Beside him at the picnic table, 68-year-old singer Kenny Aronhalt’s mind had returned to the very same name night, one on which he memorably passed his jeans jacket from the stage to the lovely, shivering girl up from Kentucky who has been his wife now for 37 years.
At 7 p.m. Saturday, May 10, the State Theater will fill with memories of the days the bands Scram and New Music ruled the Springfield rock scene as two of its members release seven new original songs on vinyl and disc with an updated version of an eighth.
Joining them on stage will be Jim Britton and Mike Neal on guitar; Jeff Gastineau on keys and guitar; Cincinnati musician and Springfield native Mike Topogna on drums; and backup singers Lisa Carey, Karen Brucker, Mallory Picazo and Mary Aronhalt.
The last two are Aronhalt’s daughter and wife, the older of whose memory banks house two details her husband did not recall of that special night: The date, which was Oct. 13, and the song that followed the passing of the jacket, “Dancing in the Dark.”
Lured by a quiche
Twenty-two at the time, she had just started teaching third grade, was already at work on her master’s degree in education from Moorehead State and was in Springfield for the first time because her college roommate, Nancy Short, needed a ride home and had promised then Mary Lykins the pleasures of her mother’s quiche.
“It was a rare weekend that I didn’t have a karate tournament,” said the woman who had studied martial arts since childhood and who went downtown dressed to kill in ‘80s issue straight leg jeans and high heels.
Frankly “not expecting a lot” from a local (and possibly yokel) band, “I was blown away,” she said. She landed the next day backstage at Dayton’s Courthouse Square, where New Music was adding to the list of national headlines it opened for that included Mark Farner of Grand Funk Railroad, Gary U.S. Bonds, Detroit’s Rare Earth, Dave Mason and Henry Lee Summer.
A sound man
As blown away by the band at that time was Curt Britton, who had run his own bands’ sound systems when growing up in Springfield and returned after studying sound engineering in Houston in time for Scram’s formation in the fall of 1979.
Jazzed at bring able to focus on sound alone, he helped the band rock the foundations locally at Ruby Tuesday’s, Saturday’s and the Capri Lounge with spot-on covers of Led Zeppelin. That earned them gigs at McGuffey’s and East Wind in Dayton and the Agora/Newport, which was the center of live music at Ohio State University and, thus, Columbus.
“It was just so fun, so powerful,” Britton said of the band’s music – but lasted only until Scram packed it away with the decorations of Christmas 1982.
Come January, Doug Gibson, the drummer who had driven Scram like a Formula 1 big rig began lobbying Sandow to start practicing with him and guitar prodigy Frank Surber, who began playing Springfield bars at 14 and at 17 had managed to meet Gibson’s stringent standards.
Back at the picnic table, as Sandow puzzled over the reason for Scram’s breakup, Aronhalt said, “I think it was an ego thing” between the two them. While Sandow asked aloud why “I finally gave in” to reunite with Aronhalt, it was Britton’s turn. Upping the gain on his voice to 11, he shouted this: “Are you kidding? He was the best!”
A new purpose
From a marketing point of view, New Music may seem like a compromise that emerged on the 14th ballot of a deadlocked convention. It clearly lacked the cache of “Expanding Man,” an early candidate plucked from the opening line of Steely Dan’s Deacon Blues. Still, nothing could have better described the driving force of New Music.
“We wanted to break away from Scram in some ways,” Aaronhalt said. They began doing so in rented practice rooms at the aging Carey Building and its brother from another tired building at High and Spring streets.
Britton said the new ground rules for practices – “No friends, no girlfriends, a little beer” – were strict but effective. With them in place, the time-honored epoxy of talent and discipline produced results.
Remembering consecutive weeks with three- and four-hour practices, Briton told Aronhalt and Sandow, “I don’t know how you had lives with your wives or girlfriends.” Sandow’s response —“Day by day” — seemed lifted from a 12-step program.
The band focused on what Britton calls “deep B sides” – not the hits of the biggest groups but the more sophisticated tunes musicians often prefer but hesitate to do for fear of losing their followers. Songs included Lion by Toto, Murder by Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, which Britton considers among the band’s best.
“They would play (one) two or three gigs and learn something else and move it up. These guys were absolute masters at that.”
The faces
Old-school discipline was aided by new faces and instruments.
Jeff Davis came in to work his magic on early Casio keyboards with a meticulousness that “drove me nuts,” Aronhalt said — except when he listened to the result. He also remembers “the huge difference” and “much fuller sound” with the arrival of Jacques Harenberg on saxophone and Dean Simms on trumpet.
(The duo was introduced as the Brass Balls, a name with the irreverent punch of “Scram.)
New Music drew audiences and created memories like the snow-bound weekend at the Valley Hi Ski resort, which first seemed doomed to failure by traffic snarls until an avalanche of college students showed up and the band rose to the occasion.
The band would climb yet one step higher on the musical stairway to... you know.
Leveraged buy-in
“I pulled Curt aside and told him, it’s time for you to produce us,” Sandow recalled. “And he looked at me, like, ‘Okay.’
In the time of leveraged buy-out, theirs was a leveraged buy-in.
“He wanted to please us, and we wanted to please him,” said Sandow. “And from that point on, it took the music to another level” – one that set them on the path to originals.
While those would prove successful, Aronhalt went along with serious doubts.
“I wanted the audience just to go nuts,” he said, and he imaged them instead bored by originals unfamiliar to the that couldn’t dance to.
“I could just see girls standing at the edge of the dance floor with a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other …. I could smell it,” he added.
That all ended the night they played one of the originals for the third or fourth consecutive gig “and I saw people sing the words.”
The Only One was written before Frank Surber left for California’s Guitar Institute of Technology, and replacement Jonathan Womacks was getting his feet wet when the band wrote three or four songs in rapid succession.
Britton, who has never reported the sighting of a UFO, said that It’s Love “literally came out of the atmosphere,” and The River “fell right out of the universe.”
Said Britton: “I’m tearing up just thinking about it” – the kind of thing E.T. might have remarked on when he called home.
The latest music
In 1986, New Music fell prey to the usual causes of band disaffection, and Aronhalt launched Roy Blue with Womacks and Davis. Over the years, versions Scam and New Music had reunion shows at Jeff Malone’s Ringside Café, Eric Mader’s remodeled Savoy Lounge and Casey’s restaurant on Springfield’s west side. Then three years ago, when sidelined by eye surgery, Sandow said, “I messaged Kenny and asked what he was doing.”
The return message said “Nothin’,” which soon turn into something.
“He sang (the first song) “over the phone, no music, no nothing,” Sandow said.
And though the song was discarded, the method stuck.
Sandow wrote music around Aronhalt lyrics but said “I wouldn’t let him hear any until he came up to the studio,” where the drum, bass, guitar and tracks were in place.
That planned spontaneity worked, and songs “started falling into place,” Sandow said.
While the musicians who will play May 10 were added to the final product, the two writers delayed recording the drum parts in hopes of involving Doug Gibson, who had suffered through two kidney transplants, numerous bone breaks and the failure of a pancreas transplant due to his diabetes. Through one foot amputation, then a second, Sandow practiced with Gibson as he tried to adapt his playing to prosthetic feet.
“His life’s mission in the last three or four years was to record on this. We were a week away from him coming down to track, and the day before Gibson was to travel to the studio ... he calls me up and tells me he had Covid.”
“We were waiting for him,” Aronhalt said, “and I didn’t know what to do. I was torn” – torn in a way he expresses in a song of that title on the disc.
Gibson does appear on the previously recorded track Good Morning Sun and was appropriately celebrated after his Christmas Eve 2023 death in a memorial service that featured a video of him playing and at which Aronhalt, Sandow and Jim Britton added their own music.
After Gibson’s passing, Sandow played the State Theater with local judge Rich Carey’s band and thought it might be the place for a release party. He realized for that to happen, he had to act.
I made a few phone calls (and) “within 24 hours everybody was onboard.”
“And in my opinion,” said Aronhalt, “when that happens, it’s supposed to be.”
His hope for the songs is neither for himself, Sandow nor the band, he said, but a hope that younger musicians – perhaps local (though not yokel) musicians – might find in them something that inspires them to create a little more new music.
HOW TO GO
What: Aronhalt & Sandow album release
When: 7-11 p.m. May 10
Where: State Theater
Tickets: springfieldstatetheater.com