By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
The Welders have withstood the test of time. How much time, no one’s sure.
Saxophonist Bob Manley, says it must be 50 years since the loose gang of musicians from the BG bar scene have congregated once a year at Howard’s Club H, to perform what they once dubbed “industrial folk rock.”
Typically, that was on the weekend of BGSU’s spring break, when most of the kids weren’t around.
Well, in 2001, I wrote a story on the musical reunion that said the band got its name in 1986 when they played a benefit, but they had been playing together in various combinations well before that.
This year, the band emerged from the mists of time on Friday of Easter weekend.
The bar was packed and rocking, as was the stage accommodating 10 musicians shoulder to shoulder and a grand piano. Regulars saxophonist Manley, organist Gus Sonnenberg, drummer Tim Stubbs, vocalist and rhythm guitarist Joe Baker, pianist Michael Peslikis, and bassist Tim Berry were on hand from the floating musical collective.
Death has claimed a couple of the originals guitarist Tony Duda and Lyle Yackee, who played harmonica and actually knew how to weld. Original front man Doug Fiely, a creative madman whose unpredictability powered the show, is no longer up to making the trip from Dayton. Baker, who has dealt with his own health issues, presides over the proceedings seated with his guitar on his lap, and his son, Nate, at his elbow, singing, and playing saxophone and guitar.
The Welders’ roots are tangled up with the local music scene, dating back to Rail, the Tank Farm Band, Hardy’s Live Band, Rod’s Collision, and JoeBobDuda, the forerunner of the still active Joe Baker Band.
The Baker Band – Baker, Manle, Stubbs, and lead guitarist Denny Gwynne – now forms the core of The Welders, but it’s a welcoming crew. The personnel shifts not only from year to year but from set to set.
Robbie Evans, who was playing his own show at Howard’s the next night, sat in for a set. A couple musicians from Pennsylvania who Baker knows from touring joined in. Bassist Fred Layman was called into service for a few numbers and vocalist Deb Weiser, of Ginger and the Snaps, did “Mustang Sally.”
Nate Baker is the youngest. So, when 87-year-old Peslikis was on the stand, and not down the street at Sam B’s eating Oysters Rockefeller, there was an almost a half-century age span.
The set had a free form feel epitomized at one point when Neil Young’s “Helpless’ flowed into Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” (This was first done by the composers themselves.)
Not that this crew seemed inclined to hang up their instruments anytime soon. No, they seemed ready to keep rockin’ on at Howard’s until the next Welders’ celebration.
