Good Ole Boys and Silver Chicken
by Bill Brina
Special to the Times Union, Albany, NY
May, 1977
The Good Ole Boys picked last weekend
at The Boulevard to pull off a classic Mr. Hyde-to-Dr. Jeckyll
transformation. Friday, their performance might be charitably
described as spotty. Actually, 4/5's of the band -- banjo player
Tom Stearns, guitarist/vocalist Rick Lyndon, fiddler John Glick, and
bassist Bob Jones -- were busy trying to hold their own, but leader
Frank Wakefield, who's the best mandolin player on the planet when he
cares enough to be was completely lost in the ozone.
For one reason or another, Frank got
an early start on the evening and just kept on going, with unfortunately
predictable results. His playing proved erratic at the beginning
of the evening and rapidly deteriorated completely: missed notes,
broken runs, ruined tempos, excessive volume and extreme sloppiness
characterized much of his output. Though Tom Stearns, in
particular, strove manfully to keep the band together despite their
leader's musical meandering, the results were all together
unsatisfactory.
Saturday night, fortunately, it all
fell together. Frank turned up in better (i.e. fewer) spirits and
came to play. He didn't turn in the best performance I've ever
heard from him (his playing occasionally became just a mite sloppy) but
he held his own, providing precise, exhilarating mandolin runs and crisp
swinging fills. The others, particularly Stearns and Glick,
responded with joyful, flat-out ensemble picking and fiddling and
several truly outstanding solos. Those high, lonesome harmonies on
Frank's material were as good as ever and Rick, filling in for the
absent Dave Nelson, provided warm vocalizing for the "new grass"
material that the band occasionally seems to specialize in.
Appearing both nights with the Good
Ole Boys was Silver Chicken, a youngish local country-rock
quartet that has improved enormously over the past few months. The
band clearly derives its inspiration from the Clarence White-era Byrds
with spacey,
 heavily
electronicized dual lead guitars, exceptionally powerful bass playing
from Rick Bedrosian, and energetic rockish drumming. When the band
first popped up late last fall, their ensemble playing seemed chaotic
and inchoate, but six-months of woodshedding seems to have turned the
trick.
Friday night they cut the Good Ole
Boys cold, prompting the latter group's road manger to request
half-jokingly, that Silver Chicken not do that Saturday. They
didn't, mostly because the Good Ole Boys turned in an immeasurably
better pair of sets Saturday, but they held their own with a well-chosen
collection of Byrd songs, original material and Rick Bedrosian's rich
collection of Dave Torbert's songs.
Leader Jim Fish played down in
Florida last year with the band that became The Outlaws. While
Silver Chicken isn't quite there yet (Fish's vocal are shaky and the
band's harmonizing is a bit ragged), success that The Outlaws have
achieved seems attainable for this band. They're young, hungry,
relatively clear headed -- and that good.
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