John Hedger - North Folk River Band Interview
North Fork River Band was a group started in Lexington, Kentucky around 1969 by bass player Bill Dwyer. Bill, (far left in the above band photo) was kind of an old school hippy from Boston who moved to Lexington with his brother Kevin. I would say Bill was ‘kind of a hippy’, though not by obvious appearances. He had only a slight hint of hipness to his looks, (always fairly short hair, with a thickish upper lip mustache). His personality possessed the kind of intensity that at first seemed very calm, though he had a way - sometimes with his questions/sometimes just with his eyes - of peering through one’s soul - and, in an embarrassing way, revealing any façade a person might be hiding behind. Bill’s brother Kevin, who was not in the band, though he definitely had the old weathered hippy look. We all knew him as “Cotton” - as he had this striking cottony white stringy hair and intensely lined and wrinkled facial features. He often dressed in “Gandhi-like” white linen loose clothing and had the ominous appearance of how one might picture what God would look like! My conversations with Cotton always seemed like brief, tricky, verbal games, and I never felt like he thought very highly of me in my awkward adolescence – though Cotton did come through for me in a very big way once.
The North Fork River Band was a major part of, not only my musical life and early musical development, but a very important part of my teen adolescent life and experience for the three or four years from 1969 to 1973 I played in that band (honestly I’m not sure of the timeline details), though in my memory it seemed like I was in that group a very long time! If you refer to the above band photo, I’m the young punk in the center of the shot. My name is Johnny Roy Hedger. I am a guitarist in blues, classical guitar, Renaissance lute, and a modern composer of classical music for guitar. I make my living mainly from teaching guitar lessons, plus performing. Now I’d like to give you a bit of my personal background and early “pre-North Fork” musical development: I was born in Alabama, though I have no recollection as we moved from there within 6 months after my birth. My dad, James Edwin Hedger, was a mechanical engineer and worked briefly for many companies, including GE and later IBM. In my earliest years we lived in Alabama, North Canton Ohio, somewhere in Canada, two places in Minnesota, (St. Paul and St. Cloud). St. Cloud is where my first cognizance began. I remember we were living in a tiny trailer park on a farm owned by “Mr. Fisher”. who had a great strawberry field and was on a very steep bank of the Mississippi - though in Minnesota the river was not as vastly wide as it is further down south, though it had a very strong current and with the high banks looked very scary to me! Mr. Fisher sometimes would put me on his lap as he drove his tractor... Which always gave me a thrill! That’s how we existed...
My dad had a red Volkswagon van with a trailer hitch on it and we would move from place to place, living in a silver trailer that was not much longer or wider than the van. I recall living in Salt Lake City for a mere 3 months, which was very nice for one summer... Like an Oasis! Then we settled in Huntington W. Virginia at my aunt Gracie’s house, which was the first place that felt like a real home to me. Then after 2 years my father got a permanent career with IBM and when I was 8, in the 3 rd grade we moved to Lexington, Kentucky. Music for me started when I first heard “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” by the Beatles on the radio. I recall going to the movie theatre mainly to see a 15 minute film on The Fab Four and I did get caught up in the excitement of all those screaming girls! Thinking of singing like the Beatles, “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah”, and thinking Boy oh Boy! I sure want to do that!!” The Beatles seemed like a breath of fresh air compared to all the contrived doo wop and “teen” shlock that was played on the radio in 1964. For my 10th birthday, my main wish was for a guitar! My aunt Ruth worked at Kenney Music in Huntington and picked out a blond acoustic, and got me hooked up with one very frightening, and impersonal guitar lesson where this young guitar teacher just went through the motions for maybe 20 minutes and never even once looked me in the eye. I ended up more scared and confused when the lesson was over!
But I truly treasured that cheap guitar! - with its spruce top and dark wood back & amp; sides. I would prop it up in my bedroom and stare at it for hours... Admiring it’s curves, and fascinated about the mysteries of the fretboard that I secretly vowed to master one day! However, at the age of 10 I had no guidance. I tried to learn a few chords but the fingering charts were terribly confusing to me. I did better with single note riffs like the Peter Gunn Theme, which I believe I could play on the 6th string with my 1st finger only. At that age it didn’t occur to me yet that I might be able to play with all 4 fingers! Then about a year later I met a school mate named Tony Capps. I recall going over to his house and his dad had a small archtop guitar propped up near the fireplace that I thought looked so cool and awesome. My friend Tony would brag to me that he took guitar lessons with Bill Brooks of the Torques! The Torques were one of the top R&B soul bands in Lexington. I was impressed! Somehow Tony revealed to me that learning chords wasn’t so hard after all - so it did help to get me going. I saw my first rock concert with Tony. It was Chuck Berry, who was accompanied by another great Lexington band ~ the magnificent Seven with Tony Stallard! Other acts that night were The Shirelles and The Coasters! Tony Capps and I talked about starting a band and I blurted out “I’ll play bass!”.
The band never got off the ground but I asked my dad to convert a Kappa Cobra electric guitar I had into a four string, short scale bass (probably a little too short!). Then finally realizing that converting a 6 string to a bass didn’t really cut it – though he did a great job, repainting it and all... My dad finally took me to a music store and bought me a $500 Mosrite semi-hollow blonde bass. It was the finest instrument I had ever fondled and held in my hands! So, word got around a bit that I played bass and I ended up in my fist band with an older, 20 something character named Reynolds Howard and we actually played a gig! – a private party where we probably had 30 minutes of material, then took a break and had soda and potato chips! However it was in rehearsals with this band (and I don’t recall the band’s name) that I met Jamie Asher... (The beautiful guy in the bottom right of the above North Fork photo). Jamie, aka Butch Asher, was a keyboard multi-instrumentalist and vocalist that had a band in Lexington called “The Jamie Asher Blues Band”. I saw them play a school dance once and they totally blew me away. They did mostly Eric Burdon and the Animals songs at this dance. I really watched his bass player, who looked so cool and confident, plucking his Gibson bass with his index and middle fingers.
I was learning by watching! It was after seeing his band that Jamie came to our own little band’s rehearsals. He would put his arms around me and show me the notes I needed to play on bass for songs like “Midnight Hour” and “Little Latin Lupe Lu”. It was as if Paul McCartney himself were showing me bass licks! That’s how much I admired Butch and appreciated him taking me under his wing. My second band playing bass at the age of 12 was a group of guys who were all 4 to 6 years older than me. We were a soul band called The Kentucky Kernels. We got the name from our keyboard player Alan Stein - who’s father owned the popular Kentucky Kernel restaurant in Lexington. We played songs by Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, Arthur Conley’s “Sweet Soul Music” etc.. Sam & Dave tunes! The first gig we played was a fraternity party at Transylvania University in Lexington where, at the age of 12, I drank some keg beer. That wasn’t really too shocking for me as I smoked cigarettes from the age of 10, and had just started drinking around 12 when I was in the 7th grade. At first, I really wasn’t very hip to soul and R&B when I joined the Kentucky Kernels. I was into the Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Dave Clark Five - but, soul music started to gradually grow on me and within a year I was purchasing my own Wilson Pickett albums.
Around that same time I recall being at a party where someone was playing Eric Burdon and the Animals greatest hits on the stereo. I was amazed by the sound of that Hammond B3 organ (played by Alan Price). I asked the party host who the band was and soon bought my own copy of that two album set. That’s where I started falling in love with the blues I think... Listening to The Animals. Eric Burdon had such a great voice for blues. Much more seasoned than the Stones I thought, though not nearly as famous. Going into the summer of 67’ my family moved to Austin TX where my dad had already been transferred by IBM a year earlier. It was that year right before we moved when I happened to buy “Are You Experienced” the debut album by The Jimi Hendrix Experience! Living and going to school in Austin I listened to that album constantly, every day until Hendrix released his 2 nd album “Axis Bold As Love” which I also bought immediately! An Austin rock radio station was advertising a Jimi Hendrix concert in San Antonio. I begged my sister to take me and a couple of my friends. So, on August 2 nd , 1968, I saw Jimi Hendrix play (with The Soft Machine opening) at San Antonio’s Municipal Auditorium. The PA vocals sounded totally distorted, like maybe they took a 100 watt Shure Vocal Master PA and turned it on 10... Yet me and my fiends didn’t care. It was very exciting being in the same room with Hendrix... And he was so cool!
Another memorable concert I saw in Austin was James Brown... Again with my same friends. I think we were three of about six white people in the whole place. But it was cool! James Brown had two of everything! Two drummers / two bass players / two guitar players. He brought the house down! Well my parents divorced that year and my mom gave me and my sister Carrie a choice to either stay in Austin or move back to Lexington. So we both sorely wanted to move back because we had so many friends in Lexington. My old band The Kentucky Kernels in Lexington had changed their name to The Oxford Circle and they had replaced me on bass by then of course. I didn’t expect Them to take me back with open arms though I was impressed that they had upped their game and were doing some Jimi Hendrix tunes like “Fire”. Around that time I made the executive decision to switch from bass to guitar. This was a major decision for a 14 year old! I borrowed a very cheap and junky department store electric from a friend and would play it while sitting on the couch while sister Carrie and I were watching Wagon Train, or maybe Star Trek on the TV. I’m sure it was annoying to my sister to hear me constantly plunking it, even though the guitar was unplugged. She finally blurted out one day “ Give It Up Johnny! You’ll never ever learn to play that guitar!!!” This made me only want to play it that much harder and prove to her she was wrong! It happened one summer evening that I attended a dance at The Lexington Aquatic Club where surprisingly, they featured two Blues bands! The first band was a slick Nashville band that played a lot of Paul Butterfield Blues Band material.
I was really impressed with that band. However, the second band changed my life! It was a totally “unslick” hippy blues band from Cincinnati called Balderdash. The drummer was their lead singer, and I was taking notes! “Here’s one you all have probably heard. Rock Me Baby by BB King!” – well, I hadn’t heard it until they played it, and neither had I heard of the Paul Butterfield stuff the previous band played, but as I said, I was taking notes! Balderdash had a great Hammond B3 organist but the band member who I thought was a total artist was Gerry Parker on guitar! He played a late 50’s Gibson Flying V guitar with the fins sawed off to where it looked like a teardrop. His stage presence was very incognito and out of the spotlight – as he took a blue floodlight on the floor and pointed it out toward the audience, where all we could see was his silhouette when he played. His playing got hotter and hotter as their set progressed. Gerry had a perfected, and beautiful singing string vibrato where his hand waved like a hummingbird’s wings. He would also slide chords up and down the neck in a very artful way. It looked to me like the same chord shape sliding up and down the neck. I was fascinated! And told myself “I have to learn those sliding chords somehow and I have to get me a singing vibrato like that!”. I decided that night I was going to be a professional blues guitarist! - and the next day I went to a downtown record store, Barney Millers, and bought my first BB King album. “The Electric BB King – His Best” and The Paul Butterfield Blues Band “East West” album. Later that month, I bought the great Albert King album “Years Gone By” on Stax records. I had never heard Albert King but dug the album cover! Albert’s guitar playing was a revelation to me. Really stung my ear! I made it a project to learn every lick and solo on that album! I really scratched that record up going over it lick by lick and sometimes switching my little suitcase RCA stereo record player to half speed in order to slow down the guitar licks and study Albert’s vibrato. Around that same time, a buddy of mine named Tim Whalen said he knew a guy who was starting a band and needed a lead guitar player. I had already auditioned for another group of two hippy brothers who didn’t call me back, but Tim took me over to Bill Dwyer’s house and we all sat down on the floor while I tediously played through that entire Albert King album...
Playing one song after another along with the record. Bill raised his eyebrows more than once, even though my playing was a bit rough – Bill was impressed enough to ask me to join his new band. Again, I can’t recall what we first called ourselves, but we played our debut gig at really seedy joint called The King’s Palace. Actually, at 15 I had been in that bar a few times to watch a friend do a mediocre James Brown shtick, where he would have a stripper wrap a cape over his shoulders in James Brown dramatic fashion ~ although this fellow was an Irishman with striking orange hair! It was my idea to tell Bill and the guys that we should play The King’s Palace. We went over there one afternoon to book a date. I recall Bill turning his head in disgust as a topless waitress shook her breasts in his face. We got the gig, and probably sounded pretty rough ~ nervously doing tunes like Booker T’s Green Onions, etc… And at the end of the night this bar owner didn’t want to pay us. Now this is where Bill Dwyer would really pull through for us. Remember, Bill was “kind of a peace loving” Boston hippy, yet he would not hesitate to square off with someone when the occasion possibly called for it! No violence happened but somehow Bill got our $90 out of that guy and of course we never played there again. This was the seed group who later became The North Fork River Band. Our drummer Chip quit the band shortly after that first gig. We soon held auditions for another drummer and unanimously settled on Steve Parish (right/rear in band photo). We really liked Steve’s personality as well as his drumming and Steve stayed and played solidly with us for the duration of the band! Around that same time, it turned out that we either gently kicked out our lead singer and dear friend Rod Kress, or he decided to leave. Rod’s voice often reminded me of Bob Dylan. He had some very good vocal qualities to his voice but was perhaps a little too folky for what we wanted to do. I’m not really sure what the catalyst was for Rod’s leaving, but the next vocalist we tried was a head shop owner who had recently blown into town named Mouse Miller... But first, a slight diversion. I should not go without mentioning the reality of some moderate mind - altering drug use within the band. Our first singer Rod at that time was a pot seller. There was a good amount of socially passing around of joints, although Rod’s Kentucky Blue grass was rather harsh on the lungs and not nearly as strong as most marijuanas of today. I never really had a passion for pot myself and never purchased any, though I would feel obligated to join in mainly just to be sociable and saw no harm of taking a puff or two when the joint was passed my way.
I gradually became aware of Bill and his brother Cotton’s, and other friend’s use of psychedelic, hallucinogenic drugs ~ such as LSD in tab form, with names like “Purple Barrels”, or “Owsley Chocolate Chip”. Also organic mescaline or organic psilocybin which was always offered processed in capsule form in those days. At first I was rather scared of dipping into those drugs myself ~ recalling at least one very frightening video I was shown in my 8 th trade year in the Austin Texas junior high school I attended ~ where we were shown examples of LSD causing people to totally go crazy and psychotic and ending up permanently in a psychiatric ward for the rest of their lives! Imagine how this frightening film affected adolescents like myself! The one very cool thing about that film we were forced to watch was the brief 10 minute segment about Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead! It showed Garcia practicing some awesome runs of modal scales in a room within the band’s super cool communal house they rented in the Haight/Ashbury district of San Francisco. I loved that part of the video! Bill Dwyer never ever tempted me or encouraged me to try hallucinogenics, but eventually I became curious and asked about trying some. After our lead singer Rod Kress exited the band, and as I mentioned above, there was a brief time when we had a new lead singer named “Mouse” Miller. Mouse owned a head shop on Limestone St. near downtown that was a kind of “hippy row” district. I can’t recall the name of his shop but he had all the stuff! Black lights and black light posters... Pipes etc., etc... This was still in the days before we were called North Fork River Band. Anyway, when Mouse got wind of me wanting to try LSD he was very eager to help me along on my “first trip”! Actually, he became rather annoying really (sorry Mouse, if you’re reading this.) Bill, Mouse, and myself decided I would drop only half a tab of Purple Barrel. When I dropped it Mouse would never stop talking! He would say somewhat corny, but heady things like “ We’ll LISTEN ~ to the Doors!”. The corny pun of course is - was he referring to the band “The Doors” or to listening to actual inanimate household doors and see if they speak to us? This turned out to be a somewhat fractured Alice In Wonderland experience for me on my first trip. Mouse mentioned that - on acid I would be able to clearly hear “every note!” of Eric Clapton’s guitar solos with Cream. Then he suddenly stoked up a record playercand played the beginning the Greame Edge dialogue in the opening of The Moody Blues album “On The Threshold Of A Dream” which, in the way Mouse presented it to me, gave me the first impression of The Moody Blues as a ‘weird scary band’ that were probably into some dire witchcraft stuff, or worse! Imagine That!
Mouse had good intentions, and I realized he was very excited about guiding me through my first trip. Well, it turned out that Mouse Miller was not all that great a vocalist and I believe his head shop wasn’t doing all that well, so he left our band and likely left Lexington as quickly as he came. Thus, once again we were without a real lead vocalist for the band and then someone mentioned that Butch Asher had come back to town from California and I said “Yeah! Butch is a Great singer! Let’s get him!”. Butch, at that time was unfortunately really into shooting up speed, but unlike most skinny speed freaks, Butch was actually looking very healthy... Even a little plump and overweight! I recall Bill driving me over to some couple’s pad where Butch was hanging out. Bill could see the horror on my face as I was staring at the couple on the floor, who were so emaciated - looking as if they had just been released from the German Auschwitz camp... With used needles laying in a dish on the floor, eagerly hitting speed up into their arms. We discussed meeting up with Butch later and left him there. Then as we got back into Bill’s truck – he knew I was shocked by what I had just seen and Bill shook his head and said, “John, Don’t ever, Ever get into that!”. On a lighter note, we later picked up Butch from his parent’s house and talked him into joining the band. I talked Butch into pulling out his old Farfisa portable organ, which had been in storage at his folk’s house. When he stoked it up at Bill’s house we winced a bit as a couple of cockroaches ran out from between the organ keys. Butch, at that point was actually more into guitar, though after playing and feeling out his Farfisa again, it brought back shades of his Jamie Asher Blues Band days and he enjoyed improvising lines and licks on it I’m sure. I still wanted to play blues and thought the organ was perfect for blues but Butch was totally into Neil Young and wanted to stick with guitar and to name our band “Young”. The rest of us weren’t too keen on that name - though Butch and I did scratch a few records working out the chords to some great Neil Young and Crazy Horse songs like Everybody Knows This is Nowhere / Down By The River/ Cinnamon Girl, etc…
Creedence Clearwater was also putting hit after hit on the radio waves at that time and we worked up those songs too. A week, or so later Butch declared that we should call ourselves North Fork River Band, likely named after the North Fork of the Kentucky River which I believe begins in Letcher County Kentucky and flows 168 miles into Whitesburg, Hazard, Jackson, and Beattyville Kentucky. How Cool is that?? I was easy going enough not to keep pressing the point of wanting the band to play blues. Bill made the point that since we did not really ‘live the blues’ we probably shouldn’t focus much on blues. Heck I was just happy to be playing lead guitar in a band, so I was ok with not doing Albert, or BB King songs. We did work up some Ten Years After blues, and one blues tune by Jethro Tull maybe off their first album, plus some Stevie Winwood tunes by The Spencer Davis Group... I’m a Man / Give Me Some Lovin’. Bill was still into progressive rock and always followed the Billboard album charts and always kept on his subscription to Rolling Stone! Back to the band’s North Fork LSD experiences ~ as things progressed, we began to regularly drop acid at Bill’s house on the weekends. Bill was a great host! Our tripping would turn into all night album listening sessions which was very influential and impressionable to me at the age of 15. He seemed to have so many hip, surprise albums and had great joy in turning us on! Bill would spin debut albums of Grand Funk Railroad, Procol Harum, “Arthur” by the Kinks (Great album!) Nach’l Blues by Taj Mahal, etc.. In these all night sessions I first heard the entire album of “Tommy” by The Who, “Odgen’s Nut Gone Flake” by The Small Faces with the great vocalist Steve Marriott and wonderful bassist Ronnie Lane, also “To Our Children’s, Children’s, Children” by Moody Blues ~ Bill would turn us on to one killer album after another. Wonderful Stuff! Now, if you remember, in the opening paragraphs I mentioned that Bill Dwyer’s brother Cotton, who usually seemed uninterested in me, actually came through for me in a big way. With our many weekend excursions into LSD I built up a tolerance to the drug, where it seemed to not get me nearly as high as it did at first. So I quietly decided to stop taking it for a couple of months.
Then one evening, my friend Ricky Bell was visiting at Bill’s house and offered us some kind of synthetic mescaline in capsules. I was a bit hesitant, since I had kind of quit, but decided to join in at the last minute. Well, it turned out that these capsules were a weird mix of mescaline and speed, along with perhaps a dash of heroin and who knows what. With my tolerance down I was Up and Spinning! ~ for 48 hours straight, on a trip that seemed like it would never end. I was feeling much fear and paranoia and was not a happy tripper! I couldn’t talk to people or even make a clear sentence. After it looked to everybody like I just would not settle down, Cotton came to my rescue by actually coming over to my mom’s house. How he snapped me out of this was simple. He showed me a pill bottle that had the word “SLEEP” printed on it ~ he then pointed to that word SLEEP and convinced a young, gullible me that one pill would take me out of this intense roller coaster ride I was experiencing and that my 48 hour nightmare would finally be over. I believed him! Took the pill, which could have been all sugar for all I knew. When I finally slept and came down I was depressed and socially spaced out that whole summer long! I was very sensitive to psychedelics, but was always trying to prove I wasn’t. Yet after much struggle that summer, it came to a peak and I fell into a paranoid episode - and once again, I couldn’t respond to people. My friend Bill ending up driving me to the psych ward of a hospital. I stayed there a few days and took their red sleeping antidepressant capsules and came out of it. My mother was at
that time also in the hospital from a heart failure. I remember her saying to me “John, you really have a true friend there with Bill.” After seeing a psychologist for a year or so, etc., I finally snapped out of my depression – realized that no matter how much fear or anxiety I had – I would still wake up the next day – still alive, still breathing, right?... So why stay so endlessly and stupidly depressed? My friend Ricky Bell pointed out the Doors, Jim Morrison blues lyric “I’ve been down so God-Damned long ~ That it looks like Up to me”. This simple lyric helped, and became part of a new mindset for me. A catalyst which pulled me out of my “lost soul” depression, and I’ve never looked back! I felt like I HAD hit bottom -Perhaps more than once… And that’s when you begin to see that little ray of sunshine & amp; hope from the bottom of the deep well you have dug yourself into... Realizing that being down and depressed is not really killing you – and there’s no where to go but up! So I guess I really did end up “Hearing The Doors!” While I was in the group, Bill would often take me to rock festivals to get both of us some exposure to the current rock scene. I recall one festival in Akron Ohio where The Byrds, and Canned Heat, and Gentle Giant were supposed to headline, but none of them showed up except Bob “The Bear” Hite of Canned Heat - who sat in with a really hot band called Pig Iron! Pig Iron had a guitar player who to me sounded as good, or better than Eric Clapton! Earlier that day Kenny Rogers also performed. At that time he had only the one psychedelic hit “Just Dropped In ( To see what Condition My Condition Was In). That was pretty cool and he even played in the rain! I believe the reason that the big groups didn’t show for this Akron festival was possibly that word got around about poor ticket sales and there was fear of getting burned and not getting paid. When three famous headliner groups don’t show up - something is fishy!
Other notable concerts and festivals Bill took me to were to see Grand Funk Railroad and the Lemon Pipers at Ludlow’s Garage in Cincinnati. The Lemon Pipers opened up and I thought they were so much better than Grand Funk. The Lemon Pipers were a very mature and highly developed band by then and much, much better than that single, early psychedelic radio hit “Green Tambourine” they had. Bill Bartlett was a great guitar player in The Lemon Pipers. He later started the group Ram Jam that did that rockin version of the Leadbelly song “Black Betty”. Black Betty is a great example of Bartlett’s masterful guitar skills. What I lked about Bartlett was that, though he played very loud, his tone was fairly clear and had great quality about it. Not overly distorted like most guitarists were. This gave Bartlett a unique individuality and set him above the crowd I believe. I struggled myself very much with getting a good tone and sound on guitar. When I was 14 I had a Maestro (Gibson) Fuzz Tone box. The thing about guitar effects like distortion boxes is that they give one a false sense of power and sustain - yet in reality the guitar becomes so compressed that there are nodynamics or “punch” to the attack when the pick strikes the strings. In North Fork I played an SG shaped Gibson Les Paul junior guitar through a Fender Silver- Faced Twin Reverb amp with JBL 12 inch speakers. I had my fuzz box and also bought a volume pedal. Now one thing a guitar player with an 80 watt amp does NOT need is a volume pedal! A guitarist with a volume pedal almost always is the loudest thing in the band.
I remember playing a jam session with North Fork where we played some Creedence songs and maybe some blues like Good Morning Little Schoolgirl (10 Years After version), and Bill Dwyer confronted me afterwards very sternly and said many people at the jam were saying I was playing way too loud! I eventually read an interview of my hero Michael Bloomfield, who also favored a Twin Reverb amp and took note that he just used a touch of reverb to get his sound and besides getting his tone settings that was all. I had some other bad experiences where I would be at a jam session and asked to play but I didn’t have my favorite fuzz box or volume pedal with me and couldn’t get a decent sound to save my life! I soon decided not to rely on guitar effects and began to just play with more of a straight tone. Now I still longed for more sustain and was still a bit frustrated that my Twin Reverb amp was so squeaky clean and bright sounding and wished I had an amp that would break up a tiny bit and give me a dirtier sound just straight through the amp. I didn’t realize that I probably needed a smaller Fender Vibrolux with lower wattage to get a more broken up sound in the smaller clubs without getting too loud. It’s funny, when I was younger most of the amps were very bright and very clean and I didn’t like that. Nowadays most amps on the market are way too broken up and distorted for me – even the new hand-wired boutique amps. I now long for that bright clean sound of those early Fender amps and it’s hard to find one like that without spending $3,000!
So, getting back to the many festivals we attended ~ there was an excellent 1970 Cincinnati Pop Festival where I saw Ten Years After, and one of my favorite heavy groups – Mountain, with Felix Pappalardi on bass and Leslie West on guitar! Pappalardi was the producer of Cream. To me , Mountain were a perfect balance of light & Heavy... Light and articulate sections, with classical overtones contrasting with Balls To The Walls Heavy Guitar Rock. They really were a World Class four piece group! This festival also included Bob Segar who at that time had only one hit ~ Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man, and I saw a better, more mature Grand Funk Railroad than I had previously seen at Ludlow’s. Still, I thought front man Mark Farner was a bit too phony and egoed out and I didn’t care for them really. Also Mott the Hoople played! And Iggy, who I had never heard of and thought was kind of silly with no shirt and long silver sparkle gloves to his elbows... Constantly squatting and waving his elbows like he was doing the Funky Chicken! – plus Alice Cooper, who I had also never heard of. I thought Alice’s guitar player was amateurish and slightly out of tune... So I wasn’t very impressed with either Iggy or Alice. Yet they became very famous. Without a doubt, the most memorable concert I ever attended was The Moody Blues at Cincinnati Gardens around 1970 I think. I really hadn’t heard the Moodies very much and didn’t know much about them. The concert started with Van Morrison opening up. He sounded really great and soulful, yet he looked rather pissed about all the Cincinnati hippies screaming for the Moody Blues through his entire set. Though Van Morrison often looks pissed anyway, right? I was not prepared and had no idea how great the Moody Blues were as a band until that night. This would have been their peak period... Around the time they had released To Our Childrens, Childrens, Children, which became my favorite Moody Blues album. At one point in the concert, Justin Hayward was finishing one of his heartfelt ballads and he had that whole arena of screaming hippies so quiet you could have heard a pin drop. As he finished it was like there was a brief moment of complete concentration and silence where the whole room took a breath - and even Justin’s other bandmates applauded him. '
I left that arena believing that I had just witnessed the greatest rock band in the world! Every member of that group was an artist in their own right and each contributed equally it seemed. Plus, they were so classy, and appeared so friendly and personable. I recall seeing other progressive groups like YES who seemed to never smile or show much personality at all...Which can leave an audience rather cold. But The Moody Blues had it all! Other memorable concerts I saw as a teenager were Pink Floyd playing Dark Side of the Moon in Louisville before the album was even in the Kentucky record shops. Also, in Louisville I saw the Kinks, just after their Muswell Hillbilly album and around the time of Preservation 1. Ray Davies is a genius songwriter, on par with Pete Townsend, Chuck Berry, John Lennon. or anyone. Oh, and one final concert to mention. I almost got fatally crushed at a Grateful Dead concert at Cincinnati Gardens. They venue wouldn’t open the doors and people kept pushing like waves. I was stuck in the middle and feared for my life as there was nothing I could do. At one point my feet were off the ground and I couldn’t breathe. Then, maybe a year, or two later I heard about audience members being crushed, trampled, and killed at a Who concert at Cincinnati Gardens and I wasn’t at all surprised! I knew exactly what had happened. So, besides going to concerts, the North Fork River Band did actually play many gigs. We were booked by a talent agency who kept us playing about every weekend at school dances and fraternity parties mostly. Some memorable gigs were when we played at a downtown psychedelic club called Operation Deep Freeze. There was a hippy commune who lived above the club organized by a fellow named Rodney Bell. One evening, playing a set, It was the first and only time I ever performed while tripping on acid! It was pretty scary and unpredictable enough that I never wanted to try that again! Later on we also played a couple of local pop festivals which took place on
Crawson’s farm(?) in a rural area of Lexington. Around that time we had a 2nd lead guitarist who was older than me and was more experienced though he gave me a lot of room and respect, as I in turn respected him. Such a nice guy though, for the life of me, I cannot recall his name. He kind of blew into town for a bit and then was gone! Those were nice events and times. I had to leave the band around Christmas of 1973 because I went to stay with my oldest sister Peggy and her family near Chicago. Actually, I had been kicked out of Lexington Public Schools for skipping 11 days in a row. I thought they were inviting me just to visit and hang out, but they enrolled me into a Chicago Public School the next day! This was probably the best thing that happened to me as it got me on track to finish high school and go on to vocational school in electronics, and to finally attend the University of Kentucky to earn a Bachelor of Arts in music and also a Master’s degree in music composition. It was my brother in law Ralph who reasoned with me and turned my head around. He said things like “Let’s face it. You’re no Jimi Hendrix, So you might as well go to college and learn more about music than anyone else!” I loved Chicago. Got to see the great Segovia play guitar at Chicago’s Music Hall. I would beg my sister to take me to Alice’s Blues Club to see Howlin Wolf or Muddy Waters but they wouldn’t. I was only 16 and probably would not be allowed in. So when I came back to Lexington North Fork had replaced me with a great guitarist named Matt Presby. I really admired Matt’s playing and felt like he knew a lot more about music and guitar than I did. He really knew some “Guitar Secrets” and I thus felt like I could have learned a lot from him. I sat in on a couple of their gigs with North Fork before joining a new band with some talented guys simply called Fredd… Another story! Unfortunately there are no recordings of North Fork River Band that I know of. In that era there was not much in the way of home recording gear and recording studios were expensive.
We were not really geared for making records anyway, nor leaning toward writing and performing original material. I would do some of that later on with my own blues projects. North Fork River Band was a very good band for all of us to gain some experience, learn songs, and play some gigs. We were very serious about playing good music and grew quite a bit musically in those few years. I’m still in touch with drummer Steve Parrish (top right of band photo) who is a dear friend of mine and a great, solid drummer. Bill Dwyer, who, if I recall correctly - had become a forest ranger in the forest parks out west, came to visit me for a few days with his two young kids in the early 90’s. It was great to see him again! Jamie “Butch” Asher passed away on May 26th, 2017. I dearly miss him! Jamie was one of the best front men I’ve ever worked with in my life and I feel honored that he ever wanted to play with me. He was solid as a rock and played and sang with great style and soul. I loved all of those guys very much! They took very good care of me in my rough and tender teenage years!
© Copyright 2022, Johnny Roy Hedger
