Surviving members of the Wildweeds, a popular ’60s band who scored a regional hit with “No Good to Cry,” will perform together in Connecticut for the first time in 46 years.
Singer/guitarist Big Al Anderson, a founding member of the Wildweeds who later joined NRBQ before becoming a successful Nashville songwriter, will also perform with the Floor Models, his latest band. The shows take place on Dec. 26-27 at the Hills Point Hotel in Windsor Locks, starting at 7 p.m.
“It’s going to be three days of rehearsal and hope,” Anderson said by phone from Nashville. “We just thought it’d be fun. Everybody’s got arthritis. Everyone’s complaining.”
The Wildweeds’ definitive lineup — Anderson, Ray Zeiner (vocals, keyboards), Martin “Skip” Yakaitis (vocals, percussion), Bob Dudek (vocals, bass, drums) and Al Lepak (drums) — hailed from Windsor. While still in their teens, the band cut its teeth in black clubs in the North End of Hartford. “Best days of my life,” Anderson, who was only 15 at the time, said. “It was always wonderful. We had black and white musicians playing together all the time, but it was a black crowd. They didn’t care that [white kids] were in there. They loved it.”
Following the Beatles’ example, Anderson began writing songs. “No Good to Cry,” a capsule-sized tale of love-gone-bad that traffics in musical tension and release, was the second one he’d ever written. “[WDRC DJ] Dick Robinson was kind of instrumental in this whole thing, because we were playing his record hops at the Windsor Locks K of C [Knights of Columbus], and he got us into the studio,” Anderson said. “He got us down to Syncron Sound [in Wallingford], as it was called then. We cut two sides, and then we went down again and cut ‘No Good to Cry’ by ourselves.”
Syncron, where “No Good to Cry” and other demos were recorded, was eventually purchased by Doc Cavalier, a dentist-turned-producer who rechristened it Trod Nossel Studios. Both Cavalier and Jerry Greenberg, who helped the Weeds secure a deal with Chicago’s Chess Records, were credited on the single, even though neither was present at the recording session. The song topped WDRC’s Swingin’ ’60s Survey for four weeks in 1967 and was eventually covered by the Hour Glass (Duane and Gregg Allman’s early band) and Moving Sidewalks (featuring a young Billy Gibbons, who later formed ZZ Top). In September of 1967, with “No Good to Cry” still ascendant, the Wildweeds opened for the Doors at Wallingford’s Oakdale Theatre; the following year, they blew away headlining act the Vanilla Fudge at the Bushnell in Hartford.
But like many young bands of the time, the Wildweeds suffered through lineup changes, shady business dealings, changing tastes and diminishing confidence. “No Good to Cry” didn’t crack the top 50 nationally; no other Wildweeds single came close. The new sounds coming from San Francisco and London were decidedly more psychedelic, and the soul-based Weeds struggled to keep up.
“Everything was changing, and we were really an R&B band,” Anderson said. “It was hard to adapt. I wasn’t a great writer back then, really. I wasn’t into [the psychedelic thing] until later in life… I hadn’t done drugs yet or anything. I didn’t get psychedelic until later.” The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April of 1968, furthermore, marked the end for integrated clubs in Hartford.
The Wildweeds released an album for Vanguard Records in 1970 — Anderson had already joined NRBQ — and split for good in 1971. Yakaitis died in 1988, and Dudek passed away in 2002. “No Good to Cry: The Best of the Wildweeds,” a retrospective, was released in 2003 by the now-defunct Confidential Recordings; used and new copies appear on Amazon for $60-$213. Anderson reunited with Zeiner and the Lepaks — Al and Andy, who replaced his older brother when he was drafted — for a pair of shows at the Iron Horse Music Hall in Northampton at the end of 2011.
They didn’t perform in Connecticut, where natives who saw the Wildweeds in their heyday aren’t likely to forget the experience. Guitarist Jim Chapdelaine, a member of Anderson’s Floor Models, “saw them as often as I could get to them, because they were astonishing… They were an amazing band and deserving of the legend.”
Chapdelaine was only 11 when he first caught the Wildweeds at the Teen Center in Enfield. “They would pack the place and they would do soul songs that were amazing, and then do a country song, or a psychedelic song,” he said. “It was amazing what they could do.”
Anderson, Chapdelaine remembered, was playing a gold-top Gibson Les Paul.
“He was a big man. He was probably 17… I thought he was playing a toy guitar, and I couldn’t believe what was coming out of it, and how good the band was. It was staggering. I thought, ‘What if he had a real guitar?'”
AL ANDERSON, THE WILDWEEDS AND THE FLOOR MODELS perform at the Hills Point Hotel in Windsor Locks on Friday and Saturday, Dec. 26 and 27. Showtime is 7 p.m. Tickets are $45. Information: bigalanderson.com.
