Archival Buffalo News feature articles 1980s

  Another almost-forgotten Fillmore Room frolic. March 5, 1980  Pearl Harbor Blasts Are Right on Target           Look. Out in the lobby. It’s … no, it can’t be. The woman has to be a punk-rock refugee from McVan’s. It’s the hair – short on tip, straggly in the back. But wait, what about those gorgeous cheekbones? Even under all that makeup, they could only belong to Pearl E. Gates.           Once she’s up there in front of the band Tuesday night for a couple hundred kids in the Fillmore Room of Squire Hall on the State University of Buffalo Main Street Campus, it all falls into place. This is Pearl Harbor and the Explosions. Their mission: Get you dancing.           Everything they launch is right on target. Short and punchy, their songs take flight on the bass and drums, soar on their harmonies and zero in with just the merest splash of rhyth...

  A show that also was a homecoming. As kids, the Roches used to come for summer visits with their relatives here. Feb. 2, 1980 review Roche Sisters Put Spark into Folk          One is a harlequin in red, yellow and blue. One is a scruff wearing a Buffalo Blizzard T-shirt. And one is a vamp in black with feathers in her hair.          They’re Maggie and Terre and Suzzy. Maggie and Terre and Suzzy Roche. Their name is spelled R-O-C-H-E. Along with Steve Forbert, they’ve been breathing fresh fire into the fallen form of folk music.          Antic harmonies are one of their strong suits. Another is funny lyrics. In one song, they sing about begging to get a job back in a restaurant.          “I’ll get down on my knees and scrub behind the steam tables,” they promise.        ...

  Nothing like a milestone to make us newsies look back at how far we’ve come. In the case of the ‘70s, those 10 years made quite a difference! Jan. 13, 1980 The Decade in Review          Virtually everything on the face of American culture since World War II came to a head and popped in the ‘70s. It was an era when popular music lost its innocence. The ‘70s were the decade in which the Beatles broke up and Elvis Presley died.          Presley’s death in 1977 was the most earth-shattering passage, but he wasn’t the only one to cross over to Rock ‘n Roll Heaven in the ‘70s. The obituary list reads like a Who’s Who: Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Duane Allman, Keith Moon, Ronnie Van Zant, Jim Croce, Donny Hathaway, Mama Cass Elliott, Sandy Denny, Phil Ochs, Lowell George, Ron “Pig Pen” McKernan of the Grateful Dead.          For the record indus...

  The Police, having sold out Harvey & Corky's Stage One in March 1979, begin the new decade with another full house in Buffalo, this time at UB. Jan. 21, 1980  Rock-reggae Fusion Gets Stinging Display          Even though it’s obviously a couple sizes too big for him, the gray jacket he wears Sunday night gives Sting (as Gordon Sumner calls himself) a certain mature hauteur as he leads the Police into a spirited charge through their first number, “All I Want Is to Get Next to You.”          It’s the same attitude Sting struck as Ace, the king of the Mods, in the Who’s movie, “Quadrophenia.” He’s a man of quality. One writer observed that when Sting sings reggae, it’s not wild, natty dreadlocks reggae. Instead, it’s neat, blow-dry reggae.          What’s more, not one hair is out of place. Sting’s mock-Jamaican falsetto and the rhythmic savvy of...