Driving down Mountain Road recently, I stopped at the stop sign at Second Street and looked up and to the right and the memories started flowing.
I found myself staring at the second floor covered porch of the building that once housed the Mountain Inn, a local watering hole in my neighborhood.
This was once the home of my pal George Miklosi, who also was quite a drummer. George had a champagne sparkle set of Slingerland drums and he could really play and keep any beat.
Back in the mid-60s, kids like George and I wanted to play in a rock and roll band, so we went out and took lessons and we practiced until we could kind of play decently. Our dream was to be a cover band that would play at local dances,
Well, George and I got together with Gary Pringle, a tall kid who could sing and play guitar, and George’s cousin Steve Miklosi, who played the bass guitar. We added Jack Edwards, a heckuva keyboard player, and we formed our band — the UNCLE Agents.
Wait. What?
Back in the 60s there was a very popular TV show called “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” — a television series that was broadcast on NBC from Sept. 22, 1964, to Jan. 15, 1968. It followed the exploits of two secret agents, played by Robert Vaughn and David McCallum, who worked for a fictitious secret international espionage and law-enforcement agency called U.N.C.L.E. — an acronym for the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement.
Anyway, we decided to try to capitalize on the show’s popularity, hence we became the UNCLE Agents.
Yeah, I know.
Well, I convinced my parents to buy me a new electric guitar — a Caribbean blue Goya Rangemaster. It was a beauty. It had six buttons on it that adjusted the sound that would emit from my Premier amplifier. It was way cool, man.
And so were the UNCLE Agents. We did manage to get some gigs, and we weren’t ever asked to leave early. Kids actually did dance to our music. It was always fun, even though we would never get too far or too popular.
The best fun was practicing on that open/covered porch above the Mountain Inn bar. We would plug-in and play on, man, day after day. Neighborhood kids would gather below and sit on their bicycles as we labored to learn the songs of the day.
There were other bands in Plymouth back then, and they were much better than the UNCLE Agents. Bobby Walters, Joe Yurko, Joe Kubicki, Paul Zbick and Tommy Oliver — if I recall correctly — had a band called The Mob. They were really good. And Tony Piazza and his pals had a band that was also excellent, I think they were called Thee Restless Breed.
When The Beatles arrived on the scene, kids like us just wanted to emulate them. We took lessons, we learned what we could, we chose our instruments carefully and we formed these less-than-iconic bands. And we had fun reverberating though our neighborhood.
My pal Wayne Bevan sang with a lot of groups, one was Museum — they even recorded an album or two.
But on that porch was where we had our most fun. We were just a bunch of kids trying to find our way in the world, and we dreamed. We knew most of our dreams would never reach the level of John Paul, George and Ringo, but we were determined to try. We just wanted to experience a little bit of what to would be like to be a rock and roll star.
Even if it the dream ended at a CYC dance, or a Wilkes or King’s dance.
Or on that porch above the Mountain Inn in the old neighborhood.