s range became as legendary as his pocket.
Still active, still curious, Greg appeared in the Oscar-winning Summer of Soul and is now featured in the new Sly Stone documentary Sly Lives, streaming everywhere. He also recently co-produced the Grammy-winning Basie Swings the Blues and continues to perform and record from his new base in Las Vegas.
Greg Errico isn’t just a drummer. He’s a living groove library, an unsung architect of modern rhythm—and still, unmistakably, the heartbeat of the Family.
Howard Wales
Keyboard Legend
"Howard was so incredible, I was just hanging on for dear life. For some reason Howard enjoyed playing with me, but I was just keeping up. Howard was so outside. It was a wonderful experience, playing with Howard did more for my ears than anybody I ever played with because he was so extended and so different." ~Jerry Garcia
RECORDINGS
"THE MONK IN THE MANSION"
"RENDEVOUS WITH THE SUN"
PERFORMANCE & RECORDING CREDITS
RONNIE HAWKINS (TOURS) TORONTO, CANADA. 1963
LITTLE ANTHONY AND THE IMPERIALS (TOUR). 1964
FOUR TOPS (TOUR). 1964-1965
COASTERS (TOUR). 1965
THE CASINOS ("THEN YOU CAN TELL ME GOODBYE"-STUDIO). 1965
FREDDIE KING (STUDIO SESSIONS) CINCINNATI, OH. 1965-1966
LONNIE MACK (TOURS) CINCINATTI, OH. 1965-1966
JAMES BROWN (LIVE) EL PASO, AUSTIN, AND HOUSTON, TX. 1967
AB SKHY BAND (STUDIO & LIVE) SAN FRANCISCO, CA. 1968
GRATEFUL DEAD ("TRUCKIN" AND "CANDYMAN"-'AMERICAN BEAUTY'- STUDIO). 1970
JIMI HENDRIX (LIVE) LOS ANGELES, CA. 1970
HARVEY MANDEL (STUDIO), "BABY BATTER" & LIVE). 1971-1974 & 1990- PRESENT
JERRY GARCIA (STUDIO "HOOTEROLL?" 1972) (LIVE) 1969-1972, SIDE TRIPS
"EL TOPO" ALBUM, VARIOUS ARTISTS. 1973
"RENDEVOUS WITH THE SUN" -SOLO ALBUM. 1976
HOWARD WALES (TOURS). 1977-1981
WRITING & COMPOSING. 1982-1989
PRODUCTION OF SOLO ALBUM, "THE MONK IN THE MANSION". 1990-1993
LIVE CONCERTS AND SESSIONS, VARIOUS ARTISTS. 1991-2020
SQUID B. VICIOUS
A SILVER TENTACLE IN THE BAY AREA MUSIC SCENE
Born as Bobby Scott in Germany and raised in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco since the early sixties he began his professional music career as a teenager performing with artists such as The Pointer Sisters and Stevie Wonder. Throughout the seventies, Bobby Scott toured extensively throughout Japan and Germany with his band Starbaby, featuring vocalist and violin player Carol Mayedo. Carol was the featured violin player on Neil Young's American Stars and Bars album. Neil Young frequented the bands countless shows with their strongest support being in the South Bay and Santa Cruz. Starbaby was Neil Young's favorite band in 1979.
Squid, a name given to him by an old sea scout master and exploited by manager and associate David Gross of David Gross Entertainment, is credited with writing over five hundred songs and producing projects for countless local musicians and groups including Platinum Squid and Calamari Gold, his own incarnations.
Since 1987, he has been playing lead guitar with The Legendary Sy Klopps Blues Band with other notables such as Neal Schon, Greg Errico, and Ross Valory. Their first CD Walter Ego, was released by Guitar Recordings and was produced by Bobby Scott and David Denny, along with the follow up album Ol Blue Eye is Back. They have performed with Blues Traveler and Soul Hat at the legendary Fillmore, and have recently played at the pre and post Bammies parties in San Francisco.
In 1988 he joined the Bay Area's World Beat leaders The Caribbean Allstars, as lead guitarist. He had several opportunities to trade guitar licks with Carlos Santana, who was a frequented guest and major fan of the band. From Earthquake Relief, to The Greek Theater in Berkeley, to the mammoth Ben & Jerry's Concert in Golden Gate Park, they played to fans everywhere. The band' s last release was called Paths to Greatness on Rokk Steady Records.
In 1990, Squid teamed up with legendary guitar virtuoso Harvey Mandel as bass player. His unique style with more of an innovative guitar approach to the bass, creates a very original sound. The 1997 Harvey Mandel solo album "Planetary Warrior" features Squid on two tracks. You can also find Squid on the 1995 release "Snakes & Stripes." From jams with everyone from Van Morrison to Gregg Allman, Squid has his tentacles on the pulse. The band had reunited with keyboard legend Howard Wales at The Tribute to Chet Helms and literally ignited the crowd. Phil Elwood of the San Francisco Examiner was quoted as saying that the band organized by Harvey Mandel was gutsy stuff, compelling (an overwhelming) beat. Knockout performance!
In 1992, Squid joined Diesel Harmonics as bass player, along with David Denny from The Steve Miller Band. The band features at least three guitarists in their concerts, giving the band a metallic country edge, with crafty tunes and smooth vocals.
Later in '92, he joined Imo and the Moongazing Band as lead guitarist with reggae legend Earl "Chinna" Smith.
In 1993, Squid introduced The Squid Vicious Orchestra, and headlined the Herbie Herbert Roast, a benefit concert for Thunder Road at Bimbo's in San Francisco. The band featured an all-star cast with guest performances by Joe Louis Walker, Robben Ford, Huey Lewis, Narada Michael Walden, The Tower of Power Horns, and members of Journey. His repeat SVO performance capped off the evening at The Tribute to Chet Helms, where Squid was so busy that night, that people were asking him, what bands are you ‘not’ going to play with tonight?!
Multi-instrumentalist Squid B. Vicious recently released a new album under his band name Platinum Squid called “Up From The Deep” with his long time music partner, co-writer and lead vocalist Jimmy Marin aka Jimmy Platinum.
Squid B. Vicious, earning his way to the silver platter!
THE PSYCHEDELIC
GUITAR CIRCUS
featuring...
HENRY KAISER
HARVEY MANDEL
STEVE KIMOCK
FREDDIE ROULETTE
Experimental guitarist Henry Kaiser, a man of boundless energy and an anything goes perspective - who incidentally falls into the Salvador Dali , "I don't take drugs, I am drugs" school - is one of the founding fathers of the relatively new school of American free-improvisational guitar, showcased on numerous solo recordings and side projects. A longtime expert on what is now collectively termed as "world music," Kaiser has produced records of Indian and Korean classical music and most recently traveled to Madagascar to record and perform on the acclaimed "World Out of Time" CD's (with partner David Lindley).
Harvey Mandel ranks as one of the pioneers of not only blues-rock but of virtually every sonic trick rock guitarists have come to take for granted. Along with Mike Bloomfield, he pushed the blues envelope into wide-open spaces and upped the ante considerably when he moved to San Francisco at the height of the Fillmore era. "Without sounding immodest," he states, "I would say we were trendsetters in that area of guitar playing, because it didn't exist before then. There were no Hendrixes or Claptons when I started playing. There wasn't that much on record - you couldn't go down to your local record store and get the real stuff - so my original bible was the Ventures. Then I saw real blues guys like Buddy Guy playing in person." In addition to his work with Charlie Musselwhite, John Mayall, Canned Heat and the Rolling Stones, Mandel's solo LP's are classics - in particular, his debut, Cristo Redentor.
Harvey Mandel has a knack for extending the accepted blues vocabulary, thus transcending the genre. "It wasn't so much what I was listening to," he points out, "it was more the physical part of the guitar. I wanted to be able to express it more like a violin or a harmonica; for some reason I always went for that sustain, long before I even knew what it was. Then feedback came as a result of that." (This was incidentally, long before the advent of Marshall amps. "No, it was mostly on little Fender amps at first, using different tricks, and I eventually used an all-tube, low quality Bogan pa amplifier. Had the greatest natural sustain.")
Just as his landmark Cristo Redentor was more than a 12-bar blues treatise (its use of congas inspired none other than Carlos Santana to add the instrument to his line-up), Harvey is much more than a straight blues guitarslinger. "The truth of the matter is, I always considered myself more of an all-around guitarist," he says, "although my roots come from the blues. But I'm as much a rock player as I am a blues player, as much a jazz player in my own little way. It's a melting pot of all those styles put together."
Besides appearing on Harvey's records, Freddie Roulette has worked with Musselwhite, John Lee Hooker, Sly Stone and Earl Hooker, but has remained and underground legend for the most part. As left-field as his choice of instrument and musical style are - a black bluesman playing an 8-string Hawaiian lap steel guitar - it is his facility and ideas that make him totally unique. In uncharacteristic understatement, Henry Kaiser calls him "a true original." A long-overdue follow-up to 1972's "Sweet Funky Steel," produced by Harvey Mandel is also available.
Guitar aficionados know Steve Kimock of the Northern California band Zero (which at one time included one of the psychedelic guitar's forefathers, the late John Cipollina). "He's much more than a psychedelic guitarist, just like I am," according to Kaiser, "but there's a part of both of us where we're second-generation psychedelic guitarists. He's very tasteful, and this record only shows a few of his many facets."
Henry Kaiser’s 50 year plus career includes electric, lap, and acoustic guitars, encompassing styles of rock, jazz, blues, Hawaiian, finger-picking and bottleneck. Toss in a personal assortment of sounds and what you've got is a guitarist who's been called upon to cover almost every style of music.
Steve says of himself as, "...underplaying an unusual idea; it has a deliberatness to it. It's not about what I play, rather how I play. The technique used to humanize the approach is to tune the guitar in an unusual fashion, so the tuning kind of plays the song all by itself. The clarity that I hope people hear in my playing is not the brilliance of the technique, rather the clarity of thought."
Harvey Mandel, Carlos Santana, Howard Wales
Marin County, CA - 1994
The Otto Preminger of Rock & Roll
With Harvey Mandel at the NAMM Show in LA
The Lumberjack of Bass Guitar
A CONVERSATION WITH GUITAR
LEGEND JOHN CIPOLLINA
The following is a conversation with legendary guitarist John Cipollina of Quicksilver Messenger Service in the infamous Haight-Ashbury home of my good friends Joanie Levin and photographer Alan Blaustein, in San Francisco, California, USA, on June 30, 1985 at 2 AM, PDT.
I had the pleasure of knowing John Cipollina during his last years while I was living in San Francisco. We always had a mutual affinity for 1950's pioneer guitar legend Link Wray.
Just a few weeks before his death, and a few years after I conducted this informal interview, I had the opportunity of playing drums with John at a friends wedding in San Anselmo, California, at which John, an ordained Minister, performed the wedding ceremony. We of course performed the classic Link Wray song "Rumble." I thought it would be nice to share this with the world at large. Enjoy!
David Gross
A conversation in progress.....
John: ....because of the the blues, Bloomfield, Howlin' Wolf, and all those guys...we would play blues societies. It was weird, I've never done anything like that.
David: Small clubs or bigger places?
JC: It was like academic, small mostly.
DG: People studying every note.
JC: Yea, like a private club, they'd take notes, and sit there, and instead of doing an encore, we'd have question and answer periods.
DG: Like workshops.
JC: It was weird, and then when we got into England, and Germany....then it was reversed.... then I was the draw. First time we went over was the Nick Gravenites Blues Band.......Second time it was Nick Gravenites, John Cipollina for a couple of nights, for one night, and the next night would be Cipollina-Gravenites.
DG: You mixed it around a little bit.
JC: Yea.
DG: It was like a long series of shows you did there, then.
JC: We did about seven weeks.
DG: You were like a local band for a while.
JC: Oh yea, no, I couldn't walk down the street, man.
DG: Who were some of your bigger influences....let's go in styles......was it the blues?
JC: Yea, alot of blues... Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Robert Johnson, later....Leadbelly.
DG: Link Wray?
JC: Link Wray was like one of my main, major influences.....and now I'm one of his biggest fans.
DG: You know, he should come out and play a gig with you or something.
JC: You know my studio.... I had Link in my studio eight years ago, for purpose of putting a band together. Have you seen Link?
DG: I'm dying to see him. I've only seen him on a video clip.
JC: He's got a red SG, right?
DG: Right, sure.
JC: I got him that guitar.
DG: Is that right?
JC: Yea, I got him that guitar!
DG: I love "Rumble" and "Black Widow."
JC: Rumble, man.....Rumble just blew me away. That's what turned me on to playing guitar. He's the father of the power chord. I still remember it as one of my strongest memories, man. It just burned itself in my mind. I heard Rumble....it was '58. When I heard that, what I heard was, dirty, man. What he was doing was saying, fuck man, kiss my ass, you know, real rebellious shit, you know, without saying it, you know?
DG: Alot of it was on the radio at that time.
JC: Oh yea, Rumble was a ..... hit.
DG: Do you know Dick Dale?
JC: Yea.
DG: What did you think of him?
JC: I like Dick Dale, I could appreciate him more during the surf period....like I was like.... I was anti-surf, you know? Because they were collegiate. They would like ...like during the folk era, you know...The Kingston Trio........ I was a beatnik..... I was more into jazz....grooving, sharing, umm....that kind of stuff, and like but Link Wray, man. Link Wray affected me so much that first of all, alot of my style, alot of my chords and stuff I got by copying, you know? I saw him on TV man. I'd never played guitar, and he had his guitar that looked so offensive, it was phallic.
DG: What show did you see him on? Ready, Steady, Go or Hullaballoo?
JC: Something like that. Might have even been......it might have even been Ed Sullivan or something like that. But, you know, he was the pioneer...black leather jacket, greased back hair, shades.....you know, lowriders.
DG: Where is he from ?
JC: He's from Maine, you know, back east....Maryland. He's an Indian. And like I had so many images of him.... when I met him, the first time I met him I was scared to death of him, man. I heard he was in town, friends of mine knew him and I offered him my studio, you know. I would have given him....anything... Then I asked permission to come to a rehearsal, you know.....if he would have just said split, I would have split, man. And he turned out to be just one of the guys. And somebody should sit down with him, with a tape recorder, see, cause Link doesen't do any drugs, and he's a vegetarian.
DG: I wish I could say that about Peter Green.
JC: And myself. This guy is a walking encyclopedia of Rock and Roll. He was real tight with Presley and he's got stories, man. He knew all those guys, man. He was on all those big tours, you know. He was one of the original pioneers of rockabilly guitarists. He was a singer and he was in the Korean War and got shot up real bad, got sprayed with a machine gun, and lost a lung. He was told he would never sing again. That's when he got into instrumentals .....he did Rumble, Rawhide, Raunchy, and all that stuff. But I was so infatuated by him, I looked for 10 years for a guitar like he had, man....and would pay any price for it. It was a real turn on to come up and say, hey, check this out, you know?
DG: So he was hanging out in California?
JC: Yea, he was living here for a while.
DG: Where's he at now?
JC: I don't know, I heard a rumor he was living on the East Coast or Europe. And he's got a million ex-wives, man. Ditching alimony on all of them, man.
DG: King Farouk!
JC: Last time I saw him, he snuck into California and he called me up and he was at a hotel with his new bride, he just came in to sign some papers and get out and beat extradition or something. And then I saw him in Copenhagen, but the guy really influenced me alot, man. It was like real satisfaction meeting the guy, you know, and getting next to him.
John Cipollina and Link Wray.......Rest in Peace.....
~ David Gross
