Thank You Larry

Jat Storey

11 years ago

A good thing happened to me this week which has been several weeks in the making.

Back in July, as you 1537 obsessives will doubtless remember, I posted about one of my favourite hard rock bands from the early 90’s, Rochester’s finest, Uncle Sam. I always thought they were a great band who just didn’t get the breaks they deserved, Heaven Or Hollywood was a great debut and their follow-up Letters From London was a mini-masterpiece. Best of all though, when I saw Uncle Sam in Manchester we got to meet Larry Miller, Bill Purol and Dave Gentner, well we got to wake Larry up and they were lovely to us, signing (and biting!) a couple of LPs.

Last month I got an email from Larry Miller who had somehow stumbled across my blog and telling me it was ‘neat that someone captured the neatest 25 days of my life’ (their UK tour). I was and remain rather blown away by this, this was Larry Miller emailing me to say thank you! I remember him being a real gentleman when we met him and he remains so today, in fact he very kindly sent me a copy of Uncle Sam’s third album Fourteen Women … Fifteen Days, which I’d only heard about when doing a bit of research back in July.

I’m very grateful too, not only for the CD which was co-produced by Kim Fowley and is a much darker set of tunes than any of theirs that had gone before, but for the chance to have a bit of an email chat with someone I really thought was great. Larry told me that Bill Purol had passed away, which I was very sorry to learn and that Dave Gentner is currently in a band called the Veins and also that he doesn’t play any more, which I think is a shame.

If you make some excellent music and play some great gigs and treat the people you meet along the way kindly then you’re going to find the odd (very odd!) person along the way who remembers you and what you did with real affection. So Mr Miller, thank you for then and for now, and whatever you’re involved in now good luck with it all!

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to rock!