"True Story" - Dave Zelzer (Wisconsin drummer, member of Bagshot Row)
Przez dłuższy czas poszukiwałem informacji o tym zespole (Bagshot Row), który znałem jedynie szczątkowo
z jednego, świetnego nagrania ("Turtle Wax Blues") , które znalazło się na "wielotomowej" kompilacji - "Brown
Acid - The Eleventh Trip" (2020) .
Moja praca nie poszła na marne. Udało mi się nawiązać kontakt i porozmawiać z jednym z dwóch żyjących członków tego zespołu - Dave Zelzer (perkusista zespołu pochodzący z Nichols, Wisconsin, absolwent - Seymour High School, a w czasie powstania i działalności zespołu - student University of Wisconsin - Stevens Point, miłośnik blues rocka),
a to jego historia :
" Hey Paul.... Mid morning here in Green Bay, had some coffee and now I’ll try to give a decent timeline/history of Bagshot Row...
Mike, Bob Staska (the bass player) and I were students at UW-Stevens Point’s music department and Mike and I wanted to put a band together ... We knew Bob was a bass player and good singer, so we approached him and he thought it a pretty good idea, too. Bob was a Viet Nam veteran and around 5 years older than the rest of us... at the time, Mike was 18, I was 19 and Bob around 23 or so... Back then, 1971, Chicago and BS&T were the gold standard (we thought and I still believe) of great musical accomplishment, so we approached four of our fellow classmates, trumpet, sax, trombone and a keyboard player-- and a 7 piece band was formed-- I came up with the regrettable name of ‘Loch Ness’, which for some reason confused bar owners as to the type of music we were performing-- thinking we were some kind of Irish/Scottish band... I digress, but that problem was overcome by our booking agency telling certain bars and venues that we were a country band. Go figure. Anyway, we played a bunch in Wisconsin and while the band wasn’t the greatest, we worked hard at learning our craft. Summer was coming and only Mike, Bob and myself were interested in continuing to play that summer and try to make a go of it... Long story short, the 7 piece band broke up (BTW-- even back then, it wasn’t real easy to book a 7 piece band...). The three of us worked at becoming a trio and stumbled upon Larry Bennett, lead guitarist and ocassional vocalist. I can’t remember how we met Larry, but in a few rehearsals and after he and Mike engaged in guitar wars, we became a four piece, Larry suggesting the name “Bagshot Row”, he and his then wife fans of ‘Lord of the Rings’ etc... We became a fairly hard rocking band, specializing in Rolling Stones, early Aerosmith, Mott the Hoople, Spirit and stuff of that sort. Initially we traveled about in a VW camper pulling a trailer-- BTW, we always felt the camper’s heater was incorrectly named, as it sure didn’t heat. Really suffered some nights in the winter. Gets cold up here in Wisconsin. After about a year of that, Bob/the band bought a 1959 International Harvester school bus, and we put two couches and two cots in the bus and started to travel about in that thing. A couple of notes here-- school buses always sounded like a great idea for touring until you actually started doing it. Loading equipment was a huge challenge as the back door, the emergency exit, was probably close to five feet high and back then all the equipment and stuff was big, heavy and a pain to move-- but when you’re young, skinny and full of energy, it wasn’t that big of a deal-- just part of the process. Now, it’s amazing the size and quality of sound reinforcement and how easy it is to transport and set up. The other problem was maintaining the piece of shit bus-- that wasn’t cheap! So, that went on for some eighteen months or so and we became interested in making a recording to sell on gigs and maybe get some local airplay. Bob had kind of a novelty blues tune called ‘Big Fat Momma’ we all agreed would be a good tune for the 45’s ‘A’ side-- but we needed something for the ‘B’ side. We had been performing the Stones’ ‘Live With Me’ for quite some time and I loved the happy guitar riff the song was built upon and suggested we do something of that sort. It didn’t turn out like that, but ‘Turtle Wax Blues’ was created. We came up with the title one afternoon up in Ashland, WI, standing about at a Holiday gas station where a special sale for Turtle Wax was going on... looking back on it, I think we were lucky we didn’t run into copywrite infringement issues-- but we were a little bar band in Northern Wisconsin obviously flying under the proverbial radar... Mike, Larry and I collaborated on both music and lyrics(Mike was left off the credits on the record for some reason, but in the copy at the Library of Congress, he’s credited-- he deserved it, as he notated the whole thing for the copywrite...) and after about a week or so of messing about with it, we started to work it up in the basement. Oddly, we never performed the tune live-- only learned it and then recorded it... Bob checked around and found a fairly new studio in Madison, WI-- Full Compass Sound-- and we played some gigs where none of us were paid, but the money went into the recording fund. Full Compass is now a successful supplier of guitar, keyboard and sound reinforcement equipment. I have no idea when the studio morphed into what it became. We recorded down there nearly 50 years ago, so who knows? It took us 2 or 3 takes for ‘Big Fat Momma’(we played that every night at gigs, so we knew the tune really well)-- featuring a friend and fellow music student, Steve Peterson, on keys, but if I remember correctly, 8 to 10(or more) takes for ‘Turtle Wax’. We also killed a couple of cases of Budweiser and an awful lot of some fine Moroccan hashish, sharing all with the studio engineer... We had 500 45s made and all of us received, I think, 25- 50 copies. I have no idea what happened to the rest, and over the years, I ended up with one copy. Luckily, I digitized both sides back in the mid 90s-- removing clicks, scratches and surface noise-- because about 9 years ago, it, along with a bunch of other stuff, was destroyed in a house fire. You don’t ever want to go through that if you can avoid it. The loss of ‘stuff’ was minor compared to the loss of my dogs and a couple of cats. The band continued on till in April of ‘74 , Bob decided and told us he wanted to do something else and so in early June of ‘74, we performed our last gig. For me at the time, it was kind of devastating emotionally... Mike stayed in Point for a year or so, working with a country rocker called, I think, ‘Uncle Whiskers’, but I’m not sure. He was also working for a music store in Point. In ‘76, he started working in the Appleton (a town about 25 miles from Green Bay) store of the company. After a few years, he went back to school, but then had a number of other jobs-- as did we all-- including doing puppetry for young kids at schools, selling insurance, spinning records at taverns and finally working as a chef at a number of restaurants. He continued to gig in bands, playing mostly bass and of course singing. About 13 years ago, he succumbed to cancer. He and I stayed in touch through all those years til his passing and truly was one of my best friends over the years. We never had a chance to work in any bands again, but as I said, stayed close friends. Both of his daughters are excellent musicians, and his oldest is a band director/teacher in Oregon. Larry and I stayed in touch for a few years, including trying to put a band together in ‘76 in Wausau... at some point, he and his then wife started moving about and I kind of lost touch. He worked as a martial arts instructor and continued to play in bands, from what I’ve been told and about 10 years ago, sent me some music from his band called ‘Lobotomatic’. Very hard, ‘mud’ rock-- not my favorite genre, but I appreciated the fact it was all original music. About 18 months ago he succumbed to cancer. I’m not real sure what Bob Staska did over the years, although for a while, in the late 70s he lived in Appleton and in addition to whatever he was doing for a living, spun records and stuff at local taverns. I don’t know if Bob survives, as about 20 years ago, I was gigging up in Crandon(a little northern Wisconsin town-- his home town) and coincidentally, he was visiting his brother, walked into the bar as we were setting up and asked if he could sit in on sax. He did not recognize me until I called him by a nickname only those of us in the band would know. “Is that you, Zelzer?” Yep. At that time he had survived at least one bout of cancer, but his time in Viet Nam had exposed him to Agent Orange and he was struggling with his health. And what happened to me? Well, after leaving Point, returning to my childhood home (I was 22-- still kind of a child) I spent an alcoholic couple of months grieving over the loss of the band and my girlfriend, who unfortunately at the time, was the wife of Larry... I then spent some months working in a factory until I was able to land a broadcasting job in Wausau, spent 5 years moving about the state at different radio stations, finally making it back to Green Bay in’79. I’ve spent the better part of 40 years working in radio here in Green Bay, initially as an on air talent, then the final 25 years or so, writing, voicing and producing commercials and my final radio gig was as operations manager at a local station. I continued to play-- in some real good bands including a power pop band in the early 80s, a variety band-- played lots of taverns and weddings and finished in a blues band for nearly 20 years. Some of those bands I drummed for working concurrently... I liked to play. When I was younger, I would work my day job and still play sometimes 4 nights a week. Youth!! I also improved as a drummer. I played what seems to have been my final gig a couple of New Year’s Eves ago-- final tune-- ‘Hotel California’. I always approached every gig as if it could be my last, always striving for that ‘perfect’ gig... and finally, while certainly not perfect, I seem to have played that final gig... I’m 70 now and even in the basement, playing along with some of those great ‘no drum’ tracks on YouTube, I don’t have the energy nor the desire to play out anymore. The actual gig itself isn’t that much trouble, but all of the other stuff, hauling drums from the basement, loading into the car, unloading, setting up, tearing down... etc. has become too much. And I’ve found to my disappointment, I don’t learn new tunes as easily as I did when I was younger... So, it was time. ..."
"... and it was a surprise ‘Brown Acid’ was interested. I have no idea where they found out about us, but it was nice, none the less. Just wish the other guys were around to appreciate it. Somebody did a review of ‘Brown Acid’ back in October ‘20 on Twitter and said he thought the best song on the album was Turtle Wax... I don’t know if that’s true but I certainly got a kick out of reading that! ... "
Epilogue
The internet is great. Together, we found Bob.
And this story ends with a very nice ending.
Zdjęcia - Dave Zelzer
(Dave Zelzer - trio Little Cisco Band)
Bagshot Row ( 1971 - 1974) from Stevens Point (Wisconsin, US) :
- Dave Zelzer - drums
- Bob Staska - bass
In memory :
- Mick Pockat (2006) - vocals, guitar
- Larry Bennett (2020) - lead guitar
Steve Peterson - keyboards (gościnny udział w sesji nagraniowej singla)
Singiel :
" Big Fat Mama " (Bob Staska)
" Turtle Wax Blues " (Zelzer, Staska, Pockat, Bennett)
(1973, Pirate Brand - Guda Records, FCS - 1008)
Password - "kossoff 1963"
Niestety pamiątki po zespole (zdjęcia) spłonęły w pożarze.
Many thanks to Dave Zelzer, without whose help this publication would never have been created.
