Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

On this, the occasion of my 2000th posting, I thought I'd display some Antarctic musical history...I'm gradually unearthing these photos from various shoeboxes in my garage; this is by no means a comprehensive history yet, but if I discover more of interest I'll post them in the
future. I may do this as more than one post, just to try to keep the captions matching the images...these were all taken at McMurdo Station
(except as noted otherwise)...okay, here we go:

This first shot is from my second season (1980-81): this is the band 'Herman Nelson and The Darts' in the Green Room (Construction Materials' Office), enjoying our 'Champagne on a Beer budget', fifteen minutes before showtime in the Carpentry Shop next door. From left-to-right: Paul Werner, rhythm guitar/carpenter (son of a Chase Manhattan Banker; he fled that scene and built himself a small cabin in the Idaho woods); Tony Waite, bass/welder (from Athens, Ga.; fresh off an incarceration for possession); Yours Truly, lead guitar/surveyor; my brother Neal, keyboards/clerk typist (aka 'Big Dick Cheezball and his Swingin' Organ', a year after graduating Valedictorian from the Monterrey Institute of Foreign Studies); John 'Sure-Eye' Wood, drums/Biolab Manager (oceanographic dude from So. Cal.); Danny Kelly, roadie/plumber (aka 'Big Boy'; crazy Irishman from Roxbury/Boston); Colin the Kiwi, drums/mess attendant (original drummer for the NZ band 'Pop Mechanix'). As usual, 'Herman', our lead singer, was nowhere to be found until thirty seconds before we went on...:


Afternoon before the show: setup/soundcheck in the Carpentry Shop: John W. playing my Tele upside down and me checking drumkit No. 1:


'Big Dick' warming up at his Wakeman-esque keyboard stack (note the Moog Rogue and the 'Swingin' Organ' itself, a Navy Special Services Farfisa):

Here are a couple of shots of the Penguin Bowl (1981 and 1985), the annual Navy vs. Civilian Thanksgiving Day football game, held on the
Ice Shelf at Williams Field (the airfield named after a Navy D-8 operator who broke through the ice in the sixties and froze/drowned...he's still in his cab on the ocean floor below) This first one is of the marching band on the sideline preparing to perform the pre-game show (me on snare drum):


This is a shot of the 'Announcing Booth', a stake-bed pickup parked at the 50-yard-line...note the generator and P.A. (My brother doing his formidable Howard Cosell imitation):

MORE!!! MORE!!! MORE!!!
PS: congrats on #2000, Dane - as usually, you did it your way

Pix of 'Icestock', the annual outdoor music festival, held every year since the first one in 1990 in Derelict Junction, beautiful downtown McMurdo. This is from the first 'Icestock': 'The Ozone Holy Rollers' onstage: Sara from Wyoming singing; John McIntyre on slide, me on the Tele and Brooks Montgomery on harp (Brooks was our Survival School Instructor; he can be seen as 'the guy who falls into the crevasse' in
the IMAX Antarctic movie):


The rest of these are from 'Icestock II', 1991: I was the musical coordinator for the first three Icestocks, and played in almost every
band each year. The first shot: me topping off with 'antifreeze':


This is 'The Blue Ball Allstars'...my best Chris Squire move:


Legendary band, 'The Crud":


A shot of 'The Crowd':

More shots of the B.B.A.'s:





Preparing to do another shot of 'antifreeze' (Rock Impressario and Icestock Logistics Coordinator Ricky Campbell in right foreground, seeing if we 'need anything'):

The Ozone Holy Rollers, v2.0:

And finally (for now), the amazing Kiwi/Yank band 'The Spliffs', from my last season ('92): New Year's Eve party in the McMurdo gym...


On the right, 'Roscoe' the Kiwi, fantastic guitarist who's now a fireman at London's Heathrow Airport; on the left, the incomparable Dennis Murphy, finest bassist I've ever played with, wearing the hat Lowell George threw into the crowd at an early seventies' Little Feat show:


"Your Tax Dollars At Work":

Hmmm... cool pants...

I was grungy before there was 'Grunge'...

Happy Groundhog's Day, everyone...

Dane that is way too cool. You play everything and sing too. I am impressed my man. Now if only there was a sound byte or two?

Any "lost tapes" in the archives?

Oh gee... yep i just remembered it's Groundhog's Day today... or, to be precise, it's the day after Groundhog's Day here if this makes sense...
The thing is, i also had this kind of pants about 12 or 13 years ago...
Yep... any records to complete the story?

Man, I don't know about tapes...maybe, but it's just a matter of whether they surface out of my garage or not. I'm sure other people have 'em, and I know the first Icestock was videotaped in it's entirety...maybe #'s 2 & 3 as well. I don't know who might have 'em today. I have a videotape of a show we did in the Galley in 1984, but I haven't looked at it in years, and the sound quality wasn't very good as I recall.

I was really living 'in the moment' in those days, and not thinking too much about documentation....keep in mind we were working sixty hour weeks, many of us (myself included) outdoors ten hours a day. But I wouldn't trade a moment of it (okay, maybe a couple of moments...)

The parties were the best I've ever been to, for sure...out of necessity, mostly.

Man, what a great story... take a bow... my hat off to ya!
A bit sad there's apparently little or no recorded documentary, though... a bit unfair, perhaps...
Cheers,
SC.

Well, as I said, someone may have tapes, etc. Perhaps they'll surface someday in time to ruin my political career.

One thing I do have is tapes of 26 weeks of my AFAN radio show in '85-'86...gotta get 'em into the computer before they deteriorate completely...

Simply amazing Dane. What great experiences.