Gardner Berry turned 62 just hours before New Year’s Day, and the retirement age musicians shows no interest in retiring. “I think the fact that I’m still doing it 48 years later,” he said, when asked what is his most important career accomplishment. “48 years this month I did my first gig,” Berry added.
The keyboardist-vocalist is a walking encyclopedic history of New Hampshire’s music scene. He is currently a member of Mama Kicks. Before Mama Kicks, Berry spent the early 1990s and a chunk of the 1980s leading show bands at popular Manchester restaurants. Prior to his house band years, Berry was a member of well-known local cover bands Double Cross, Stone Cross, and The Tel-Stars, dating back to 1964.
Berry is no doddering old man. Aside from his mainstay band, New Hampshire’s hugely popular Mama Kicks, he also plays in a Led Zeppelin tribute band, Four Sticks. “The thing I’m proudest of currently is that a couple of weeks ago, I did three Four Sticks gigs in a row and could still talk and cheer on the Patriots the next day. I felt pretty good about that.” And yes, he did perform the caterwauling “Immigrant Song” each night of the Thursday-Friday-Saturday nights gigs.
Berry’s career began in 1964 when he and his friend Billy Blaine, of Derry, New Hampshire, formed a local outfit named The Tel-Stars. Berry and Blaine went on to form, in 1969, a soon to be hugely popular hard rock cover band, Stone Cross. After Stone Cross, Barry played in a cover band called Double Cross with another former member of Stone Cross. Berry was then asked to form a big band format for the Manchester restaurant Classics. When the owner of Classics had to shut down to tend to his ailing wife, The Yard restaurant allowed Berry to form another outfit, the Wicked Big Band, for their establishment. Eventually, Berry formed the duo Mama Kicks with his then wife Lisa Guyer, a local rock goddess from the Concord area.
Each band in Berry’s career was a name-recognized outfit that made Berry a local celebrity in southern New Hampshire. He is not sure why he each band became a sensation. “I honestly don’t know,” Berry said. “I’ve been very fortunate to play with really good people. I never felt like I was in a shitty band.”
Up until Double Cross, Berry only needed to show up and play his keyboards. But, once he started the Classic Show Band, he had to become the organizing presence as well as the piano player. Classics Show Band was a house band that featured a rotating cast of singers. Berry had to recruit everybody.
“It can be a pain in the ass,” he admitted. “But I’m afraid if I don’t, it won’t be done right. Currently, I book the band(Mama Kicks) 90 percent of the time. But I’ve kind of swept some of the gigs off to Lisa. She can do it. She can talk on the phone as well as anybody; probably better than most.”
With Mama Kicks, Berry was no longer a front person. He sings some lead vocals, but Guyer is the front person of the group. The other theme running through Berry’s career is his focus on cover bands. “I’ve never been in an original band,” he said. “I’ve written some songs for bands that played original material. But it’s never developed. Because, from a business point of view, people like to hear what they’re already familiar with. In Stone Cross, we took a shot at writing some songs and recording some songs. But the transition was from King Of The Bar Bands to the absolute toilet of original bands. It wasn’t our strong suit.”
When Berry started playing out in 1964, he did not imagine he would still be doing this in 2012. “I couldn’t imagine myself being 62,” he said. “Back then, I was young and naïve. I thought I was going to make it, die young, and leave a good looking corpse. So much for that. Thinking back on my parents being this age, I think, ‘Jeez, they’re old.’ It’s hard to imagine leaving the house, never mind playing rock and roll.” Berry, these days, only has a few friends his own age. Everybody else in his life is up to 20 years younger.
Unlike other musicians from the classic rock era, Berry doesn’t despise rap music, and he likes some of the older country and western artists like Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings. “Billy Cyrus was the downfall of country music as far as I’m concerned,” Berry said. “It’s directly attributable to him and his stupid haircut.”
Berry has worked occasional day jobs. But Fed Ex didn’t pay as much for five days of work as one solo gig. He was also a security guard, and he was a CNC machinist for Poly-Vac. “When you’re committed to this rock and roll life, which I am, which I have been, you don’t really have the time to go out and take a job.”
Running the band means Berry is responsible for marketing. He said there is no underestimating the need to stay in people’s faces. He always makes sure that Mama Kicks fans know where the band will be playing. Newspapers were important too. The Hippo Press, Manchester’s vaunted alternative newspaper, when it was formed in 2000, were quick to jump on the Mama Kicks bandwagon. Some years earlier, Berry and Guyer did an interview with the Nashua Telegraph. That Telegraph article marked the first time that Berry and Guyer announced they were splitting up as a couple. After the article ran, they were worried that people would think their duo was also breaking up.
“We hadn’t really told anybody,” he said. “You tell people that your principal members are separating, people are going to freak out. People always read too much into whatever they know, or don’t know.” Of course, history shows that the two remained good friends and have continued their musical partnership to this day.
Because Berry has always been, throughout his adult life, in a popular local band, he is recognized everywhere he goes, sort of like being a rock star. “It’s great,” he said. “I rarely pay a cover charge. Sometimes I can get to the head of the line. That’s not always the case. But, it’s nice to be recognized for doing something you enjoy doing. If you’ve devoted your life to, it’s nice to be recognized. I don’t mind that.”
The southern New Hampshire music scene was born around the time Berry played in the Tel-Stars. Nearly five decades later, people still tell Berry that they remember seeing him playing with the Tel-Stars in the Derry Labor Day parade every year for four years. “Younger players told me they started playing an instrument because they used to watch the Tel-Stars,” Berry related.
The first year of the Tel-Stars, Berry was their bass player, before switching to organ the next year. He doesn’t brag about his bass playing. “I’m a shitty bass player,” he admitted. Berry also admitted to a failed attempt, years later, to play guitar, swiftly realizing he could play everything way better on piano. These days, Berry fills in the low end notes for Mama Kicks with his left handed keyboard playing.
“I think I’m particularly good at it, playing bass with my left hand, not that I have more knowledge than anybody else, but just because I’ve been doing it for so long,” he said. When asked if his keyboard bass notes gives Mama Kicks a unique sound, he said “I don’t know if its unique or not, but it keeps the budget down. One less mouth to feed is good.”
The Tel-Stars recorded a 45 in 1968. “We wrote a song and the song was called ‘Love For A Lady In Gray.’ The B-side was an instrumental that we opened the show with; not an original. We were all excited and we were saying this will be a hit. Of course, it wasn’t.” Time has been kinder to the Tel-Stars original song. Berry said a collector of old records loved it and burned several copies of the record onto CD.
Berry’s classic hard rock cover band, Stone Cross, was formed in1969 but didn’t take off until 1970 with what they consider to be the original line up, Berry, Blaine, Phil Monastesse, and Mike Mulroy.
“Stone Cross, I think, hit its peak between 1970 and 1978, which was when Phil left the band,” Berry said. “We were just a rip roaring cover bar band. I think we did a great job. I loved that band.” The keyboardist attributes that time period’s heyday to the players and the chemistry between them as well as their top of the line sound system. “It was amazing production for a bar band,” Berry added.
Berry next moved onto Double Cross, which he joined with the bass player who replaced Phil Monastesse in 1978. After three years, Double Cross split up due to tension between having two hard rock players and two Top 40 players not agreeing on what material to emphasize.
Next up, was the Classics Show Band, which came after Berry’s brief stint in the world of day jobs. Forming and managing the show band at Classics was like a calling that Berry couldn’t ignore. Local businessman Paul Labbe was one of the two owners of Classics.
“Labbe was opening this club based on a Milwaukee called Rupert’s. Rupert’s had had a house band with a rotating cast of singers. Labbe wanted to do the same thing at Classics,” the keyboardist said. So Labbe hired Berry to put it all together. Current Mama Kicks personnel Lisa Guyer and Chris Lester were in that band with Berry. When Classics closed down three years later, Berry formed the Wicked Big Band at The Yard restaurant.
“I’ll be honest with you, I had difficulties with The Yard,” Berry said. “I didn’t really get along with the management. But, in retrospect, it was the right move to make, going to the yard.” Berry kept Guyer and a few others from his Classics lineup. Eventually, Berry and the Yard management couldn’t agree on money issues, even though there were 700 people coming out weekly to see the Wicked Big Band.
“The difference in perception was, The Yard thought they had a great place, and we just happened to be playing there. Our perception was, we had a great band and people came to see us. It remains to be seen who was right and who was wrong.” Berry went on to form the hugely popular Mama Kicks duo with Lisa Guyer(which eventually became a full band) and The Yard still remains in business to this day. Berry, these days, can look out into his Mama Kicks audience and see faces he knew at The Yard and Classics.
The Black Brimmer American Bar & Grill, located on Elm Street in Manchester, hosted Mama Kicks for 13 years, where the band did wonderfully for 11. Eventually, Mama Kicks stopped drawing the huge crowds it drew for the first 11 years, and they left the room on good terms.
“Our demographic is decidedly older than a lot of bands,” Berry said, “and people were getting a little scared of going downtown. The Brimmer changed. Their food wasn’t as good, I don’t think. It became more a bar than a restaurant. And again, our demographic is older. They like to come in and have dinner.”
Berry and Mama Kicks left the Brimmer on a high note, having a lot of people come out to their send off during their final night. “The last night was amazing,” Berry said, “although the Brimmer never thanked us once.” The ending of the Mama Kicks era was not the only sad passing at The Black Brimmer. Original owner Bill McDonald envisioned a downtown blues room. After McDonald passed away, everything changed, and highly rated blues, funk, and R&B bands that had played the room were replaced with young, hard rock cover bands. Today, it’s a bar where young people are rambunctious, fight, and get arrested.
Berry recently played a book release party with the original Stone Cross lineup. A writer wrote a book about the late 1960s/early 1970s Connecticut Valley music scene. The author asked some of the bands he wrote about to play a few songs at his book release party. Berry and his former band mates enjoyed the show, and that lead to a few informal sessions with the original four members, with drummer Mike Mulroy coming up from Virginia to visit during Christmas holiday and did some jamming with them.
“The band felt right. Playing together felt like it used to feel,” Berry said. “There’s a camaraderie, a musical synergy. It just all clicked. It felt like the band I remembered.”
It was an emotional event when Berry got together with the guys he used to spend all of his time with 30 years ago. “I liked those guys back then, and I like them now,” he said. “It’s interesting seeing how all our lives have changed.
Berry has lived through some major changes in the local music scene. At the time Stone Cross was in full bloom, audiences were open to hearing songs they were not familiar with. Stone Cross could play the funky (borderline disco) “Fire” by Ohio Players and it would go over well with a crowd of young hard rock fans, as long as the band played it well.
In his Mama Kicks outfit, audiences look to Berry to play something they would know the dance steps to. “Nowadays, everybody wants to hear something they’ve heard a million times,” Berry said.
