It started in 1966 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 ëtil 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. Emmylou Harris played with them. David Bromberg sometimes sat in the front row picking his guitar along to their singing. Paul Siebel taught Wendy one of his songs in the 4x5 foot bathroom of the Four Winds.

Midway through that first year Wendy bought her first bass guitar, a Hofner clone. Practicing at home for the first month with no amplifier, she developed an unusual style. "Then for the next two weeks I carried that bass, in a huge cardboard box, way across town every single night before 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, Gerde's Folk City (where we set a record in 1970 of 31 weeks as headline act), Bitter End, Kenny's Castaways, Speakeasy, The Gaslight. 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. "Since we all lived in dark hovels, we didn't go over to each otherís apartments. Instead we met on the street. We knew if we went to the Village that our friends would be there. In summer weíd all sit outdoors on steps leading to strangers front doors and comment on the carnival of people crowding the street. In winter weíd gather in one of the coffeehouses and talk music. It was glorious."

Yet it really started when Roger was 5 and sang "Donít Fence Me In" on a radio show, followed by 8 years of piano lessons. Several preteen summers were spent in his cousinsí 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 Clarkís for the folk/dance tune, took postgraduate courses at Harvard and did theoretical research for NASA. But 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 "at which I learned to hold the cello between my knees but didnít get to play a single note. My passions instead were singing and painting." Granted lifetime membership by the famous Art Students League in NYC, she was awarded 1st prize for one of her paintings in a prestigious juried exhibition. "I went to three colleges and ended up relocating from the New York City area to Boston. Roger and I were both taking philosophy classes at Harvard but didn't meet until I moved in to Old Joe Clark's, where he was living. We were immediately drawn to each other, hitchhiked and tented in North Africa and Europe for 5 months then studied mime and acting. In a Theatre Company of Boston performance of Shakespeare Roger managed to chip his own tooth and stab a fellow actor during a scene with fencing sabres."

Since every actor seems to end up in NY or LA, they moved to New York City where Roger was a member of The Harlem Theatre Company and did 4 Off-Broadway plays. 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 Roger and Wendy 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" hit the charts in Europe.
Wendy bought her 2nd bass guitar, a 1969 Hofner Special Limited Collectorsí Edition, 5000/1, 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 at Madison Square Garden's Felt Forum, a few college dates, and were booked on the Johnny Carson Show but disbanded before appearing.

In the late 60's and 70's Roger and Wendy broke ground in what has come to be called the Psych Folk genre. They were one of the very few American innovators 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 highly unusual.
Roger Penney is the first person and, as far as is known, the only person ever to have created and played electric psychedelic autoharp. 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 autoharpís chord structure to facilitate switching between keys and donated the new layout to Oscar Schmidt. Now all major autoharp manufacturers worldwide have switched to making 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 bandís 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, Van Morrison, Michelle Shocked, Emmylou Harris, Suzanne Vega, and Harry Chapin.

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 very much liked the engineer, Ben Rizzi. During the mix down, 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 ll' was also recorded at Master Sound."e;

In 2006 their musical career surged upward with the unexpected reissue of their 1977 album by a British record company and its being played on 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 songs date from 1969 to 1976 and were taped at Rensselaer Polytechnical Institute, Gerde's Folk City(NYC), 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 70ís. Five of these cuts are reissues. The other eight 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's collection in New York and in the archives of the radio station at R.P.I.

A 12 inch vinyl reissue by Anazitisi Records of the 1977 "Bermuda Triangle" album came out in spring 2008 and vinyl of the 2007 "Missing Tapes" cd in 2009. The 1971 album "Love Rog And Wem", recorded when the group called itself ROGER AND WENDY, was reissued in the fall of 2009 as a 12 inch vinyl by Acme Records (UK).

DISCOGRAPHY

EUPHORIA
"Euphoria" (1969) MGM/Heritage Records, vinyl LP
"Euphoria" (2007) Heritage/Beatball Records, reissue of 1969 LP
"You Must Forget" (1971) MGM/Heritage Records, single on 8 track tape
"Calm Down/What A Day" (1973) Polydor Records, single

ROGER AND WENDY
"Roger and Wendy" (1971) vinyl, Horny Records
"Love Rog and Wem" (2009) vinyl, Acme Records (UK)
"Love Rog and Wem" (2010) CD, Lion Records

BERMUDA TRIANGLE
"Bermuda Triangle" (1977) Winter Solstice Records
"Bermudas ll" (1984) Winter Solstice Records
"Bermuda Triangle"(2006) unofficial reissue on Radioactive UK Records
"Bermuda Triangle"(2007)cd, official reissue on Winter Solstice Records
"The Missing Tapes" (2007) Winter Solstice Records, cd
"Bermuda Triangle"(2008), vinyl, Anazitisi Records
"The Missing Tapes"(2009) 12 inch vinyl, Anazitisi Records

http://www.myspace.com/bermudatriangleband
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bermuda_Triangle_Band
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penney