The Professor aka Gary Rhoades
(“Damn Fool”)
I started playing in a band in 1968 called Inner Darkness with Paul Gregersen, Darwin Edwards and Steve Budge. Paul’s brother, Craig, eventually replaced Steve on the drums, as Steve was having problems with his parents and became a runaway. Sadly, Steve was eventually murdered while hitchhiking in Cheyenne, Wyoming in 1973. Darwin was also replaced by Mike Jones (nickname: Stranger) on Bass Guitar, and we decided to form a new band with a new name. The name we chose was Ground Earth. A name that means absolutely nothing… However, I liked the name better than the band Dan was involved in called the Bean Brothers, where they wanted to cut holes in the back of their jeans and have their butts sticking out!
We quickly discovered that Stranger only knew one Bass line. He managed to play it on every single song that we learned. It was from Peter, Paul & Mary’s song, “I Dig Rock and Roll Music”. It was really stupid! Out of necessity, we sent Stranger packin’ and replaced him with Kevin Hoff. Kevin was a few years older, but was a seasoned Rock & Roll veteran. Our sound finally began to take shape. After about a year, Kevin left the band due to a new job that limited his ability to play in the band anymore.
We then acquired Alex Conger on Bass, and we were up and running again. Besides Bass Guitar, Alex had another talent which gave us the ability to play some music that we couldn’t have attempted before… Alex could sing just like Jim Dandy of Black Oak Arkansas, which was very popular at that time.
Alex was also an electronics wiz, so we gradually started becoming more technologically sophisticated with our equipment. In fact, we got to the point that we couldn’t carry all of our equipment in just a van. So, Craig’s step-dad, George, bought a trailer that he rented to us to make a profit. He always threatened to “kick our butts”, if we didn’t pay him right away!
Craig’s other brother, Scott, had a sneaky dog named Spot, who always found a way to sneak into our band room and ruin our equipment. You can imagine what a dog can do with a room full of amps that resemble fire hydrants. I remember one night coming to practice and seeing Paul’s amp lying face down on the floor with two huge holes in the speaker column. Evidently, Spot had tugged on the guitar cord, knocking over the amp. The force of the fall ripped the amp head off of the speaker cabinet. From that time on, we called Spot, “Amp Eater”. Man, how we hated that dog! Fortunately for us, Spot died in a house fire a short time later. We all had a big celebration that Spot (alias Amp Eater) was finally gone.
After about 3 (or so) years of playing, I left the band for a few years (1972-1974) to serve a church mission. GROUND EARTH carried on for a little while before finally breaking up. Lead Guitarist, Kory Neider replaced me, and then Alex ended up moving away to Cedar City, Utah for about six months. That was the end of GROUND EARTH!
In 1973, Craig and Paul formed a band with Bob McLeod (Woosh) and Joe Keele, called CLOUD, which was short-lived. Then, when Alex returned, Craig, Paul and Alex started a new band called MERKIN, with Evan Anderson and Gary Dunn. MERKIN was around throughout my mission, and eventually broke up after Gary and Evan graduated from I.S.U. In 1975, I started to get serious about playing again, and formed the band COTTONWOOD with Alex Conger, Calvin Hunter, Craig Gregersen and myself. (Craig’s brother, Paul, had since moved away to Blackfoot, Idaho and was working the night shift at his job there).
Calvin was the celebrity of the band. He was well known as a popular radio DJ in Southeastern Idaho. Calvin was the only band member who was actually trained in voice lessons. The first time I heard Calvin, I thought he was an opera singer who converted to rock and roll. It took me a while to get used to his vibrato and voice. However, Calvin soon adjusted to rock and became a great friend and singer. Calvin played a beater organ/piano that I think we found at the local Salvation Army Store? Sometimes he would bang on the piano so hard the legs would buckle. Fortunately, it kept in tune, and I can still envision Calvin banging on that organ. Calvin only played with us for about a year and a half, before moving away to Montana to pursue a TV NEWS Anchor position.
Calvin was replaced by 2 people in the Latter part of 1976– Lyle Thompson was brought in to take over the keyboard duties. But the best personnel addition we made was that of Lead Guitarist/Saxophonist/Singer extraordinaire, Dan Jones! Dan was truly a talented musician. Because the rest of us were all self-taught, Dan made sure we did things right. I recall when Dan would often bring the crowd to their feet by playing his guitar behind his head—there was something magical about doing that at a dance.
Alex, Craig, Dan, and myself were a crazy bunch of guys who felt invincible in the world. Playing from 1976-1982, we were Rock Stars driving around four states, playing into the wee hours of the weekend nights. We played for clubs, churches, schools, universities, and played in small dumps where the pigs outnumbered the people. There wasn’t a gig we wouldn’t play. Our band slogan was, “If No One Would, COTTONWOOD”. Generally we were so wired after playing a gig, we couldn’t sleep, and drove home every night. Even when we were 12 hours away from Pocatello! I look back at our experiences and truly wonder how we survived? I remember sleeping in the back of the van while driving back from Wyoming in a snowstorm, and waking up to us doing 360’s on the highway with our band trailer leading the van, going down the highway! As in this case and many others, we all survived without a scratch. Truly it was a miracle. When Craig, our drummer would drive, none of us could sleep because he would practice playing his drums on the steering wheel. We frequently feared for our lives many times. I guess we felt invincible or at least we thought we were!
Our favorite meal was chicken fried steak and french-fries. At every truck stop we begged the cook to throw on extra steak grease—that’s how we ate them. We liked our steaks best when the fries covered your plate and you had to do search and rescue to find the hidden steak. I often wondered why we didn’t all have heart problems when we got older.
Our Band had plenty of personality. Alex was the innovator of our group. If we needed a new sound system he would find some way to get us one for our next practice.
Alex was very unique. At one dance in Gooding Idaho, he got a little nervous with stage fright while talking to the crowd… Realizing he got his words mixed up, he just said loudly into the microphone, “Verrrrrrrrrt”. To this day, I don’t know where in the galaxy that phrase came from, but whenever one of the band members became confused or disoriented on stage, you would hear one of the other band members say, “Verrrrrrrrrt” in the microphone—interestingly, the crowd (and us) always laughed. I guess that’s why we kept doing it. Over the years, I tried to figure out why saying “Verrrrrrrrrt” was so funny? But it’s just something you have to experience to understand.
One evening we were all playing at a nightclub when the lights suddenly went off. All of a sudden, we heard Alex scream, “Oh will you call me”, doing his Jim Dandy (Black Oak Arkansas) impression. Evidently some girl in the audience reached out and grabbed him good. Today we would call that sexual harassment, but back then, it was just someone grabbing you. I believe that’s when Alex started singing Tenor after that. “Verrrrrrrrrt”!
Alex frequently complained that our guitar amps were too loud. When playing at an outdoor concert, Alex complained that Dan and I were playing so loud that his ears were bleeding! For some reason, Dan and I found that comment extremely funny. After all, how can your ears bleed from music? So, in every gig after that, we would slowly inch our amps and turn them in Alex’s direction, so that he would feel the full force of the Marshall and Music Man amps! As the night went on, we would slowly increase the volume until we could get Alex to cry out in pain, “Guys, I can’t take it, my ears are bleeding”. Oh, those were the days…
One of the more memorable events, was when Dan and Alex got it into their heads that we needed more sizzle in our show. Therefore, we purchased an awesome light show that included exploding pods. The pods were regular light sockets, that we filled with black gunpowder, to explode at the climax of a rock song. I noticed over time, that the explosions kept getting bigger and bigger. As Dan reasoned, “if a tablespoon of gunpowder would make a big bang, imagine what a cup of gunpowder could do?” You really don’t want to imagine what happened…
There were times when we set off the explosions that we had to evacuate the dance floor. I don’t believe you could use this type of sizzle with OSHA standards today. When the explosions didn’t give us the sizzle we needed, Dan started scooting (ever so slowly as not to be noticed) the fully-loaded pods directly below the feet of selective band members. When we’d hit the climax of a particular song, Dan would explode the pod. We had some great memories watching our fellow musicians jumping out of their pants. The crowd liked it too!
Dan was really the leader of the group. Because we primarily used his blue Dodge van to move our equipment, he would get quite upset when fellow band members wouldn’t show up to pack their own equipment for a gig. Therefore, Dan started the “Beat the Hell out of their Equipment Movement”! If you weren’t there to load your own equipment. That is, if Dan or someone else had to load your equipment for you, you could expect a few dents or scratches on your gear.
I remember one time, when our drummer didn’t show up to load his drums. Dan calmly picked up a recently purchased Bass Drum, and threw it in the trailer! Unfortunately, the drum-head was penetrated by a metal mic stand. We all laughed so hard that tears came down our faces. When Craig saw what happened to his drum, I thought he was going to throw up! No one likes to play a gig with busted equipment. All we could do or say to Craig was, “Look at your Face”. A term we used often when a band member was in pain because of equipment failure. I guess you might call us sadistic. However, we dealt with equipment failures and stressful situations by highlighting the look on the person’s face. “Look at the Face”! No matter how much pain you were in, you just had to start laughing.
Often we got stuck in some hell-hole performing songs for a bunch of redneck, purist-true country music lovers, that had never heard a rock song in their lives. When this happened, Dan would play a song he wrote called, “Don’t Drop No Mustard On My Clean White Shirt Baby”. The crowd loved the song, but it was really a knock on country music! We could never figure out why people loved a song about mustard so much? Go figure…
Finally, Craig our drummer, was like Schroeder in the Peanuts cartoon. Like Schroeder, Craig always packed around this stinky rug that he used for keeping his drums from sliding off the stage. Over the years, we begged Craig to clean the rug so we didn’t have to smell it while driving home from a dance—(over the years, it absorbed every odor of every night club we played in). When begging didn’t work, we next threatened Craig that we were going to throw it away if he didn’t clean it. Looking back, I think Craig must have believed the rug possessed some magical powers. Like Sampson, thinking he would lose his strength by cutting his hair… Craig believed by cleaning the rug, he would lose his musical talents. So he never cleaned it!
After about 8 years of packing this smelly rug in the van (it was too precious to leave in the trailer), Craig got so mad one night after listening to everybody complain about his rug, that he stopped the van, grabbed the stink rug, and threw it out onto someone’s yard in northern Idaho. Craig was so devastated that he didn’t say anything. It was one of the few silent times we didn’t say, “Look at his Face”! We knew Craig had just lost the only love of his life.
Our other favorite phrase was “Damn Fool”. No matter what you did or how you did it, you were called a “Damn Fool”. Even when introducing the band, one band member was always introduced as “Damn Fool” from Idaho. We picked up this phrase from Craig’s Grandpa, who once yelled, “Get outta the way, you DAMN FOOL!” to the family dog, who got in his way while he was pouring a cement sidewalk. We laughed so hard at that incident, that the term “Damn Fool” stuck, and became a part of our vocal lexicon. I don’t know why we used the phrase so much, but I can tell you this, maybe the phrase was an accurate description of all of us. We were just a bunch a “Damn Fools”.
As for the original COTTONWOOD members today… Alex is still an entrepreneur running his own web company. Calvin still works in the broadcasting industry, and now manages several radio stations. Craig is a Magician and manages a DJ entertainment company. As for me, I became an entrepreneurial Marketing Professor. Some things just happen. I would do it all over again. All of us were changed from our experiences and for the better.
