The psychedelic folk of Roger and Wendy truly is astonishingly beautiful and enchanting without sounding dated or too freaky.
BERMUDA TRIANGLE - the infamous BERMUDA TRIANGLE BAND, ROGER AND WENDY, |
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It started in 1966 in New York City with the guy across the hall, who
was missing 2 fingers, saying he earned money playing flamenco
guitar in a Greenwich Village coffeehouse. Roger and Wendy exchanged
glances. Could it be that easy to get paid for making music? They put
together some songs with 2 vocals and Roger's autoharp, and headed from
their 5th floor walk-up slum building, where the holes through the ancient
brick wall were big enough for snow to blow in, across town to the BASEMENT
coffeehouse on MacDougal St. in the village to audition. Hired after one song,
they played their first sets that night and every night thereafter til 4 A.M.,
7 nights a week, 365 days a year.
The coffeehouses were then called basket houses since the only pay was what was collected in a straw basket passed around at the end of each 20 minute set. Steve Stills (Crosby,Stills & Nash),saying "I love you guys music", dropped $20 in, which more than half covered their $35 /month rent. Emmylou Harris played with Rog and Wendy. David Bromberg
sometimes sat in the front row picking his guitar along to their singing. Midway through that first year Wendy bought her first bass guitar, a Hofner clone. "Then for the next two weeks I carried that bass,
in a huge cardboard box, way across town every single night before I got up
enough nerve to play it on stage."
They often played 2 different coffeehouses, or even 3, in one night,
running up and down Macdougal St. to make the next set on time. Twelve
20 minute sets at 3 clubs in one night was the record. The Freudian Slip.
Four Winds, the Basement, Fat Black Pussycat, Rienzi's, Cafe Wha?,
The Underground, Folk City, Bitter End, Kenny's Castaways, Speakeasy,
The Gaslight. Too many to remember.
Greenwich Village was booming. Every night Macdougal and Bleecker Sts.
were so jammed with people shoulder to shoulder that no cars could get through.
Live music pumped from every third doorway. Friends hung out on stoops, fire escapes, leaned out windows. The air was thick. The pavement vibrated.Since we all lived in dark hovels, we didn't go over to each other's apartments. Instead we met on the street. We knew if we went to the Village that our friends would be there. In summer we'd all sit outdoors on steps leading to strangers' front doors and comment on the carnival of people crowding the street. In winter we'd gather in one of the coffeehouses and talk music. It was glorious. Yet it really started when Roger was 5 and sang "Don't Fence Me In" in a radio show
contest where he won first prize, followed by 8 years of piano lessons. Several preteen
summers were spent in his cousins' Anchor Cafe, a gritty honkytonk at a port on Lake Erie
filled with stevedores and merchant mariners. In the late hours of the night he
would fall asleep on the bench seats as the seamen danced with the local women
to the songs of Hank Williams and Hank Snow on the jukebox. While at an engineering
college he bought his first autoharp from the Sears-Roebuck catalog and began
experimenting with various electric pickups. After graduating with honors, he moved into
a folk music communal house in Cambridge, Massachusetts aptly named Old Joe Clark's
for the folk/dance tune, took postgraduate courses at Harvard and did theoretical research
for NASA. But the love of music insistently pulled him away from a scientific life. He once
again immersed himself in traditional music at picking roundtables at the Silver Vanity
folk club in Amherst, Massachusetts.
On the other hand, there was Wendy with one year of comic/tragic piano lessons
and 1 single cello lesson "at which I learned to hold the cello between my knees
but didn't get to play a single note". Granted a lifetime membership in the famous
Art Students League of New York, she was awarded 1st prize for one of her paintings in a prestigious juried exhibition. "I went to three colleges and ended up relocating from the New York City area to Boston. Roger and I were both taking philosophy classes at Harvard but didn't meet until I moved in to Old Joe Clark's,where he was living. We were immediately drawn to each other, hitchhiked and tented in North Africa and Europe for 5 months (I use the word 'tent' loosely,it was actually
2 ponchos snapped together and leaked badly) then studied mime and acting. In a Theatre Company of Boston performance of Shakespeare Roger managed to chip his own tooth and stab a fellow actor during a sword fencing scene." Since every actor seems to end up in NY or LA,
they moved to New York City where Roger was a member of The Harlem Theatre Company and did 4 Off-Broadway plays, one of them with James Earl Jones. It was then that they encountered the 3-fingered flamenco player mentioned above, and they committed full-time to music. R&W moved from coffeehouses to clubs after a year and a half, and eventually
played every single club in Greenwich Village, perhaps 40 or more.
In 1969 Roger and Wendy joined with Sharon Alexander and Tom Pacheco to form
the sunshine pop group EUPHORIA and released an album on the MGM/HERITAGE label
titled "EUPHORIA". The single "You Must Forget" hit the charts in Europe.
Wendy bought her 2nd bass guitar, a 1969 Hofner Special Limited Collectors'
Edition, 5000/1, natural blonde, with active electronics (a rarity in 1969). "Our record company
volunteered to pay for it, so naturally I chose the most expensive bass in New York City."
EUPHORIA played a concert with Van Morrison at Madison Square Garden's Felt Forum,
a few college dates, and were booked on the Johnny Carson Show but disbanded before appearing.
In the late 60's and 70's Roger and Wendy broke ground in what has come to becalled the Psych Folk genre. They were one of the very few American innovators to play
in this style as it was mainly a British movement. Characterized as having strong roots
in folk music, it has electric and often unconventional arrangements. The lyrics
are complex and symbolic, the instrumentation highly unusual.
Roger Penney is the first person and the only person ever to have created and played electric psychedelic autoharp. He is also the inventor of much of the technology required.
"In the early 60's there were no pickups to amplify the autoharp other than a contact mic which had a tinny sound. Eventually bar magnetic pickups made specifically
for autoharp were available and I bought two. I ran two channels, one from each
of the 2 pickups, either as a straight amplified channel and/or to effects units. Among the
effects units I used were two Gibson Maestro G2's (the same model that reputedly
Jimi Hendrix used on several recordings) which triggered wahwah, fuzz, tone, percussion
etc. My favorite unit in the 70's was the Eventide Clockworks phase shifter. Next was a
Lexicon Prime Time digital delay. Another effect came from five 25 cent transducers
that were surplus from a pinball machine. I mounted them on the autoharp and ran a line
into a Linndrum sound module which allowed me the option of playing percussion/drum
rhythms simultaneously with finger-picking the strings." He now uses multiple effects to
achieve the multidimensional quality. The passages that listeners mistake sometimes for
electric guitar are actually autoharp. In addition, women bass players were a rarity in the 60's.
Consequently, their group was far out there beyond the leading edge.
Roger had also redesigned the autoharp's chord structure to facilitate switching between
keys and donated the new layout to Oscar Schmidt. Now all major autoharp manufacturers
worldwide have switched to making autoharps using his design.
In 1970 the College Concert Circuit courted the band and arranged many very successful tours. ROGER AND WENDY quickly became the top act, and released a folk album "Roger and Wendy"
in 1971. Changing the band's name in 1975 to BERMUDA TRIANGLE, they gave more than
3000 concerts. For part of that time they incorporated a second woman, Sam, as fiddler/drummer.
Several of the many artists they shared the stage with are Billy Joel, Van Morrison, Steppenwolf, Harry Chapin, Suzanne Vega, Sly and the Family Stone, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Carolyn Hester, David Bromberg, Michelle Shocked, and
Emmylou Harris.
The psych folk album "Bermuda Triangle" was released in 1977 and "Bermudas II" in 1984.
In 2006 their musical career surged upward with the unexpected reissue of their 1977 album
by a British record company and its being played on radio stations all over the world.
In 2007, Roger and Wendy officially reissued the 77 album "Bermuda Triangle" as a CD
with 6 additional bonus songs. The bonus songs date from 1969 to 1976 and were taped at
Rensselaer Polytechnical Institute, Folk City(NYC), Woodstock New York, and Bell Sound(NYC)
and most had never before been released.
The band also released in 2007 "The Missing Tapes" CD, a compilation of some of their
Psych Folk tracks from the 70's. Five of these cuts are reissues. The other eight were
part of the group's live performances but were never released on disc. A number of the songs
had been completely lost with no known existing copies until they were unearthed in a
longtime friend's collection in New York and in the archives of the radio station at R.P.I.
A 12 inch vinyl of the 1977 "Bermuda Triangle" album was reissued in 2008 by Anazitisi Records.
Anazitisi also released a vinyl LP of "The Missing Tapes" cd in 2009.
The 1971 album, "Love Rog And Wem", recorded when the group still called itself
ROGER AND WENDY, was reissued in the fall of 2009 as a 12" vinyl by Acme Records (UK).
In October of 2010, Lion Productions (Records) released a cd of the "Love Rog and Wem" album.
DISCOGRAPHY
EUPHORIA
"Euphoria" (1969) MGM/Heritage Records, vinyl LP
"Euphoria" (2007) Heritage/Beatball Records, reissue of 1969 LP
"You Must Forget" (1971) MGM/Heritage Records, single on 8 track tape
"Calm Down/What A Day (1973) Polydor Records, single
ROGER AND WENDY
"Roger and Wendy" (1971) Horny Records, vinyl LP
"Love Rog and Wem" (2009) Acme Records (UK) 12 inch vinyl
"Love Rog and Wem" (2010) Lion Productions (Records), cd
BERMUDA TRIANGLE
"Bermuda Triangle" (1977) Winter Solstice Records, vinyl LP
"Bermudas ll" (1984) Winter Solstice Records, vinyl LP
"Bermuda Triangle" (2006) unofficial reissue on Radioactive UK Records, cd
"Bermuda Triangle" (2007) official reissue on Winter Solstice Records, cd
"The Missing Tapes" (2007) Winter Solstice Records, cd
"Bermuda Triangle" (2008) Anazitisi Records 12 inch vinyl collectors' edition
"The Missing Tapes" (2009) Anazitisi Records 12 inch vinyl collectors' edition
For more information,stories and photos:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bermuda_Triangle_Band
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penney
http://www.myspace.com/bermudatriangleband
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HERE ARE THE STORIES… As we said goodbye to Jimi Hendrix and rounded the corner from MacDougal on to 3rd, we went past the Night Owl, a little club where Jimi had played years earlier as Jimi James and the Blue Flames. The Night Owl was known as the starting place of The Lovin' Spoonful. Also having played there was The Ragamuffins with Jon Hall, (who later formed the band Orleans "Dance With Me"), Tom Pacheco and Sharon Alexander. When Sharon and Tom saw us playing at the Cafe Wha! they asked us to form a group together and we became partners in a band called "EUPHORIA" (summer of love west coast harmony pop), reissued in 2007. As a coincidence, performing with us at the Cafe Wha? (yes, the question mark was a part of the name. Very beatnik don't you think???) was Jon Hall and his inbetween band KANGAROO. The Cafe Wha? was a downstairs Greenwich Village club where years before Roger had first seen
Bob Dylan play one Sunday afternoon. It was then a "basket house" which meant that after
each set the performer gets up and passes around with a straw basket for tips. Dylan was still playing
mostly Woody Guthrie songs. Yes, Rog put in his quarter for Bob. Actually the Wha? was an upscale
basket house. That is, the waitress passed the basket for the performer. Some of the clubs like Gerde's Folk City had a liquor license and others like The Freudian Slip did not. Their specialty was Rum And Cola, but the only rum was from food extract. Once in a while a "Knowledgeable" customer would complain that there wasn't any rum in his cola, so the waitress would take the drink to the kitchen and give it a triple dose of extract. That always satisfied the customer. Greenwich Village is an area in lower Manhattan(NYC) about 15 blocks high and wide, but the
"Village" that every musician refers to was a zigzag strip of just 5 short blocks.
I counted 22 venues where there was full time live music, some running from 7PM to 4AM, plus a
couple of off-Broadway theatres.Opening a club not on the strip meant almost certain death.
Our at-the-time manager was a partner in a venture that was 4 blocks away, The Generation Club.
The club had 4 acts for one week each. 1.Jimi Hendrix, 2.Ian And Sylvia, 3.(can't remember),
4.Chuck Berry. Like the others, they told Chuck he'd be paid at the end of the week. He started
to pack up and said he wanted his dough up front in cash or he'd walk. So he got paid…the
only one who did get his money. All the rest were stiffed. The club folded after 4 weeks even with
great stars in the lineup. Hendrix took over the lease to turn it into his own Electric Lady studio.
At the time we were living in the East Village. On the floor below lived the trumpeter for
BLOOD SWEAT AND TEARS, and 2 floors below a motorcycle gang had taken up residence. It was never quiet
but one night, very late, we were awakened by what sounded like a violent rainstorm, and there were
people yelling in the hallway (not uncommon). The gang war had erupted with a rival motorcycle gang
and they had set our building on fire. It seems that the gang from third street had tried to fricassee
our gang. After the fire was put out we moved back into our building, the only ones who did.
There was a one foot diameter hole in our floor to the apartment below that
the firemen had chopped, so I put a board there and life went on. Until…a couple weeks later
during the middle of the night OUR gang brought one of THEIR gang to our building for a little barbecue,
right across the hall from us. At that point, the detectives investigating the murder suggested that
it might be time to move, and we were 'on the street'. And all of this was going on while we were
doing the EUPHORIA album. A good friend Joan Egan took us in for a couple months. Going back a year or two earlier, one of the coffeehouses we played at was the Four Winds on 3rd st, open til 4 AM every night. A cold NYC winter night would find a bunch of musicians there keeping warm and dry, along with a couple of narcs (undercover detectives) doing the same. Often people would just take out their instruments and play along as we were doing our set. Not from stage, from their seats. There was barely enough room for us on stage. Among those who did were David Bromberg, and a guy we knew as "Billy the Flute". He was Neil Diamonds' flute player and keyboardist. He invited us one time to watch them rehearse before a show at the Bitter End. Others who were playing at the Four Winds at that same time were Steve Goodman'City of New Orleans', and Emmylou Harris. Emmy had just come up from Texas where she had learned Mr. Bojangles from Jerry Jeff Walker, and we learned it from her, and eventually put it on our ROGER AND WENDY "Love Rog and Wem" album. Sometime later, with her guitar on-top her belly, a very pregnant Emmy shared the bill with us for a week or two at Gerde's Folk City across the street. A few years later, we played a couple of concerts with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, who had the 'hit' with Bojangles. Skipping ahead to the late 80's, I just read an interview with someone we met at the Speakeasy Cafe (formerly Rienzi's), Michelle Shocked. She was playing at the open mic night and living in a squat on the East Side. We went there with her and there were a half dozen or more? people living in the abandoned building, very reminiscent of our 1st street apartment after the first fire.We became good friends and when we had a college gig in New Jersey we asked her to come with us and be our opener. The show went really well, so when we had an upcoming tour we asked her to join us. So the three of us set out in our van to the midwest. One of the gigs was at Eureka College, the then President Reagan's alma mater. About a month after getting back, she came over to tell us that someone who had recorded her live (informally) at Kerrville Folk Festival had released the tape (bootlegged) and it was on the charts in Britain. The Texas Campfire Tapes. Coincidentally, before going on tour, she had recorded some songs in our basement rehearsal room on the same type of tape recorder as the Campfire Tapes, my Sony Walkman "Pro". A fantastic little tape recorder. When we talked recently, she said she probably still has the cassette somewhere because she never throws things away. |
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A week ago I had never heard of BERMUDA TRIANGLE. Now I cherish these two albums. A footnote in the history of psychedelic folk that will now be promoted to a major chapter. Truly wonderful music with totally its own sound, which to a great extent depends on Roger Penney's electric autoharp, the enchanting voice of Wendy Penney and the unique arrangements of the two. Listen to the unusual way in which BERMUDA TRIANGLE interprets the classic "Nights In White Satin". Everything that follows is as good or even better still. "Truly bizarre folk-psych album that's more enjoyable than a lot of "better" records. Transcendental female vocals, and autoharp which is often treated with phasing flanging and other effects. Fine originals. This album is kind of a shock on first listen,because at least to these jaded ears it's not often I discover something so original and bizarre."---Lysergia-Acid Archives "If you like psych folk YOU'VE GOT TO HAVE THIS ALBUM"---Uncledog-Rock--written in Japan This one is something of a stunner.Recorded in1977. "Right Track" kicks in full of autoharp and wah wah. "Dream On": shows the autoharp off very well, beautiful stuff. " Standing Together" is a more serious folk number with the autoharp to the fore again and with an attacking rhythm. Recorded on the Winter Solstice label. We can only be but grateful as the resultant album is a joy and "Superb 70's NY Psych Folk rarity." This album was only privately released and now sees the light again. It is a special recording which does not reveal itself after one listen. With driven soul in the vocals, and with speeded up rhythms heading for the light,using rock rhythms, covers or originals for enlightenment. Also the instrumentation is pretty weird and beautiful. There's use of electric piano and an Arp synthesizer which produces some unusual sounds. On "Right Track" this track sounds as if this is orchestrated, but I think the keyboards were responsible for this effect.[ROG says it was all autoharp] Also electric and acoustic autoharp provides more special acoustic and semi-electronic touches.The female singer, Wendy, has a beautiful folk-like voice, with some range in her singing. Her voice fits well everywhere, like on the opening track, a cover of the beautiful Moody Blues track (which is one of many peoples' all time favorite songs) "Nights in White Satin", with additional backing male voice, oscillating violin,electric piano and percussion. There's often a sing-a-long and celebrate feeling, from rock to more pastoral,like the closer, "Wind", a track which has the most psychedelic atmosphere, with an ethereal folkvoice, moody electric piano and bass. |
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The coffeehouses were then called basket houses
Live music pumped from every third doorway. Friends
Art Students League of New York, she was awarded 1st prize
mime and acting. In a Theatre Company of Boston
In the late 60's and 70's Roger and Wendy broke ground in what has come to be
"In the early 60's there were no pickups to amplify the autoharp other than a
In 1970 the College Concert Circuit courted the band and arranged many very successful tours.
