The Rock Files: The Segarini Band – Phase One

After 15 years of playing in bands, I finally decided to put my name on one…

Someone once asked me if Bob Segarini is my real name. How could it not be? Who would make up a name like Segarini?

The Segarini Band actually started in Montreal after the band I had put together previously, (All the Young Dudes), dissolved on the heels of the only record I have ever recorded that was, quite frankly, an embarrassment.

The Dudes live, were amazing. Ask anyone who ever saw them and they’ll tell you. David and Ritchie Henman, founding fathers of April Wine, Brian Greenway, a future Winer, but at the time, “The Kid”, a wunderkind guitarist and singer we found slugging it out in cover bands in the West Island, Wayne Cullen, another youngster brought up from the minors, (a band called ‘Bacchus’), to replace Ernie Earnshaw in The Wackers, and one of the great bass players. William ‘Kootch’ Trochim, who had been in The Family Tree and The Wackers with me. A formidable group live, reduced to a thin sounding hiccup in the studio by a New York ‘producer’ and his engineer who would have been better utilized as door stops or garden gnomes.

The Dudes album, We’re No Angels, had some great material on it, but if you want to hear the band as it should have been, pick up All the Young Dudes…All the Old Demos, have a couple of beers and crank it up. I think Bullseye Records still have a few copies available.

Getting back on the horse…

So I’m sitting in Montreal with an itch to play music and no band, licking my wounds from the Dudes debacle, and wondering what to do next, when I have an epiphany. Why not, I ask myself, put together some crackerjack musicians, write some songs that are more intimate and subtle, and experiment with some musical elements I had not yet tackled. I had always included my R&B and country roots in my music, but I had never pushed the envelope in the areas of ballads and jazz. Something more personal. Something I would be totally responsible for. Something I would put my name on…Bob Segarini and the Silver Bulletini Band. No. That sounds too familiar. Let’s just go with the last name. It was good enough for my dad and the supermarkets…and it’s good enough for me.

I talked David Henman into one more kick at the can, and through him, found Mike Root, an overly talented drummer with jazz leanings who was more than capable of adding a different flavour to the proceedings, but was in constant motion, like a kitten with a ball of yarn. Sometimes, even when he was just sitting there, he seemed to blur, vibrating on his drum throne like a hummingbird. Another musician from the West Island came onboard as our bass player. Still a good friend and a really fine player, he has the single most Canadian name I have ever heard.

Gordy Byrd

Just say it a few times out loud…Gordy Byrd. “In goal for the Canadiens, number 17…Gordy Byrd”.

Oh yeah…Makes me want to drink a case of stubbies and head down to the St. Lawrence Pool Hall for a couple of steamies.

To add to the jazz element that Root brought to the band, we found a keyboard player whose virtuosity made the rest of us feel humbled to even be in the same room with him. Fred Henke. Good God, what a player!

I would show him the chord changes to a new song and he would instantly learn them, and add the greatest passing chords and nuances, elevating the tune from okay, to oh wow. Every single time. The guy was, (and probably still is), uncanny.

We were complete now.

The Segarini Band.

Get your elbow out of my eye…

We started a period of rehearsals that went on for months. I do not like to rehearse. I get a rash. I get bored. My mind sometimes wanders so far away, I forget to sing or doze off. For me, rehearsing is like standing in line for a rollercoaster…an eternity of shuffling forward, the only thing keeping you on your feet is the anticipation of the ride. Ask anyone who has ever played in a band with me and they will tell you. I would rather sit on a hot plate and be forced to watch a Murder, She Wrote marathon than rehearse…but the music demanded it, and I reluctantly submitted to the tortuous procedure.

Armed with a case of beer per session, cartons of cigarettes, and an unlimited supply of bad jokes and gas, we dove into the task at hand.

Adding to the crap factor of rehearsing was where we rehearsed. I couldn’t tell you whose house it was in, but it was the smallest room ever built.

Seriously, it couldn’t have been any larger than 8 x 8, with one window and no ventilation. We were stuffed in there like a pimento in an olive. You literally could not move more than a few inches in any direction without stabbing someone with the neck of your guitar, or taking a drumstick to the eye. If you dropped your pick and bent over to pick it up, you either hit your head on an amp, or cracked it against someone’s knee. I’ve seen cupboards with more room in them.

The worst part was the gas. There were farts cut during those rehearsals that I am willing to bet are still in that room. Pale green, mostly dormant, but still lethal all these years later.

But this was about the music. So we sucked it up and rehearsed, fueled by beer, pot, smokes, and the desire to get out of this friggin’ box as soon as possible, and eventually, armed with songs like Love Story, Keep Me Strong, and Self Abuse, we did…almost.

David bails…and is replaced by ‘whatsizname’…

Now that we were ready to play, (we may have even played a gig, come to think of it), and ready to conquer the world with our decidedly different sound, (Gordy Byrd still insists we were ahead of our time), the inevitable spanner in the works occurred, David Henman, who loves to rehearse, came to the conclusion that he wanted to pursue a different path and resigned first chair guitar. Oh dear…now what?

This is odd for me, because I draw a complete blank.

We replaced David, but…

I have absolutely no idea where we got the new guitar player. I do not remember what he looked like. I cannot remember his name. I cannot recall a single note he played.

I do remember that he was a really good player, which leads me to believe that Fred, our resident Genius, must have brought him into the fold.

Regardless of where he came from, it meant going back into that midget rehearsal room and doing some more rehearsing.

Oh Goody…

A week at the Elmo…downstairs.

I think we played a couple of gigs to less than enthusiastic audiences in Montreal before I got the great idea of taking the band out of town to get some seasoning.

We got a week long gig at the prestigious El Mocambo in Toronto. A legend even then, it was the place to play in The Big Smoke.

At least the upstairs was.

We were booked into the downstairs bar. A dim, sullen room where fine local bands honed their skills, but people went mostly to drink and forget, and drink to remember, and just drink. I was completely unknown in Toronto, and the people who packed our nightly shows disguised as empty chairs will attest to that. It was one of those gigs from hell as far as response goes, (upon hearing a smattering of applause one night, Gordy leaned over to me and whispered, “Oh look. We woke a couple of them up”), but at the end of that week we were tight as hell and sounding absolutely great. But we never broke through to the audience.

It wasn’t that we were bad, on the contrary, we were one of the most musical and adventurous bands I had ever been in. With the jazz underpinnings, Gordy and my own rock and pop sensibilities, and Fred’s Mensa quality playing, we were cutting edge, entertaining, and sadly, out of step with every other band out there. If you looked hard enough, you could see the question marks over our audience’s heads…like a Felix the Cat cartoon.

When we would launch into the jazz/funk groove of the instrumental, Self Abuse, there they would be, eyes glazed over, beer halfway to their lips, and that question mark hovering above them like a halo,

It wasn’t pop, rock, or metal…it was…The Segarini Band. And playing to a group of people who were there to hear Satisfaction, Smoke on the Water, or Brown Eyed Girl, we were a fucking mystery.

When we got back to Montreal, I made the decision to pull the plug and rethink what it was I was going to do. I had learned some valuable lessons through all this, though. One was that I could write for and carry a band on my own as long as there were guys that shared the vision and were great players. And the other was clear as a bell.

Whoever, and whatever it was, it was going to be called The Segarini Band…and I would only rehearse at gunpoint.

Next Wednesday’s Rock Files: The Segarini Band – Phase Two

That’s enough for now. Email me at segarini@fyimusic.ca with your comments, complaints, and thoughts…and remember…don’t believe a word I say.

Bob “The Iceman” Segarini was in the bands The Family Tree, Roxy, The Wackers, The Dudes, and The Segarini Band and nominated for a Juno for production in 1978. He also hosted “Late Great Movies” on CITY TV, was a producer of Much Music, and an on-air personality on CHUM FM, Q107, SIRIUS Sat/Rad’s Iceberg 95, (now 85), and now provides content for radiothatdoesntsuck.com with RadioZombie, The Iceage, and PsychShack. Along with the love of his life, Jade (Pie) Dunlop, (who hosts and writes “I’ve Heard That Song Before” on RTDS), continues to write, make music, and record.