Today on I’ll Follow You, I’m in conversation with two of the most influential people in my musical life, Ed Bialon and Don Graves.
(You can stream our chat via the embed here or pretty much anywhere else you source your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, and Google Podcasts.)
Ed and Don were members of my dad’s band, the Terry Felus Trio, for about ten years, from the early 1970s through the early 1980s. And as you’ll hear me joke later on in the episode, this was no run-of-the-mill guitar-bass-and-drums trio. Oh no. My dad played various keyboard instruments, mainly accordion, while Ed played vibes (and sometimes drums) and Don played drums (and sometimes electric guitar). Terry and Ed both sang a little bit, though Don was the primary vocalist.
The Terry Felus Trio was known and loved around Northwest Indiana as a great party band, getting hired to play for wedding receptions, milestone anniversary celebrations, and New Year’s Eve shows, though they were also frequently booked at local venues like Mama Puntillo’s in Highland, Indiana, and Sarti’s Restaurant and Lounge in East Chicago. In the days before DJs and easily assembled Spotify playlists, these guys were Shuffle Mode personified. They could play a little bit of everything, and took great pride in being able to pace a night for everyone’s maximum enjoyment.
So, I wanted to sit down with them and get the scoop on how exactly they did what they did. I wanted to dig into the history of how they all knew each other, where and how they all trained as musicians, and get a glimpse into this now mostly bygone era of live bands who didn’t try to sound like anyone but themselves.
Over the course of our chat, it was revealed that Ed was secretly one of Don’s first drum teachers and that the name of the first band that my dad Terry played in was The Premieres. They give me the dirt on the kinds of clubs they made Terry promise to never book them into ever again and on the highlights of the worst of their bad gigs. And they reminisce about the best places to go for after-show meals and then sum it all up with the statement that “the thing that made us cool was the joy that we had in playing the music . . . listen for the joy, it’s there.”
SHOW NOTES
The Terry Felus Trio on Bandcamp
The introductory audio clip is the Terry Felus Trio playing “Celebration” on December 31, 1982/January 1, 1983.
“Haskell Harr is best known as the author of graded method books for rudimental snare drumming.”
Here’s some photos of my dad Terry hanging out at Judy’s Music Studio. (Judy was the last name of the guy who owned it.)
The musical clip is the Terry Felus Trio playing “My Favorite Things” at Sarti’s on December 29, 1973.
Here’s a great video showing off the sounds and features of a Cordovox:
Here’s a photo of my dad’s Minitmoog, which my husband had restored for me by Mike Borish of Borish Electronics in Chicago back in 2018:
More info about the Clavinet. (You know the sound of the Clavinet even if you don’t know you know it–it’s what Stevie Wonder uses to play the iconic riff in “Superstition.”)
My friend and I accidentally stumbled through St. Anthony’s Feast in Boston’s North End.
Here’s a short essay on when, why, and how I set up the Terry Felus Trio Tribute page on Bandcamp.
I’ve tried to remember to share the link to the Terry Felus Trio’s New Year’s Eve 1982 gig on social media most Decembers since I originally uploaded the audio in the mid 2010s.
The Terry Felus Trio playing Sarti’s:
The musical clip is the Terry Felus Trio playing “Put a Little Love in Your Heart” at Mama Puntillo’s on March 27, 1976.
Some photos that give a pretty good glimpse of the band’s gear and overall stage set-up:
The musical clip is the Terry Felus Trio playing “Can’t Help Falling in Love” at the Sherwood Club on either May 11 or 12, 1976.
The subsequent musical clip is the Terry Felus Trio playing “Abracadabra” at that same Sherwood Club gig on either May 11 or 12, 1976.
I wrote a little bit about one of the times that my dad’s name was recognized by someone in downtown Chicago in this essay that appeared in my zine Satan Is My Father. You can read my essay on Dropbox here.
If anyone has any information about the steel-mill documentary I Can’t Quit (perhaps under a different title?), please let me know! I couldn’t find anything more about it online in the course of my googling.
Queen of Peaches 