From 1978 to 1980, Davy & the Crocketts added a bit of rockabilly and old-time rock'n'roll to the New Wave club scene in Buffalo, New York.
By Dave Meinzer
The Beginning Davy & the Crocketts began as my desire to have a real performing band at the outset of the New Wave Era. I'd jammed with friends for years and had pseudo bands but never anything "serious." In late 1977 the combination of Elvis Costello's first album and the emergence of my friend Bob Kozak's rock'n'roll band, The Jumpers, lit a fire under me. I'd just started working at Buffalo State College and the editor of the college music magazine had an office down the hall where he'd play his electric guitar. I asked Geoff Copp if he want to be in my band and he said something along the lines of, "Hell, yeah!" For bass, I tapped a guy I'd met when another friend of mine, Kathy Moriarty, was auditioning musicians for her group. Russell Steinberg played with her for a while but was available in early 1978 when I called him. Our first drummer was Dimitri Popodopolous (aka D. Pop) who was also playing in The Good with another friend, Bernie Kugel, as well as another band, The Secrets. I don't think any other band name was ever considered. I think I just told everyone the name would be Davy and the Crocketts and everyone liked it. As a child of the Disney '50s I'd been called Davy more than once and the Davy Crockett thing gave us a little different angle at a time when bands were wearing sport coats and skinny ties or ripped jeans and safety pins. We could wear coonskin caps and cowboy shirts and make it work. Also, Geoff could keep his beard and still look cool. We rehearsed in Russell's garage apartment off Elmwood Avenue for a couple of months, working up various old rock'n'roll and rockabilly tunes, a couple of Beatle songs, Elvis Presley numbers, etc. The general idea was to be kind of like the Hamburg era Beatles.
The Debut By May of '78 we were ready. We arranged with Kathy Moriarty to be part of her Sunday evening open mic at the Central Park Grill. We'd play along with The Good - and all the kids with folk guitars that signed up to sing "Helpless" or "Wild World" or "Amie." Honestly, I remember watching Bernie and The Good play that night better than I remember performing myself. But at some point on that pleasant spring evening I plugged my Stratocaster into my Deluxe amp and we played a half dozen songs: "Misery," "Traveling Man," "Nervous Breakdown," "Heartbreak Hotel," "Mystery Train," and "Summertime Blues." The response was very good - we had the place filled with friends and they loved it.
Summer 1978 We played the open mic again in late July. By that time I'd bought a little black Rickenbacker guitar (like John Lennon's) and loaned the Strat to Geoff because his guitar wouldn't stay in tune. (Later he got a nice Gibson thanks to his girlfriend, his family, and Russell.) Also by that time Dimitri had told us that he couldn't continue to play in three bands and we'd have to find someone new. (D. Pop was later the drummer with Bush Tetras and the Gun Club. A photo of the Gun Club once appeared in the British rock magazine The Face in which Dimitri is wearing a Davy & the Crocketts t-shirt.) Dave Zwink had played in a college group I'd been part of, some of our basement jam bands, and with Kathy's group, so he was an obvious person to ask to replace Dimitri. We rehearsed during the summer, building a repertoire, and on Sunday, August 13 we played McVan's Rock Castle at Niagara and Hertel for the first time. We got to play a full set along with The Jumpers, The Secrets, The Good, Kathy Moriarty and the Pagan Babies, and Aunt Helen in a show billed as "A New Rock Celebration." In the next day's Buffalo News Dale Anderson mentioned our "erstwhile amateurism" and sure enough, Davy & the Crocketts got paid to play for the first time. Paying gigs at the Armory Tavern and the Masthead followed.  
The Official Davy & the Crocketts Promo Photo is on the left. Dave Zwink is sitting on the floor with Geoff Copp, Dave Meinzer and Russell Steinberg behind him. Maurice Narcis shot the photo at the long-gone Pat's Hot Dog Stand on Sheridan Drive in Tonawanda. It was also the reference Marlene Weisman used to draw the cover art (top of the page) for our single.The picture on the right shows us in my parents garage during one of my mid-summer brithday parties. Eric Jensen took the picture.
Recording Artists In September, we played for free again (a fund raiser for the University of Buffalo radio station, WBFO) but it paid off in another way. In the crowd that evening was a legendary Buffalo musician, Tom Calandra. Tom had played for years with Raven, probably Buffalo's best known rock band up to that point. In 1978 he was running a recording studio and record label out of his North Buffalo basement. Tom contacted us later and we went over to his studio and he offered to help us out. Tom was a really great guy and the access that he gave me and the band to his studio was a wonderful thing. We started making plans to get our sound on tape - and eventually on vinyl. Of course to record we needed original songs. The first one we had learned was "Long Time, No See" a sort of Neil Young-ish song I'd written a year or so before. (Any similarity to "Don't Cry No Tears" is strictly... um, unavoidable.) The song we chose to record first was "Turn Your Back" a new composition that was very much an attempt to write something like Elvis Costello. For the recording session, on January 11, 1979, I used another new guitar: a 1966 Fender Telecaster. We were in and out of Tom's studio during the next few months trying various songs, but those two would be the eventual single.
Ups and Downs Meanwhile we'd continued to build our repertoire and reputation. We performed songs including Elvis Costello's "Radio Radio" and "Mystery Dance" plus oldies like "Mr. Soul" and "Louie Louie" (eventually 66 songs, 14 of them originals, were played live at least once). We played at UB and Buffalo State, the Schuper House, the Masthead, the Spectrum, McVan's, and even Kitty's Dodge City Saloon - along with odd shows like a Halloween Party at Children's Hospital and the Channel 7 Variety Club Telethon (at 4 in the morning). We shared bills with The Jumpers, Billy Piranah and the Enemies, The Vores, The Tourists, The Scooters, an early version of Electroman, and others. In early February, after a dozen shows with out any real problems, we hit a bad one. The Stage One was a club out in the suburbs owned by concert promoters Harvey and Corky (Harvey Weinstein is now a movie mogul with Mirimax). They were having a "New Band Showcase" every Monday - a deal where bands would come and play, without pay, as an audition for future gigs. Being naive musicians we thought that, playing for free, they'd treat us nicely. Unfortunately the guy Harvey and Corky had hired to run the place was a jerk. Even though the day had been a snow-day and most things were closed or cancelled, we were told to come anyway. The club manager was rude and uncooperative almost from the moment we walked in the door, so we walked out the door - without playing. Of course Mr. Manager told us: "If you leave here without playing you'll never work in this town again." One good thing came out of the evening: a new original song, "Stage Zero," expressing our contempt for Mr. Manager. April 1979 saw a couple of the Crocketts' best shows. We celebrated Texas Independence Day at the Masthead with a big crowd and a bunch of all-star jams at the end of the evening. Various Jumpers, Enemies, and Tourists (plus little Vinnie Gallo, now Vincent Gallo, a celebrated movie actor and guitar collector) joined us in jams of "Nervous Breakdown" and "Johnny B. Goode." Then four days later at the Schuper House, we played a show that was opened by Stu Shapiro and Joan Krist, followed by the debut performance of Extra Cheese, a band fronted by Gary Storm whose WBFO radio show "Oil of Dog" was a touchstone for those whose musical tastes tended toward the obscure and avant garde. Gary's fans (and ours) were out in force and we had the grand pleasure of playing to a packed house and a jammin' dance floor.  
Two gigs in April 1979. I've always loved the Schuper House shot on the left because everyone looks like they're having so much fun. Eric Jensen took the picture. He also shot the picture from the Texas Independence Day party at the Masthead - but he used my camera so it's in color.
The Crocketts on Record By the end of June we'd finished recording the songs for our single. Tom Calandra's record label was called BCMK (for the Buffalo College of Musical Knowledge) and ours was the second release to bear the BCMK imprint. We pressed 500 of them and sold them in a sleeve with a drawing of the band that Marlene Weisman did for us. (Marlene went on to do graphics for Late Night with David Letterman and Saturday Night Live.) It arrived from the pressing plant on August 17 - Davy Crockett's birthday. We got an occasional airing on WBUF - the only station at the time that would touch anything local like our record. We also got some positive input from Andy Schwartz at New York Rocker magazine who thought it was "tasty." We even got a call from Planet Records in Los Angeles but once they actually heard the record they decided it wasn't "what we're looking for."
The End The band continued to play regularly and record occasionally through '79 and into 1980. Any one who came to one of our shows could count on seeing Russ pumping out the "Hit the Honky Tonks" walking bass line on his black Thunderbird bass and Geoff strumming a Buddy Holly-style chord solo on "Too Soon." If the show was longer than one set chances are Dave and I would switch places for a song. Dave would strap on my guitar and sing "Sea Cruise" while I sat behind his blue Ludwig drums (with the yellow plaid shirt stuffed in the open-front bass drum) and tried to figure out how drummers get their hands and feet to do so many different things at once. One of the more unusual shows we played was an evening at McVan's that came about when an acquaintance, Emily Zane, asked us to play with her new band, Stripsearch, and a group from New Hampshire. Stripsearch, while not real musical, had a certain artiness that made them entertaining. (Years later, while watching the Olympics on TV, I saw Emily on a commercial billed as "Emily Z, New York Poet.") The band from New Hampshire turned out to be G.G. Allin and The Jabbers. The were very over the top, and not very entertaining. (Allin eventually made a career of public self-mutilation and is now dead.) By the spring of 1980 however things were pulling in different directions. Geoff in particular had grown as a guitarist and musician and he and Russ were really itching to do something newer and less restrictive than the country-rock-leaning Crocketts. So, with the bloom off the rose, we went into the studio on May 3 - four days shy of the second anniversary of our first show - and re-recorded one of our signature original songs, "Lovesick." Then, with that and seven other songs safely on-the-record, we broke up the band. About a month later Geoff and Russ debuted their new band, Pauline and the Perils, with Pauline Digati and Tim Switala. They went on to become hugely popular at places like the Schuper House, McVan's, and the dinner-theater-turned-rock-club downtown, The Continental. I recorded another eight songs at BCMK and released an album with those and the Crocketts recordings at the end of 1980. Thanks to Billy Altman the album got a very kind one paragraph review in Creem Magazine. Dave went away to law school in Oregon. The band name got used again a couple of times. In 1982 I played a handful of shows with Paul Ipolito, Steve Berner, and sometimes Tom Kaminski and we called the band Davy & the Crocketts. But except for me and a few songs that group had no relation to the original Crocketts. More recently a Welsh band with a lead singer named Davey called themselves the Crocketts. They released several CDs of their Clash-like music but they weren't much like us - on-stage profanity was never our style. McVan's, The Masthead, The Schuper House, The Spectrum, The UB Fillmore Room... they're all gone now. Saddest of all, so is Tom Calandra; he passed away in 1998. But every time I drive by the convenience store at Niagara and Hertel I can't help remembering the rough brown walls, low ceiling, and red spray-painted light bulbs of McVan's, and the thrill of finally getting out there and playing loud rock'n'roll for dancing people. June 2002 Postscript Much of the reason this page is here is because Bob James (who played in the Tourists and Third Floor Strangers back then) called me about re-releasing a song or two by the Crocketts along with some other bands and tracks from the scene and era of Buffalo music that the Crocketts were part of. The result: a two-cd collection with 47 songs by about 25 acts, called "This Is It: Greater Buffalo's Greatest 1977-1984, released in October 2002. It includes the Davy & the Crocketts tracks "Turn Your Back" and "Stage Zero." As part of that project Bob also put together a release party/reunions concert. On October 24, Russ, Geoff, and I (with John Brady III pinch hiting for Alaskan Dave Zwink on the drums and my wife, Cathy Carfagna, adding keyboards) reunited for a three-song set as part of the show. It was great fun playing with the guys again. Russ and Geoff also reunited Pauline & the Perils. The show included the Jumpers, the Vores, Lip Service, the Stains, a Tourists/Third Floor Strangers band, the Method, and the Riddlers. We also had the opportunity to honor Tom Calandra at the show.
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