![]() This Barracudas was the band that cut the album "A Plane View of the Barracudas" for Justice Records, recently reissued on CD. We knew this was a great opportunity for Ben, so there were no hard feelings. Ben Luck, our piano player, left the band to join The Barracudas. But, as it turned out, our beer party was the key to victory. The Spiders repertoire consisted of "the first three Rolling Stones albums", according to Joe and we were pretty worried when we heard them. It included The Outlaws, whose organ player, Butch Owens, would soon join our band, and a band that we had never heard of called The Spiders, whose guitar player, Joe Sheets, will figure prominently in the rest of this story. The competition at this contest was pretty stiff. We let It slip out that, if we won, we were throwing a beer-party afterwards, and to and behold, we won I could not attend the party, being only twelve years old at the time, but I'm sure a rousing good time was had by all and the porcelain was hugged by many who attended. The contest was to be decided by votes cast by the paying customers. Our first taste of success was winning the local Battle of the Bands at Skateland in Sandston. ![]() This was the Line-up that actually started to get paying gigs on a semi-regular basis. The original line-up of this band was Bob Holmes on rhythm guitar, Kenny Roberts on bass and sax, Ben Luck on piano, Gray McCalley on drums and myself on lead guitar. We were, at various times, The Crusaders, The Resonators, finally settling on The Hustlers in the spring of 1967. To make a long story somewhat shorter, we went through several personnel changes and name changes. I went back to playing baseball and forgot about playing music until Gray called one Saturday about a year later and asked if I wanted to practice. That first primitive incarnation of the band didn't last very long. The reason that I mention ail of this is because this was the day I met Gray McCalley Gray and I together became the nucleus of Short Cross. I don’t remember, but I'm sure it was a wonderful sound. Since none of us had even seen a bass guitar up dose, I played bass on my Stella acoustic guitar, tuned down an octave, with a cheap microphone stuck in the sound hole. I was just beginning to learn how to play guitar and they needed a bass player so I was recruited to play bass. I must go back to the day in 1965 that my father introduced me to the son of a friend who was playing in a band in Sandston, Virginia.
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