Beyond The Road Runners: Chilldron
Like their regional peers the Nomadds and the Natives, the Road Runners had a classic Midwest run—short, lively, and full of good stories.
By ’68 life pulled everyone in different directions: Dick Grissinger settled down to family life in the spring. Joe Sikora joined the Air Force in August, and Jay Mason went daisy-petal-pickin’ in September. Ramsey Mason and Kenny French, (followed soon by Jay), joined Tom Meinders, Tony Cannova (of the Nomadds), Roger Hayes; and later Kenny Heim (of the Natives), in The Porters, a popular Freeport group. Meanwhile, Gary Goetz headed north to the Gary Van Zeeland agency and soon became half of the front-line duo for a new touring act called Monte Carlo.
In the fall of ’71, Monte Carlo played dates in Dubuque and Rochester. Joe, home on leave from the Air Force, stopped by—prompting a couple of pop-up Road Runners reunions at Bud’s Tap and the Golden High Point, followed by late-night talk about recreating the band once Joe returned the next summer. With The Porters folding at the same time, Jay and Ramsey were more than ready.
By early ’72, Jay and Berklee-trained drummer Rick Kurtz (from Clinton’s Star-Spangled Banana) had joined Gary on the road with Monte Carlo, tightening up with keyboardist Steve Hodge and vocalists Gary and Corinne Koenig. They covered a huge touring circuit—D.C. to Colorado, Ontario to Oklahoma, and plenty of cities in between. A few managers pushed them toward the “next level,” and that lit a spark.
With Joe’s Air Force stint coming to a close in the fall, the group of former Road Runners had opportunities to revisit old times while looking to the future… These guys wanted to play together some more.
So, at the end of ’72, Jay, Gary, and Rick headed home to chase a progressive-rock idea they’d been cooking up. They brought along Corinne, and in Colorado they added a blazing-fast guitarist and songwriter, Ben Barronowski. Joe and Ramsey had already sat in with Monte Carlo late that year, so they were ready when the new band kicked things off with a famously wild New Year’s Day party at Bud’s Tap in Savanna.
With hindsight, it really was “lightning in a bottle.” The repertoire leaned into progressive rock, jazz-rock, and even folk-rock touches. The band—now a 7-piece “guitar orchestra” with their own sound engineer from Michigan, leased a house in Bettendorf and rehearsed six days a week in the finished basement. There they recorded a demo album. Though the live sets were not peppered with completely danceable tunes, listening to the group was a thoroughly memorable experience. The album was turned down in L.A. by a young Irving Azoff, offering Simon Cowell like critique: “there’s nothing here that we can sell“. After that, the group abandoned the initiative and went their separate musical ways. The recorded tracks are currently being remastered with plans to release them online by the end of this year. The collection will be known, natch, as
The Basement Tapes.