Oct. 7, 1977 feature: Pepperwood Greene band

 

Local bands didn’t enjoy the same spotlight in Gusto that they got in TV Topics. This story was nestled into some spare space on two widely-separated pages in the back of the magazine. 

Oct. 7, 1977

How to Evolve

A Rock Group 

          When Don Kraus and Ted Lehman decided to form the newest edition of Pepperwood Greene last spring, they scoured the city for new talent. They put up signs everywhere, which brought them guitarist Paul Miserantino and bassist Joel Thomas. They haunted open mike sessions, discovering singer-songwriter Robin Greene at the Tralfamadore Café. They even walked down Elmwood Avenue asking folks if they could play, which is sort of how they met Andrew Suggs, their new drummer from Memphis.

          Kraus and Lehman are past masters at throwing unlikely combinations together. And making them work. They began as a duo – Lehman on guitar, Kraus on clarinet (“Ted & Don, unique folksinging group,” says a four-year-old club ad in their scrapbook). They’ve piloted a succession of Pepperwood Greenes, ranging from folk to jazz to bluegrass. They don’t know what to call the music from this newest team.

          For want of a better label, it’s light rock, but there are jazz and folk influences in what they devise. Whenever the songs aren’t original, as in their revival of Cream’s 10-year-old “Take It Back,” the arrangements are.

          Robin Greene’s songs, like “Lois Lane” (“ … there she was, a mild-mannered reporter/ Living in an apartment on Channel 4/ In love with a superstar/ She went a little too far …”), are Joni Mitchell crossed with Genesis. Another of the group’s original tunes sounds like Frank Zappa. A previous Pepperwood Greene did Zappa’s “Bebop Twitch and Tango.”

          Otherwise, Pepperwood Greene is seeking dates the same way Kraus and Lehman assembled the group. For starters, they threw a free concert as part of Buffalo State College orientation week (Lehman’s a ’77 Buff State graduate) and phoned up everybody they thought should hear them.

          They were across the hall from a crowded beer blast with mainline rockers Cock Robin. In comparison, Pepperwood Greene’s room seemed like a study hall. They weren’t totally at ease with their arrangements and their high notes were distorted cruelly by the sound system and the concrete walls, but there was no mistaking the power of their creativity and determination. Enough of the right folks showed up to keep them working for a month.

          They play acoustic Wednesdays at the Circus Bar, 203 Military Road near Grant. They help the Odyssey, 1005 Tonawanda St., celebrate its anniversary Sunday.

          One of two bands “in residence” at UB’s artist-oriented College B, they’ll hold open rehearsals in the Amherst Campus Ellicott Complex the second Tuesdays of each month. There will be three concerts in the Katharine Cornell Theater also, one of them with the other “in residence” group, the jazz players of Tender Buttons, on Oct. 22.

          Part of Tender Buttons used to play with the previous Pepperwood Greene, which died during last winter’s blizzard. An earlier band included three members of those bluegrass comedians, the Pointless Brothers. The longest-lasting Pepperwood Greene came before that, a folk trio with singer Kathy Moriarty.

          “For a while, it changed every semester,” says Kraus, a science fiction writer who got his degree in English from UB in 1976. “But we kept the name because people remembered it. We’d dig up gigs and pull out some people that we knew and play them.”

          Pepperwood Greene is a place in California’s redwood country where Kraus and Lehman stopped during a cross-country trek in 1973, a journey on which they decided they should play music together. They’re both from Syosset, on Long Island’s North Shore, and they’ve known each other since junior high.

          “We met drinking hog,” Kraus explains. “That’s where you go into your father’s liquor cabinet and take a little out of each bottle.”

          Joel Thomas and Paul Miserantino have known each other since junior high also. They played in numerous bands together at Williamsville North High School. Thomas went with a commercial group for a while. Miserantino tried acoustic guitar.

          “I feel a lot more creative now,” Miserantino remarks. “We’re expressing our feelings in this group.”

          Most of the material, however, is Lehman’s and Robin Greene’s. Greene has a stack of tunes she wrote playing solo during her years in Kenmore East High School and Villa Maria College.

          “It was hard for me to start singing other people’s music,” she says, “so I always just made up my own.”

          Drummer Andrew Suggs came to town with Fleetwood Mac last summer, part of Bill Graham’s Winterland Productions T-shirt sales operation. He started wandering when his bass-playing brother married and gave up music. While the band gets on its feet, Suggs hopes to find space for a carpentry shop and built cabinets for sound systems.

          Kraus and Lehman have a business called Space Productions that “does everything.” Handbills offer their services as handymen. They sell session time on their four-track tape recorder. They would like to get up a cooperative referral service, putting artists and craftsmen in touch with others who could use their services.

          “We’re into promoting creativity,” says Lehman. “Buffalo has all the good things a city should have, but it’s small enough. We can get around and deal with things. It feels like home.”

          “Besides,” says Kraus, “it’s a great place to be broke. I have a great time and I’m broke a lot.”

          “We’d love to make it from here with local people pushing us,” Lehman proposes. “If a band from Buffalo made it from Buffalo, it would change the whole music industry here. So we want to be more than just a group, you know?”

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IN THE PHOTO: Pepperwood Greene. No caption, but because of the instruments (and in Ted Lehman's case, the beard) I'm pretty sure that, left to right in front, it's Paul Miserantino, Don Kraus and Andrew Suggs; and in back, Robin Greene and Ted Lehman. 

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FOOTNOTE: Ted Lehman’s artist bio on Facebook notes that he left Buffalo for Atlanta and has worked mostly from home, writing songs and recording. His songs have been covered by other music artists, he says, and have been used in film, TV and advertising.

          Paul Miserantino moved to L.A. with his friend Daniel Gerous, a drummer, and they played in bands out there, notably one called the Twisters. In recent years, Paul has worked regularly with one of his bandmates in this edition of Pepperwood Greene – Robin Greene, who’s now Robin Grandin.

          Robin was inducted into the Buffalo Music Hall of Fame in 2021 and her bio notes that she has had quite a long career with a variety of bands here, there and everywhere. She was on the road with a group called Rainbow in the 1980s, and in Nashville in the 1990s, notably with a successful recording group she co-founded called Mustang Sally, which played with lots of leading country acts. Back in Buffalo since 2006, she led her own Rockin’ Robin band in the 2010s. In tribute to her mother, who died from Alzheimer’s disease, she has founded Music to Remember, a non-profit which helps those with memory problems “with the healing power of music.”