Next gig
T.A. Van Auker plays the Simon Kenton Inn, 4690 Urbana Road, from 6 to 9 p.m. March 9.
With the interview finished, Terry Van Auker expressed a sense of relief that I didn’t ask about recreational drug use.
I held up the 8-by-10 of his band taken in 1967, when he was 20.
“This,” I joked, “tells me everything I need to know.”
The photo looks to have been snapped the morning after a bad trip — except for the guy with the cupped hands in the striped pants, who looks as if he told his bandmates just before the shoot, “I told you guys you should’ve come with me last night to see the Maharishi.”
Now 65, Van Auker has found his own inner peace in the decades since a promising rock ’n’ roll career fizzled, leaving him with some amusing pictures and a few cool stories of opening for The Doors and The Who, but little else.
“I’m real fine with the direction my life took,” confessed Van Auker, a Springfield resident since 1982.
The direction his life took includes a 28-year marriage, two daughters and a successful woodworking business.
But, as Faulkner once said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
And, as Morrison once said, “People are strange.”
In the past year, an obscure album by Van Auker’s band, Owen-B, has found a new fanbase with devotees of vintage garage-rock and heavy psychedelic music.
Initially self-pressed in 1970 because no record label wanted it, the self-titled Owen-B album now is on CD thanks to the reissue label Gear Fab Records.
At year’s end, the Something Else! webzine called it one of the top reissues of 2011 — right alongside the long-awaited CD debut of The Left Banke’s 1967 debut album, “Walk Away Renee/Pretty Ballerina,” in addition to deluxe editions of material by The Kinks, Hollies and others.
“It’s kind of amazing and kind of neat,” said Van Auker, who played lead guitar. “I’m glad to see someone, somewhere kind of likes it.”
He knew that the one and only album by Owen-B — plus the two earlier singles they released with famed producer Wes Farrell — had a following.
It’s just that, by the time the new CD came out, the initial shock had subsided.
“I had seen this online in recent years going for $150,” he said, referring to the original vinyl. “I thought, ‘Wow, isn’t that amazing?’ Then I heard a rumor that someone had bootlegged a repressing of it.”
Owen-B released two singles nationally with Farrell before he lost interest when the band wanted to record an album of all-originals.
He went on to produce the Partridge Family’s music.
But what’s even stranger about the resurrection of the Owen-B album is the timing.
Just before the CD’s release, Van Auker coincidentally had started playing music in public again for the first time in almost 30 years.
Now a regular at the Brandeberry Winery and the Simon Kenton Inn, T.A. Van Auker’s solo act consists of “old boomer tunes, basically,” he said.
But when he gets around to playing, say, “Mrs. Robinson,” few people know he used to be on the same record label as Simon and Garfunkel themselves.
In fact, barely anyone in Springfield knows this side of Van Auker — that the guy who makes custom furniture, and whose craftsmanship is on display locally inside the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Westcott House, didn’t always cut just walnut and oak.
Once upon a time, he cut singles for the biggest record label in the world.
It all started in Mansfield, where Van Auker grew up.
Fresh from high school, the band that eventually changed its name to Owen-B — The Wildlife — came together in early ’66 with the Byrds and Stones as influences.
One night after a 1967 gig in Mansfield, John Walsh, a staff producer at Columbia Records, signed The Wildlife on the spot.
“We thought, ‘Oh my God, we’ve made it,’ ” Van Auker said. “But we had a lot of learning to do. That’s what it really meant.”
The contract called for three singles.
“They weren’t real high on supporting them,” he said. “They just threw them out there.”
But, from time to time, they’d pass Paul Simon in the hall during trips to New York to record.
“I was too intimated to say anything,” Van Auker said. “I just thought, ‘Holy crap, there’s Paul Simon.’ ”
The three singles came and went, and so did The Wildlife’s contract with Columbia.
They did, however, open two shows — one in a high school auditorium near Peoria, Ill., and another in Cleveland — for The Doors.
The very next weekend, The Doors made their infamous appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
“Morrison,” Van Auker recalled, “was not available for human interaction.”
On the other hand, keyboard player Ray Manzarek is remembered as a real nice guy.
Van Auker also has fond memories of The Who, whom they opened for at Denison University in 1969 as Owen-B.
“Boy, were they good,” he said.
The Who played “Tommy” in its entirety.
But on the drive home, the guys of Owen-B were practically rendered deaf, dumb and blind by what happened next.
“We’re sitting at a traffic light. It’s like 2 a.m.,” Van Auker said. “Up beside us pulls this station wagon, and someone was taking The Who to Port Columbus.
“Keith Moon’s face lit up. A couple of them got out of their car and did a Chinese fire drill around our van.”
Chiming in, Van Auker’s wife, Diane, summed it up best.
“Great moments in rock ’n’ roll history,” she quipped.
Contact this reporter at amcginn@coxohio.com.
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