30 years of keeping the beat

Sunday, February 28, 1999

30 years of keeping the beat

Rick “Bam” Powell helps mold music scene with the Raisins, Stagger Lee, Blue Birds and Bucket

If the past 30 years of Rick “Bam” Powell's life were turned into a TV miniseries, it would tell a pretty thorough story of Cincinnati's music scene.

Since his high school bands of the late '60s, the drummer and singer has kept the beat for many of the area's best groups.

He's done it all, from progressive country with Stagger Lee to funky R&B with the Blue Birds. He's perhaps best-known for playing in the hottest local pop-rock band of the early '80s, the Raisins. March 14, the Raisins will reunite at the third annual Cammy Awards at Sycamore Gardens. It's the first official Raisins reunion since 1985.

POWELL FILE

• Born: Richard Thomas Powell at Jewish Hospital in Cincinnati on March 19, 1952, to Richard Lewis Powell and Nancy Patton.
• Education: Graduated Lebanon High School, 1970; attended Ohio Northern University.
• Career: His first band was the Tracers, his current band is Bucket. In between he played with the Chamberly Kids, Channel 8, Voyage II, Dillinger, Brutus, LeBlanc & Carr, the Raisins, Stagger Lee (twice), Curly and the Blue Birds.
• Family: He and wife, Judy, are expecting their first child in May. He has a daughter, Faye, 16, from his first marriage.
• Discography: early high school band 45s out of print; LeBlanc & Carr's Falling (1977), out of print. Raisins LP (1983) available on CD. The three-cassette post-mortem Raisins collection Everything and More (1985) is out of print; the Blue Birds CDs, The Blue Birds (1993) and Argentina (1995), are available at local stores. A new, live Blue Birds CD is expected in March.

“I'm really not enamored with a particular type of music,” he says. “I'm more influenced by local people than I am by big-timers, and I'm really just attracted to energy. If somebody's really excited, I want some.”

Mr. Powell, 46, grew up in Loveland, where he still lives. He was first drawn to the British Invasion sounds of the mid-'60s coming out of his transistor radio.

“We were all AM radio kids. All we ever heard was what was on WSAI,” he says.

When singing along with the hits lost its novelty, he and some pals started what would become his first band, the Tracers. “I was the bass player for two practices,” he says with a laugh. “But the drummer couldn't play the beat and I knew how to play that beat, so we traded.”

He first heard live R&B at the Halfway club in Hamilton. That's where Lonnie Mack and other blues-inspired white musicians gathered, including many who had done sessions at Cincinnati's King records.

“Grown men playing R&B,” he says of that early inspiration. “I don't think they even knew the Beatles even happened. That's when it hit me, when I saw it with my own eyes.”

Before long, he was playing that music himself, gigging around the area with R&B and country musicians while barely a teen-ager. Before he was out of high school, his band drew the attention of local talent scouts.

Randy McNutt, now a Cincinnati Enquirer reporter and author of several music books, was producing pop singles at Jewel Studios in Mount Healthy. He and partner Wayne Perry recorded one of Mr. Powell's high school groups, the Chamberly Kids.

“I just loved his voice,” Mr. McNutt says. “Bam just had a real soulful rock voice. Right off you could tell his musicianship was excellent.”

In young bands, the drummer is almost always replaced for recording sessions. But Mr. Powell was so good that Mr. McNutt brought in a substitute bassist instead, Roger “Jelly Roll” Troy, who went on to fame with bluesman Michael Bloomfield. “Even as a kid, Bam could keep up with Jellyroll,” says Mr. McNutt.

But the Chamberly Kids didn't find teen stardom. Renamed Little Flint, they failed to dent the charts.

Football and music
In 1970, Mr. Powell graduated from Lebanon High School after his family moved there in his senior year. With the Vietnam War raging, he accepted a partial football scholarship (and the accompanying student draft deferment) and went to Ohio Northern University. A music major, Mr. Powell, not nearly as big or mean as the average middle linebacker, preferred the teamwork of his eight-piece horn band. “That's when I went, "I guess I better figure out what the hell I'm doing (on the drums).'”

Bands on Bam;
Bam on bands

“He's an incredibly natural guy, totally unaffected, just a wonderful person to be around, absolutely musical.”
— Bob Nyswonger, the Raisins and Bucket
“He's an incredible singer and songwriter. And he has very quick reflexes. A few times when I would spontaneously throw my guitar over my head to the back of the stage (where Bam's drums were) he would manage to duck.”
— Rob Fetters, the Raisins
“He's got different ideas about writing songs, which is great, 'cause country has gotten so sterile. And he's such a good singer. I've been telling him to get out from behind those drums, get out front and just sing.”
— Bobby Joe Mueller, Stagger Lee
“He's a heck of a songwriter, singer and drummer.”
— Marcos Sastre, the Blue Birds
“He's the nicest guy I know in town. He's definitely got his own style of writing. He'll write a couple things that are country, then he'll write something that's soulful as hell. He's the most musical drummer I've ever played with. He really listens, which is rare.”
— Lee Rolfes, Bucket
“I've been really lucky. I've had the opportunity to work with a bunch of really good players.”
— Rick “Bam” Powell

During his junior year, his stepfather, Morris Chambers, was killed in a trucking accident, and Mr. Powell quit school to return home. Shortly after that, he moved to Florida with a band from Findlay, Ohio, which soon hooked up with nationally known fusion guitarist Scott Henderson in the group Brutus.

From there, it wasn't a big jump to Muscle Shoals, Ala., home of the famed recording studio of the same name owned by the legendary R&B rhythm section that had backed Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett and other soul greats.

There, the simple truths of Southern soul reminded Mr. Powell that the best music wasn't necessarily the most complex.

“I was trying to become a chops-meister,” he recalls. “Then I got down there and it kind of grounded me again. "Simple is better' and all that cliche stuff is true.”

In 1977, he joined LeBlanc & Carr, recorded with the group and opened a national tour for Lynyrd Skynyrd.

“They were turning into the Stones. Things were getting crazy,” Mr. Powell recalls of the tour. He also remembers the guys in the Skynyrd band complaining about the problems they were having with the private jet they'd leased. “They hated that plane,” he says.

They were right. On Oct. 20, 1977, the Skynyrd plane crashed, killing three band members, including singer and chief songwriter Ronnie Van Zant.

Luckily, the LeBlanc & Carr band traveled separately, but the group broke up a few months later. Mr. Powell moved to nearby Tupelo, Miss., where he got a call in the early '80s from his hometown about joining a new band called the Raisins. The group had tried such fine drummers as Mike Hodges,but none clicked. He wasn't ready to come back yet, however, and it took a second call a few months later to convince him.

Cooking and playing
By 1981, Mr. Powell was married to his first wife, Mary, and back here trying to get the Raisins going. It was tough playing in a new band that did original material instead of the more lucrative covers of current hits.

“And my wife was pregnant, and the Raisins weren't making any money, that's for sure. I said, "Man, I got to get a gig.' I got a job cooking for Perkins, and I got up this kind of country thing over in Cheviot.”

When lead singer Bobby Joe Mueller joined that band, Mr. Mueller said he had a good name for it. “This kind of country thing” became Stagger Lee (named for the Lloyd Price R&B classic). The earliest version of the group also included fellow Raisin Rick Nihisel, now known as Ricky Nye of Red Hots fame.

Mr. Powell's life was changing quickly. His wife gave birth to their daughter, Faye. and soon he was bringing his daughter to practices.

“He'd set down Faye in her car seat right on his floor tom while he would play, and she'd just sleep through rehearsals,” Mr. Mueller recalls.

When the Raisins released their debut album, with the local hit, “Fear is Never Boring,” that band's fortunes changed fast. The Raisins rapidly grew into the hottest ticket on the local scene, and Mr. Powell and Mr. Nihisel left Stagger Lee in the hands of Mr. Mueller, who leads the band to this day.

Too much versatility
In the first half of the '80s, the Raisins, with a feisty new-wave edge and four lead singers and songwriters, seemed a sure bet for national stardom. But the band's versatility worked against it. Manager Stan Hertzman remembers being told by several major labels that the Raisins had too many singers and songwriters, that the band needed to focus on one voice and one style.

In 1985, their dreams of national stardom fading, the Raisins broke up. Rob Fetters and Bob Nyswonger rejoined their old drummer Chris Arduser in the Bears, a group fronted by former local guitarist Adrian Belew, who has since gained a reputation worldwide. The Bears developed a cult following through two fine albums for IRS Records, but broke up by 1988.

Meanwhile, Mr. Powell went back with Stagger Lee, staying for seven years, as the band rode the country music boom. Stagger Lee enjoyed lengthy house-band stints at the Stony Ridge Inn and the original Silver Saddle.

“That's when "Mustang Sally' became a thorn in our side for all time,” Mr. Mueller jokes.

Sung by Mr. Powell in his raspy, blue-eyed soul man's voice, the Memphis soul hit became one of Stagger Lee's most requested songs, a tradition that continues today, even though the drummer left the group in 1992.

Former Scouts
Mr. Powell's next major project was the Blue Birds, a band that evolved from guitarist Marcos Sastre's group the Scouts. With Charlie Fletcher on keyboards and Michael Bany on bass, that version remains many fans' favorite.

“We had four-part harmonies in those days,” Mr. Sastre recalls. “It's been a good band in every form, but that was a pretty unique group there.”

Mr. Bany left the Blue Birds for the Goshorn Brothers, the band with which he was playing when he was killed after a performance at Tommy's on Main on Dec. 29, 1995. Mr. Powell quit the Blue Birds last year, not for another band, but mostly to get a break.

“It just kind of ran out of gas for me. It was just time to go,” he says of his 1992-1998 years as a Blue Bird.

Mr. Sastre wasn't surprised. In fact, even without Mr. Powell saying anything, he set up recording equipment at what turned out to be the drummer's last night. “I just had that kind of feeling to go on and record it,” he says. That recording will be available on CD within the next few weeks, Mr. Sastre says.

Mr. Powell is now in Bucket, a trio that reunited him with Mr. Nyswonger on bass, along with singer/guitarist Lee Rolfes. And, as he did in many of his other bands, he's also working a day job, loading luggage for TWA at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport.

Mr. Powell's also working on a solo album with some former band mates, including, on four songs, the Raisins, the most popular of his many local groups. He hopes to release it later this year.

“Some of those tracks are great,” he says. “The Raisins stuff, those guys came in and it was weird. I don't play like that unless I'm playing with those guys. This weird muscle memory kicked in.”

March 14, that weird muscle memory will have another chance to surface, when the Raisins reunite at the third annual Cincinnati Area Music Awards (the Cammys) at Sycamore Gardens. It will be a big day for reunions, as he and Mr. Nihisel also will play with Stagger Lee.

Mr. Powell won last year's R&B instrumentalist Cammy for his work with the Blue Birds. But in the course of his eclectic musical career, he's been eligible for awards in just about every musical category.

Even if you never go to local bars, you've heard him sing. It was Mr. Powell's voice on the Gold Star Chili “Coney, Co-co-coney” commercial, and he's also done jingles for LaRosa's, Hudepohl, J.T.M., Little Kings, Michel Tires and Miller Bros. Paints. When local ad agencies need a gritty, honest voice, Bam's their man.

He's happy to see his musical life slow down a bit. Decades on the bandstand have left with him with occasional ringing in his ears, so he enjoys the lower volume of semi-acoustic Bucket gigs.

He even took a weekend off in the middle of February to see daughter Faye, 16, compete in winter guard, the indoor version of color guard. Her team, the Kings High School Winter Guard Corps, won the 1998 international world championship.

Mr. Powell and his second wife, Judy, are expecting their first child in May. Despite his many brushes with national fame, the drummer says he's never been happier, personally or musically.

“We don't really have any great aspirations or anything,” he says of Bucket. “It's just "Hey man, this is fun, let's go do it.'



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