Chris Wimpey

Rick Hodgkiss, Jim Reger, Roger Williams

“They’re a pretty strong bunch of kids and they realize the dangers. They look out for each other. If there were only one, I’d be worried. One kid out in the cold cruel world. But when they’re all together like that, I think it’s like a little army.’’

— Mother Weir

In Westwood, a few miles from UCLA, near the end of a tree-lined street, stands a pleasantly Midwestern-style, slightly ramshackle three-story house: the Los Angeles residence of The Weirz.

Larry Weir

Ann Summa

The Weirz are a band living together — there is a certain feeling of people in transit. The Weirz are also a family living together — there are also comfortable overtones of security and stability.

The kitchen is light and airy, and the counter space is cluttered with enormous Mexican papayas. The living room is dark and sepulchral, like an empty nightclub on Sunday morning.

While various Weirz go about their business in the rest of the house, the living room waits, empty of people but full of their toys. The room is almost totally taken up with the instruments and stage equipment of the band: pianos, synthesizer, amplifiers, guitars, horn cases, drum boxes, cymbal envelopes, PA system, mike stands naked as trees in winter, and coiled miles of wires scattered in happy profusion like a springtime nestful of pit vipers.

To sit on the overstuffed sofa and face these silent totems of the Weirz clan is a strange experience. The sheer quantity of the equipment is awesome; it gives some forewarning of the chaos to come as the Weirz (the name is Weir; they added the z for fun) begin to drift through the living room — singly and in groups. Some say hello, some merely nod, a few sit down and talk, others sit down and listen.

There are nine of them, and introductions soon become meaningless as names, ages, duties, and roles jumble together in a catechism of confusion.

Larry, Joan, Pixie, Tom, Cathy, Theresa, Michael, Estelle, Maria. Guitars, congas,, trombone, drums, trumpet, saxophone, vibes, keyboards, bass, flute, Hammond M3 organ. Singers, percussionists, horn section, composer, arranger, roadies, drivers, managers. 26, 14, 21, 23, 20, 19, 16, 24, 25. Horseback rider, runner, skateboarder, jazz freak, country nut. Friendly, hyper, confused, decisive, innocent, crazy, cynical, spontaneous, naive, sexy, introverted, normal. Brothers and sisters. Sisters and brothers. Six of one, three of the other.

It’s a Weirz Weirz World.

The Weirz are perhaps best known to San Diegans as the creators of a hit off of one of the KGB radio Homegrown albums. The hit — “Gypsies from Bonsall’’ — was a fairly accurate representation of the Weirz lifestyle at the time:

We’ve been kicked from every place that we’ve lived in

Because the neighbors don’t like music after ten o’clock shu bop shu biddily bop

Tried to fit eleven people in one room, drove the landlord crazy

Till he went and kicked us out shu bop shu biddily bop

Found us a place where we can do our thing

We’re gypsies from Bonsall

There’s no stopping at all

We’re gypsies from Bonsall

Cut the school bit and the routine job trip

Cause it all looks better after two a.m. o’clock shu bop shu biddily bop

Trade it all the trucking on the freeway

For a crazy farm of rabbits, goats and hen and crowing cock shu bop shu biddily bop.

©Larry Weir

“Gypsies From Bonsall’’ was a significant event in the life of the band, proving as it did that they could succeed with original material, that they were doing something right after all.

Now, after five years of The Weirz, it seems they are standing on another threshold. Soon all the scenes may change, all the roads unwind, all the characters change. They may forget all the arguments with weasel-eyed club managers trying to cheat them out of their money, all the crazy conversations with flipped-out gas station attendants in the middle of night in the middle of nowhere. All this may change, for the Gypsies from Bonsall are about to go Hollywood.

Jack Barry, the emcee from the quiz show The Joker Is Wild, is in negotiations with the Weirz’ lawyers for an eight-show series. The shows would be “sort of a Sha-na-na type thing’’ using all the members of the group.

The Weirz, kicked from every place they’ve lived in, may soon find a home in the living rooms of millions of Americans.

Any way you look at it, that’s quite a trip for a restless family band from Escondido.

“I was the organist at the cathedral in San Diego — St. Joseph’s. And my husband joined the choir. He had a beautiful voice. And so that’s where it all started — up in the choir loft.’’

— Mother Weir

The St. Joseph’s choir loft may have been the beginning, but somewhere along the way a little credit is due Mercy Hospital, where all nine Weir children were born.

All the children except the youngest, Joan and Michael, were raised in Escondido. All were involved in the church choir and school bands. The taking up of instruments was not always a matter of inner compulsion. For some, it appears, it was simply an accident, a flash of whimsy on the part of the music teacher. Pixie, for example, now plays the trombone because her first band teacher told her, “Ah, you have big lips. You shall play the trombone!’’

In the late Sixties, KOWN radio in Escondido was pushing a single by a local band — “Boy It’s All In Your Head,’’ by the Royal Enterprise. The Royal Enterprise was not pure Weir, but was heavily dominated by the older children. The mild success of the single led nowhere, and in 1969 the family moved to Oxnard where Father Weir, an architect, was thinking of setting up his business.

In Oxnard the band suddenly took on more character; the family had moved, friends had been lost, childhood haunts left behind. Things somehow felt more serious. Oxnard was not the sunny, familiar, sleepy North County. It was a large, poor, multiracial city north of Los Angeles. The Weirz, no longer the Royal Enterprise, were the new kids in town and they were determined to make a name for themselves.

In the move, the band had lost their bass player, and thus by necessity, without premeditation, the Weir Sibling Assimilation Plan went into effect. “We had to take our keyboard player, who was then Maria, and say, ‘Maria, you will now play bass guitar.’ And then we took Estelle, who was off wandering through the tulips somewhere, and put her on keyboards.’’

For months they sat in a garage in Oxnard trying to get things together, writing tunes in the style of Iron Butterfly and dressing in psychedelic paisleys. The first performance, in front of an all-black audience at a local recreation center, was less than a success. The highlight of the evening was a vicious fight in the parking lot that completely emptied the hall in the middle of the band’s set.

While they struggled to secure some sort of a following, Larry Weir, the oldest and most musically ambitious at the time, came up with the idea of putting on a musical. Although his original intention was simply to get a few credits from his college professor, the show took on its own life, and soon the entire family was involved in some aspect of theater production — set-building, staging, program direction, advertising, music, publicity, printing of programs.

Pixie Weir

Ann Summa

The first show was such a success that they did another one the next year, selling out the 1800-seat Oxnard Community Theater. A third musical was also performed there in 1973. Everything from the lyrics to the lights, from the management to the music, was a Weirz product. By the time of the third musical, they had attracted a retinue of eighty people — actors, artists, singers, hangers-on. The shows were becoming an expensive habit.

In order to help finance the productions, the more malleable Weirz band hustled around the Ventura-Oxnard area, trying to secure good-paying dates. When they discovered the CPO clubs on the military bases, they attacked them with the delight of a child on Christmas morning.

Larry: “It was like a gold mine when we realized that we could go to Pt. Mugu, to the military base, and say…”

Pixie: “Six girls! That was all you had to say. Six girls!’’

The musicals were the training ground for the band that was to emerge in late 1973 after the family moved back from Oxnard to Poway. The final incarnation of the Weirz — a complete nine-piece band with a distinct flavoring of the best-selling group, Chicago — returned to the garage to tighten up.

While they were tightening up, their next door neighbor, a law student studying for his bar exam, was getting uptight. Their “excessive” practicing drove him to distraction, despair, and eventually legal proceedings. The band was forced to move to Bonsall, a tiny, close-knit community between Vista and Fallbrook.

In Bonsall they converted their garage into a studio and produced their first hit, “Gypsies From Bonsall.’’ The environment in Bonsall was obviously more agreeable than Poway, for one of their most ardent supporters was the local county sheriff, Don Nicks. It was Sheriff Nicks, as a matter of fact, who urged them to try and get the song on the KGB Homegrown album. They took his advice and found themselves with a hit.

From Homegrown to Hollywood was not simply a two-and-a-half hour drive on the freeway. The Weirz made plenty of side trips along the way: San Francisco, Vancouver, Tucson, Spokane, Denver, San Antonio, Houston, Louisiana, Florida. They purchased an enormous truck to carry their equipment and the portable stage they take with them. Self-contained, self-propelled, like a sophisticated smart bomb, they roamed around the country, exploding before unsuspecting audiences.

It’s not an amazing story, not a particularly unusual background for a struggling young band, yet there are some disturbing quirks — some convoluted little twists in the fabric, wrinkles in the design — which make the tapestry of their tale decidedly different.

In the first place, they are basically a female band. The horn section, keyboards, percussion, and most of the vocals are performed by the women. While Larry is the acknowledged leader — he writes all the songs, most of the lyrics, and does a lot of the arranging and managing — Pixie’s stage presence is a main focal point of their show. The night I saw them at the Troubadour in Los Angeles, fourteen-year-old Joan’s conga solo was definitely the inspired high point of the evening. Ultimately, however, Larry is the voice of authority within the group.

Trumpeter and vocalist Cathy Weir’s opinion may not be shared by other women in the band, and will certainly not endear her to any liberated feminist, but it does offer some insight into how the band, as well as the family, functions.

“We all put in our own decisions, but Larry has the last say. We respect him more because he’s a guy. I would rather have my brother telling me what to do. I like having a guy telling me what to do rather than a girl. When my sister had to take over one time, we all had fights. Larry has kept us together.”

For Larry, the presence of his six sisters in the band is an obvious asset. Speaking of a recording session at A&M Records, he comments on how the sexual make-up helps make friends. “There’s immediate interest when somebody says, ‘Hey! There’s a group down the hall with six chicks! And three of them play horns!’ I mean, you know, we have a freak show. They run in to find out what’s going on. We’ve met a lot of people.’’

In the music industry in Hollywood, of course, meeting people is the name of the game. Thus far, the Weirz have met Tom Scott, the Crusaders, Robben Ford, the Pocaro brothers, Freddie Hubbard, and Henry Louis. In other words, the cream of the L.A. studio session scene. They’ve been invited to sessions, gone over to Joe Sample’s house (he’s one of the Crusaders), studied with members of Tom Scott’s L.A. Express.

Then, of course, there is the family connection. The family aspect is not something that Larry likes to dwell on. He realizes that it can be exploited, but overall seems to feel that it creates an unnecessary barrier between the audience and the musicians.

“I remember contacting all these military bases and telling them, ‘Hey, we got this great family band.’ Just to make the money, you know? We don’t like to use the family aspect — you know, you can use it as a scam to get certain gigs, but I could never go to a college, say, and tell them, ‘Hey, I’ve got this great family band. . . . We just want to be judged for our music and our playing abilities. The fact that we’re related, that’s neat and an asset, but you can’t use that as the staying power for the group. I would prefer that people think of us as individuals with different last names and treat us just like they would Santana or any other group.

“When we play places where we’ve been advertised as a family band, it’s just the shits. You have to spend the first half hour of your set trying to win that uphill battle. People are just sitting on their hands thinking this is supposed to be some sort of pop trip. It’s such a psychological thing.

“There have been so many funky family groups that it’s not hip to accept them. Up until this time there hasn’t been a very hip emphasis on musical families. They’ve mainly done trips where they’ve had stock arrangers come in and do things. They’ve never been able to stand there on a stage without a backup orchestra and put on the type of thing we’re doing. We have a very bombastic group. We opened the Runaways and we blew them off the stage.’’

There is a good deal of truth in what Larry says about the hip acceptability of a musical family. Rock and roll has never been known for its salutary effect upon the stability and health of the American family. This is not to say there have not been rock and roll “families’’ — witness the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers. But there has never been a rock and roll family.

If you are still skeptical, if you still think that all family bands must be pop-oriented, distinct echos of the squeaky-clean Osmonds, with their capped teeth, blow-dried hair, and Listerine breath, then segue along with the Weirz into: ‘ ‘The Night The Weir Gang Hit Vista.’’

“We worked this club in Vista one time. It was the first time after we were on the Homegrown album, and we built up a solid crowd there. We were really making the club money.

“We worked there for one solid week and then I got a call from my bank. They told me I was overdrawn about 500 dollars. I went down there and they told me this check had come back. It was from the nightclub — a 900-dollar check. I went down to the club but the manager was gone.’’

Having discovered that the manager had absconded with their pay, Larry came up with a proposition for the club owner: the band would play an extra week and take all the money until the check cleared. They would also be paid for their extra time. He was giving the club owner a chance to redeem himself.

“Come Saturday night I go up to the bartender and tell him I need the 900 dollars plus what we were supposed to get that night.

“He says, ‘Well, I can only give you what you’re supposed to get tonight.’

“I said, ‘What the hell is this?’ and I phoned up the owner. He lives in La Costa. I mean he’s a millionaire.

“He says to me, ‘I’m sorry, Larry. You can’t take any more money from me because I need money to run the club next week when you guys are gone. I’ve got to survive, so don’t be taking any more from me. I’ll make it up to you a little later sometime on when I can.’

“I said, ‘Well, bullshit. I’m taking my money. ’

‘“Larry, don’t you dare take that money!’

“ ‘I’m sorry.’

“So I hung up and I turned to the bartender and said, ‘Look, you take a walk down to the end of the bar and keep yourself busy, because we’re going to get that money.’

“Then me and a couple of other guys just went into that cash register. The police were on their way down. We just took that money and put it in a bag and I got in this car, this getaway car, and drove all the way to L.A.

“The sheriff came up when they were still loading equipment in the truck. Tom told them the story and they just laughed. The next day in the paper there was a story : ‘Band Robs Nightclub.’’’

The Weirz are not just a family that happens to be a band; they are a band that happens to be a family. One of their greatest fears seems to be that when they are “discovered,’’ the men with the money will try to manipulate them, try to mold them into something they aren’t.

“It would just be horrible,’’ says Larry, “to sign on with a producer who wants to do it his way and we’re in the studios just going out of our minds, saying, ‘Oh, this is so shitty!’ You have to feel right about a situation. You can’t totally go against the grain and do something that is just shitty, because you can’t get into it.’’

Like Tom Scott, Larry Carlton, and other session masters of L.A., Larry talks hopefully about the “right marriage’’ — the perfect blend of producer, engineer, and artist.

One fear that the band as a whole doesn’t seem to have is that personnel changes will come along and fragment the band.

Joan, whose perspective at fourteen might be different from her sisters, doesn’t see marriage as being a viable alternative to band life. “Music is our marriage for now, until we’re successful. How can you get married if you’re frustrated? You only bring the other person down if you haven’t reached your goal.’’

Larry himself, peeking in the door of Hollywood’s music world, is enthusiastically optimistic about the band’s longevity. “I’m beginning to think that maybe we’re going to be doing this for a while. Look at Chicago. As everyone grows up, we’re naturally getting more interested in the business. We’re starting to find that it’s a blast. It beats doing anything. It beats shoveling shit somewhere. It’s a gas. It’s fun. The whole hope of the group has been that if we do boogie, or whatever happens, at least we will have learned enough from the group to be able to stand up as a musician in some other band.’’

Regardless of what success the future may bring, the Weirz seem satisfied right now. They know too many talented musicians who are just not working. They are definitely not complaining about life on the road, but they do have hopes for something a bit higher. “We can still make money on the road or doing the nightclub thing, but we realize that we’ve got to reach a lot higher than that. We’ve got to get into the recording thing.’’

For now, obviously, the Weirz will remain the living embodiment of the maxim, “The family that plays together, stays together.’’ As Larry says, “Listen, what else would we do? Our alternatives are, um, uh, limited. ’’

The Weirz, (from left) Michael, Estelle, Theresa, Larry, Pixie, Tom, Maria, Jean, Cathy

Ann Summa

As for Mother Weir — for whom everything began in the choir loft — she has no complaints either. “I think they learn so much from each other. They learn to live in a group like this where you have to cooperate. You can’t go out and kill each other, because you know you’re going to have to work together. The music binds them together. I think the musical thing has been beautiful for the family.’’ Finally, there is Father Weir, the silent sponsor during all the bad times, the stolid supporter of the band whose nine-to-five job helped them keep going. I never did get a chance to ask him what he thinks of his progeny, but Saturday night at the Troubadour, I did get to hear what they think of him.

Towards the end of the second set, Larry asked that the light be dimmed and then announced that it was his father’s birthday.

“Where is the old dude? Ah, there he is. Okay. Everybody sing along:

Happy birthday to you

Happy birthday to you

Happy birthday dear daddy

Happy birthday to you.’’

As the entire club joined in, the spotlight located Father Weir, a kindly looking man in a suit. He stood there in the light, eyes blinking, listening to a roomful of strangers singing happy birthday to him.

What else can be said? What else can be sung? Even in jaded, cynical Hollywood, a roomful of laid-back patrons abandoned their Perrier to join the family.

Happy birthday dear daddy

Happy birthday to you.

-JEFF SPURRIER

It’s a weekend night at Mission Valley’s Ivy Barn. Outside, car cruise up and down the rows of nearby parking lots in hopes of finding an empty space. As usual on weekends, it is very crowded. Inside, refugees from the work world slump down in plushly padded red booths and squeeze together around heavy wooden tables, drinking, letting down their hair, and letting out the pressures of the nine-to-five, Monday-through-Friday work week.

Seated at one of the tables is Ron Rawlings, a tall, bearded man about thirty years old. Rawlings, who is here alone tonight, is gregarious and talkative. He’s been a court reporter and also a stock broker, a position at which he made “obscene amounts of money.’’ Rawlings is telling several persons at the table how he’s spent some of that money helping a woman friend — a songwriter and piano player — land a recording contract.

“We’ve spent $60,000 on album demo tapes and talked to one of the hottest producers in the business,’’ he says. There, have been few tangible rewards — a few good tapes but no recording contract. Rawlings’ friend, Amy, is still playing the small-time circuit, tonight at a local lounge. But Rawlings says the financial investment has also taught him some lessons — for instance, the first stage of making it in music.

“It’s very simple,” he says, “but it took us a lot of money to find out. The first thing you’ve got to do is get something on tape that’s really representative, and then you’ve got to get an influential industry person to listen to it.’’ Rawlings’ experiences have also taught him that the struggle for success in the music business can sometimes take its toll. “Some of these musicians’ stories will really make you cry.

“You want a really great story, a real tear-jerker? Write about what some of these guys go through trying to make it in music. It reminds me of the 1840s, guys going west for gold, some of the guys walking from San Francisco to Alaska. And that’s what some of these guys [musicians] are doing— coming from West Virginia and Chicago to New York and California, hoping to strike it rich.’’

In other parts of the Ivy Barn’s lounge, as Rawlings talks, the three members of the East West Band are just getting into the beginning of their work week. For them, it’s the latest installment of what they hope will be their own rock-and-rolling-to-recording-contract story. If musicians’ treks toward gold can be compared to 1840s miners’ walks to Alaska, the East West Band has probably gotten as far as upper Washington. Since February of 1977, when they came to California from West Virginia, the group — Rick Hodgkiss, Jim Reger and Roger Williams — has supported itself through music. Of course, it has not been easy.

It’s opening night for the East West Band at the Ivy Barn, an engagement they hope will last several weeks. It’s just after eight, almost an hour before the band will do the first of four forty-five-minute sets. Reger is at the bar, looking the epitome of rock and roll cool, with a globe of light-brown curls and a moustache that comes to two dagger-like points at his jaw line. But Reger is tense. An athlete in high school, he talks of always experiencing opening-night nervousness, “like a football player’s pregame jitters.” The afternoon of a performance, to ease the nervousness that will come later, Reger runs six miles and does either a half hour of self-hypnosis or twenty minutes of Transcendental Meditation. “But this, ” he says, looking to a beer, “is the greatest meditation of all.”

As Reger talks, Hodgkiss is fretting about the sound system, which the band had spent hours setting up. Hodgkiss off-stage is shy, in contrast to Reger’s easy, joking manner. He’s quiet and Solitary as he adjusts an amplifier. His long, wavy hair framing a thin face with prominent cheekbones, he has a Renaissance look about him as he twists dials, like da Vinci tinkering with an invention.

Williams, the band’s lead guitarist, is chatting, shaking hands as he almost bounces from person to person, exhibiting the almost manic energy that marked Paul McCartney in the early Beatles’ films, although he more closely resembles George Harrison. Williams has the most musical experience of anyone in the band, plus some college stage experience — and his lack of nervousness reflects it. The socializing before the show and between sets comes especially easy to him. “It is a public relations thing, getting out there and meeting people, ’ ’ Williams says. “But you want to do it, too. You appreciate their being there — you wish you could meet them all.” -

Now Reger is carrying two chairs to one of the tables in the room. “Making it,” he says, “is hustling a table for the band and carrying chairs for friends.” Many of the friends were there this night because the "band had called them that day, hoping to spur a good opening-night turnout that would impress the Barn's owner.

Shortly after nine the band takes the stage and opens with Firefall's ‘”It Doesn’t Matter. ” Fifty to sixty persons have filled the room to capacity. Some men are dressed in crew-neck sweaters and slacks; there are several couples in suits and gowns, and one man in a cowboy hat. If there is a common denominator among the audience at this point, it is that no one seems to be listening to the music. The noise level in the room becomes especially noticeable when the band moves into Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide,” which Reger introduces as a ‘”quiet, beautiful love song,” designed not to upset the waiting-for-dinner crowd. A middle-aged woman interrupts her conversation only long enough to give a quick review of the band. “They don’t have a drummer and my son’s a drummer. I have to be negative.”

It’s not the ideal reception, but the band doesn’t seem overly concerned. “You’ve got a lot of people there the first set who are just waiting to eat dinner,” is the way Hodgkiss tells it. “You can’t start judging an audience until the second set. By the third set, you know they’re either in the bag or out of it. ”

The band is now into Jackson Browne’s “Doctor, My Eyes.” Williams has switched from amplified acoustic to electric guitar, and for the first time this night several people look half-heartedly toward the stage.

A hand-clapping version of America’s “Don’t Cross the River” comes next, and one woman starts moving to the music. Reger bows at the end of the song and offers a toast. “Here’s to all our good friends — you know who you are — and to everyone else we haven’t met yet.” The band begins mining a heavier rock vein with Eric Clapton’s “Lay Down Sally” and is rewarded by more movement and attention from the audience. The reaction is so favorable that the band ventures an original song, Williams first asking, “You don’t mind if we do one of our own, do you?” Playing unfamiliar material in lounges, where people like to sing along, is a risky thing — especially risky in the first set, when patrons have an entire evening to seek out a band that plays familiar songs. But this tune, a Jackson Browne-tinged road number and one of ten originals the band performs regularly, is well received.

The band, near the end of the first set, tears through Pure Prairie League’s “Amy,” a song well suited to its strong guitar work, three-part harmonies, and Hodgkiss’s high vocal range. By song’s close, the audience seems in the musicians ’ hands. The band does not let go the remainder of the night, mixing its repertoire from “Surfing U.S.A. ” to a Buddy Holly medley to Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty. ” When the evening is nearly over, several persons are dancing in an aisle, and pleas for “More!” echo in the room after the band closes with an eerie, heavily electric version of Heart’s “Crazy On You.”

By now the band is ecstatic, higher on the performance and the crowd’s reaction than on the several shots of tequila they’d put down (gifts from the audience). ‘ ‘Everyone had such a good time,” Hodgkiss is saying. “And, aside from the music, having a good time is what it’s all about. On a night like-this, you just get such a tremendous circle of energy flowing between you and the audience. You feed each other.”

Buckhannon, West Virginia, where the members of the East West Band were born and partly raised, is a town of about 8000 persons, known for its one college — West Virginia Wesleyan — strip mining, constant rain, and a good school music program. Hodgkiss and Williams — both now twenty-six, as is Reger — began playing in that program in the fifth grade, Hodgkiss on drums and Williams on trumpet. Both later switched to guitar. They met Reger in the seventh grade, when all were caught up in the Beatles craze and playing in English Invasion-styled bands, Hodgkiss and Williams in the Vipers and Reger in the competing Vassels.

Roger Williams

Chris Wimpey

The three played in separate bands through high school and then went to different colleges. Reger headed for the University of Morgantown and earned a degree in psychology, later going on to a semester of law school and jobs as a social worker and counselor. Hodgkiss put in two years at Glenville State, then worked as a lifeguard and welder. Williams majored in music and drama at West Virginia Wesleyan for a year and then drifted to Chicago, where he managed a department store during the daytime and played nights in a group called “Fuchsia” with Kevin Cronin, now lead singer with R.E.O. Speed wagon.

By 1974 Williams was back in Buckhannon. He soon fell in with another band, playing colleges and jamming with Hodgkiss and Reger on the side. Before long the three formed a group, based on their common taste in music. By this time each knew he wanted to be a musician; welding, counseling, and strip mining faded as possible careers.

“Too many of my friends were firemen ,” recalls Reger. “I knew I didn’t want to do that. It’s such a rush being on stage . . . being paid good money . . . being good? . . the best. It just beats the shit out of getting up and packing a lunch.” And there were fringe benefits, too. “You make friends. People buy you drinks . . . offer you pot, cocaine, themselves.”

The early days in West Virginia, however, were not always friendly. “We got this gig on the wrong side of the tracks,” says Reger. ‘ ‘It was the kind of place where you’d better play soul music, or else. We didn’t. The people just gathered around the stage and swore at us. It was the longest night. ” It was one of the experiences that helped the band decide that its future was not in Buckhannon. ‘ ‘We decided to up and go somewhere,” says Williams. That somewhere for the band—and the wives of Reger and Hodgkiss and a lady friend of Williams — was San Diego. The band came with the name Sunny Buck, in ironic memory of Buckhannon’s gray skies.

The band was already polished and professional when they arrived here. They took on Chuck Bennett of C.M.I. Management as a manager, and, even in the crowded San Diego lounge circuit, found themselves working steadily — the Springfield Wagon Works, the Monterey Whaling Company, the London Opera House. From February of 1977 to August of 1978 the group was only out of work for about two months — and two weeks of that period was a voluntary vacation. After Bennett took his fifteen percent, the band members were averaging about $125 a week in take-home pay. And both wives were working — Reger’s as a piano instructor and substitute teacher, and Hodgkiss’s as the financial aid director for National University (“The only one of us who’s got a real job, ’ ’ Hodgkiss jokes.) The band shared a fifteen-room house in El Cajon to further reduce living expenses, allowing them a $4500 investment in a nondistributed album the group is now working on. The band was doing so well that in August its members moved to separate apartments. After a year and a half of communal living, says Hodgkiss, “we just needed some privacy.”

The East West Band was in desperate need of the energy it received from the opening night at the Ivy Barn. Since moving into separate apartments, the musicians had gone through their toughest period since coming to California. With living expenses increased about one-third, they suddenly found work scarce. They had been booked at San Diego’s Triton, but that bar discontinued entertainment. The next few weeks were slow — and depressing. They briefly filled in for a band at Kearny Mesa’s Springfield Wagon Works and then did a two-night stand at the Ivy Barn. The Barn had been the first room the band played in San Diego, then receiving fifty dollars a night. The two-night stand was designed to prove to the Barn’s owner that they could draw well enough to be paid the approximately one hundred dollars a night they received elsewhere.

They would later be booked there at that rate, but there was no immediate word from the Barn, however, and the band accepted a two-week job at the Stag and Hound in Yuma, Arizona — partly, members say, because they had been promised an engagement at the Monterey Whaling Company if they took the job. (The same company owns both restaurants.) The band opened in Yuma several days after the Ivy Barn audition; it was, to say the least, a disappointing experience. ‘ ‘Saturday night at the Ivy Barn had gone really well. In Yuma we opened to six people. You went from really feeling good, from asking ‘Why am I getting paid for doing this?’ to ‘Why am I doing this for this amount of money — it isn’t worth it,”’ Reger recalls.

The audience was larger on weekends, but it wasn’t an audience they felt comfortable with. It was an audience, Hodgkiss says, of farmers, cowboys, motel owners, and jar-heads (Marines). “We would have been all right if we could have played ‘Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mothers’ all night,” Reger says. The band played any country song ‘ ‘that we could fake our way through,” but still had to resort to rock and roll. It wasn’t well received. The audience alternated between staring at the band and asking for dirty jokes. When the musicians heard a story about a gun-toting cowboy once shooting the hat off a band member, the three were ready to believe it.

Things went from bad to worse. When the band returned to San Diego, Reger’s bass was missing. ‘ ‘We were in such a hurry to get out of Yuma that we packed too quickly, ” he says. A call to Yuma failed to produce the bass, an expensive Fender. Then the expected job at the Monterey Whaling Company did not materialize, making it harder for Reger to get a replacement instrument. It’s hard for musicians to get bank loans, because they have no guaranteed income, and “when you’re out of work two weeks, you’re looked at like you ’ve never had a job,” Reger complains.

The disappointments almost broke up the band. Williams accepted an offer to join a steadily touring band and only reconsidered when promised by Hodgkiss and Reger that things would get better. “I just wanted more,’’ muses Williams. “Sometimes the only way you can get something done is through a rude awakening.” There were promises of greater effort and perhaps adding a fourth member. And if Williams had left the group, he would have left behind more than a familiar list of songs. “We [the band members] just go back forever,” says Reger. And that $4500 album, which band members will sell themselves, was almost near completion.

The problems have left their mark on the band. For one thing, their confidence seems slightly shaken. In August I sat with them in a room of the El Cajon house. Blankets were draped over windows to keep the harsh East County sunlight from eyes more accustomed to dim lounges. The group was rehearsing Kenny Rogers’ “Love or Something Like It” and having trouble remembering the lyrics. ‘ ‘It will be awfully nice when Kenny Rogers is doing our songs,” Williams was saying. “Can’t you see him in rehearsal trying to work up one of our songs . . . saying he can’t remember the words?” How far away from the East West Band was that major recording contract that would put Kenny Rogers — and the East West Band — in those reversed roles? I asked Williams then. “It’s just a matter of being in the right place at the right time. I know we’re as good as a lot of the intermediate bands (such as Pure Prairie League or The Dirt Band) that are doing well,” he replied.

I asked the band members the same question when they returned from Yuma. Hodgkiss’s response: “We’re not really ready. You need plenty of original material, an image, a full band. Still, America signed as a trio and back-up musicians were hired for them.”

And the group’s attitude about the financial aspects of the business and some of the compromises had also changed since August. “When we first came to California, we thought all you had to do was play your music well,” says Hodgkiss. But they learned they had to be businessmen as well as artists. Lounge owners are very cognizant of the ‘ ‘bar figures ’ ’ a band generates; most, says Williams, expect to take in three or four dollars at the bar for every dollar they pay the band. ‘‘I always ask to see the books; that’s part of my job,” says Williams. ‘ ‘I want to be able to go to a lounge owner and say, ‘Hey, we’re pouring five to one [dollars]. I want a raise.’”

The relationship between bar figures and a band’s success is one of the reasons groups offer frequent toasts. ‘‘There’s one band in San Diego that does a toast after every song,” says Reger. “They have the audience doing a Jack LaLanne act with its glasses.” Despite being aware of bar figures, the East West Band has not been willing to lead toasts after every song. And it’s been reluctant to resort to some of the techniques that more quickly fill bar tills: the coordinated outfits and stage movements that draw in a crowd that drinks the more expensive liquor. “We get a beer-and-wine drinking crowd,” says Hodgkiss. They have also avoided the use of jokes that create a nightclub-like drinking atmosphere. “We get up on stage knowing we’re not Henny Youngmans,” says Hodgkiss. But the recent disappointments have brought a modification of those attitudes, and some change in expectations.

“We had a talk with our manager and discussed some changes,” notes Reger.

“He’s got a lot of one-liners he’d like us to do and some videotapes of comedians and comedy albums. And he wants us to work more on patterns of movement, put together a more polished stage act.

“He [Chuck Bennett, the band’s manager] goes to conventions where they book for college concerts. They have booths with twenty-minute videotapes of groups, and you’ve got to have a polished performance for the tape. ’’College representatives book concerts from the conventions. Next year Bennett will attend a conference for colleges throughout the southwestern United States, and the East West Band hopes to have a tape there. College bookings, as an opening act to a name band, can bring from $500 to $1500 a week. One weekly performance, on the average, would bring the band as much as it makes now in four nights’ work. Living would be easier and they’d create a new audience. Plus, they’d get the exposure that could land them a recording contract.

But for now the East West Band, coming off some good nights at the Ivy Barn, is content to put in another year on the lounge circuit. The period of unemployment may be behind. Reger got a loan from an Ocean Beach bank for a new bass (plus a $200 gift from friends to underwrite the cost), the band still has rock and roll in its veins, and on good nights, still gets that circle of energy going with the audience.

The band is still driven by that rock and roll dream that Williams talks most eloquently of from his days with Kevin Cronin in Fuchsia. “I was only nineteen then, and not half the professional or musician that I am now. But the band was really hot. We had been booked to play as an opening act for the Grassroots. I was thinking. ‘This is it. This is going to be my chance…playing in front of 5000 people.’

“They canceled us (in favor of Nils Lofgren) two weeks before the concert. Now, I didn’t really mind — Lofgren was good. But I went to that concert and sat seven rows back, behind a lot of screaming girls. I remember sitting there looking at Lofgren and thinking, ‘That could have been me.’”

-RON RAPOSA