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  A Cool  ALL Their Own -The Genesis of Luteface  

by James  Rannadair- special to the St. Kilda Clarion  (May 17th 1997)

 
   The mid 1970's.Oh! Those were exciting and crazy times. The altruism of the late 60's had fallen away in a blur of drug abuse and cynicism and along with the loss of forward motion in the youth movement came a screeching halt in the heady period of musical experimentation.
   Into this vacuum, spilled the musical genius that was Luteface. Calypso Shenanighan, Benny McSporran and Oort and Venlo  Lanarski - all boyhood friends, created a brand new sound that was exciting and crazy and in the mid to late 1970's barnstormed their way through coffee houses and summer fairs all across Canada.
   " Cool" is a descriptor that is difficult to define but this is for certain: Luteface was cool! One of the things that Calypso really liked about playing in Luteface was that he did not have to change his hairstyle or buy clothes that were in style. Luteface was just cool and the members were cool in a way that un cool got so un cool that it went right through being un cool to the other side- COOL.
   When he was young teenager, Calypso did not like listening to what other people listened to - the music that the radio said was COOL. He leaned more towards odd early heavy country rock , like BraveBelt and BTO. Hey those Bachman guys were BIG guys - not afraid to be who they were….BIG and LOUD and people liked them- except the "In crowd". They were not pretty enough. And their no-drugs -no women stance on tour made them seem every un cool…but that made them cool.
   So… Calypso , Benny, Oort and Venlo decided that early BTO would be their model of coolness. The boys pooled their money and sent Calypso to see the new concert movie - the Last Waltz for ideas. And he found it- on one of the songs played by the Band at the end of the film. Robbie Roberston was playing an odd thing that was half guitar and half harp - that was it! The central sound for Luteface- well that and Calypso’s own Lute , handed down to him by his great uncle Frank. 
  The four Lute faces (as they secretly referred to themselves) used to sit for hours in the basement of Calypso’s parents house on Spitzwarren Avenue in Rextown - a suburb of the great megapolis to the south. There they would eat bag after bag of Cheesies and listen to BTO I and look at the photos of the band- trying to puzzle out that “look”. Calypso was especially interested in the way Fred Turner’s jeans had worn-out in a funny way. It looked like he carried his wallet in a front pocket and constant rubbing on It (of his bass guitar?) made for a rectangular area of pale denim on his thigh.
   So, with a little bleach and a tooth brush, Calypso set about simulating the worn outline on his own jeans and all was fine until that day when they played (for no fee) at the Flesheville Cow Palace and that bleached patch fell right off his jeans. He was embarrassed but only until some girls in the audience noticed and giggled and waved at him. After that the Lanarski twins followed suite and skipped the whole bleach and toothbrush route and just went after their jeans with a blunt knife. Several years later the gang happened to notice Eddie Van Halen sporting torn jeans while on tour….funny how the least likely people act as fashion leaders.
   Benny though, was not interested in torn jeans. He was fascinated with Robbie Bachman’s combination of worn out T-shirt emblazoned with a Garnet Speakers Logo and wire-rim glasses. The Lute Faces were using small amps purchased at the local Savette's store, so Benny went at his white T-shirt with a black marker and wrote SAVETTE's amps and speakers on it.
   Thus attired in t-shirts, torn jeans, wire rim glasses and un-kempt hair ( which their parents’ only allowed then to have for the day of the concert - washing required right afterwards) they took on their first paid gig at the local High School in Rextown  Ontario.
   Luteface hit the stage at 7pm on that fateful night of June 15th 1975. Benny actually “hit the stage” as the wire rim glasses he had acquired at the Sally Anne were prescription and given that his eyesight was perfect and the fact that the glasses were made for a very myopic person, Benny tripped over a lead and tumbled into his set of congas and bongos.
   The crowd roared in laughter and a few ‘ hip” kids in the “ in-set” sniggered and shouted,  “dorks!”. But, when the first note zoomed out of the P.A. - a note so clear and unusual in sound - a note produced by running a lute through a phase inverter, the crowd settled down. After a two bar lead in that sounded suspiciously like the intro into BTO’s “ Don’t Get Yourself In Trouble”, Benny’s demon drumming kicked in and the two guitar-harps of the twins wove their way into the mix.
  The crowd started to groove. They started to move. They danced and shouted to the hypnotic trance-inducing sound. Even the teachers playing chaperone stationed around the edges of the Gymnasium started to jive.
  And…THAT was how it started. Cool and exciting had been re-defined in one shining moment.
                                                                                                                     

                                                                                                                             James Rannadair