After almost 50 years, we are still a band of brothers

It was early fall, 2020. The country had endured several months of the COVID crisis, there was no vaccine in sight and my wife and I were still holed up inside, venturing out in public only with a face mask, sometimes two of them. I was weary. That’s when I got an email from Chuck, my longtime friend from high school with whom I had played in a traveling dance band five decades ago. Written in his iconic personal style, the message was addressed not only to me, but also to the other former members of the band.

“Anyone interested in assessing whether we have enough collective interest in planning and executing an in-person get together where we attempt to make palatable music?” he asked.

Translation: Do you want to get the old band back together? I admitted that it sounded fun, but it also sounded like a lot of work. Besides, the virus still dictated much of what we did. Even in a perfect world, most of the guys from our eight-piece combo saw one another only about once a year, and we hadn’t played regularly since the early 70s when we were at our peak, on the road performing six nights a week, five hours a night. Sure, we were tight back in the day, but what would a bunch of aged wannabe rock stars sound like now? It might take a jackhammer to knock some of the rust off of us, I thought. And we certainly didn’t need any more stress in our lives.

I couldn’t speak for the other guys, but as the band’s former lead singer, I had a pretty good idea of my own capabilities, and they were a far cry from what they had been when I was in my late teens and early twenties. In those days I had seemingly endless energy and a good bit more than a two-octave vocal range. Nearly fifty years later, that young man’s voice was light years behind me. Most of the songs we had played back then were never meant to be sung by a retired guy on Medicare; and that’s what I told Chuck in a phone conversation.

“We’ll re-learn the songs in lower keys if we need to,” he assured me, unfazed. “And besides, you still sing a lot, right?”

“Sure,” I replied. I did a musical weather program for kids and helped lead music at my church. “But what about you and the other guys?” I persisted. “Do you even own instruments?”

“I’m buying a new bass guitar and amp,” he said, “and now that I’m retiring, I’ll have some time to practice.”

Not everyone was retired. Tony our guitarist and Robin our keyboard player still had full-time jobs, though fortunately they still played a bit. In fact, Robin had been a label-signed contemporary Christian artist for 15 years. From Facebook I knew that our trombonist Jerry had picked up his horn again.

“Okay,” I told Chuck. “See what the other guys say, and we’ll go from there”

“Oh, they’re already on board,” he announced. “But we need to find a new drummer, and also some guys to play saxophone and trumpet.” Our former trumpeters had either scattered or passed away years ago, our sax player had put down his instruments when he became a college professor, and our drummer had moved to the Pacific Northwest and all but disappeared.

“In the meantime,” Chuck continued, “send me a list of songs you’d like to do and I’ll come up with a set list.”

As I sat down with pen and paper, I wrote down the names of some songs I always enjoyed performing. There was Chicago’s “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is,” “Your Song” by Elton John, a few tunes by Santana and the Doobie Brothers. I played the recordings of these old songs to see what I remembered. Singing along, I realized the lyrics to most were still embedded in the dark recesses of my brain, but trying to hit all the notes was more difficult. I knew we’d have to change the keys to a bunch of them, but I finally admitted to myself, This is possible.

A couple of weeks later, five of the original eight met on a zoom call to discuss the possibilities. To my surprise, everyone spoke as if the concert was a done deal. And they weren’t talking a short show either. Most wanted to perform a minimum of three 45-minute sets. Where and when and how? These were all questions left for another day.

Back in the 70s we had called the band “Special Guest,” admittedly a gimmicky name, but it stuck, and we gained a following in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area where most of the guys still lived. As for me, after living in the Plains, the Northwest and the Deep South, I had retired to Nashville, so showing up for endless rehearsals in Texas wasn’t in the cards. But the others began to meet, and, working around job and family responsibilities, and fighting inevitable flare-ups of arthritis in their guitar-playing fingers, they gradually cleaned the cobwebs from their musical memories.

Jerry used his networking skills to locate a couple of other horn players, and we managed to find a drummer who had also played in the 70s and already knew many of the songs. Age mattered, it seemed.

Months went by, vaccines became available, and finally I made the 11-hour drive to Texas, where with fear and trembling, I rehearsed with the guys for the first time. To be honest I wasn’t expecting much, but after a couple of songs I came to a startling, yet welcome conclusion: We didn’t stink! In fact, some of the songs, with just a bit more polish, could soon be ready for prime time. Now the question was, where and when would we play?

Those turned out to be huge issues. My family had been agonizingly waiting (and still is) for my grandson’s foreign adoption to go through, and if international travel to Asia were to open up, I’d be out of commission for several weeks. One of the band members was going through a divorce, COVID exposure still loomed and a couple of the guys tested positive. All of this blurred our performance timeline; nevertheless, we agreed that unless we had a firm date—a deadline to shoot for— we might languish in limbo for months. A search for venues found one that could accommodate us, and we booked it for October 30, 2021, ready or not.

Rehearsals ramped up. Each time we met, we sounded a little better. We adjusted the set list, eliminating songs that were either too dated or just didn’t excite us anymore, and learning a few new ones that had stood the test of time.

As our instruments and voices started to gel, I started to get excited. We were having fun! And there was something else happening too, something I had not anticipated. Playing the old songs not only brought back memories of younger days, they also reminded me of the bond my band mates and I had developed decades ago from first attending high school together, then playing together, then traveling together and living together on the road. That bond had slipped below the surface for many years, but it had never disappeared. Life had pulled us in different directions; it had taken us to different parts of the country; it had shaped our different careers, our different goals, our different personalities and politics. Still, for at least a few moments, we got a glimpse of what we had been fifty years ago—not just a band of musicians, but also a band of brothers.

As I write this, we are only days away from our performance, and our concert is sold out. We’ve titled our event Special Guest—One Night Only, but we know that the concert represents hundreds of nights, and as many days, that we lived through together—exciting, bold, sometimes painful, but forever treasured.

Some clever grammarian once said, “Nostalgia makes the present tense and the past perfect.” For the guys in Special Guest, nostalgia has actually injected some perfection into an extremely tense present. Sharing music and memories has enabled us to shine a positive light onto a season of negativity—celebrating a kinship that neither time nor distance nor reshaping of priorities has ever broken.

And as far as I’m concerned, that’s the best reason of all to get the old band back together.

Go here to read my other stories about my band’s life on the road in the 1970s.

A “fly on the wall” glimpse of a recent living room rehearsal