In my years playing with the Desperados, we'd gone through three drummers and two guitar players. According to Rick Miller, Savvy had probably gone through nearly a hundred different members coming and going since he'd started the group back in his parent's garage while in high school. It was just nonsense to let ourselves tuck our tails and give up over the loss of one person -- no matter who they were. So we all promised to give it our best shot to see just what we could do.    

Rehearsals for the reorganized Savvy began on October 7th at the house on Bewley Drive that Dan shared with my old keyboardist from Desperados, Jim Wise. The house had a huge front room that we converted into a jam hall. I was a little apprehensive about rehearsing there because Dan had a cat, and I've always been extremely allergic to them. He promised to keep Emerson (his cat) out of the front room, and gave the area a major cleaning. I agreed to give it a try. I bought a complete set of new Boss effect pedals, and a nifty case for them to live in. I also bought a new Marshall amp and cabinet. The first song we worked up was "This Time" by Bryan Adams. Rich sang the lead vocal on it. We were impressed, and encouraged by the result. Next we worked up David Bowie's "Modern Love" and  "King of Pain" by the Police. I sang lead on those. We seemed to find a comfortable groove in the new music that was NOT going in the direction of the heavy metal headbanger stuff. Sure, we played a little bit of everything, but bands that didn't commit completely to the freaky wild look that went with it, just weren't pulling off the heavy stuff that was taking over the hard rock scene. 

The following day, we worked up another Bowie song, "China Girl", "Sharp Dressed Man" by ZZ Top, "Take Me Back" by Bryan Adams, and "One Thing" by The Fixx.  It was fun and exciting to be doing new material. There was also a great amount of pride between us, knowing we were going to pull this off after all. The more we rehearsed, the more anxious we were to get back on the stage. We had seven new songs in two day's time. I was so encouraged by our progress that I had to wonder if Ricky's departure might have been a blessing in disguise. Having only two guitar players meant that my cherry sunburst Les Paul would have to be more than just a prop from then on. I'd been playing rhythms and third harmony guitar leads when Ricky was in the band, but Marty apparently had his hands full with everyone else and rarely put me in the mix. (RJ would often joke that Marty was a two-handed soundman - one hand for Ricky's vocal and the other for his guitar.) Not being in the mix with the "old" Savvy, I'd found it a waste of time to improve. The new regime meant slacking would not be an option. I was playing better and having fun at the same time.  At the end of rehearsal, Rick Miller asked us if we thought we could be ready to make our big comeback on Halloween night at Savvy's. We were thrilled! Having a firm date would only help us work harder. We were two weeks away from taking back OUR stage. 

On Saturday, October 15th  I did a Ronald gig in Azle, in the rain. From there I went to visit my parents. Mom had sold the piano I'd bought her a few Christmases ago.  It turned out to have a cracked sounding board that couldn't be fixed. Besides, she never took an interest in learning to play like she thought she would. Chris had been working out with weights we'd installed in his room and his upper body was showing results. There was a lot going on at the home place and I stayed longer than I'd expected.  

When I got home, Rhonda called. She was really upset that I'd failed to call her at 6pm as we'd planned. I told her about my day and that I'd stayed longer than expected at my parent's house, but she wasn't buying it. She basically told me off and hung up. I took a hot bath and put the conversation out of my mind. She called back later to apologize. I invited her over. The Dallas Cowboys played the Eagles the following day, winning their 7th game in a row! New quarterback Danny White was doing a fine job of filling Roger Staubach's shoes. Roger had retired in 1980. 

We had another rehearsal scheduled for Monday, but got the news that Dan's cat, Emerson, had been run over and killed. Dan was taking it pretty hard so we cancelled. Emerson, named after keyboard great, Keith Emerson, had meant a lot to Dan. RJ and I went over and tried to cheer him up. Ricky came dragging in from Houston after a week of playing Rocky's Club. According to Ricky, they'd been a huge success and were booked back again soon for $3,600 for a week. Good for them!

I was having trouble getting my McDonald's checks again, so I drove over to the main office in Dallas to see if I could stir things up. I came away with a big check from an entire month's worth of work. That money came at a critical time. I was having a hard time staying financially afloat after buying the equipment needed for the band's comeback. Somehow I managed though. If I could hold out for just two more weeks I'd have a steady income again. A band called Info played at Savvy's. They sounded great but could have used a makeover. At least a look is easier to fix than lack of ability to play. Their singer was really good.   

There was frightening news from the Middle East. Back in 1982 the Lebanese government asked the US to establish a peacekeeping force between Muslims and Christians in Beirut. The Muslim forces didn't want the US involved and often attacked them with artillery and mortar fire. On October 23rd, 1983 a large Islamic Jihad truck loaded with 2,500 pounds of TNT crashed into the main gate of the U.S. Marine Headquarters in Beirut killing 241 USA Army, Marine and Navy servicemen and wounding 81. Only two minutes later another Islamic Jihad truck packed with explosives crashed into a French base two miles away killing 58 soldiers. (It would later be determined that the attacks had been carried out by Hezballah with the help of Syrian intelligence and financed by Iran.)

The day after the attacks in Lebanon, there was drama at home, too. Ricky broke his collar bone playing full-contact sandlot football - without pads. It was amazing that he hadn't been hurt earlier. It only took one play for me to learn my lesson. That was how my problems with my knee started two years earlier. It was going to be interesting to see how his injury would impact the Ricky Lynn Project - if at all. 

There was more. In the early-morning hours of October 25th, United States armed forces invaded the tiny, obscure, southern Caribbean island of Grenada, freeing its 110,000 inhabitants from a murderous, expansionist regime. A terrorist style Marxist group had overthrown the government and executed the country's legitimate leaders. Cuban military units put up a tough fight for several days, but as our invading troops grew to over 7,000, they surrendered, or retreated into the countryside.  Miraculously, the US suffered only 19 casualties, and the enemy lost only 49. Our nations flags flew at half mast. Within only a few months, Grenada would be holding free elections, and on the one year anniversary of the conflict, President Ronald Reagan would be welcomed there with boundless enthusiasm. Thank God someone was taking care of the big problems so we wouldn't have to be bothered as we put our little band back together. Sadly, that seemed to be the sentiment at the time, but we didn't take our fallen soldier's sacrifices lightly.

After only 3 weeks of rehearsing, we had worked up close to 50 songs. Most were popular songs playing on the radio, but we also revived about 10 of our originals from the Ricky era. I found myself hanging out with RJ a bit more since Ricky had left the band. Ricky had been sort of a buffer, or comfort zone that separated RJ and me from each other. We were like teenage girls; you can never have three at a sleepover or there's trouble! But two work out just fine. Now RJ and I seemed to be the "two" for a change, which was a nice throwback to our earlier days. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out the latest computer innovations, and downloading programs by modem from other computers - a primitive precursor to the Internet. Things didn't always work that easily for us though. I'm sure there were times that we must have looked like two monkeys trying to figure out how to split an atom. 

During a rare moment of vulnerability, as we were huddled around an Atari disk drive, RJ told me he hated being called "RJ". The nickname had been coined around the time we started playing with Savvy, and he had always seemed to embrace it. He understood that it was a little too late in the game to try and undo it. 

In local rock news, we learned that the lead singer from Cheetah had replaced Rick Cunningham in Rage. I went to check them out and they sounded really hot. With Marty now on the road running sound for Ricky, we were in the market for a new soundman. We were really lucky to find a great one right when we needed him. His name was Dave Davis, and he was a Godsend for us.  Dave mixed the entire band, rather than just focusing on Ricky.  He was a very congenial and warm person who was a true technical minded kind of guy. Dave clearly understood the sound business from an educated standpoint. He was approachable and the customers liked that. Marty, while really a sweetheart at his core, had layer upon layer of a sort of "bad-dude biker" persona going for him. He liked being scary and intimidating. Many Savvy patrons steered clear of Marty. 

Dave Davis, our new sound man.

The light man position had not been difficult to fill at all.  "Little" Brian had been helping out for a while with lights, setup, tear down, and whatever else needed to be done. With Marty, Rabbit, and David all gone, Little Brian took over as chief roadie. He was one of the most pleasant people I'd ever met at Savvy's. The guy was always cheerful, and never had a bad thing to say about anyone. He reminded me of a miniature version of Rich Mauch. And I had something else in common with Little Brian. He had dated Rhonda for a while before we started going out.  

Little Brian, our new chief roadie
and light man.

Halloween night finally arrived, and we couldn't have been more ready! It was the first Halloween gig that I'd played that we didn't dress up in costumes - unless you consider rock and roll stage clothes to be costumes too. Our plan was to come back with a fresh new look. Gone would be the rainbow of Spandex pants across the stage. No more bandanas, either. We weren't going to even try to get into the new trends of all out wildly teased and sprayed hair, tattoos, and heavy eye makeup.  We were too nice to be real bad boys, and our fans knew it.  After deliberating over it for some time, I decided to go with more of the modern David Bowie "pop" look. We'd all agreed that was wanted to be taken seriously on our first night back. [Hard to explain, and I haven't found any photos or video of that night to substantiate what I think I was wearing. We'd been so focused on learning the songs and coming back strong that we overlooked documenting the event. Perhaps some photos of that night will surface eventually and I can add them to these pages.] 

The audience's response was far more positive than we could have ever hoped for! Our fans had grown extremely tired of all the old stuff, same thing night after night, so just the fact that we had mostly all new material gained huge points for us right off the bat. Dave Davis had the best sound mix ever to blast through Savvy's Nightclub, and we had a roaring full capacity crowd on hand to appreciate his handiwork. The five Savvy boys were in prime form, proud, and back in our element. The gauntlet had been thrown down, and we knew we would have to work really hard to keep things at that level. No slacking off. No getting complacent and lazy. 

A week went by and we were astounded by the number of compliments we'd received. Ironically, a great deal of people were telling us that we actually sounded "cleaner" for some reason.  I'm sure Dave Davis had a lot to do with that. We weren't kidding ourselves by any means. We knew that by losing Ricky, we'd lost a major appendage, as well as a favorite character in our ensemble. But while Ricky no doubt had the largest following, the other five of us had our own followings as well. And when those five followings were added up, we still had quite a crowd happy to see us come back home. 

We weren't at war with the Project, but we were definitely in competition with them. Once we were back on track at Savvy's, we had a definite edge. No matter how much more someone may have preferred Ricky's band, a lot of our customers just didn't want to have to drive all over the state to track them down when they were ready to party - when all they had to do was drive up the street -- or across town -- to the club they called their own. A lot of the Savvy's Nightclub regulars enjoyed both bands for a while, but eventually Ricky would have to cultivate a new fan base all his own. And that's what he did. Oddly enough, there were some fans who seemed to feel betrayed by Ricky's departure. It was like when an avid sports fan's favorite player gets traded away, or leaves for another team because of money. It was like that with some people, and many of them had strong opinions about it. I'm sure Ricky was hearing a similar chorus of people pumping him full of rhetoric about how much better he was without us. That's the music business. Tit for tat. Ricky was a dynamic, incredible performer who didn't have to waste any time worrying about us.

We'd worked extremely hard towards having a successful comeback and we couldn't have been more pleased with the results. We were proud of our accomplishments and thankful to have the club to come back to. We were appreciative that our fans waited around for us and gave us another chance. And we were completely thrilled with our good fortune of finding Dave Davis when we did. We knew we had come back strong. Someone else apparently thought so too. In fact, that "someone" thought we sounded so good that he sent Jerry Hudson to talk to Rick Miller about the possibility of hiring Dave Davis away from us! That really stirred things up again. Perhaps more than anything else to date.  Poor Marty. It appeared his head was allegedly on the chopping block already. 

The new Savvy lineup:  Rick Miller, Steve Jones, RJ Jones, Rich Mauch, and in front, Dan Kostura.
This was actually our old album cover photo with RLG digitally removed, and a new color logo added. I did this using Photoshop on 2/5/2006.

NEXT CHAPTER: Lightning Strikes Again and Again

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