The Penetrations, page 2

The Red Baron In 1972, one of our favorite places to play was a "3.2%" bar called the Red Baron.  A simpatico guy named Jim Smith owned the bar and he treated the bands well.  He also brought in some big names to play there. Years later I would spend four nights a week there in the Billy Spears Band, when the place was the "Billy Spears Country Playhouse." Notice that the venue's name does not appear in this ad.  The Red Baron was in arrears to the Lawrence Journal World and the paper would not print an ad with the Red Baron name. Recorded at the Red Baron: Ray Charles's I Don't Need No Doctor A 15-minute dance medley of Tell the Truth, You Got Me Hummin', I Thank You, and I'll Go Crazy.  The "beating" sound is the Leslie tweeter almost touching the microphone. B.B. King's Woke Up This Morning The Supremes' Back in My Arms Again A medley of Aretha Franklin's Rock Steady with Booker T. and the MG's Chickenpox

Pitching a wang dang doodle...

As mentioned before, our practice space was a loft over Burk Awning at 706-1/2 Massachusetts, where Michael Duby, Becky Reed, and I also lived.
One night in our early days we decided to have a party in the loft and play for our own party.  There must have been a keg or two, because hundreds of people showed up.  With the dancing, you could feel the floor shake - a lot - but it did not fail, thank God. Burk would have been upset the next day had his ceiling fallen into his shop!.

We began to get gigs here and there.  We played at the Red Baron, the Red Dog, the Mad Hatter, and the Zodiac Club, which was downstairs from the Red Dog and later became the Seventh Spirit.  Of course, we also played for dances and outdoor gigs.

Warming up for Muddy Waters   Above:  An excerpt of a review of Muddy Waters from the Insider Magazine, Fall 1972. Below:  Muddy Waters, with George "Mojo" Buford on harp, at the Red Baron.

A real highlight of the Autumn of 1972 was warming up for Muddy Waters and his band at the Red Baron.  Three nights in a row, we sat in the front row after we were done and watched Muddy, Joe Willie "Pinetop" Perkins, Calvin "Fuzz" Jones, Luther Tucker, Carey Bell, and Willie "Big Eyes" Smith - all now dead - play the blues.  Muddy invited Becky up to sing "I Got My Mojo Working" with him.  We presented Pinetop Perkins with a bottle of his favorite beverage, mint gin, and I was able to procure a little weed for Muddy (at his request).  I still have his autograph on my Muddy Waters Chess compilation album.  Muddy gave me the name of the A&R man at Chess and said we should send him a demo.  We never did.

Busted.
On the not-so-good side of the ledger, a true story:

We were booked to play a club in Hutchinson one Friday night during the Summer.  We arrived to find another band setting up.  It was Kansas - yes, THAT Kansas, who later achieved stardom with "Dust in the Wind."  But at that time they were just another band, formerly called "White Clover," from Topeka, with whom I guess you'd say we shared the sandbox.  It turns out that both bands had been booked for that night.  Well, guess which band went home?

There is a lot of material on the band(s) Kansas to be found on the web.  Two of the better pages IMO are here and this Russian site.

Busted. On our way back home, we were riding through Newton in our rental van.  In the van we had some Boone's Farm wine and some ditchweed which yielded more of a headache than a high.  Becky "small bladder" Reed had to relieve herself, so we stopped at the side of the road when it seemed no one was around.  So, four of us got out to urinate, and a few moments later a police car pulled up behind us.  The officer read us the riot act and was about to let us go when Brad, who was in the van and very nervous, dropped the Boone's Farm out of the van.  The cop heard the bottle hit the ground, giving him cause to search the van, so he found the pot.   We spent the weekend in the Harvey County Jail.  We got out on bail due to the kindness of Deanne Hochstetler's parents, who lived in Harvey County and put up their property as surety for the bail.  All of us, that is, except for Darrell.  Somehow his father, a Topeka psychiatrist, found out about the bust.  He went to Newton to bail out his "wayward son," and Darrell had to ride home with an irate parent... Deanne Hochstetler, pictured at left at 1317 Rhode Island, was Michael Duby's girlfriend AND Becky's best friend at the time.

We were all charged with possession, but we knew to keep our mouths shut.  The case was ultimately resolved when Becky, who was under 21 and didn't even like reefer that much, took the rap for us and pled guilty.  As I recall, the penalty was a $150 fine and six months of probation.

We try a sax player.

Later that year, for a few months, we added an 18-year-old saxophonist from Hays, named Jim Martin.  Unfortunately, we never developed a personal or musical chemistry with him.  A sax would have been a great addition, but we were spoiled:  The guy who ran the Zodiac Club, Bobby Watson (no, not the well-known jazz guy) kept his tenor sax behind the bar and would sit in with us sometimes when we played there.  He'd obviously been around and knew how to blow the blues.  As I recall, Jim Martin was technically proficient but not sufficiently schooled in R&B, and we were not into schooling anyone.  We had all "picked it up" on our own, and we expected him to do the same.

Here are a couple of songs we recorded in the loft with Jim Martin.
You've Got a Great Big Problem - a Ray Charles number, from his ABC-Records era.  Bud's high harmony makes it sound kinda  like the Raelettes... Everything goes alright until the sax solo.
Take Me in Your Arms (Rock Me a Little While) - we didn't give Jim much to do on this one.

Shakin' that Thing, recorded live at the Richards-Gebaur Air Force Base NCO Club, outside of Belton, Missouri.

We played a few military venues, the most memorable being Fort Riley, where the entire audience was men ... and they were dancing half-way through our gig.   Remember, our troops were still in Vietnam!

The following images are of an article written by Steve Wilson and appearing in "The Insider Magazine, King Harvest Review" for the Fall of 1972.  Perhaps I should simply have put this article on the web page and left it at that... It makes reference to our impending addition of Jim Martin on sax.  That lasted for all of about two months.