A City With A Beat

By Don Rittner

You are eligible for an AARP card if you ever heard of The Ruins, Blotto, Bougaloo, Monolith, OD, Horton Strong, Love’s Ice Cubes, Tino and the Revlons, or The Knickerbockers.

While it may be hard to imagine, Troy and Albany have quite a music history and it didn’t begin with the 1960s. In fact, original music was being written and recorded in Troy for close to 200 years.

The Troy Music Hall, famous for its acoustics, was opened 129 years ago on April 19, 1875. Even before the city was a city, members of the Apollo Lodge, Free and Accepted Masons, purchased a bassoon, violin and other instruments to form a band in 1797.

The Schenectady Museum is currently exhibiting a history of local music, called “Factory Bands to Funk Music in the Capital Region, 1900 to Present,” at its Nott Terrace location. It runs through to November 8th. It’s well worth the visit.

Part of the exhibit features photographs and information on several local company bands. It seems that during the early part of the 20th century, many companies like General Electric, American Locomotive and Mohawk Carpet Mills sponsored or initiated small bands that played local gigs. These probably instilled camaraderie among the workers and a sense of connection with the companies they worked for. You can also view some interesting early instruments including an odd looking Gibson made Harp-Guitar hybrid. Costumes, bandstands, and a room with mood music “atmosphere” allow you to sit and do some contemplation.

Over at the other end of the museum is a section that contains many locally produced 45 rpm records produced by local groups with names like The Units (Fear of Strangers), The Distraction, Coal Palace Kings, Stomplistics, Working Class Stiffs, and others. Other memorabilia such as broadsides and other PR pieces along with photos of the bands are on exhibit.

To make it really interactive, the exhibit contains a full drum set, an organ, and xylophone type instrument (made with cardboard or plastic pipes) that visitors can play. Part of the exhibit featured live performances over the last few months by local musicians such as Ernie Williams, Ruth Pelham, The Uncle Sam Chorus, and over a dozen more.

It was a real walk down memory lane when I viewed the material dealing with the 60s and 70s. As anyone will tell you that grew up here, Troy and Albany had a great Music scene. In Troy, rock bands played at RPI and its fraternities, Paul’s, Valenti’s on West Sand Lake Rd, and early on at The Escape, the basement of a church on Hoosick Street. In Albany, Bogart’s, J.B. Scotts, and Refer Network’s Sunday concerts in Washington Park were favorites. Other venues included The College Inn up towards Saratoga and The Hide Out in Glenmont.

Several local groups had their music recorded including the Bougaloo, Tino, The Knickerbockers, Blotto, and others like Horton Strong had their original music played on local radio stations. If you were an aspiring musician, you purchased your instruments at Hilton’s (Troy & Albany), Romeo’s, or George’s Music Store. If you wanted to actually learn how to read music or take lessons, you would go over to Miller’s Music Store on 4th Street.

RPI’s radio station, WRPI, use to have a live performance night and singers like Natalie Merchant would stop by (before she made it big). On Saturday nights, you would tune in to Kaleidoscope with Jim Barrett, who still does Kaleidoscope on WZMR, 104.9 FM, and the commercial stations like WTRY and WPTR with jocks like Lee Gray and Boom Boom Brannigan would spin out the top 40 hits.

Most of us rock and roll wannabes never made it big of course, but it sure was fun trying. In those days, getting a record contract was not easy. There was no such thing as digital music, just analog. You bought vinyls, not CDs, and having stereo meant you had two speakers.

Today, groups can make their own digital music, some without actual instruments, using software like Apple’s Garageband. They press their own CD’s from their personal computer, and market their homemade product on the Internet or at their gigs. You can now download music from Apple Computer into your iPod for 99 cents a song and store over 1,000 songs.

As Bob Dylan once sang, “The Times They Are A-Changing.”