How to go
Who: Scram with special guest One Eyed Jack
When: 8 p.m. Nov. 27
Where: Casey's, 2205 Park Road
Tickets: $12; available in advance at Kincaid's is Music, Dream Merchant and Sonie's School of Dance. The band also will be collecting food that night for the Second Harvest Food Bank.
SPRINGFIELD — Memorial Hall was the Parthenon — the temple where, so many lifetimes ago, five young gods commanded adoration with a metallic thunder.
Now Memorial Hall is an ancient ruin, and the notion that a local band could pack the place, not once, but three times, on its own seems like the stuff of myth.
’Twas no myth, though — Scram did once walk the land.
But almost 30 years after people stopped believing in Scram like they stopped believing in Odin or Zeus, the young gods are set to return.
They just don’t look like gods anymore.
“At one time,” lead guitarist Dole Shaffer explained, “we all had hair.”
The day after Thanksgiving will see the first full-fledged reunion of Scram since 1982, the year the hard-rockin’ Springfield quintet broke apart under the weight of its own ego.
There have been previous, so-called Scram reunions — most notably a show at Casey’s restaurant in 2003 that drew 1,000 people — but they weren’t like this.
“We didn’t know what else to call ourselves,” lead singer Kenny Aronhalt confessed.
This will mark the first time that all five members heard on the band’s one and only album — Aronhalt, Shaffer, guitarist Alex Rossitto, bassist Jeff Sandow and drummer Doug Gibson — will be back together on one stage.
They’re all now in their 50s. A couple of them are grandfathers.
At this point in their lives, ego has gone the way of the male perm. It’s hard to admit you ever had one, an embarrassment of youth.
Drummer Gibson doesn’t even have the same pancreas.
Close to a decade ago, he underwent a double-organ transplant (he got a new kidney, too) that finally ended a 30-year battle with diabetes.
“I was the one guy who was always sober,” he joked. “Ninety-nine percent of the time.”
They were never friends.
“A working relationship is what we had,” Sandow said.
But this is the way it always should’ve been.
“It’s like an amusement park ride,” Aronhalt said. “Your cheeks hurt from having so much fun.”
Officially, the reason for the reunion is to celebrate the recent release of the band’s self-titled 1980 album on CD by Retrospect Records, a Las Vegas-based hard-rock reissue label that seeks out bands like Scram — the ones that slipped through the cracks.
“The right person didn’t hear us,” Shaffer recalled.
The right person, however, felt they deserved a second chance. One last opportunity to put things right.
This is where the gods start to talk of God.
For a band that once worshipped at the altar of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, rehearsal now begins with a prayer.
“It’s not by happenstance. There’s some reason, otherworldly, we got back together,” said Aronhalt, who’s now a praise-and-worship leader at a church in Olive Hill, Ky. “There’s some healing that needed to be done.”
Ironically, it fell to Shaffer, who admittedly was heartbroken when he was kicked out of the band in 1981, to remaster the “Scram” LP for CD.
“This is God’s will,” Shaffer said. “Spiritually, we needed to discover each other again.”
Shaffer, who bluntly recalls that his phone never rang for the 2003 show, took it upon himself to get Scram back together.
“I’m like a little kid again,” he said. “I’m all giddy inside to get to play with my pals again.”
But don’t let the God talk scare you — the band’s famous Zeppelin covers still sound like they were forged by pagan hands atop Mount Olympus.
“Within the first couple measures,” Sandow said, “we were on it.”
The passage of time, however, has allowed the members to look back, objectively, at what went wrong.
Not long after forming in 1979, Scram was supposed to be the band that made it.
“We were of age musically and came together at the right time,” Sandow said.
“We hit it hard,” Gibson added. “All we did was practice.”
It paid off.
The band could fill Memorial Hall whenever it wanted.
In 1980, Toto reneged on an invitation to have Scram open for them at Memorial Hall when too many people showed up to see, well, Scram.
But in the end, Scram didn’t even make it past Reagan’s first term.
“A lot of us didn’t want it bad enough deep down inside,” Aronhalt said. “It was too comfortable to be home. It takes every single member to have that burning desire.”
The frontman carries his own burden.
“I could sound like Robert Plant. I could sound like Jim Morrison,” Aronhalt said. “Those aren’t necessarily good things when it comes to writing your own music. You have to find yourself. I never did. I never did get to find my real voice.”
The other guys have complaints of their own — namely that the album, recorded and mixed in mere days, always sounded lifeless, thanks to the band’s relentless practicing.
The band could play its material with “fierce accuracy,” Sandow said, “to the point where it was sterile.”
Things have only improved with age.
“Now,” he said, “it’s with feeling.”
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0352 or amcginn@coxohio.com.
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