Cornerstone Productions - Early Thunderfoot #

I guess the other members of Cornerstone the band must have had a meeting or two at the end of the summer when Lonnie came back. Anyway, Lonnie calls me up and and asked me what I was doing? I told him I was working on some new music that I was planning to record but with professional players that I could pick out and I could pick them from Grant McEwan or Central. He wanted to be a part of that so he was my first guy for this band concept that I was thinking of calling Thunderfoot. I pulled all the horn guys from Central, two sax players, an alto and a tenor. Two trumpets and a trombone player that I had used on some of my live gigs before, Dan Shedden. Gordon Ferchoff was also one of the trumpet players who is a good friend of my brother.

Of course, I used Wes Yaciuk on guitar and I think it must have been Richard that brought in Randy Ritz on bass. I feel like I have known Randy forever but I cannot remember when or where that initial meeting was. It turns out that Randy, Wes and I had all gone to Grant MacEwan as guitar majors and all had the same guitar teacher, Tom Gilroy. But, Wes was the only one that came out of that program still a guitar player. I was pretty much only playing keyboards by this time. I qualified for a loan on my own to by my Fender Rhoads 88, and that means it was a full keyboard and heavy as all it could be. I guess I had gotten tired of schlepping that thing everywhere on the roof of my Gremlin.

I brought in Richard to be the engineer and it took a bit of convincing to get Ruben to agree. However, I do know that Ruben was impressed with what Richard could do because he called Richard in to do the odd recording engagement for him. I think the way that Ricard was able to capture the drums which was always an issue for Ruben and Richard being a drummer himself had a keen ear to get what he wanted to hear on tape. I think I had two rehearsals with various parts, never the entire collection of players. On the night of the recording, I had my friend Gary Steinbrenner taking photos during the sessions. These are the only pictures that I do have of me being in the studio. The session came together fairly well as everyone knew what they needed to do and they did it well. I of course had charts for everything and everyone. We recorded two songs “Sounds Nice” and “Eighteen Eighty-Nine” One of the trumpet players was Mark Smith, the son of the senior pastor at Central George Smith. I remember him asking me if this was a secular song and of course it wasn’t I told him that both of these songs were from stories that his Dad had told in church. He was a great story teller and I knew how to turn that idea into a couple of songs.

Richard was very impressed with Lonnie. Interesting note here, Lonnie played Richards drums as I just loved either his Rodgers or Ludwig snare. It was a long time ago. I never pressed any of these songs to vinyl but made a bunch of cassette copies. I even remember that I had a launch party at my Uncle Larry’s place as this was were I was living at the time. I was also still working at F.G. Bradley because I used a box of pre-cooked hamburgers that I bought from them. You can’t buy directly from F.G. Bradley unless you are an employee. F.G. Bradley supplied restaurants with their branded food. They made all the Dairy Queen, Red Baron, A&W burgers. All the steaks for the steak houses and so on.

This was a good sounding tape and remember my brother Rodney was pretty excited about it as it played it every where to all his friends. It was the sound of what I was capable of doing when I was creating something beyond just using friends but instead using players that were really good on their instrument, and they were playing the notes that I crafted on the scores that I wrote.