BERMUDA TRIANGLE BAND, ROGER and WENDY, ROGER PENNEY, EUPHORIA-bio
It started in New York City with the guy across the hall, who
was missing 2 fingers,, saying he earned money playing flamenco
guitar in a Greenwich Village coffeehouse. Roger and Wendy exchanged
glances. Could it be that easy to get paid for making music? They put
together some songs with 2 vocals and Roger's autoharp, and headed from
their 5th floor walk-up slum tenement, where the holes through the ancient
brick wall were big enough for snow to blow in, across town to the BASEMENT
coffeehouse on Macdougal St. in the village to audition. Hired after one song,
they played their first sets that night and every night thereafter 'til 4 A.M.,
7 nights a week, 365 days a year.
The coffeehouses were then called basket houses since the only pay
was what was collected in a straw basket passed around at the end of
each 20 minute set. Steve Stills (Crosby,Stills & Nash),saying "I love you guys music",
dropped $20 in, which more than half covered their $35 /month rent.
Midway through that first year Wendy bought a bass guitar, a Hofner clone.
"Then for the next two weeks I carried that bass, in a huge cardboard box, way across town
every single night until I got up enough nerve to play it on stage."
They often played 2 different coffeehouses, or even 3, in one night,
running up and down Macdougal St. To make the next set on time. Twelve
20 minute sets at 3 clubs in one night was the record. The Freudian Slip.
Four Winds, the Basement, Fat Black Pussycat, Rienzi"s, Cafe Wha?,
The Underground, Folk City, Bitter End, Kenny's Castaways, Speakeasy.
Too many to remember.
Greenwich Village was booming. Every night Macdougal and Bleecker Sts.
were so jammed with people shoulder to shoulder that no cars could get through.
Live music pumped from every third doorway. Friends hung out on stoops,
fire escapes, leaned out windows. The air was thick. The pavement vibrated.
Yet it really started when Roger was 5 and sang "Don't Fence Me In"
in a radio contest where he won first prize, followed by 8 years of piano lessons.
Several preteen summers were spent in his cousins' Anchor Cafe, a gritty
honkytonk at a port on Lake Erie filled with stevedores and merchant mariners.
In the late hours of the night he would fall asleep on the bench seats as the
seamen danced with the local women to the songs of Hank Williams and
Hank Snow on the jukebox. While at an engineering college he bought his first
autoharp from the Sears-Roebuck catalog and began experimenting with
various electric pickups. After graduating with honors, he moved into a folk music
communal house in Cambridge, Massachusetts aptly named Old Joe Clark's
for the folk/dance tune, took post graduate courses at Harvard and did
theoretical research for NASA. But the love of music insistently pulled him away from
a scientific life. He once again immersed himself in traditional music at
picking roundtables at the Silver Vanity folk club in Amherst, Massachusetts.
On the other hand, there was Wendy with one year
of comic/tragic piano lessons and 1 single cello lesson.Her passions were
singing and painting. Granted lifetime membership in the famous Art Students League
in NYC, she was awarded 1st prize for one of her paintings in a
prestigious juried exhibition (see PHOTO section.).
R&W were drawn to each other in Cambridge, Massachusetts, hitchhiked
and tented in North Africa and Europe for 5 months, then studied mime
and acting. During a Theatre Company of Boston performance of Shakespeare
Roger managed to chip a tooth and stab a fellow actor while fencing.
Since every actor seems to end up in NY or LA, they moved to NYC
where Roger was a member of The Harlem Theatre Company and
did 4 Off-Broadway plays, one of them with James Earl Jones.
It was then that they encountered the 3-fingered flamenco player mentioned
above, and they committed full-time to music.
R&W moved from coffeehouses to clubs after a year and a half, and
eventually played every single club in Greenwich Village, perhaps 40 or more.
In 1969 R&W joined with Sharon Alexander and Tom Pacheco to form the
sunshine pop group EUPHORIA and released an album on the MGM/HERITAGE
label titled "EUPHORIA". The single "You Must Forget" was a top hit on the charts in Europe.
Wendy bought her 2nd bass guitar, a 1969 Hofner Special Limited Collectors' Edition,
natural blonde with active electronics, ( a rarity in 1969). "Our record company
volunteered to pay for it, so I chose the most expensive bass in New York City,
naturally." EUPHORIA played a concert with Van Morrison
at the Felt Forum (Madison Square Garden), a few college dates, opened for
Iron Butterfly, Sly and the Family Stone, and were booked on the Johnny Carson
Show but disbanded before appearing.
In the late 60's and 70's Roger and Wendy broke new ground in what has come
to be called the Psych Folk genre. They were one of the very few American
trailblazers to play in this style as it was mainly a British movement.
Characterized as having strong roots in folk music, it has electric and often
unconventional arrangements. The lyrics are complex and symbolic, the
instrumentation very unusual."Roger Penney is the highly respected pioneer of
electric autoharp."(FOLKFORUM) He is also the inventor of much of the technology
required. He now uses multiple effects to achieve the multidimensional
quality.The passages that listeners mistake sometimes for electric guitar are
actually autoharp. In addition, women bass players were a rarity in the 60's.
Consequently, their group was far out there beyond the leading edge.
Roger had also redesigned the autoharp's chord structure to facilitate switching
between keys and donated the new layout to Oscar Schmidt. Now all major
autoharp manufacturers worldwide make autoharps using his design.
In 1970 the College Concert Circuit courted the band and arranged many very
successful tours. ROGER AND WENDY quickly became the top act and released
a folk album "Roger and Wendy" in 1971. Changing the band's name in 1975
to BERMUDA TRIANGLE,they gave more than 3000 concerts. For part of that
time they incorporated a second woman, Sam, as fiddler/drummer. Several
of the many artists they shared the stage with are Billy Joel, Emmylou Harris,
Michelle Shocked, Harry Chapin and Suzanne Vega.
The psych folk album "Bermuda Triangle" was released in 1977. "We chose
Master Sound Recording Studio in Franklin Square, Long Island,New York
because we liked working with the engineer Ben Rizzi. During the mixdown,
at times there were 8 hands on the board running the sliders and buttons. The
vinyl disc was pressed at Sterling Sound in Paramus, New Jersey. Our 1984 album
Bermudas II was also recorded at Master Sound. "
In 2006 their musical career surged upward with the unexpected reissue of their
1977 album by a British record company and its being played by radio stations
all over the world.
In 2007 Roger and Wendy officially reissued the '77 album "Bermuda Triangle"
as a CD with 6 additional bonus songs. The bonus cuts date from 1969 to 1976
and were taped at Rensselaer Polytechnical Institute, Folk City(New York City),
Woodstock New York, and Bell Sound(NYC) and most had never before
been released.
The band also released in 2007 "The Missing Tapes" CD, a compilation of
some of their psych folk tracks from the 60's and 70's. Five of these cuts are reissues.
The other 8 were part of the group's live performances but were never released
on disc. A number of the songs had been completely lost with no known existing
copies until they were unearthed in a longtime friend Hal Weiss' collection
in New York and in the archives of the radio station at R.P.I.
album came out in 2008. It has a 4 page insert with bio, photos,and lyrics,
all on high quality art paper with a pvc protective outer sleeve. It includes one
extra unreleased track from 1974.
A beautiful collectors' edition Vinyl of the "Missing Tapes" cd has just been
reissued by Anazitisi Records. It includes a full size 12 page booklet with stories
from the road and reproductions of 8 of Wendy's paintings.
2009 also saw the vinyl reissue by Acme Records (UK) of ROGER AND WENDY's 1971 LP "Love Rog And Wem"
A copy of their very first 1971 album entitled "ROGER AND WENDY" sold recently
on the internet for $900.
DISCOGRAPHY
EUPHORIA
"Euphoria" (1969 ) MGM/Heritage Records, vinyl LP
"You Must Forget", (1971) MGM/Heritage Records ,single on 8track tape
"Calm Down/What A Day" (1973?) Polydor Records, single
"Euphoria" (2007) Heritage/Beatball Records, reissue of 1969 LP
ROGER AND WENDY
"Roger and Wendy" (1971) Horny Records
"Love Rog And Wem" (2009) 12inch vinyl reissue by Acme Records (UK) of the 1971 album
BERMUDA TRIANGLE
"Bermuda Triangle" (1977) Winter Solstice Records
"Bermudas II" (1984) Winter Solstice Records
"Bermuda Triangle" (2006) unofficial reissue by Radioactive UK Records of 1977 LP
"Bermuda Triangle" (2007) official reissue on Winter Solstice Records of 1977 LP
"The Missing Tapes" (2007) Winter Solstice Records
"Bermuda Triangle" (2008) Anazitisi Records, 12 inch vinyl Collectors' Edition reissue of 1977 LP
"The Missing Tapes" (2009) Anazitisi Records
For further information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bermuda_Triangle_Band
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penney
http://www.myspace.com/BermudaTriangleBand