Jim Schoenfeld:

RAININ’ HARD IN ‘FRISCO

As told to: Dave Bidini

Joe Crozier was the coach in my rookie year. Before an 11-day road trip out to the coast, Joe told me to bring my guitar. We were fighting for the playoffs and he wanted to keep the guys loose. I remember sitting in the airport playing “Taxi” by Harry Chapin. The guys loved that song. Pretty soon, they were all gathered around the guitar singing, “It was rainin’ hard in ‘Frisco…” and, because Joe had an eye for things that weren’t the norm, he figured that having some monkey bringing his guitar on the road would help the team play better. And it did. A while later, an interviewer in Buffalo asked me if I had any hobbies and I told him that I played guitar.

When you’re a kid, everything seems like fun.

A local disc jockey, Danny Nebrith, read the story and said, “How’d you like to go into a recording studio and make an album?” When you’re a kid, everything seems like fun, so I went down, demoed some stuff– you didn’t really need a great voice if you were a Buffalo Sabre in the 70s– and later on, we brought in some studio musicians and did the record. But I wasn’t the only one: Jim Lorentz did a record, Rick Dudley did one, too. We were a young, exciting, wild team, and these albums were a natural extension of that. In the jacket of the record, someone wrote that it was a goal of mine to make an album and appear on the Tonight Show, but that wasn’t true. I was twenty-years-old and it was fun. Thankfully, nobody owns turntables anymore.