And Another One Gone

Published by Rick on Tagged Uncategorized

On Friday I was looking through the San Francisco Chronicle website, looking to see if maybe the Warriors had won a game, or maybe Trump said or did something irrational or dumb. On looking for those stories, I stumbled across the story about the death of Cas Banaszek, who played the position of tackle for the SF 49ers football team from 1968-77. Then it occurred to me that, though I’d only met him a couple of times, had he not been part of a business partnership that started an SF night club called Tarr & Feathers Saloon, which opened in May of 1971, my career could have turned out vastly different, and most likely the goals we were hoping for would have been more difficult.

Tarr & Feathers was named after a minority owner of the club, Wayne Tarr, who knew nothing about the business end, but because he was a self-appointed yell leader for the 49ers with an amazing gift of gab and a ton of friends, he was able to talk people into coming in, and the club wound up staying in business for a good 20 years. Wayne was also a big fan of the act that I and my partner had been a part of, a band that I had formed with a couple other friends from college. That band was about to break up, and I had decided to move into San Francisco to be close to Ruby.

We weren’t sure what we wanted to do, but we heard that Wayne had opened the club, and decided to wander in one weekday afternoon in early June, 1971, to see if maybe they had an idea about entertainment yet. Wayne was there, and happy to see us, and no, they hadn’t really thought about live entertainment. When we ran an idea by him about maybe doing a similar act to the previous band, he was all for it. He hired us on the spot, suggesting maybe we come in the following Saturday and sing for a few hours. He also volunteered to pay us $25 for our time, even though it was technically an audition. A paid audition was more than we could have hoped for. When we left the pub, we said, “Well, I guess now we better come up with an act!”

That was easier than we expected, just having to agree on what songs we’d like to sing. The band that was breaking up had gotten by on doing mostly 1950’s music, well before the full nostalgia for the decade that culminated with the success of American Graffiti, Happy Days, and Grease. We kept that idea in our own act with a few variations, and passed our audition, pulling it off with my Fender Vibrolux amplifier accommodating my guitar and two microphones. We were promised two nights a week indefinitely, with each of us clearing $50 per week. In 1971, you could live on that, believe it or not. It helped that we found other venues, in and around the City, to fill other nights.

Wayne would be there almost every night we worked there, and Cas along with his teammate and partner, the late Len Rohde, would come in if the team wasn’t on the road. They could never wander in unnoticed for two reasons: 1) The 49ers were, for the first time in their 25 year history, a winning team, and these two guys were part of the reason for that, and 2) They were both huge, around 6 foot 5, and weighing about 270 pounds (or nearly 20 stone for you English readers), thus conspicuous, to say the least.

The two men’s size also helped when, toward the end of that first summer, union pickets were set up in front of the club to try to intimidate the club into going union. They especially concentrated on me, for the SF musicians’ union, basically a thug operation and having relatively little to do with music, thought that by making me join their union, they could then force Tarr & Feathers to go union as well, and perhaps persuade the rest of the clubs around the area to follow suit. (Did I mention the club was on Union Street? Irony.) We could see the pickets through the large window that faced out onto the street while we were performing, and on occasion, one of them might make a threatening gesture to me. They couldn’t bother Ruby because she didn’t play an instrument. Cas and Len heard about the harassment, and decided to not only come by the club, but to escort us back to our car when we were done, and dare those thugs to try anything. The pickets subsequently found another club to bother.

We worked at the San Francisco venue for nearly a year, developing a certain amount of confidence, and Tarr & Feathers expanded to a second venue in Palo Alto and then a third one in Walnut Creek, about 30 miles east of San Francisco. We played them all at various times over the next few years, but except for Cas’s brother Ken managing the venue in Palo Alto, there wasn’t much of a connection to the 49ers. A shame too, that during that whole first autumn of working as a duo, we could have gone to any 49ers home game for free as guests of Len or Cas, but we really weren’t into football. We even played a drunken party for them one Sunday night after they had just gotten creamed by a not very good team. We got to meet every player that night, though many were the worse for wear. The Niners won their division that year, the last time they would do that for 10 years.

Cas died on Thursday at age 74, Len Rohde died in 2017, and Wayne Tarr in 2015. And here I am, living to tell the tale.

 

December 7th, 2019



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