PAROUSIA 1980; Photo taken at Forest Lawn Cemetery. –photo courtesy of Marsha Falcowski.
The Plant 6 on Delaware Ave. in Kenmore was firmly on Parousia’s “most favorite club to play list”.
It was like a second home for our band, a lot of it had to do with a favorable geographic location from the Music Mall in Cheektowaga and the surrounding cities where each of us lived. We had friends and fans in both the city of Kenmore and Buffalo, so the Plant 6 was a convenient place for all of them to come together and hang out with us.
We played at the Plant 6 many times between August 1980 and March 1982. We found the club to have a cooler vibe than the Plant 6 on Niagara Street – – bigger, cleaner, more upscale.
From the Buffalo Evening News “Gusto” August 15, 1980
Friday 08/15/80 & Saturday 08/16/80 – Our first weekend gig at Plant 6 on Delaware Avenue in Kenmore featuring the full 7 piece rock band, Patrick Connolly (vocals/flute), Kim Watts (vocals/percussion), Barry (Guitar/vocals) & Gerry (drums) Cannizzaro, Garth Huels (lead guitar/vocals), Robert Lowden (bass guitar/vocals) and Eric Scheda (keyboards).
We were stoked to have a local weekend gig. That meant we could leave our equipment set up on stage for the next night. That was a big deal because by this time in our career, we were hauling around some seriously large and heavy equipment like a complete P.A. system including a pair of bass scoops, a pair of Perkins bins for midrange and two pairs of high-end horns, plus three stage monitors, about a dozen microphones with stands, EQ, power amps and electronic crossovers. We had a main sound-board off-stage and various smaller audio mixers on stage for drums and keyboards.
Band flyer – PAROUSIA at the Plant 6 – August 16 and 16, 1980
Then there were the band instruments… three guitars, three large guitar amps, pedal boards, effects, tuners, an eight piece drum kit plus cymbals and hardware plus drum platform, a Hammond organ with separate rotating Leslie speaker, a Fender Rhodes piano, ARP string synthesizer and a Moog Sonic-six synthesizer and various percussion instruments.
We got to the Plant 6 early, about 7:00 pm on Friday, to set up everything and do a sound check as we always tried to do the first time performing at a new club. To our surprise, the Fish-Fry was still in progress. The trays of food were all over the two-tiered stage… the women who ran it were dead serious about their Fish Fry… apparently this was the “bread & butter” of the Plant 6.
When it came to Parousia versus the Fish-Fry, the Fish Fry won. The fish-fry was going to make the club more money than we could in a weekend. We asked them politely if they could move the trays off the stage but got a stern look and a solid “no”. So, we assembled what we could outside in the parking lot or off to the side and waited for the ‘all powerful’ fish fry to wrap up so we could take the stage!