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daily nebraskan
monday, January 12, 1981
Rock band eyes big- city gigs, record contract
By Pat Higgins
According to a market survey done last
week in the Wall Street Journal, the most,
preferred leisure-time activity for young
adults 18 to 24 is "something called party
ing." Sociologists interested in observing this
phenomenon first would be well advised
to venture out to the Royal Grove, partic
ularly on a weekend night. The Grove is
what the Iron City Houserockers have in
mind when they say, "Have a good time
(but get out alive)."
By popular consensus, Blackberry Wint
er is considered the premiere group to play
at the Grove, and last Saturday they con
cluded a successful week-long stand there.
Blackberry Winter is an undeniably tight,
professional outfit that has existed in
various forms since the early 70s when
it migrated from Kearney to the capital
city.
Ballroom circuit
Bass player Randy Sharp and drummer
Murray Kahler have been in the band since
1971, said guitarist Fred Bettge, "who
joined the group in 1975. Blackberry Wint
er plays the ballroom circuit on a fairly
continuous basis, which could be a grind,
but Bettge is optimistic about the work.
"We arc making a lot of progress right
now. When we play, we like to do a
healthy mix of covers and originals. We do
14 of our own songs now, and that is the
most important part of the show for us.
Randy, Rich Lane and myself do most of
the writing."
The melodic originals are, without a
doubt, the highlight of the performance,
For those effete collegiates who have
never dared to enter the rough and tumble
ambience of this establishment, an explan
ation is in order. The Grove has a mainly
working-class crowd that is chiefly inter
ested in, as they say, "getting down." It
would be an ideal locale to hold a Charlie
Daniels look-a-like contest.
The form of music preferred is note-for-note
covers of "progressive" hits, which
allows for a maximum of mindless boogie
by the audience. So if hearing Kansas.
Foreigner, et al causes a religious exper
ience in your life, the Grove is the place
to be.
M II ' ' UIM-IIJIII ll
Photo by Mark Billingsley
and several of them have the potential
to be hits.
"We have a studio here in Lincoln where
we have been working on some demo tapes
to give to record companies," said Bettge.
"We were out in New York for a while and
we are going to spend the month of Febru
ary in Los Angeles, where we can play
some showcase gigs and hopefully meet
some record company people."
Zander at Grove
Cheap Trick made an appearance in
Lincoln last week and lead singer Robin
Zander made the scene at the Grove.
"He seemed to enjoy our band," said
Bettge. "We were offered the opportunity
to open for Cheap Trick at Pershing, bijt
we had a prior commitment. Zander seem
ed to be a real nice guy. He is not on a
real ego 'rip. A couple of us went back to
the hotel and partied with him after the
show."
Blackberry Winter is looking forward to
making its video debut soon on Nebraska
Educational Network, which is sponsoring
a series comparable to "Soundstage."
"They are going to have four different
kinds of bands." Bettge said. Blackberry
Winter is the only rock band that they sel
ected. They haven't decided if it is going
to be a half hour or an hour show vet.
"It will be a challenge because there
will be no opportunities to overdub.
But we are really looking forward to doing
it. It should be a lot of fun."
Kennedys' Children' presents a difficult lesson
By Penelope M. Smith
The 60s is an ambiguous time for anyone to deal with.
For a great many people, the decade isn't over. It's been
touted as the high tide of a generation and venerated by
one that never experienced it. So that deriving any sort of
message or meaning is just short of impossible.
Our lack of detachment, and yet our inexperience,
makes Robert Patrick's play, Kennedy's Children, a diffi
cult lesson. After the initial feelings of "not applicable,"
one discovers uncomfortable questions which apply to
all of us, whether children of the 70s or of the 40s.
( 1 i v
reuisvj
The cast did a good job with a very difficult play. The
desire to be gone in the second act came more from
Patrick's words and tales of lives going nowhere .
The best performance of a very good cast was Catherine
Lyon's Rona, an activist who saw the 60s as waves of love
and beauty only to be disillusioned by a mass movement
toward Utopia that never came. Lyon handles her charac
ter with a forthright toughness laced with memories of
old naivete that make her both comprehensible and touch
ing. The killing in his head
Robert Deschaine as the Vietnam veteran Mark has a
tension and a way of staring that brings out the little boy
that can't stop the killing in his head. He sits shaking at
his table, drinking his beer, the anger ready to spill out be
cause the boy's identity was so twisted and maimed that
the man was never allowed to form.
Amy Hinds does a marvelous job of making her charac
ter. Wanda, humorous, yet detestible at the same time.
She is a mouse without color, personality, passion or
excitement. Sipping her white wine, she confuses JFK
with Christ and lives in a non-existent Camelot with all
the ccstacy of Saint Theresa.
Phil Rooney plays the down and out gay actor. Spar
ger, with a slow numbness and time for thought that
allows the audience to laugh and be saddened. He speaks
with a disillusionment that is sometimes funny and some
times crude, but always affecting. He sees and is still con
demned to be the way he is.
"I believe everything was different once," he says,
"everything was the same once, too."
Continued on Page 9
Five characters sit in a bar in the early 70s reciting the
tragic and monotonous litany of their lives. They wander
before your eyes like plodding George Segal sculptures of
plaster as they recite the way they once formed and
"lived" in the 60s.
'Never ending battle'
The director, Cary Wayne Noble, describes the play as
"part of the never ending battle between our past and our
present." But Patrick's script leaves his older viewers say
ing "I remember when there were hippies all over," and
his younger ones with confused feelings and an inability
to relate. To overcome these feelings requires a lot of
emotionally exhausting thought, a little philosophy and
a willingness to pay attention.
One views the play with the same intimate discomfort
as one feels when sitting next to a verbose drunk. The
characters have no present, only pasts, and they speak of
them in an alcoholic haze of bared souls that leaves one
half listening and restless, yet fascinated in spite of ones-self.
Patrick plays with perceptions and how humans pro
ceed from them. Noble says that "memories are strange
inventions of the human mind," but the minds of
Patrick's characters are inventions of their memories, they
derive their sense of self from the world around them so
that one is left with the question of how strong or unique
a thing individuality actually is.
Corporate heads roll in Fantasyland
as Mickey loses out to sex appeal
The Mouse wasn't happy, which didn't surprise me.
One of his pet projects over the years, "Wonderful World
of Disney," had been axed by NBC after god-knows-how-many
seasons, a victim of old age and low ratings. The
Mouse, Mickey Mouse, pointed in the general direction of
a chair in his office and said, "Have a seat."
cIsfEi
He didn't wait for me to ask any questions. "You prob
ably want to know how I feel about the show going down
the tubes," he said. He stopped to light a cigar. "Let me
tell you, it made me sick when I first heard it, but I'm
starting to accept it. This is a tough business. Shows get
bumped off every day."
"But not many shows last as long as The Wonderful
World of Disney,' " I countered. "Do you have any idea
what went wrong this year?"
"Sure," he said, settling back in his chair and resting
his feet on his desk. "We got cuted right off the air."
"Cuted?"
"Yeah. Past tense of cute."
I did not want to know what kind of linguistic hocus-
pocus turned "cute" into a verb, but I did want to know
what he was talking about. "How did you get as vou say
'cuted' off the air?"
"There are five ways you can keep a show on the air
in this business. You can be sexy, you can be violent, you
can be funny, you can be warm, and you can be cute, in
that order. On "Disney," house rules said that we couldn't
be sexy or violent, which were two big strikes against us
right there. We looked at our availabletalent and decided
that we could be funny sometimes and warm sometimes
and cute all of the time."
"So what went wrong?" I interjected.
"Let me finish. Like I said, our strong suits were the
bottom three items on the list, but we had a market be
cause of our time slot. Sunday evening. People have been
watching pro football all day and they either forget to
change the channel or they want a chanue of pace or
something and there we arc. an automatic audience But
then CBS came along with "60 Minutes." That show hurt
us, because they could be sexy or violent or funny or
warm, or all of them m one show, dependmu on whom
they interviewed or what scandal the exposed That
left us with cute. We weren't worried, thouUh It's hard to
beat cartoon characters and animals for 'cute appeal."
C ontinued on Page 9