Buffalo - Newcastle
RAM - Feb 77 No 51

It was one of those Saturdays where the clouds covered the sun by the humidity pressed against you with the stickiness of fairy floss, and every time you moved you broke out in a sheen of sweat. So here we are burning down the Newcastle expressway in Dave Tice's Jaguar ... yes, yes ... a genuine 6-cylinder-twin-overhead-cam JAGUAR and Dave is explaining the hit and run battle of keeping up payments on the thing. It's not all high payments for short hours in rock'n'roll y'know. In fact, as Dave explains it, Buffalo has always operated pretty much at a loss, culminating with an abortive support tour with Ritchie Blackmore late last year that cost the Buffs thousands of dollars and only garnered them slight appreciation into the bargain. Nevertheless, it's a genuine Jag-u-ah and we are burning rubber down the Newcastle Expressway and Dave right now is switching on the cool, cool air-conditioning. Whhhhoooooooooosssshhh!!! A hot wind roars through the vents and damn near scorches our eyebrows off. "Guess it's not working today." Explains Dave unnecessarily. Just one of those days I guess. A few hours later we're at Merewether Beach watching the 2NX guys move the stage from one end of a paddock to another. The problem being the end they'd originally set it up had no power supply. The beach is near deserted due to severe lack of sunshine, but about 500 punters dutifully await the commencement of festivities. The sea looks the colour of regurgitated pea soup and the sky resembles a very messy bouillabaisse. I look at my beach towel sadly, it won't be used today. About two hours later Buffalo go on. They are good. The latest line-up of Tice, Jimmy Economou (drums), Chris Turner (guitar) and Ross Sims (bass) have a fine understanding, albeit their current state of under-rehearsal shows through. They do a mixture of material stretching back to their second album (Shylock) to heavy duty Stones re-treads (Little Queenie, Star Star) to material from their fourth album Mother's Choice, to selections from an up-coming album Buffalo V. Shylock still wears well but the big best moments are the new material.

RAM Feb 1977 No 51

Chris Turner, guitar player with Buffalo, has announced his intention of going ahead with a solo project. Chris denies any rumours of a split in the Buffalo ranks. His own project, called Ten Year Tour, involves a solo album and a show which will be built around his own guitar playing. His individual activities will not detract from his work with Buffalo. Buffalo's latest album is called Buffalo V, and features Turner's playing. The album has been recorded but won't be released till March. All is not well between Buffalo and Phonogram, their record company. After Buffalo V is released the group will be signing with a new recording labelŠ

RAM 3 March 25 1977 No 54

Buffalo's Dave Tice has left the country to join a British band called Count Bishop as "guest" lead singer. They¹re an established London group who had a successful EP out last year. Count Bishop have been offered a tour of Britain and Europe with the Climax Blues Band and they Dave along on the tour and an album. Buffalo is not disbanding. The members are taking a vacation to see how their solo endeavours go. Lead guitarist Chris Turner is working on a solo with an act, bass player Ross Sims. The band may or may both get back together, it al depends, you know. Unknown Buffalo's singer Dave Tice left for London last week to fill his "guest singer" spot with the Count Bishops, an English blues-based band Š The Count Bishops have been given the support spot on a British tour by John Cale, the Welsh former member of The Velvet Underground. The member of The Underground who has gained the greatest recognition is Lou Reed; Cale has always had a cult following, but now his peculiar talents are beginning to be more widely recognised. Meanwhile Buffalo V, a new album will be released shortly ...

Last charge from Buffalo

Average Rock'n'Roller Buffalo. Vertigo. 6357104 $6.95
You can struggle for a long time and make a lot of albums in the Australian rock business and still not get anywhere. Buffalo, who started out as a rough middleweight metal band six years ago and who just got better at playing rock'n'roll have now split up. Dave Tice has gone off to England to try out his vocal chords, leaving Turner and Sims to start up a new group.

Rock With Tom Zelinka

Unknown

Last month one of the censored paragraphs that didn't appear on this page was a story on Buffalo and their Plea of Hope. The story was that the band had been waiting some 12 weeks or so for Countdown to give their latest single a visual plug. And if Countdown wouldn't, members of the Buffalo Kan Club threatened to poison Melbourne's water supply and the band were willing to rape anybody still standing. Finally, after a word or two from Buffalo record pluggers, Countdown graced Rollin', the underground disc in question, with a screening to the world. Almost. Countdown played an excerpt from the single. Guitarist Chris Turner went down on his hands and knees and dutifully thanked the Lord. And added: "If it's not too much to ask, Lord, how about the single in its entirety next. Huh, Lord?"

Unknown

Two Buffalos were given a bit-part in the television series Young Doctors. A one-line walk-out scene carrying their guitar cases and saying "Goodnight" to the club manager.

BUFFALO - Sometimes You Really Know It Just Aint Fair
RAM 17.6.77

That's one thing you get used to, especially when you work within the fringes of the industry - tales of groups existing on near zero money, in debt to their eyeballs. But the rock bizz is like most others, the spotlight is on the successes outfront and the rearguard is left to carry on as best it can. I can remember a Sherbet with four national Top Five hits under their belt being deadly serious about pooling their money for fish'n'chips: and yesterday I walked into The Saints house, them having sold about 20,000 albums and many more singles (mostly in England), and they're living in a cold water flat with no money to buy heaters and no money to pay the electricity bill if they did. Now Buffalo were a band who went through six years of playing for an ultimate reward of very little appreciation and an overall loss of money. And the really sour thing is they made a lot of good quality music. Actually they were amongst the foremost pioneers of heavy metal music in Oz. Dave Tice told me the whole story one night when his emotional floodgates burst open, or rather, he let it out in a retrospective bewildered, sad, emotional outpour one night as he was driving us back to Sydney after a Buffalo gig in Newcastle.

It wasn't a 'we did so much and got so little' self-piteous rave it was nobler, more sad than that. He was describing how the band had change and turmoil and opposition to become a consistently better playing outfit each time and only to have a further buck of shit poured over them. In the early days, back in '70, the group had guitarist John Baxter and were one of the first groups in Oz to have picked up on the sort of blitzkriegoid, berserkoid riff-erama Black Sabbath had taken over the threshold of last restraint. In those days radio reacted to heavy metal just like it's reacting to new wave rock, now a strict hands-off policy. Buffalo used to put on their own dances, creating their own circuit just like the New Wave bands are doing now. They attracted a crowd of rowdy 'don¹t give none of that commercial bullshit, give me music so hard'n'eavy I can feel it in me backbone.' Sure they showed their influences - but they were the fastest heavy metal rifferama machine in town. "When I first saw Black Sabbath" says Steve Phillips a rock scribe of the time "Buffalo were supporting them. By the time Black Sabbath came on, I thought I'd already seen them." It was with John Baxter the group had what seemed their best times. A gold record, several national tours, two other albums that reached sales of over 10,000 each. They also had the reputation of being the most obnoxious, most brutish, most belligerently dumb group in the country. "And it just wasn't true." Said Dave Tice on that drive from Newcastle. "There was a writer in Sydney for Go Set called Stephen McLean who distorted what he wrote about us, so if our audiences jumped and screamed it was a blood bath." "He wasn't the only one ... radio stations would ask us to play their concerts for nothing, then cut the power half way through the set because they'd freak out about the noise. And when we'd go in for interviews they'd say things like "You're animals aren't you?" "So we said 'Yeah, we're animals' ... It pushed us to being tougher than we were ... 'OK! If you think we're animals we'll be worse than you think we are.' "It was stupid" said Tice with the bewilderment of retrospect, "it wasn¹t what we really were Š well Jimmy (Jimmy Economu the drummer) could get pretty well off his head, but I'm pretty quiet myself ... the thing is, we got this audience of kids who really identified with the outcast image ... incredible people some of them. Fifteen and they'd have run away from home and be living in cellars and some of them had Buffalo albums - that¹s the only things they owned, they didn't have a stereo to play them on. Kids who'd been driven out of their homes by drunken fathers Š girls who lived off what they could find in the rubbish bins at the markets Š that was the side Buffalo saw all the time, the other side." And then Baxter left, and the heavy metal blitzkrieg was replaced by the slide guitar boogie of guitarist Norm Roue. He was then augmented by Karl Taylor and pretty soon afterwards Norm, brain damaged beyond belief, left. The group released a disjointed album, Mother¹s Choice that showed the band had dropped blitzkrieg heavy metal but hadn't decided what to replace it with yet. Soon afterwards Karl Taylor was replaced by Chris Turner who was then supplemented by Colin Stead. Stead left, then Peter Wells, long serving bass player, split to form Rose Tattoo. He was replaced by Ross Sims. "You can only beat your head against a brick wall for so long" says Tice, "we weren¹t making any money out of gigging and some people just said "I'm giving up'." Finally Tice gave up. The drummer of the English group Count Bishops came over for a holiday: saw Buffalo, liked Tice, knew the band in England needed a new vocalist, took back some tapes. Bingo! Tice was offered the job. He accepted. "The thing I¹ve always wanted was for Buffalo to work out." he says. "I put everything into that for seven years and to see it all Š" Buffalo did have achievements. They were a much needed focal point for heard, heavy rockin¹ in this country for many years. To some a small minority admittedly, they were standard bearers and they took the job seriously, never let their supporters down. And they finally mutated into a band that produced an album called Buffalo V which is just now released and which covers a wide range of rock fields, most of them excellently. Tice bought around a cassette dub of Buffalo V some months before he left for England and frankly I was amazed. There's a song called Hotel Ladies that builds to an astonishingly powerful climax: and a ballad called Sailor that's beautiful in its stark, roughedged presentation, and a power chord song called Rhythm Madness which thunks dementedly against the wall. And there are others, some not as tight and cohesive, but overall it's an album that does the band proud - a real testament to a spirit of 'Fuck you we can do it after all.' And the horrible thing is, I can see it's probably going to suffer the same fate as Buffalo itself. Something good being buried. Sure there'll be ads in the music papers for it (maybe in this paper, more likely than not) but with the band not being here to play it in front of crowds, it stands a good chance of being placed in the back shelves of record stores for a time then disappearing altogether. And even if the band were here to get them to play to enough people to effectively promote the album would cost many thousands of dollars that just aren¹t there to be had. For the economics of the record bizz are heavily weighted against bands without a top notch track record these days. So much so, that Garth Porter of Sherbet had said if he had to do it all again, he¹d just not start ...he'd join a bank not a band. And I can't help feeling a bit helplessly sad about it y'know. 'Cos even though I know there are hundred of records released every year that are good enough for success, but end up being discarded when someone has laid the whole process of disillusionment in front of you, and they aren't angry, just sad and a bit lost, that's when it starts to gnaw at you too.
Anthony O Grady

Average Rock and Roller Buffalo
Vertigo 6357 104 Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977

Not being one to shut the stable door after the horse has bolted I'm not going to bemoan the passing of the now defunct Buffalo. However it's good to see this posthumous platter freely available because it removes any spectre of "the legendary lost Buffalo album" and puts their career in the right historical perspective. There are some surprise here for those who would quickly write them off. Unfortunately most cuts bring them the dubious accolade of top of the twelve-bar heap, though their dreariness is often relieved by some surprisingly pointed lyrics. While the title track flatters itself to aspire to the level of average the irony behind its wry lyrics make it a strong statement, while the bitterness behind "Bad News" shows that a cliched twelve-bar melody needn't accept cliched lyrics. Elsewhere, 'Rollin'" has a C&W swagger that brings to mind a saloon scene from some B-grade Western while the attempted knockout punch of the three-part "Hero Suite" is merely a Santana Caravanserai duplicate merged into a hand-me-down Sabboid riff exercise. However the fadeout is really neat and you can have alot of fun trying to work out how they divide two distinct sections into three movements. Ultimately it's left to the ballads to score the points. Rich vocals from Dave Tice over relaxingly peaceful acoustic guitars raise "Sailor" to prominence but it's "Hotel Ladies" that's the epic. Probably the best Australian single of 1976 (now inexplicably deleted), "Hotel Ladies" explores a direction that had they pursued it could have taken Buffalo to the top. A darkly brooding country blues reminiscent of Neil Young at his most powerful, it builds via a clucking wah-wah solo a la Steely Dan to a beautifully heavy climax without ever blowig apart the tension or losing the original dynamic. It's a forgotten modern Australian classic which transcends their categorisation and ensures that Buffalo bow out with at least one memorable moment.