Meeting Howard Wales, Terry Haggerty & Kevin Hayes

[robert777]

When	Saturday, January 11th; 8:30 pm - 11:00 pm
Where	Redwood Café, 8240 Old Redwood Hwy, Cotati
Cost	$20 (Seated Show)
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Sat, Jan 11 2020 @ 8:30 pm - 11:00 pm

A evening of music with Howard Wales, Terry Haggerty & Kevin Hayes!

Organist, Howard Wales has typically been best known for his collaborations with Grateful Dead front man Jerry Garcia. After honing his chops during the mid-1960s backing acts ranging from Ronnie Hawkins, Lonnie Mack the Four Tops to James Brown. He first performed with Garcia at the weekly jam sessions with bassist John Kahn and drummer Bill Vitt at the Bay Area club the Matrix, and in 1970 resulting in the classic Hooteroll? album. Howard also played on the Dead's seminal American Beauty. For over the last four decades now, Wales has been quietly and meticulously self-producing and releasing high quality instrumental albums as an independent recording artist in Northern California. Howard’s rare live performances remain the stuff of myth and legend.

Guitarist, Terry Haggerty is buried treasure. As guitarist with the Sons of Champlin, Haggerty was always accorded the full respect of his peers on the '60s San Francisco rock scene like Jerry Garcia, Jorma Kaukonen, Carlos Santana. He has been known -- throughout the world -- among guitar cognoscenti via the handful of recordings he made over the two decades of the Sons' existence. Some of his demo tapes have attracted intense interest inside the industry over the years. But even now he remains something of an unknown, a titan hiding in the hills, a legend waiting to be discovered.

Kevin Hayes is a Bay Area based drummer & songwriter, probably best known for his 20 years as the drummer for The Robert Cray Band. During his time with Cray from 1989-2008, he recorded 9 studio albums and one double live disc, recorded over a seven show run at London’s historic Royal Albert Hall opening for Eric Clapton. He has played on records by John Lee Hooker, B.B. King, Van Morrison, among many others. Since leaving Cray’s band, he has recorded 2 albums and toured in a band with slide guitarist Roy Rogers & Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek, and has made a record and toured extensively with the British blues guitarist Matt Schofield.

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FREEBIRD

Dec 27, 2019
by Robert Feuer

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Keyboardist Howard Wales will be in the spotlight at Cotati’s Redwood Café on Jan.11, with what he calls “an organ trio,” backed by guitarist Terry Haggerty and drummer Kevin Hayes.

Wales has led an improvisational lifestyle which carries over to his music. “I’m totally original. I don’t do cover songs,” he says in an early December phone interview from his current home in Weaverville.

He began performing in hometown Milwaukee, playing pop music on his Hammond B3 with local bands starting at age 20, before hitting the road for points unknown. Along the way, he acquired a 1949 Chevy panel truck from a judge for $85. His Hammond B3 traveled inside. Occasional hard times saw him subsisting on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and salads.

In the Midwest, he joined Lonnie Mack on the classic King label for a year and backed up the Coasters, the Four Tops, and Little Anthony & the Imperials, with a band called the Click. In El Paso, he worked in “an all-black club including ten frightened white people hiding in the corner,” he says, and briefly played with James Brown. They didn’t get along.

Wales arrived in San Francisco in 1968, where saxophonist Martin Fierro helped him get a job in a tortilla factory and invited him to play on the soundtrack of the film, El Topo, described by a critic as an absurdist acid Western.

Wales became a member of the blues-rock band A.B. Skyh in 1969, and jammed with Jerry Garcia, Santana, Elvin Bishop, and Harvey Mandel (Wales played on two of his albums), among many others, at the Matrix on Fillmore St. Wales hosted their Monday night jam. “It got really weird,” he says. “Everybody was there. Garcia came down all the time.” Wales also recalls performing at the rock meccas, the Fillmore, the Avalon, and the Family Dog. “It was a renaissance period. The whole scene was developing. Everything, including the people, was original.”

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From 1970-72, Garcia and Wales collaborated, leading them to record the jazzy, all-instrumental album Hooteroll in 1971. Wales wrote 85-90% of the music, he says.

He performed on three songs on the Grateful Dead’s American Beauty album – Truckin’, Brokedown Palace, and Candyman, though he never became a bandmember. Bob Weir thought he was “much too weird, too quick.” Bill Kreutzmann considered him “a madman on organ, insanely brilliant.” Wales describes himself as “way out there.”

Exclusively an instrumentalist, Wales once said, “Jammers have no fear.” This has led to many backup roles. “Keyboards players don’t mean anything,” he adds. “They aren’t recognized compared to guitars.”

From 1976 to 2014, he’s been on a lot of studio albums and demos. Another album with Wales and Garcia, Side Trips, released in 1999, was recorded at a long-ago Matrix jam. “I’ve been with the bad, the ugly, and the great,” says Wales. He has even backed up strippers and castle (baton) twirlers.

“I’m a freebird, man. I’m gonna die that way.”

I’ve been a music junkie since age 14, and have written numerous music articles for the Sonoma County Gazette, the Bohemian, the Petaluma Argus-Courier, and two national magazines, Living Blues and Blues Revue. I do the “Blues Up the River” show on KOWS Radio, every Monday noon to 1 a.m. (www.kows.fm). I’ve also published some short stories and have written a novel which sits in a drawer wondering why. Email Robert Feuer at [email protected]