In 1976 I was working at The Record Shop in Portsmouth to make money to finance my music, etc. The Record Shop was (and still is) one of the coolest things to ever happen to Portsmouth because of the dedication of its owner, Ed Wicker (and now Pat Tabor, may Smilin' Ed rest in peace) to supply Portsmouth music lovers with what ever they may happen to be looking for. During this time, a band called Space Park South was one of the biggest bands in town and the drummer used to come into the shop and buy a half dozen or so LPs each week. One of his buddies who used to come in was Jeff Porter, another drummer, and through mutual acquaintances we became friends. (Actually, how Porter and I got together is a little fuzzy now but it had something to do with all of the above.)

At any rate, I decided to start a band myself for a change. All of the other bands I'd been in had been someone else's idea and I wanted to get a band together with a common theme: to play Beatle songs exclusively. I had seen a band in Columbus called Bach which was a Beatles cover band and they were awesome! I wanted to do the same thing since I already knew a ton of Beatle songs and besides that, I had just purchased my first bass guitar and a Fender Bassman amp. But folks, this wasn't just any bass guitar - it was a Hofner violin bass - just like Paul's! I'd been putting off playing the instrument I had come to love too long so I decided to make the switch from guitar to bass. Now all I needed was a band.

Enter Alan Huff yet again. I called him up and he and Porter and I got together to see if we could make this Beatle concept happen. We started with some of the easier rockers like Back In The USSR and One After 909 then moved up to some more challenging songs like Nowhere Man and This Boy. Hey, it was great fun if nothing else! We worked long and hard on the vocal and musical arrangements, finding it farily easy to replicate the guitar parts since Alan was such a good lead and rhythm guitarist. Porter was a very good Ringo and I worked hard at copying McCartney's bass lines note for note. Learning how to play Paul's bass lines made me a decent bass player in a short time because I'd been humming the parts to myself for years and it was just a matter of finding the notes on the bass. The hard part was singing while playing those notes though, esp. songs like All My Loving. I had a whole new appreciation for McCartney's genius while working up his parts - he was and is truly the world's best bass player hands down!

Once we had a couple of sets down, our next task was getting some gigs. Let me tell ya, trying to find a place that will hire a band that plays just Beatles tunes is no easy task! We did eventually get booked though and it was a really hard sell because we learned early on that there really weren't that many Beatle fans still left out there and certainly damn few that wanted to dance to just Beatle tunes played by a 3-piece Yankee cover band!

But we were stubborn and refused to give in to the many people who pushed for us to play some other bands'songs. The only other stuff we eventually did do was a couple of my originals (which no doubt really made me appear to be even more pretentious!) But what the hell, we eventually had quite a fan base thanks to our loyal friends and the fact that if nothing else, we were unique.

Our biggest moment was winning the annual Battle of the Bands - beating out the hugely popular Space Park South, no less! One of our most interesting gigs was a dance for a deaf bowlers league - yes ya heard me right - deaf! And belive it or not these people could dance in perfect rhythm - they could feel the beat of the songs transmitted from the stage to the dance floor. It was a very rewarding and enlightening gig for us.

To see some pix of the band, go to the official Apple Web Site.

Apple continued into '77 until Alan quit and moved to Galveston. It was going to be very hard to replace him, but we eventually did. From that point on, Apple no longer played Beatles songs exclusively and we cut a single. More about the newer version of Apple on the next page...

1976-1977

 APPLE (1)(left to right) S.W, Jeff Porter, Alan Huff