For several years, Rocks played on Thanksgiving weekend at Solomon Grundy’s in Rockville Centre. Everyone was just home from college, ready to cut loose and the place would be packed. On Friday November 24, 1978, Rocks hit the stage and was taking no prisoners! With Kenny Schwarz on lead vocals and guitar, Ray Schwarz, drums and vocals, Joe Paresi, bass, vocals, Billy Murphy, keyboards and Bob Kinney on lead guitar - our repertoire had evolved from being Stones dominant to include Jersey shore Springsteen rock, plus some Lou Reed toughness.

The first set opens with a couple Bruce Springsteen songs (Although people think of this as “classic” rock, Darkness on the Edge of Town had only been released in June of 78, so these were new songs!). Things pick up with a tight version of Lou Reed’s Sweet Jane, followed by Southside Johnny’s Talk to Me. The set highlight is Reed’s Rock N Roll. Ray had a classic intro; ”All right it’s Friday night and this place sounds like a mortuary. I mean, really. Now this song here should get everybody going, it’s a song by Mr. Lou Reed, it kind of says it the way it is. If you people are ever into partying, if you people ever want to drink, you go to this song right here, man, the name of the song is called Rock N Roll, Let’s put your hands out there, get it going please. There we go.” The crowd starts to clap along and then Ray calls out “Hey, You guys in the back there, come on, let’s go, help us out, huh? What is this? You paid 2 dollars you can do it.” And off we go into our rocking 8-minute version with Kenny having a rhythm solo, Joe adding a standout bass solo, and Bob rocking an extended lead break, while Billy’s organ fills everything in. At this point the crowd is feeling good and Ray gets them clapping the beat as Billy Murphy does his classic My Best Friend’s Girl. The set ends with Meatloaf’s All Revved Up With No Place to Go - we always made Ray sing the hard ones - and this is no exception. The crowd is definitely revved up, as Kenny tells them that we’ll join them at the bar!

The second set kicks off with Kenny putting down the guitar and showing off his front man skills in the classic “Mack the Knife”, leading to Bowie’s Rebel Rebel and Suffragette City, and you can really hear the crowd reaction by the time we get to Springsteen’s Fire. Ken and Bob do the Southside Johnny novelty blues song It Ain’t the Meat leading to a climatic Tenth Ave - Born to Run. We finally get to a couple of Stones songs, Beast of Burden and Miss You - which were new songs from Some Girls just released in June. Mike “Booger” Howley joins us on harmonica for Miss You, and stays on to sing the Muddy Waters blues classic “Caledonia” . When Ray joins in for the final chorus the song jumps to another level of intensity! The set ends with a rocking version of another Lou Reed classic, Vicious.

I didn’t know that this recording existed but in fact,  Rick “Onie” O’Neill and his brother had recorded Rocks playing this Thanksgiving gig at Solomon Grundy’s in 1978. That live cassette tape was likely listened to a couple of times and then put in a desk drawer where it sat for 40 years - probably for several good reasons! For one, the mikes were placed a good distance from the stage and with the packed house, they picked up lots of crowd noise. And it was loud - so the needle was in red quite a bit! And to be sure, drinking was involved - lots of it. So, they probably didn’t notice when someone put their coat on top of one of the mics! But fortunately, 40 years later, Onie gave the tape to Kenny, who gave it to Ray, who gave it to me - and I’ve worked to revive and remaster this old tape.  

It's nice to hear something from 24 year old me and my buddies.  It's surprising that a cassette tape from 40 years ago still worked at all - there are some drop outs but you can get the feel of the good times!

Special thanks to Mike Konopka at Thundertone Audio in Chicago who converted the cassette to digital so I could edit and remix it. Mike called me during the conversion to say what a great vibe there was - saying “you can actually smell the beer!”