<p>Oh, Audio, this is fun! I still have that 45 somewhere, even though I no longer have a record player. I think it was “Man on the Moon”/“Suzy Said So.” I even have an original “On Tour” Secret Kidds T-shirt. FYI, there’s a Kweder anthology (“Kwederology”) available from Amazon. It’s worth owning if only to see the look on your old friends’ faces when it comes on during a party. Robert Hazzard is still playing, he was here at The Point last spring. I see Eric Bazilian fairly often, he works out at my gym–from The Hooters–co-writer of Cindy Lauper’s big hit “Time after Time.” Man. Having another “old flash.” BTW, Kweder is still around and playing, after a long sojourn in Europe. The Philadelphia Birdcage Liner (aka Inquirer) had a really nice front page entertainment section article about him a year or so ago.</p>
<p>
I’m pretty sure that’s it! Couldn’t find the anthology on Amazon, do you have a link?</p>
<p>This is fun. I was going to bring up The Hooters also. They were great, but I guess their first album was their peak. Is Bazilian still involved in the music biz? It would be a shame if he wasn’t. Such talent.</p>
<p>I racked my brain for “The A’s”, but came up empty.</p>
<p>Garland,</p>
<p>What an incredible memory that will be for you. I got a bit choked up just thinking it through.</p>
<p>Thanks for the memory.</p>
<p>I used to love going to Joe’s…Joe lived just up the street from me an my roommates on Spring Street downtown, just a fews blocks away from the bar. They tore Joes down back in the late eighties for one of the uglier high-rises (and that’s saying a lot)…it changed the music scene.</p>
<p>Got to plug Prince too. If anybody wants to see a great show, he can put it on. He is a freaky dude, but incredibly magnetic, like the pied piper. I have seen him twice and both times were real experiences. Everybody in the whole stadium dances and jives with him, you just cannot help yourself. One time, everyone else in the band left the stage and he broke out into a 15 minute classical piano solo that was incredible. He just looked out into the audience like he was sharing a dirty secret.</p>
<p>Audio,
Make sure you spell it right–Kweder, not Kweeder. I just double checked Amazon, and it’s there! And if you want to wax nostalgic, you can visit KennKweder.com
The Inquirer article I mentioned is linked there, and well worth reading. The Hooters are actually back together and working on an album! They’ve been playing a lot in Europe, but not around here for some reason. The A’s had one national hit that you might remember: “Woman’s Got the Strength.” Oh, they also had another one…“After Last Night” ( second line was: “it was such a fiasco”). That was their signature song, locally. If you were around to see The Hooters and Kweder, I can’t imagine you didn’t come across The A’s at some point. Their guitarist Rich Difonzo went on to become a serious session musician
<a href="http://www.ear.fm/Encyclopedia%20A/the%20a’s.htm">http://www.ear.fm/Encyclopedia%20A/the%20a’s.htm</a></p>
<p>Two shows rank as my favorites:
Cream in 1969 (from backstage)</p>
<p>Boston</p>
<p>Boston. Tom Scholz is a very interesting person.</p>
<p>driver,
I know Woman’s Got the Strength, Woman’s got the Power from Clarence Clemons, still not sure about the A’s. </p>
<p>OK, I ordered Kwederology Vols. 1 and 2 (you’re right I was spelling it wrong). I just checked Kenn’s website, they’re playing in Philly the weekend I’m visiting Penn with my daughter!!!</p>
<p>Gandert,
I saw Boston when I was in college. They played so loud, it was painful to listen to. Another band that peaked with their debut album.</p>
<p>Cream is having a reunion concert in NY. I heard ticket prices are ridiculous and I’m sure it won’t be nearly as good as the show you saw in 1969.</p>
<p>The funny thing about Boston was that the first hit album was virtually all Tom Scholz…he didn’t sing, but played all the instruments, engineered, produced, wrote the songs, etc. He was an engineer at Polaroid at the time he got his big contract, and had to assemble a bunch of guys for the tour and the album photo. But they hadn’t played on the album. The guy was a total MIT genius.</p>
<p>Audio, I say take your D to see Kweder. Let her know what Penn life is really like. I heard that the Cream reunion in London was fantastic…but $2500 per ticket or some such thing.</p>
<p>I saw Boston sometime in the late 70s at Notre Dame…playing in their basketball arena. Probably one of the best overall performances I’d seen there. Great lighting, good showmanship, etc.</p>
<p>Worst show I saw there was Grand Funk Railroad. Played soooo loud that the music was unintelligible.</p>
<p>gandert, best I can recall GFR’s music was best listened to when it was unintelligible.:)</p>
<p>curudgeon, minor correction: best listened to when YOU were unintelligible.</p>
<p>Joan Baez in a dirt-floored abuilding on or near the Ag School campus at the University of Wisconsin in the late 1960s. Her voice was still at its best, and she was warm and relaxed. And of course we were all much younger.</p>
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<p>He is an MIT alumnus as I recall. Not a common trait among rock stars.</p>
<p>My first concert at 12 was the Beatles at Forest Hill Stadium in NY in 1964. Our seats were in the very last row, but who cared!!! Coolest stage entrance and exit ever, the Beatles arrived and departed by helicopter. Landed right in the middle of the stadium. Oh yeah, the opening act was a couple of guys just making a name for themselves… Simon and Garfunkle! Also saw the Beatles at Shea Stadium in 1965 and 1966 or 1967 with 50,000 of my close, personal friends.</p>
<p>audiophile, you brought back some memories. Robert Hazard was actually a friend of my brother, many moons ago.
</p>
<p>I think my favorite concert memory was when I was in college in the early 70’s. The opening act at a concert on campus was this unknown named Don McLean, who sang this amazingly haunting song called American Pie, in addition to several other songs which wowed the audience. He was the talk all around campus for days afterwards. I always loved that I’d seen him before he, and the song, became so famous.</p>
<p>In the early 90’s, we saw a reunion concert of Simon and Garfunkel which was a benefit for the United Way. Even at that stage of their careers, they sounded more beautiful live than on any of their recordings.</p>
<p>Yes, Scholz attended MIT on a full academic scholarship, earning Bachelors and Masters degrees there. He was also a good enough basketball player that he considered trying the pros.</p>
<p>Saw Robert Hazzard just last year at a free beach concert in Atlantic City. Well, “free” if you you discount the fact that we stayed at one of the casino hotels, with all that entails. I had never heard him before, and really enjoyed the show. Oddly, he was teamed for the concert with Soutside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes – their styles are so different that the crowd was pretty eclectic.</p>
<p>I offer my solemn respects to those who found it in themselves to sit through the middle-brow formalities of a Boston symposiumI mean concert: truly a Sisyphean act. </p>
<p>I was dragged into the low-droning stands of a Boston show on a dull Sunday afternoon by some of my artistically-stalled cannabis-cronies when I was 17. Less than halfway though the mind numbing sameness of their technical ‘wizardry’ I made my way into the halls and concession stands to find them–much to my delight–populated by a overabundance of girls whom I assumed had ditched their overly earnest boyfriends–no doubt having the same reaction as I to such a ‘progressive’ rock band: thank god for the arrival of the Talking Heads-Blondie and the Clash-Sex Pistols contingency as a counter response to the death-throes of disco happening at about that time.</p>
<p>Only the plastic-blue of the Pontiac Silver-dome was more lacking in emotion, verve and creativity than that lumbering, self-absorbed band; certainly a merciful god will deduct time spent at a Boston concert for the wages due in purgatoryway to plan ahead you all:)</p>
<p>But woodwork, how do you really feel about them?
I liked Boston’s first album but didn’t really pay much attention to them after that, and I think it’s pretty obvious they were a studio band that had one solid album in them. OTOH, the same could be said of Blondie. One good album, Parallel Lines, and the rest was pphtt. Unless you really want to defend Rapture? :o</p>