What It's Like To Start A Rock and Roll Band With Your Best Friends

After playing for a year or so with R&B great, Alexander O'Neal and the Black Market Band, and another year and a half in Minneapolis’s own reggae and calypso band, Shangoya, I started another band called Sussman Lawrence with my high school friends —two of whom, included Andy Kamman my old band mate from sixth grade and my cousin, Jeff Victor on keyboards. We each seemed to know the old adage: Every fire starts with a spark.

There’s no need to remind me, I’m quite aware that Sussman Lawrence was, and still is the single worst rock band name in the world, especially since no one in the band was named Sussman or Lawrence. The name started as my idea of a joke, and on principle, I refused to change it. I was convinced that having a band name which sounded like someone’s dad’s accounting firm subverted the New Wave rock tropes of the day. As the band’s unofficial fascistic leader I didn’t even budge when a slew of great alternative names came rolling in:

Jaguar Beach

Let's Run

The Groove

The Spanking Violettras

And this classic, that we actually paid the late Bruce Allen of the highly–inventive Minneapolis band, The Suburbs, to come up with:

The Golfing Clowns

I couldn’t have moved further from my love of R&B and reggae than when I first started playing with the guys in Sussman Lawrence. They were great musicians, and because they had such great chops and could actually play difficult styles note for note, some of the guys were influenced by bands like Kansas, Boston, and Styx—bands so "white" they could burn out your corneas. On the other hand, the five of us getting together was nothing less than a miracle.

I’d played off and on with Andy Kamman since we were eleven and twelve years old. And because he was fearless enough and dedicated enough to the craft of drumming, he wasn’t afraid to try things that he couldn’t immediately master. That meant that as he was constantly learning and progressing upwards into ever more complex rhythmic styles, he would need to cope with the pain of sounding bad, even as he become better. Most people can’t do that. They learn something, they gain a little proficiency, they reap the rewards (whatever they may be) of that first level of proficiency, and they stay at that same level. People who want to progress aren’t afraid to feel the ignominious sensations they had as a beginner. Andy was that person. He was fearless and kept on getting stronger. By the time he was in 11th grade, he was one of the best drummers in Minneapolis. The fact that he lived down the block from me made it all the better. It was the same thing with Jeff Victor.

Jeff first heard me playing some old upright piano during a Saturday School class at my synagogue; we were around thirteen or fourteen years old at this point. I was working on some simple blues progressions, and he caught the music bug then and there, or so he told me. Up until that time, he had accomplished what most people who take boring piano lessons do: Absolutely nothing. But only a year later, he was playing Greg Allman songs and Bonnie Raitt. Not long after that, he was playing jazz standards and was able to improvise in any key, as well as the prog rock stuff I just mentioned. Like Andy, he kept developing on his instrument and his vocals too. It wasn’t lost on me how fortunate I was that Jeff is my cousin. We also became best friends around that time and began a shared passion that continues to this day.

Sussman Lawrence’s bass player Al Wolovitch, wanted desperately to play with Jeff and me. I think it was in the spring of eleventh grade, just before summer vacation when Jeff and I were practicing in one of the little soundproof booths in the band room. Al would come around, looking to jam with us. I didn’t mean to be a dick; I just didn’t feel like Al was cutting it. He couldn’t jam, didn’t seem to know what key we were playing in, and overall, he had no sense of groove. To this day I have never witnessed someone take on a new skill as quickly and as profoundly as Al did that summer. It wasn’t that he’d “improved” so much as he became, in less than three months, an astonishingly good, fully professional sounding bass player. Al was playing Jaco Pastorious solos note for note. He was tearing into Stanley Clarke songs, and breaking out the funkiest Brothers Johnson grooves imaginable. I couldn’t believe what had happened to him. He told me he’d just sat around for a whole summer, woodshedding on recordings by those players. Al also said something that sticks with me even now, “I just learned how to listen.” Yeah, it was deep listening for sure. That and his getting laid for the first time, was likely what turned him from, a skinny suburban Jewish kid, into a skinny suburban Jewish mother*cker on the bass. The other member of Sussman Lawrence was Eric Moen.

Eric played sax like Clarence Clemmons, and he played classical guitar like a young Segovia. To top it off, he looked like an even more handsome version of David Bowie. But like Al, Eric also wanted to play in a band with Jeff and me. Like Al, Eric was at first, another recipient of my egotistical, incurious assholic behavior. I hadn’t even heard Eric play a single note when I told Jeff, "that guy can be in the band if he can supply us with a PA system.”

When I finally did get a chance to hear Eric, I immediately dumped the PA idea. He was already a fully formed, highly creative musician and stage performer. I mentioned earlier that Sussman Lawrence was something of a miracle and I meant it. How else could you explain finding some of Minneapolis’s best musicians in your own high school? And except for Andy, who was a grade below the other four of us; how can explain the fact that we all happened to be in your same grade? To make the idea of our getting together feel even more miraculous, we were all best friends throughout our years as band mates, and we remain best friends —even today.

We were seventeen and eighteen years old when Sussman Lawrence recorded its first full-length album, Hail To The Modern Hero. The cover art was a perfect copy of an early Dick and Jane Reader, except that in the picture Dick was holding a transistor radio up to his ear and Jane was carrying a vinyl LP.

This was 1978 and in those days making an actual record was a rarity. It’s not like it today, where every musician from Dallas to Dar es Salaam can have, not one, but countless recordings of their music. Back then making a record required a musician to go into a studio with at least $250,000 of recording gear. That meant you needed a rich uncle to finance the thing. We did something a little different.

Around the time Sussman Lawrence was first forming, I found out that I had enough credits to graduate from high school early, in January, right after Christmas break. Don’t get me wrong; no one was rewarding me for having some stellar GPA. It was just the opposite. My grades were so abysmal they embarrass me, even now. I’d say throughout both my junior and senior high GPAs were on average a D. In a Fed Ex package my mom recently sent me, which included all sorts of letters and memorabilia, I had a chance to see and grasp an actual report card of mine from tenth grade.

Math: D-

Social Studies: D-

Music theory: D-

English: C-

Gym: B

I was able to graduate early only because some wise soul in the counseling department of Saint Louis Park High must have realized that I would achieve more outside school, than inside. Around the time of my Pickwick debacle (the job my dad made me get, lest I find myself back in school) I got a call from a guy named Buddy Cohen, a former Park High grad who was producing a new television show for teens. It was a bi-monthly public service show on a local station called, Steamroller. Buddy had seen the work I’d done on the Peter Himmelman Special and thought I’d be good at writing and starring in their proposed comedy segments. I still remember Buddy telling me that if I wanted a career in show business, I’d need a very hard exterior. Criticism, he told me then, was a fundamental part of the package. I would find out a million times over just how fundamental.

Though I wound up appearing in the show and writing several segments, I didn’t go by my real name, I went by the name Sussman Lawrence. The origins of what would later become one of the worst band names in rock and roll history were nothing earth shattering. My girlfriend Janet’s sister, Pam, had once asked me, “Who’s that friend of yours with the really weird first name... Sazan, or Suzman?” Since I’d always called my friend Alan Sussman by his last name, Pam figured ‘Sussman’ was his first name. I said it once out loud to myself just to hear it, and in a flash, I added the last name Lawrence. Sussman Lawrence. It sounded odd and sort of funny to me, like some dapper English douchebag.

The comedy stuff I wrote for the show was strange at best. I saw a couple of the segments on an old VHS tape a few years ago. One was called The Sussman Lawrence Coolness Techniques Kit. It featured several cool ways to smoke a cigarette, cool hair flinging methods, and cool speaking techniques. The ‘proof of success’ was that I was being stroked and kissed throughout the segment by several girls, including my girlfriend Janet.

Another segment featured me, playing an overwhelmed and overwrought Louis Buscaglia, a popular, real-life motivational speaker. It was called, Ode To Another Egg. In the segment I play Buscaglia, who was speaking about emotional resilience as he was being pelted with eggs. His positive outlook however, faded after the fifth or sixth egg was thrown. And at the end of the scene the character breaks down in tears —showing that all the motivational advice in the world doesn’t help for shit when one is engulfed by actual negativity.

Buddy also wanted me to include my burgeoning musical ideas on the show and so I first brought in the Trinidadian band, Shangoya. We played my original, “Get A Grip,” along with another Shangoya original called, “Mocojumbee,” about a restive, highly sexualized jungle spirit. (Is there any other kind?) While I was playing with Shangoya I was also working —on the sly—with my new band, Sussman Lawrence and the Ears. Because I needed to record a song for the end of my Louis Buscaglia segment, Steamroller foot the bill for the nascent Sussman Lawrence band to go into a Saint Paul recording studio called Tracks on Fifth, run by two excellent local musicians, Mike McKern and Chris Hinding. I can’t remember what they were paid to record a version of my newest song, “Ode To Another Egg,” but I’m sure we got a deal because I let Mike and Chris know that their studio would be featured in the credit roll of the Steamroller episode. And in fact, the very last card read:

Ode To Another Egg” performed by Sussman Lawrence & the Ears and recorded at Tracks On Fifth Studios in Lower Town, Saint Paul.

At the time, the five of us wanted nothing more than to make an album with the new songs we were churning out. I also knew that Mike McKern, a very cool guy who aside from acting as a kind of wise guide and mentor to me, was interested in our band. One could fairly say that if it weren’t for Mike’s input, Sussman Lawrence would never have gotten off the ground. In 1979, everyone in Minneapolis was looking for the next big thing. And there we were: young, talented, decent looking, and motivated. I was beyond motivated. I wanted to make it in the music business just like every other wanna-be star does, but I also had another reason; I wanted to achieve some degree of success before my dad died of stage IV lymphoma. I guess I wanted him to see that I was on my way to making something of myself—whatever “something” might of meant. And so, I hatched a plan.

The morning after the Steamroller episode aired, I asked my dad to call Tracks On Fifth and pretend to be a record executive. Even though he was sick and fatigued from his treatments, he was, as usual, game for this sort of thing. In fact, his willingness to take insane and theatrical risks is part of my DNA. I was on the other line listening, and repressing a laugh as he began his schpiel with Mike:

“Good morning sir. My name is Gary Rassmusen and I work with an outfit out of Chicago (my dad knew absolutely nothing about rock and roll) called Republic Records, we work with ah, Sinatra... and ah...some others, (those were the pre-Internet days when bald-faced lies were so much harder to uncover). I called to find about the rock and roll outfit that was featured last night on a show... I can’t remember what it was called, and to tell you the truth I didn’t catch the name of the band either, but they were fresh, they were different, and their music was catchy, very catchy. We’d like to track them down and make a record with them. Any idea how we can get in touch with these kids?”

As it turned out, Mike called me that same afternoon. He had an idea he wanted to share with the band and wondered if we could come to Saint Paul for a lunch meeting the next day. At the meeting Mike told us he had an exciting surprise. “We’re gonna be making a 45-inch single within the next month!” Well, I had a surprise too. “Mike that’s great news, but unfortunately, I just heard from a guy named, Gary Rassmusen from, Republic Records... I think it was. Anyway, from the sound of it he really wants to record a full album with Sussman. Of course we’d love to do the record with you guys...”

I have no idea of knowing for sure if my dad’s record company exec shtick fooled Mike (most likely it had not) but either way, in less than a month, Sussman Lawrence (we dropped the Ears) started recording its full-length debut record, Hail To the Modern Hero. The record was released in the summer of 1979 and soon our band was getting all kinds of bookings around Minneapolis. Our first gig took place at a new club near the University of Minnesota campus called Duffy’s. We sold out the first two nights and established ourselves on the Minneapolis scene in one felled swoop. But like anyone who’s doing anything they believe in, we had our detractors.

“They’re a bunch of rich spoiled Jews,”

“They sound too much like Elvis Costello,”

They’re not real rock and roll.”

“They filled up Duffy’s with their friends and family.”

Well, at least on that last point, the naysayers were one hundred percent correct. Along with some hard-core Shangoya fans, agents, and local critics, our friends and family did come out in force to support us. We practically had our entire high school in that club, but so what? We were skilled musicians, we were ascendant, and on some level, everyone who heard us knew it. If you’ve got friends and family willing to come and fill the house at your debut gig, bring ‘em the f&*k on. Like I said, every fire starts with a spark.

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My newest book, Suspended By No String: A Songwriter's Reflections On Faith, Aliveness, And Wonder is out and available now on Regalo Press https://tinyurl.com/2ktddb86