AK-47s

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Ya know, I actually could have been the singer in the AK-47s. Russ DeGidio was supposed to handle the vocals, but about 4 days before their first gig, he split town.

Bill DeGidio (Robert Conn) called me and asked if I wanted to sing...

I think the first show was on a Monday night and I had just gotten hired at some shop and my first night was 2nd shift on that Monday night. Bad career move in retrospect.

Anyhow, I suggested to Bill that he take over the vocals instead of bass and call a friend of mine, Randy Primozic, and try him at bass. It worked out. Still haunts me that I could have been on that now legendary Cleveland Confidential EP. Bill was a god.

A lot of well deserved credit goes to Mike Hudson for inspiring (or fucking up) a bunch of us youngsters at the time to start bands, but Bill was definitely the major influence on those of us from the eastside.

At one point, Bill safety pinned an American flag (a small one, about 12"x10") to the back of his leather and had written in black magic marker a bunch of band names on it. Then one Sunday afternoon he sat in his garage unleashing a guitar attack upon his quiet conservative Mentor neighborhood.

The cops arrived and Bill ended up arrested for defacing the flag. Another AK-47 moment was when Randy and I were near a Gold Circle Dept. store in Willoughby Hills. It was about 2:00 in the afternoon and for some stupid reason we pulled up next to the front of the building and I got out and spray painted the bands name on the brick storefront. We ended up getting nabbed on that one as someone had turned in his plate numbers. We sorta got out of it but not before we had to wire brush the paint off and also endure a long lecture from a cop who had been in Nam and kept asking us if we knew what the hell an AK-47 was.