Bringing Down the House with the Escorts: A Chat with Nick Colleran

Discography:

Bring Down the House (TEO, 1966)

Nick Colleran was one of the first people I ended up getting in touch with when I set out to write the first book. His group, The Escorts had come up again and again when researching early Virginia rock and/or roll. As of 2010 he was one of the few surviving early members of a Virginia rock band that I could verify and easily get in touch with. He turned out to be a great interview and an even better person. When I started this blog, he was one of the people I needed to get in touch with. Fortunately for us, he was just as happy as ever to talk about his band and what Virginia music was like in the '60s.

Pete Crigler: How did you become interested in playing music?

Nick Colleran: I wasn’t going to be an athlete. I loved music and Rock and Roll. Everyone was attracted to “pop” stars and I couldn’t sing. Duane Eddy gave me hope as a guitar star in 1958. Girls were only interested in my math homework at the time.

Pete: Tell me about your early projects.

Nick: First record was “Shake a Tail Feather” recorded in Washington DC, where I learned about recording bass direct. I also learned not to make records “gig” length. In spite of that, it sold like a hit record in Richmond.

Next record, Turn on Your love Light” was recorded at Edgewood studios by Ed Greene. He created an acoustic chamber in the evening from vacant parts of his building. It sounded great on saxophone. WMBG Radio’s Don Dale put us at Number One on the station’s top tunes list as 1965 came to an end.

Third record, “(My) Only Love” was recorded while our live album was being manufactured. It was written for us by Mark Goldman, who would sometimes play keyboards for us, and published by Martin Gary’s New Bag Music. Marty’s family owned Gary’s at Willow Lawn. We recorded in Charlotte, NC at Arthur Smith’s where we first used an EMT plate reverb and recorded guitar from the speaker feed. This was picked by Billboard magazine to chart nationally.

Pete: How did The Escorts come together?

Nick: I formed the band with Bob Buhrman in 1961: drums, bass, rhythm guitar, lead guitar and vocalist. Of course, our running joke later on in television interviews was “if you are listening closely, we’ve never been together”. We’d show up at private parties with our instruments unloaded saying “the band’s here, where do you want us to set up? Well some called a band.” We actually got paid. I visited University of Richmond and managed to have us booked through the school year at Theta Chi fraternity. That’s where I met Brenda Matlock, Westhampton College student, singer and skilled pianist, who would join and sing all the popular “girl’s songs” of the day complete with period correct teased bouffant hairstyle. Two of the original guys left for greener pastures after being convinced we had no future. The band would evolve to drop the rhythm guitar and add a young Buzz Montsinger on tenor sax. This line up of drums, bass, guitar sax and singer would define us through 1968. Enlarging the band in 1969, trying to be something we weren’t known for, did not work commercially.

Pete: What was the Richmond scene like in the mid-to-late ‘60s?

Nick: It was more a desert, than a scene. Large venues included the Richmond Arena, Tantilla Gardens and The Mosque (now Altria) Ballroom. Clubs were The Satellite (across from DuPont on the now renamed Jeff Davis Highway along with Howard’s Steak House), The Sheik at Staples Mill and Broad, The Persian Room in town on Broad Street at Laurel, The Sahara (later the Kozy Kat) in Northside and Tilly’s dance hall in Henrico in what was then the far west end. Added to that were the various country clubs. One of our first gigs was at the Country Club of Virginia for Christmas 1961 when I was 16. 

Pete: What was TEO Records and how did the band come to sign up?

Nick: The Escorts Organization for records is analogous to Tau Epsilon Omega Fraternity (or Sorority) for promotion of our dances.

Pete: What was it like making Bring Down the House?

Nick: Intense. We hired the recording engineer, promoted on-air and in the Richmond Newspapers, hung posters, ran the concessions, and distributed tickets to retail stores. When we arrived there was a line extending to the rear of the building for tickets that were already sold out in advance. Afterward, we produced and printed the artwork and contracted with a large independent label pressing plant in Pennsylvania to manufacture the LPs. We set a sales record at Gary’s. Chuck Deel of WLEE played our album at 2 PM on the day of its release and the record store was calling my house in less than two hours for more product, having sold nine cartons (275 units) in less than two hours. Mr. Deel added to the album notes. He had 37% market share for his afternoon slot. Paul Randall’s evening show closed with our album tracks for weeks.

Pete: Did the band get to tour nationally?

Nick: No, we couldn’t risk leaving school for the draft. We declined a major label offer to relocate to Los Angeles for the same reason

Pete: What ended up bringing the band to a close?

Nick: Draft caught Ricky Goldman (briefly) and we could not regain momentum after we lost the time to promote our CBS (Columbia Records) release S.O.S. We had again recorded a full album of songs in that session in Charlotte. We followed James Brown in the studio where he recorded earlier in the month. Being there inspired Tommy Clarke, whose Kings of Soul horn section played in our record. We would overdub vocals and re-mix in Baltimore with George Massenburg after we were bumped out of our time slot at Arthur Smith Studios by a Kent Cigarette commercial. I finished the album as a CD fifty years later as The Escorts Scrap Book. It had nagged at me for five decades. It is currently available along with our live Bring Down the House, also on CD.

Pete: How did you end up moving into production?

Nick: It was a logical move. I could not see starting over with a band at age 24 and I had learned a lot about the business of music and studio recording techniques.

Pete: What was it like running Alpha?

Nick: Controlled chaos. We had four rooms running and worked with anything that required professional sound engineering from court evidence, radio spots and jingles, to hit records. In addition, we became the largest distributor of anechoic wedge foam, Sonex, selling between a third to forty percent of the factory output yearly throughout the USA and internationally. In the mid-eighties we formed Alpha Audio Automation which developed the Boss Automated Audio Editor. Our clients included Sony Pictures, LucasFilm’s Skywalker Ranch and many others who synched audio to picture. At one time, we furnished all three: audio, automation and acoustics to Skywalker.

Pete: Tell me about your involvement with Ujima, Short Cross and the George Clinton related projects among others?

Nick: What would become the Ujima rhythm section recorded in my living room when I had an Ampex recorder and Neumann microphones on loan from George Massenburg. Short Cross came to my attention through my soon to be brother-in-law Joe Sheets when Velpo Robertson was fifteen. I thought I had found the next Johnny B. Goode. I convinced his band Short Cross to record with me in Philadelphia when I met them at Tom Maeder’s booking office looking for work. The record helped establish them quickly. (I would play the slide guitar part when Joe Sheets got too sick to play the session.) George Clinton was touring in our area and brought into the studio by Joyce “Fenderella” Irby who would later have a platinum hit as lead vocalist for Klymaxx on “I Miss You”. (Joyce lived with me and my family while working at Alpha and recording her own material.) It helped that I, with my band used to play R&B hits including The Parliments “(I Wanna) Testify”. George became comfortable with me and the studio and brought in a horn section from Baltimore as well a flying in Bootsy Collins from the west coast for overdubs.

Pete: What became of the other members of The Escorts and when was the last time the band performed together?

Nick: Three of us played for the Freeman High School fifty-year anniversary in 2004: Jimmie Faber, Richard Eastman and me. Tom Hill did not get the memo in time and Richard Parrish could no longer play physically. Faber still lives in Richmond, Parrish is retired in Pennsylvania, Hill lives in California with his wife Patty and Eastman lives in Atlanta area. In music, Parrish and Eastman would be part of Natural Wildlife with Ricky Goldman until his untimely death.

Parrish would be a session player at Alpha and then part of Robbin Thompson’s Band along with Velpo Robertson and Buzz Montsinger. Tom Hill was part of the band Our House and, with me, produced their tracks for ABC Television’s Wide World of Entertainment that came close to yielding them a national label deal. Tom would move on to various corporate executive positions as did Parrish when he could no longer play. Jimmie Faber fronted a new version of the band that included drummer Mike Bateman, who filled for us while Richard Eastman was in the U.S. Army band. They played under The Escorts officially licensed Federal trademark rights acquired from me by booking agent Charlie Bradshaw.

Pete: What have you been up to?

Nick: For past twenty-two years I have been involved at Acoustics First Corporation making the world sound better and quieter. We hold a few acoustical patents.

Pete: What has it meant to you being a musician/producer from Virginia?

Nick: Interesting. I did get more recognition outside of Virginia. When I was conducting a music business seminar segment for SPARS at UCLA’s Graduate School of Business, I had to explain how Alpha came to write and record the title music track to a current Hollywood film. There is something to being 3000 miles away rather than local. The same was true when I flew to New York to get our band signed to CBS Records. (Being local does not help wherever you are!)

Pete: What do you hope your musical legacy will be?

Nick: That I gave some talented people an opportunity to do something they loved and make a living at it. And, I had some fun doing it all. It’s mostly good memories.

Interview conducted on  June 24, 2021, Fifty-five years after recording The Escorts® “Bring Down The House” Live