Bill Church

SE: Are you from the Bay Area?
BC: Well, not exactly original, but I was in the Bay Area for 20 years.  I was in Europe in the early ’60s, then I came to San Francisco in about ’67…and Ronnie was out in Boulder, Colorado. That was where I first met him.

SE: Oh, you were out in Colorado?
BC: I toured with the Van Morrison band, and then Ronnie joined that band as well.  He was in a band at the time called Daddy Long Legs, a good ol’ regional favorite band.

SE: I knew you both played on “Tupelo Honey” but I didn’t know that you were with Van Morrison first.
BC: Actually, I didn’t play with Van first.  I wasn’t in Van’s band until later, but my band, the Corn Brothers was the opening act on a couple of his tours.  I had an acoustic band, and by the end of those two big tours both Ronnie and I were in the band.  Ronnie stayed long enough to do “Tupelo Honey” and then he left.  I stuck around for another album (“St. Dominic’s Preview”), with Van, meanwhile, Ronnie was back on the East Coast playing with Edgar Winter by then.  And he took one of the other guys in the Corn Brothers who played guitar and sang but was also a drummer, that was Chuck Ruff. And Ronnie took Chuck Ruff back with him and they were both in Edgar’s band.

SE: So you came from the Corn Brothers, and Chuck Ruff was the guitar player in the Corn Brothers?
BC: Yeah (laughing).  Chuck, Ronnie and I had played together in a band previously.  We had a band on Epic Records called Saw Buck, and that’s actually how  Ronnie met Chuck and I.  Chuck and I had been in many bands together, when I came back to the States from Europe, I went to the University of Nevada in Reno.  And that’s where I met Chuck and then I brought Chuck with me to San Francisco and we started Saw Buck, and that’s when we added various players, one of which was Ronnie.  And then as all bands do, in those days they dissipated quite quickly.  I started the Corn Brothers with some remnants from that band as an acoustic band and we played at the Keystone, as a matter of fact, which is where Van saw us and fell in love with the band and we became the opening act for the tour. And like I said, by the end of two tours doing that, Ronnie and I were in the Van Morrison band.

SE: So, Ronnie got his ticket to play in Van’s band through you, right?
BC: We both knew the same people, so it was kind of inevitable.  It was, who was going to drop their other project first (laughing).

SE: So after Ronnie left Edgar Winter and wanted to form his own band, did he call you right then?
BC: Yeah, he had told me that he was coming back, I was watching over his family and stuff while he was gone.  He left his family in San Francisco while he was back on the East Coast, and I was overseeing things, so I knew in advance that he was coming back and I wasn’t sure of what I was going to do, if I was going to stay with Van or not.  Then, it’s a funny story, Van was going to trade bands with Jesse Colin Young for a tour, only he was going to do this without asking anybody (laughing).

SE: Really?
BC: Yeah, and I had better things to do than to go play with Jesse Colin Young, so I told Ronnie, we’ll just start a hard rock band.

SE: That was a good idea.
BC: Yeah, that turned out to be on the cutting edge of things at that time, because most American bands were not necessarily heavy metal yet, you know?  So yeah, it turned out to be a big runaway horse.

SE: There wasn’t a lot written on you guys in the big major music magazines at that time…
BC: Well, it was just too short-lived, that was the reason.  I was only in the band 18 months, I only did the first album, then by the second album they had lost the touch, and Ronnie and Sam were fighting, and it just didn’t happen. The second album didn’t even pay for itself.  So Warner Brothers had had enough, they were pretty conservative, we’re talking hard rock acoustic here, and big changes like that didn’t sit well so, …

SE: When Ronnie went to check out Denny and Sam, did you go with him to the gigs?
BC: Oh yeah, Denny was in a local power trio, they played around the Cotati area, Sonoma State area there, so we went up and saw them at the old End of the Beginning in Cotati, which was a great place, and then Sammy was the local James Brown impersonator down at the Warf Rat.  We went down there and checked him out, and went through the process of trying out some other people too.

SE: Now Ronnie recalls that Sam used Denny on one of his demos?
BC: Yeah, he had done a demo with part of the guys from the Justice Brothers and Denny on drums.

SE: Denny’s band was The Justice Brothers?
BC: No, that was Sammy’s band.  Denny’s band was Thunderstick.

SE: That’s about right.
BC: (laughing) Denny and Sammy had really done nothing at all, they were both just club band people.  In fact, to begin with, I wasn’t really too keen on Sammy being the singer.

SE: Really?
BC: Well, all I saw of him is what I saw, and he did a lot of James Brown stuff you know, and sang like James Brown, and that’s not what I was into at that particular time.  But as it turned out, he ended up being a good rock singer/songwriter. I mean shit, I did eleven albums with him, so I guess I know him about as well as I know anybody on this earth.  (laughing)

SE: Do you remember the first track you worked on for the first album?
BC: Yeah, oh yeah. First track that we got down was “Rock the Nation.”  That was going to be the single, but it didn’t end up being that.  We had a bunch of outtakes too, we probably had about 18 songs that we had put together in the course of six months.  We wrote the songs, did the album and were out on the road within six months.

SE: You guys had 18 songs?
BC: Yeah, I think there’s 18 originally, we’ve got “Takin’ a Ride,” didn’t ever make the album, the original version of “Space Age Sacrifice,” which they eventually rehashed and put on the second album, and then there’s “Drugs,” a song called “Drugs,” and uh…oh boy, it’s hard for me to even remember. But there were a bunch of outtakes.

SE: Sometimes down the road these songs end up being just as good as the stuff that came out.
BC: Yeah well, indeed, it was a raw period when we were a raw band.  So, they burn, they blister!  There’s no question about that.

SE: I remember that when we all got “Paper Money” and we saw that there had been a line-up change, it was like opening a gift at Christmas and getting underwear, you know?
BC: Yeah, it definitely changes drastically at that point.  The band was already doomed at that point.  Sammy was probably ready to leave before I was.  He and Ronnie weren’t getting along right from the beginning.  What happened was…here’s a funny inside story for you.  The original name of the band — there were two names — that we were going to vote on, one was to use Montrose because at that particular time Edgar Winter had the top ten album in the world and we thought it would help have some impact for the band. Or, the one that Denny and Sammy voted for was White Dwarf.  Sammy was heavy into astronomy at the time, so Sam and Denny both voted for the name to be White Dwarf, and Ronnie voted for his own name, and I was sort of hung between the two, and I sure as heck didn’t want it to be White Dwarf, so I voted for it to be Montrose.  But that’s how early it was that Sammy and Ronnie were at odds.

SE: So that was before the first record even?
BC: Yeah, even before the first record.  And then our second manager, Dee Anthony, he just cemented things because he and Sammy got along great and he would call Sammy the star and he hated Ronnie, so he just drove the wedge.  I was surprised that I was the first to leave.  I thought that Sammy would be long gone before that, so it was really quick-lived.  It’s too bad, because there was a lot of potential, I mean another fact, another inside story for you…  When that band disbanded so quickly, Warner Brothers was really pissed off at Ted Templeman, so they told Ted Templeman to go out and find another band exactly like Montrose.  And he did — Van Halen (laughing).  I mean, if you were around at that time you could see exactly what had happened, and they put pressure on him to do that, and he went out and found one, and had the success that he’s hoped that he would’ve had with Montrose — and it would have if the band had stayed together.  But you had the big titan egos, you had an ego that Ronnie had, maybe deservedly so, and then you had an ego that Sammy had, which was the type of ego of the era itself.  He’d never done anything in his life, but he’s going to have a giant ego anyway because he was the front man and the two just didn’t jive (laughing).  It was really too bad.

SE: You wanted to leave after the first album?
BC: Well, we started to have big arguments and so it was by mutual agreement… I told Ronnie… it was a weird thing, his wife had left him, and the very next day he calls me up and he says, “Church, I don’t know what to do, everything’s all screwed up, so I don’t know what I’m going to do.  I think I’ll change the band around.”  I’ll tell you what, I’ll save you the trouble. (laughing).  Yeah, it was too bad, he was under a lot of pressure, and just didn’t see the future, and Sammy was star-struck and had the energy, and he went on to do a bunch of shit, so…

SE: The only TV show I ever saw you guys on was the “Midnight Special.”  Were there any other shows you guys appeared on?
BC: Oh yeah, we did a lot of TV in Europe, we did “Old Grey Whistle Test” twice, we did “Live from the Olympia Hall” in Paris, with Black Oak Arkansas opening for us (laughs), which was kind of weird.  We’d just gotten done with a tour of America opening for Black Oak.  You turn around and go to Europe and they have to open for us.  But yeah, we did a bunch of stuff.

SE: So were the live sets pretty airtight or did you guys free-form at all?
BC: The Montrose shows were regimented per se, but we had long, drawn-out segments designated for everybody to jam.  But they were relatively controlled.  We weren’t a party band like J. Geils or one of those bands, not quite that loose, but we were on the cutting edge of heavy metal. There weren’t really any heavy metal American bands at that time.

SE: I told Ronnie that I’d never heard a band that got so in your face as you guys.
BC: Yeah, not as hot off the track, it was designed specifically to jump off of the record.  In fact, that was our time limitation on each side of the record was based on how many high dB grooves we could get without losing it.  So “Space Station #5” could have jammed another ten minutes if there had been hi-fi left to do it with.  We also used a bunch of secrets at that time for ambient sound.  We had some Altec Lansing Capistranos out in the middle of one of the rooms, one of the lockers, to get the guitar sound.  It was interesting how we went about it.  And then, of course, Don Lande engineered it, and he went on to do beaucoup people.  He and Ted were a good team at that time, both youngsters.  They were young and hungry like we were, so it was a once-in-a-lifetime thing.

SE: Well, maybe not once in a lifetime, because you guys got together for that track on Sam’s record.
BC: Oh yeah, obviously, they were rolling tape from minute one, but we went right in, tuned up and went straight into “Rock Candy,” and when they heard that, they were glad that they were having that tape rolling.  They actually released that as a single in Japan, and there were actually some royalties reported on it.  That’s the only reason I knew they’d released it even (laughs).  And of course there was talk about reforming because that’s the latest thing.  Everybody’s getting back together, and it would certainly shake Ronnie’s career back into gear, and Sammy needs a good shot-in-the-arm too, but I doubt that it will ever happen.

SE: Oh, don’t say that!
BC: Yeah, it’s just one of those things, you know. Sammy is just, uh, nobody really wants to play with Sammy (laughing), that’s the problem. Every time it comes down to it, it’s either Ronnie or Denny and Sammy not getting along. It’s amazing.

SE: Denny played on a few of Sammy’s solo albums…
BC: Uh yep, Denny played on a couple of the early ones I think, and then he played on “Marching to Mars.”  But the only problem was that “Marching to Mars” almost damn near cost him his MCA record contract because it bombed so bad, and that’s probably why we didn’t do a 25th-anniversary reunion show. We’d been planning a 25th reunion show, and it didn’t come off more than likely because “Marching to Mars” bombed and MCA told Sam that he couldn’t do anything until he got another album out pronto, and of course that last one is so bad that he probably doesn’t have a contract right now (laughs).

SE: Well, what a perfect time to talk about a reunion.
BC: Yeah, we’ve talked about it a bunch of times.  The thing about it is, it always ends up in Sammy’s lap and he always decides that whatever else he’s doing is always more important.  You never know, it’s a natural, I know that Ronnie would really like that to happen. Denny would too because he’s getting older now and he certainly doesn’t need to pad his track record, and he would benefit greatly from…his peers would appreciate him more if he went back and did what actually was the thing that set him up, you know? It’s one thing to be the drummer in Heart, but then again Heart has two drummers.  Do you know what I’m getting at?

SE: Yeah.
BC: It’s just one of those things, you never know, every year everybody talks about it so…  But like I say, it’s a lot easier to adjust my lifestyle to it than it is for Sammy to do so, you know, he has a lot more to straighten out before he can do another project, and he continues to amaze me in his choice of what he’s going to do anyway because I went to Arco to see him a couple of months back and I’ll tell you, boy, he looks tired out and his band is really one of the worst bands he’s ever had, in my opinion.

SE: Really?
BC: Yeah, they just don’t have it (laughs).  He could make more conscious choices about what he’s doing ’cause he really didn’t take out a good band with him this time, he really did not.  And it makes him look tired, so he’s just not doing himself any good. He’s got to start making some better decisions. If he’s just say… hey, let’s do a…  See, what we originally planned on doing is using the Warfield, and doing three or four nights in a row, and in fact, Mick Brigdon had already committed to taking care of everything through BGP, and make it a real classic thing, do a live album, etc.  And if he’d commit to just doing that, it would spawn a whole bunch of other things.  But once again, Sammy’s gotta come down out of the clouds (laughs).

SE: Any funny road stories?
BC: Well, there’s millions.  You could talk for hours and hours about what went down, specifically with Montrose.  We were a partying band (laughs).

SE: Really, you always seemed like you guys were on the straight and narrow to me.
BC: Well, we burned the midnight oil, that band did.  We were all young and abrasive, and going for it.  It was nonstop for the 18 months we toured.  I quit the band on the road.

SE: On the road?
BC: Yeah (laughing), when my part of it came to an end, we were on the road.

SE: Did they have to get somebody really quick?
BC: No, they all went home.  The tour just stopped, that was Humble Pie and us. Might’ve been Spooky Tooth on the show too.  In fact, I think it was.  I can remember next door to me Greg Ridley, the bass player, for Humble Pie used  to beat his wife up every night on the road.  And for some reason his room was always next to mine, somehow  the itinerary just turned out that way.  So we’d get out and get on the tour bus in the morning and here comes Greg and his wife, and his wife has all of her fur coats on and lots covering her and shades on, you know, covering everything.  It was wild in those days.  The young rock tours, it was wild (laughs).

SE: So you were on package tours most of the time?
BC: Yeah, because we were handled by Dee Anthony and Frank Barcelona, and at that time Frank Barcelona pretty much had a monopoly on rock touring, so we were always with our own packages. We did Humble Pie, Spooky Tooth and us.  We did Emerson, Lake and Palmer and us, we did Joe Cocker too, he was one of Dee’s guys.  That was the good old days when he’d have all the barrels around to puke in.

SE: (laughing)  Nice.
BC: He’d take anything, he’d be getting in the limo and there’d be people off the street handing him pills to take.  Those were weird days from that angle.

SE: Well, I hope something comes together for a 30th anniversary reunion.
BC: You never know, I mean, I know that Denny’s getting tired of going abroad to go play with Whitesnake, you know what I mean?  He’d rather play domestically and I know Ronnie’s dying to do it too, and Sammy really needs it, a re-direction could help him.  You just never know.  That original band came in boom! boom! boom!  and went out boom! boom! boom!  So you never know.  And so many people are making good money with their reunions, I mean, even the Pat Travers Band is back together again.  I don’t even really do a whole lot of rock music anymore, I do mainly country music these days, to tell you the truth.

SE: Really?
BC: Yeah, people change (laughs).

SE: But you still have your old chops in the closet in case you need ’em, right?
BC: Oh yeah, I mean that never goes away.

SE: I’ve always noticed that even on the most classic of records there’s always a bass flub, but with you I can never find even one…

BC: (laughs)  Actually, in one of the Van Morrison records there’s a big blooper in there, but Van wanted it in there because Van is very much a one-take artist and he relies strictly on soul.  So I told him I’d better punch that out of there and he goes, nope, I’m leaving it in there.  So it’s on there and who knows, I hear songs from that album everytime I go to see A’s games.  For example, they play “Jackie Wilson Said” every seventh inning so… (laughs) and have for 20 years.  Pretty weird.