Bammies are back to get party started
The Bammies started as a goof. A riposte to the stuffy awards shows in music-industry centers like Los Angeles and New York, the impetus behind the Bay Area Music Awards was to play it fast, loose and irreverent.
For a long time, that’s exactly what happened. Bandleader Dick Bright, who served as emcee and music director for the Bammies from the show’s debut at the Kabuki Theater in 1978 through its mid-1980s heyday at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, remembers the time he arrived at the ceremony on the back of an elephant and hardly anybody noticed.
“The hardest thing was trying to get the crowd’s attention,” Bright said last week. “It was really raucous. We wanted to honor how cool and inclusive the Bay Area music scene was, so you would see these bluecollar bands hanging out next to rock stars like Huey Lewis and Carlos Santana.
“It turned into the best party of the year.”
Bright will reprise his role as host, in a more modest capacity, at the Bammies reunion concert scheduled for Saturday, March 24, at the Regency Ballroom in San Francisco. It’s not an awards show this time, but merely a chance to catch up and see performances by Bammies regulars like Eddie Money, Sammy Hagar, Pablo Cruise, Neal Schon of Journey and drummer Narada Michael Walden.
The show’s producer, Kenny Wardell, says he hopes to revive the communal spirit of the original parties.
Or, at least, the opportunity to hear some truly epic war stories.
“One year I was upstairs at Bill Graham Civic relieving my bladder when I heard them call my name for the best guitarist award,” Schon said at his Marin County home. “Dick Bright’s Orchestra kept playing ‘Lights’ over and over until I got there.”
The four-hour ceremonies, which were originally presented by Dennis Erokan, publisher of the free biweekly music magazine BAM, were famously fueled by cocaine and Champagne. Known for drawing a motley crew of Bay Area musical luminaries like Metallica, Grace Slick, the Grateful Dead, Chris Isaak, Bonnie Raitt, Paul Kantner, Boz Scaggs, Tracy Chapman, the Dead Kennedys and so on, each night would inevitably end with everyone onstage together for a free-for-all jam session.
“When they put a party on, man, they put on a party!” Money recalled, on the phone from his home in Malibu.
“The last Bammies I remember, at the end of the night, it was Neil Young and me on guitar, Michael Anthony on bass, and David Lauser playing drums,” said Hagar. “We got so high we did a 15-minute intro to ‘Down by the River.’ ”
At one point, the Bammies became so popular that there were viewing parties in nightclubs around the city, as well as live simulcasts on local television and radio stations for fans who couldn’t get into the 10,000-capacity Bill Graham Civic.
“In 1979, I was up for best pianist and I won, which was a huge surprise,” said Cory Lerios from Pablo Cruise. “So I got up to accept the award and, I forget who was handing them out, but as soon as he handed it to me he said, ‘Give me back the statue once we get backstage!’ When I asked why, he said, ‘It’s the only one we have. They’re making more and you’ll get one in the mail.’ Well, I’m still waiting.”
In the beginning, the awards show’s purpose was to raise money for the Bay Area Music Archive, a collection of records, tapes and memorabilia in some South of Market warehouse that is still presumably gathering dust. As time went on, nobody was quite sure why they kept doing it.
The Bammies fizzled out in 1997, roughly around the same time the prize-winning bands stopped showing up (it was the era of the anti-star) and the San Francisco music scene was up against the first dot-com boom.
With BAM magazine out of print, the organizers tried to expand the format to include musicians from Southern California, renaming the show the California Music Awards. By then it was too big, too vague and, worst of all, too serious.
By putting this reunion concert together, Wardell said he hopes to inspire a nextgeneration version of the Bammies. Having revived BAM magazine as an online publication (BAMmagazine.com) in 2011, he believes there’s still plenty worth celebrating.
“Some people say there is no Bay Area music scene anymore,” Wardell said. “Yes, there is!”
Part of Wardell’s plan is to invite some young musicians to take part in the Bammies reunion concert — let the amateurs get up onstage and jam with the old guys. He also hopes to use it as a platform to reach out to students at local high schools and colleges to start what he envisions as the Bammies Battle of the Bands.
“We’re taking our time after this concert to do it right,” he said. “I’m going to be overseeing it and letting the kids do it.”
In the meantime, fans can only hope that the concert at the Regency brings back some of that old anything-goes fervor.
“Long before I moved here, the Bammies were where I first got a real sense of the amazing love and support within the Bay Area music community,” said Raitt, a Rock and Roll Hall of famer who owns a home in Marin County. “The shows were always a blast — killer lineups, great speeches and mega hangs backstage and late into the night. I don’t know who had more fun, the audience or us.”