More Than You Want to Know
The Early Times
While recovering from injuries sustained in October, 1978, that kept me away from the piano for a while, I rather idly picked up a guitar that my parents had won in a local PBS television auction. My friend Michael Callahan had just introduced me to the music of The Beatles (yes, I know, a little late), and I found myself enjoying strumming along with the album I borrowed from him (for the record, the song that first caught my attention was "Here Comes the Sun").
Of course, I wanted to start a band. It was the inevitable next step. Soon my friend Michael (Mick) Krause and I were thumping away on old and cheap acoustic guitars (his was old, mine was cheap) in a local pizza parlor, rendering Beatles songs to an unsuspecting public. It wasn't long before Michael and Mick and I were haunting pawnshops, wishing we could afford better instruments. I don't remember how the band got its name... we were briefly Union Jack and the Rippers (with lead singer Jack Bieler), and somewhere I came up with Paul Barrow and The Graveyard Five. The idea that there would never be more than four members onstage at a time amused me greatly, as I recall. We tried to recruit everyone we knew into the band, whether they could actually play any instruments or not. A succession of guitar players and drummers came and went over the next several months - some of them actually stayed to play with us more than once! The last time we played before I went off to College in September of 1979 was for a charity event at Delmar Stadium in Houston.
The Myers-Ramsey Era
Once at Austin College, in Sherman, Texas, I wanted to start the band again. One evening while playing piano at a party, I noticed a skinny fellow watching the chords I was playing. I automatically asked the question I asked everyone new that I met; "Do you play the bass?" I was surprised to finally get an affirmative answer, and more surprised to find out that he had indeed brought it to the college. We ditched the party, went back to the dorm, and got out our guitars to practice for a while. That was how Pat Myers joined The Graveyard Five.One evening as we were practicing our joke C&W ending for "My Generation", there was a knock at the door. A neighbor of Pat's had brought his guitar and wanted to jam (or, as he told us later, he wanted to stop us from ever playing C&W again). This was John Ramsey, wanting to have some musical fun before graduating into the dark world of Med School. He taught me the opening chords to the Who's song "Substitute" (I didn't have the nerve to tell him that I'd never heard of the song), and we jammed well into the night. Over the next few months John was to introduce me to a lot of music I'd never heard before by the Who, the Kinks, and many other bands from the 60s and 70s.
Pat knew a drummer, Roy Bayless, so we recruited him into the band, without bothering to even ask if he liked our songs. Roy played in the college's jazz band, but was good-natured enough to go along with anything we wanted to play. We played private parties on and around campus, mixing our originals with songs by the Beatles, the Kinks, and the Who.
Al Somoza
Michael Paul Anderson (a.k.a. Al Somoza, a.k.a. Mr. Staff... there's a really funny story behind that one that I'll have to share sometime!) was a revitalizing spirit behind The Graveyard Five during the Austin College years. As manager of the band, it was he who found the gigs, provided transportation, lent support when needed, and just generally made things happen. For some reason, one of my favorite memories was of the time he bought me a harmonica just before a performance. He was always pushing us just a little; "Hey, come on, let's get your guitars and go record some songs!" was one of his rallying cries. He would grab his mammoth Boom Box, we would get our acoustic guitars, and we'd all head out to the spillway of the Denison Dam or to a rest area or to any exotic place he could think of to record some of our new songs. His station wagon must have had some magic properties to allow us to fit four musicians and assorted girlfriends, our instruments, our amplifiers, and Roy's drums into the back.One late-night recording session got rather out of hand, so a couple of police officers showed up to see what all the noise was. We finished the session with the police officers adding various percussion instruments to the mix. Interesting times, indeed!
Alright By Me
The Graveyard Five made our first recording in November 1979. We picked the song "Alright by Me", and I have fond memories of standing around the microphone with John and Pat getting our three-part harmonies on tape. Over the Thanksgiving break I gave a copy to my old friend Steven Bailey, who put it onto the playlist at KTRU, the Rice University radio station. Our first airplay!By the way... now it can be told! Only one member of the Graveyard Five performed on the musical backing track for the "Alright by Me" sessions. John Ramsey played lead guitar, with members of his old band in Abilene playing drums, bass, and rhythm guitar.
Post Ramsey
After John had graduated and moved on to Med School sixty miles away in Dallas, Pat and Roy and I kept the band together as best we could, eventually bringing in rhythm guitarist Tim McDonald to round out the Graveyard dimension. Tim had a Fuzzbox, which gave us a WHOLE new sound. We played several times at the campus club, as well as at several private parties in and around the town, sometimes using different names. King Arthur and the Saturday Knights was one that I remember (although Mick remembers it as King Arthur and the Reigning Saturday Nights).John Ramsey even came back and played with us a couple of times in 1980 and 1981. By now he had bought a Rickenbacker 12-string, which really enhanced our sound. He was very nice about letting me use it on stage occasionally, too.
Pat Myers left Austin College in May of 1981, in part due to health troubles, but mostly so that he could follow his true path and paint.