The Stolen Peaches

I changed the name of the Subterraneans to the Chicago Underground mostly, I guess because of my growing interest in the blues. Mike Bloomfield of the Paul Butterfield Band was my man, and in a lot of ways, still is. He died of a drug overdose a long time ago. I didn’t know about it when it happened. I was reading an interview with Phil Keaggy in Guitar Player and he mentioned how he was shocked to hear about Mike Bloomfield’s death because he was one of his major influences. I was shocked to read that. That’s how I found out. My first electric blues riffs and licks were copped from Mike Bloomfield. I still play them today. I was thrilled when TrueFire and GuitarPort both came out with Bloomfield lessons recently. I went through both of them completely and learned every lick (well all but one, the one from East West that’s like experimentation with ragas. I used to be interested in that but not so much any more). Now my other major blues influence from those days was Harvey Mandel with Charlie Musselwhite’s Southside Band. You don’t hear much about Harvey but he’s still out there. I esp. liked his solo on the instrumental Chicken Shack which was on Musselwhite’s “Stand Back” album. I lost that album but I just downloaded Chicken Shack for 99¢. His sound made me think of twisting a balloon or a guitar so on the verge of feedback that you had to damp every string you weren’t playing or it would go wildly out of control. Playing on the verge of losing control but not quite. That’s what I like. Every note flows into the next or rings through. Another good solo was at the end of Christo Redemptor. Harvey starts his solo right when the song starts to fade out. It’s a real tease. You just know he completely lost control after the fade out! It's like you have so much power going through you it takes all your effort just to restrain it! Rather than having to exert a lot of effort in getting it out. That's what it's like!

Some of the patches on my GuitarPort have the gain so high that if you’re not playing a note and damping ALL the strings, there is a horrendous noise. So you have to be playing something all the time with that patch. I don’t use them too often.

So then, the organ player, Dick and I went to the University of NH in 1966 and the band broke up. We roomed together. Dick got a gig with a band from Maine called the Stolen Peaches. Dick’s organ blew out one day when lightning hit the club where it was. He wasn’t there at the time. So then he got a B3 with Leslies. So that was a good thing.

The band got the name from some story about the drummer stealing some peaches. Either I never did hear the story or I just didn’t get it. I thought it was a lousy name.

Then, their lead player got busted for selling drugs to minors so Dick got me in the band as the lead player.

Then we got rid of the drummer and got our old Subterraneans drummer Steve. I forget how we did that.

I thought it was kind of funny. We were like a virus. We got one of us in there, then we took over the whole band and made it us. Or maybe more like an alien.