Fifty years and still kicking

And a packed house of family, friends and diehard fans were there to read it.

Slip on a tie-dyed something and kick back – this backstory was found hanging out backstage, a behind-the-scenes place to learn what turned this 1960s Jersey Shore high school band, this self-proclaimed Truckers’ Banquet into a half-century happening in Waynesburg of all places. High school bands are supposed to break up when bandmates go off to college or begin a career, right? What happened?

Blame it on Bill Molzon, who started his first year at Waynesburg College in 1969 and by the following April had managed to instigate a happening that just kept happening for the next 49 years.

It was Friday afternoon, and band members in from here to New Jersey, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Texas, Colorado and California (did I get everybody?) were together for a second day of rehearsals. The GPAC is a far cry from GNP’s first booking in the student union of 1970, when the band and its NEBLOC light show/wet show made the college art club The Creative Idea glad they booked them for a spring concert. And then another…

GNP outgrew the student union and moved to the dining hall, and Molzon graduated to become the director of the newly created audio-visual department. GNP would hang theatrical lights, put up a backdrop to project on and rock the house for the next 20 some years. And students began joining the band.

Original “girl singer” Jeannie Clark Fisher had her scrapbooks spread backstage on Friday as players spanning fifty years came in and out between sets to hug, laugh, tune-up and flashback through concerts that always ended with “see your next year.”

Until this year.

Faded snapshots of teenage Molzon, Lincoln “Linc” Davis, Fisher, Scott Buttfield, and Charlie Behrend bring it all back home to Middletown, New Jersey, where Molzon and Linc started playing together in seventh grade, and Linc began to shine as a lead guitarist. They joined the school chorus in tenth grade and took notice of Jeannie Clark, a year ahead of them and already an accomplished singer and pianist. The budding band added Bruce Douglas on drums and Buttfield on bass from Rumson-Fairhaven High School and got into battles of the bands on the Jersey Shore. Middletown classmates Behrend and Bob Christian would soon join them. Christian became the drummer when Douglas left the band. Both Douglas and Christian were back for the final show.

With its ear for the right funky beat, GNP has attracted drummers and bass players to the banquet since the beginning. Bill Harding brought his identical twin sons Billy and Andrew to play at age seven using woodblocks taped to the bass drum foot pedal so they could work it.

Harding was booked for another show on Saturday but stopped by during rehearsals to play for GNP family members hanging out in the auditorium. Billy and Andrew were hard to tell apart as they swapped with each other for sets, along with

drummers Christian, Douglas and Lars Hartmann. Hartmann was a freshman in 1984 when he came upon the band practicing in Buhl Hall. “I sat in, and I stayed.”

GNP has invited more than 60 musicians and singers to the table over the decades, and some keep coming back for more. Some, like upright bass player Jim DePriest, are WU employees. During rehearsals, his wife, Ronda, soon to retire as director of the music program, found the perfect center row seat and conducted songs using the horn section.

Scrapbook photos show the many faces of Rachel Eisenstat, a kid so taken by the magic of live performing she took voice lessons from a member of the GNP family of female vocalists and, by age 12, was singing backup. She became the voice doing Janis Joplin that people left the show marveling over and now has her own band, Raven Jane, in Boulder, Colo. On Saturday she gave the crowd what it came for with “Piece Of My Heart” then channeled the great soul voice needed to sing Rufus and Chaka Kahn’s “You Got The Love,” with horns punching through and GNP bass player Teddy Webster, the Funkmaster, up from South Carolina snapping the perfect backbeat with Randy Jones on lead guitar.

Fisher and Buttfield shared a laugh in the dressing room during rehearsals over the memory of Buttfield asking his group back in high school, “You want a girl in a rock band?”

Indeed they did. Fisher’s full range could handle those West Coast songs that every radio station was playing in the late 1960s, and her long hair and way cool clothes brought the San Francisco look to the Jersey Shore. “I remember a Battle of the Bands competition when we went against Steven Van Zandt,” Fisher told Harold Standard staff writer Jason Welling in 1999. “We actually beat his band, The Source, probably because we had a female voice. We could perform Jefferson Airplane and Janis Joplin songs while the other bands were all doing the Beatles.”

Fellow Jersey Shore musicians Van Zandt, the E-Street Band and Bruce Springsteen went on to international fame.

Fisher went off to college in Ithaca, N.Y., majored in voice and piano and moved to Texas to raise a family, sing with the Dallas Opera Chorus, teach voice, sing in dance bands and write original songs like “Family”, which became the GNP anthem. Sung by Fisher near the end of the show, it is a signal that it won’t be long before the entire band will assemble with Molzon to sing “The Weight by the Band” and applaud the audience.

The concert crisscrossed time’s radio dial with other staples – “Somebody To Love,” “Blue Bayou,” “Piece of My Heart,” “The Letter,” and of course, “Rocky Top,” the signature song of Albert King of New Freeport. The retired college fix-anything maintenance guru kept an eye on those new kids on the block in the early days and was invited to sing and bring some country and bluegrass flavor to the feast. King and his pick-up bands have been a mainstay ever since.

Percussionist Tom Minson was a schoolmate who worked the NEBLOC lights with Molzon’s sister Nancy. But when Santana wowed the world at Woodstock with his eclectic electric Latin sound, Minson found his place in the band with steel drums, congas, marimbas, found objects and instruments enough to produce every sound that can be stitched into a song.

The bluesy jazz power of the horn section goes back to Bruce Johnson, who joined the band as a freshman in 1974 and became the music director for the horns, Molzon said. Johnson brought in Lee Robinson from Pittsburgh to become the band’s featured saxophonist. Johnson died in 2015, but Robinson stayed on to add wow to the party. His son Zevn attended his first GNP concert as an infant in 2002, came back to play at age 16 and now, at 20, was here to jam with his dad.

Daria and Randy Jones of Kittens Ain’t Biscuits brought more rhythm, harmony and lead guitar to GNP when they came on board 37 years ago. Son Dylan grew up to join them, playing horns, keyboard and mandolin. This weekend he stopped by to say hello, then stayed to play his trumpet next to WU junior Tyler Williams.

When GPAC opened in the late 1990s, GNP made its last move, leaving behind the NEBLOC light show because there was little room for projectors. But now, Molzon’s students could learn to move unobtrusively on stage during performances, using hand-held TV cameras to catch the sound and action from different angles and then send it to the lobby for viewing.

“If it wasn’t for the way Billy taught us what media was about in real-time, I don’t think I would have gotten into television,” Brian Oehlbeck, a 1992 Waynesburg College grad, said. He is a TV news photographer for Channel 7 in Youngstown, Ohio, but came back this year to run cameras for the show. He remembers covering events for Pittsburgh area TV news stations as a student.

“We went everywhere, and there wasn’t any local media in the 90s that didn’t know Billy’s name.”

Molzon was everywhere, popping up on cell phones to text performers when to be where from the time hotel rooms were booked through rehearsal schedules to the setlist painstakingly arranged by Buttfield to the last moves after the show was done and the work of packing up began.

The opening songs on Saturday night, “Who Knows Where The Time Goes” and “End Of The Line,” set the mood for the third, “The Thrill Is Gone.” When Linc died in 2018, he took some of the magic with him, and Molzon decided it was time to bring down the curtain with the 50th show. Linc’s daughter Sam Kearney came in from Ashville, N.C., to lead the band in her arrangement of her dad’s favorite song, then stay to be a girl singer in a rocking old band. And the concert spread its wings, crooning, teasing and belting its way through 46 classic songs, maybe more, some new this year, some as old as the first GNP.

The Truckers’ Banquet in the classroom down the hall was finally devoured well after the midnight hour. As the show wrapped up, performers hugged old friends in the audience, then got busy breaking down the stage and helping sound engineer Mark Weis repack the Steed Audio box truck parked out back and be off in time for another job tomorrow.

Tomorrow, those still around would get Molzon’s text directions to the goodbye brunch at Marie Webb’s home in Graysville. Webb began doing the theatrical lights for the show when she was a freshman in 1978 and kept doing them after she graduated to become a lawyer. She was in the light booth, busy doing her job on Saturday night, helping make GNP the class act it has been since the beginning.