|
CHATHAM – It’s lonely at night in that section of Fairmount Avenue near the overpass. The parking lot at the Chatham Fish and Game Club is barren come the cold weather, and a beat cop is sometimes the only soul out there.
The caretaker of Chatham Fish and Game is a man named John Boccardi. A mailman who has worked out of the Chatham Post Office for 24 years, he has a route in the Wickham Woods section of the township. At night, he opens the doors of the big hardwood-floored ballroom in the fish and game building, and members of the local bridge club file in. There are events scheduled throughout the week in the stylish old club.
But on Wednesday nights, the ballroom plays headquarters to Boccardi’s rock group, Our Mailman’s Band, and the sound coming down the back stairs and out the screen door is a woman’s voice pouring emotion through guitars and drums.
The group has been together for about a year and on Sept. 11 played at the Chatham Borough Fire Department’s unveiling of the 9-11 memorial in Reasoner Park. It consists of Boccardi on drums, Chris Bukata of Chatham Township on guitar, John Grande of Millburn on bass and vocals, Carl Hovi of Chatham Township on saxophone, keyboard and vocals, Mark Sande-Kerback of Chatham Township on guitar and vocals and Noel Thompson of Maplewood on vocals and percussion.
The story of the band is the story of a mailman who met other people in the town, other professionals who are musicians, some on his mail route and others at the club, who want to play the enduring songs they learned years ago.
Cowsill Comes To Chatham
It is Tuesday, Nov. 9. Tonight is special because Bukata’s friend is in town and wants to jam with the band.
That man is Bob Cowsill, one of the founding members with his three brothers of the Newport, R.I. pop group the Cowsills, whose history hovers somewhere between Chad and Jeremy and Frankie Valli. One of their biggest original hits was a song called “The Rain, the Park and Other Things.”
There have been numerous revivals of the Cowsills since the early days, including an oldies tour with the Grass Roots (“Live for Today”), and the Turtles (“Happy Together”). In 1998 Bob Cowsill released an album of original songs called “Global,” and in October the brothers reunited at Fenway Park to sing at the third game of the Boston-New York American League Championship Series.
The big crowds are far from Chatham on this night when Cowsill starts playing with Our Mailman’s Band around 9 p.m. Flanked by Bukata and Sande-Kerback, Thompson has center stage, belting the lyrics to Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow.”
Boccardi handles the drums.
Cowsill is seated on a stool with an acoustic guitar on his knee. The mop-topped heartthrob from the 1960s is gone and in his place is a gray haired old gunslinger finger- picking in the shadows.
The group heads off on a psychedelic balloon tour of hits from the early 1970s, with Cowsill and Thompson exchanging lead vocal honors and Bukata and Sande-Kerback interfacing guitar parts.
A little later they start playing “Get Together” by the Youngbloods and as Cowsill starts in with the lyrics, the bearded, placid Boccardi looks like a wise man meditating at the drums.
Boccardi grew up in Parsippany and took to banging on drums in the Boy Scouts. His mother decided that was an activity best confined to Lake Hiawatha, however, and kept the drummer far from the family china cabinet.
But Boccardi persisted, borrowing drums and pieces of drum sets wherever he could.
By the time the mid-seventies rolled around country rock was big. This was the era of the Allman Brothers, the Grateful Dead and Lynyrd Skynyrd, and tucked away in a little dive club called the Stone Pony, some guy named Bruce Springsteen was pounding vocals at the Jersey Shore with Southside Johnny and Little Steven.
“I formed a band with this guy who went to Vietnam,” said Boccardi. “I played with him before he went to Vietnam and afterwards.”
They called themselves the Haystack Band, and they got good and the gig dates started pouring in: resorts in the Adirondacks, Pocono’s, clubs down the shore, all the big colleges.
“I met my wife,” said Boccardi. “My father realized I was serious about music because we had people driving trucks to move our equipment. In the beginning we had nothing.” Finally, they had something.
But rock and roll keeps a rhythm that must be anathema to domestic tranquility, and the group came apart eventually, the band members going their separate ways to get married and raise families.
Boccardi’s drums gathered dust in his mother’s attic for 15 years. He had three children, divorced, surfaced at the Chatham Fish and Game Club where he’s caretaker nights, walks to work at the post office days and has kept that routine for seven years.
He started playing drums again four years ago, and while playing with Thompson in the fish and game ballroom one night last year, he caught the attention of another 40-something rock and roll guitarist, Sande-Kerback of Chatham Township.
Sande-Kerback had been looking for band mates for a while. It happens that he takes his pet shiatsus to a veterinarian’s office in New Providence. It was there that he asked Dr. Bukata if the vet played guitar.
“I’ve been playing since I was seven,” Bukata recalled. “But I hadn’t played in a band since high school.” That is, until he met Bob Cowsill through his brother some ten years ago. Cowsill and Bukata played at a Los Angeles club two Christmas’ back and Bukata loved it.
He gets one night a week away from his practice, and on that night, Wednesday, Sande-Kerback took him over to the fish and game club to meet Boccardi. Boccardi met Hovi on his mail route. And so they built the band.
Playing with Bob Cowsill, a legitimate star, is a thrill for all of them and he looks delighted, too, singing “Mustang Sally.”.
And as for the lone cop who prowls the beat on Fairmount Wednesday nights, sometimes Sergeant Chris Tomaino walks up the back stairs, joins the group and sings along: another member of the community, a civil servant finding harmony with Our Mailman’s Band.
|
