Not long after the demise of Zakk, I got a call from Alan Huff, who had been jamming with a band that was getting together on the West Side. They, like Zakk, needed another guitarist and Alan suggested me. I was actually feeling sort of insecure not being a band so I happily accepted the invitation to audition for the band.

To make a long story short, we sounded pretty darn good and started working up songs. Cherry became the name and although I only knew one other member (Gary Robinson) we got along together quite well. An interesting facet of this particular band was the fact that we had a keyboardist, which added an interesting twist to the overall sound. Norbie Hager owned a humongous Hammond B-3 organ that must have weighed a ton! He also had a Leslie speaker, adding more weight to the mix. I can still recall schlepping that huge instrument to gigs, requiring all five of us to move it!

Like Zakk, Cherry played almost all top 40 cover tunes. Gary was particularly into Bad Company at the time and we played several of their tunes with him on lead vocals. We also incorporated some songs that Alan and I had worked up earlier with Zakk and added some others including Elton's Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting.

Cherry was a good band and we got quite a few gigs in our short history - mostly school dances. Our biggest gig (and our last) was at a new night club that had started up in Portsmouth called Mother's. This was a huge club, area-wise, and it drew a lot of people. Unfortunately for Portsmouth and Cherry, the club and our band became victims of a huge tragedy: The whole place burnt down one night with our equipment still inside!

I'll never forgot the horror of that fateful night. We had just played the last night of our booking and deliberated whether or not to pack up our stuff that night or wait till the morning. We decided we were really tired and the club owners were basically pressuring for us to leave anyway, so all that we took home were our guitars. Later that night, around 4 A.M, my phone rang: It was Alan screaming "Mother's is burning!" I picked Alan up and we raced over to the club. By then it was literally gutted!

Gone was all of our stuff, including a brand new Peavey amp I'd just bought and a new Peavey PA system that Gary had bought. Also fried were Gary and Alan's amps, the drums, and Norbie's beloved one-ton Hammond B-3 organ. Virtually everything but our axes had become cinders.

Ironically, we had just joined the Musician's Union and we felt for sure that our equipment would be covered by insurance if the club's insurance didn't cover it. We later found out to our dismay that neither the club nor the union could cover our losses. We were screwed! Norbie went crazy over all of this and couldn't be found for three whole days. The rest of us worked on finding a good lawyer. We were gonna sue the club owners.

Around a year later, our case went to court. We lost the case. Call it karma or sheer coincidence, but the club owner died of a heart attack around 2 months after our case. If I sound bitter it is because we had been told by the owner that our equipment was covered before we had ever booked the gig. That was a lie. Furthermore, we had basically been pressured to leave early that fateful night for some odd reason and had we not felt this pressure we most likely would have packed up our equipment. The whole incident was very strange and a lot of questions were never answered. All I know for sure is that I missed that Peavy amp and from that point on I have always made a point to insure my equipment.

But Cherry was history...

1975

CHERRY(left to right) Alan Huff, Jim Folsom, Gary Robinson, S.W. Not picured: Norbie and his B-3