Phantom Herd to Reappear for a Night : Reunion: The progressive country-rock band of the '70s will make a onetime appearance at Peppers Golden Bear on Sunday.

By JIM WASHBURN

March 16, 1991 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

ANAHEIM — “We’re not has-beens; we’re never-weres,” says drummer Greg Tully, trying to establish the proper place of the Phantom Herd in music history.

That assessment may be accurate in the grand scheme of things, but to many Orange Countians who heard the band’s “progressive country and redneck rock” music in the late ‘70s, they were a sensation; a legend still talked about a decade after the band’s rancorous demise. Long before the urbanization of cowboy music in the early ‘80s, the Phantom Herd had been tearing up Newport Beach clubs with its high-tempered, spur-kicked music.

A one-shot reunion Sunday at Peppers Golden Bear will feature original members Chris Gaffney, Dave Stewart, Al Hamel, Gary Brandin, Wyman Reese, Bunk Bentley and Tully. Most are still active in the Orange County scene: Brandin is in demand as a songwriter, producer and member of Patty Booker’s Hired Hands; Stewart is in the Jetsons, and Gaffney and Reese have received some national attention with Chris Gaffney & the Cold Hard Facts.

After rehearsing in Anaheim last Monday, the seven sat in a crowded Denny’s booth to discuss their sometimes-rocky past and their reunion.

“At one time, you could never even have gotten us to sit down together like this,” Stewart remarked, punctuated by Gaffney across the table whining, “He’s hittin’ me!”

The members certainly had their differences--they recently figured that all of them had quit or been fired at one time or another--but they also have many good memories of their span together. The night before Gaffney called him recently about doing the reunion, Stewart said, he’d had a dream about them all being onstage playing their old songs again.

Gaffney’s call itself may have been slightly less dreamlike: “Hey, Dave, why don’t we get together and slag this old beast out one more time?” he recalls saying.

The idea of a reunion came up simply because it struck Gaffney as fun, a notion shared by Peppers’ manager Ken Moon, who happened to run into Gaffney one night. Moon, it turns out, had once been the doorman at the Herd’s main haunt, Cafe Metro.

The group will be sharing the Bear bill with their rivals on the old scene, Lost Angeles. Though they claim to be good buddies with Lost Angeles, Gaffney also cheerfully noted, “To a man, we could beat the living hell out of them.”

The group began in the early ‘70s, when former high-school pals Hamel and Bentley started playing straight country just for the fun of it. Calling themselves the Bitter Rhythm Boys, over time they met up with what Hamel calls “these other undesirables,” and eventually the group mutated into the Phantom Herd. They got the name from a Frederick Remington painting of ghostly buffalo in the clouds, found while leafing through a True West magazine.

While their peers were lining up to see Yes and ELP, the Herd members were off seeing Buck Owens and Don Rich.

Rather than fitting into an established scene, Reese said, “we had to create our own scene. We never did anything that anybody wanted to make us do. We’d never get club work. From the beginning to the end, we always had to make people like what we did.”

Country music as a whole wasn’t very popular in the area then. On top of that, Bentley said, “we were never playing the country that other people did want to hear, it was what we liked to hear. We were playing Willie Nelson before anybody had played Willie, Waylon, Jerry Jeff Walker, John Prine, just the whole gamut of country progressive music.”

Reese said: “We picked obscure tunes that no one knew--we even were playing Elvis Costello songs before anybody had heard of him. And I still go in clubs today and see bands doing our old set list down to the last song. It’s interesting to see how much of an impression we made in that period of time.”

What allowed the Phantom Herd to make such an impression was a fluke booking that flourished. The band had been duking it out in San Bernardino County clubs to little avail when its manager got it an audition at Newport’s Cafe Metro in 1977.

“If only you could have seen us walking into this Newport Beach Club looking all grungy and the owner’s face looking at us,” Brandin said. “It was just classic.”

Bentley recalled: “It was this Lido Island backgammon club with all these yuppie jazz types. We knew we weren’t going to get the job, so we just played and had fun. And then people started walking in from all directions--they had open doors all around--and the place filled up.”

Reese said: “They’d been selling mostly coffee drinks in there previously, but they sold out of Jack Daniel’s that night. We’d brought some friends with us, and they were so wild that the people there were just kind of swept up in it.”

That resulted in the Phantom Herd taking up an 18-month residency in the club. They were routinely packing the place six nights a week, though initially they were getting paid only $975 a week (with their manager also getting a cut) and sleeping in their trucks across from the club. After their tenure there they moved to Isadore’s in Newport (now the Yankee Tavern) for another year and a half.

The Phantom Herd’s extinction was caused in part by the mass popularity of country music in the early ‘80s.

“The ‘Urban Cowboy’ thing hit, and the whole scene became extremely lame,” Brandin said. “We played the Crazy Horse on its first New Year’s Eve, and the management hated us. They didn’t understand our music at all. I think they called us an ‘acid rock band’ and said they didn’t want us back.

“Someone in (the club’s) management came up and said, ‘We want to hear some country music,’ and we said, ‘We’re going to do a Willie Nelson song.’ And the guy says, ‘Well, is he country?’ ”

“We weren’t ready to dress in the uniform that the movie and that atmosphere demanded,” Stewart said. “There was a clothing uniform, a dance uniform, a music uniform.”

Gaffney interjected: “They really put the schmaltz meter to it--and we never wanted to conform to that.”

Those changes, and the pressures of trying to take the group beyond being just a local sensation, complicated an already stressful working situation.

“I think everybody had a pretty big case of pinhead there, and I’m no exception,” Bentley said. “It’s one of those things where you’re young and successful and you don’t think it will go to your head, but you’re totally wrong.”

The seven agree that there was too much alcohol, drugs, enlarged egos and rampant immaturity for the group to survive. Reese maintains that Hamel was the only member who wasn’t immature, to which Hamel only responded, “I was probably too drunk to be immature.”

“It was pretty ugly, but it was typical of the times,” Stewart said.

Since the breakup, they say, they’ve often been approached by people who remember them from those days. Typically sardonic, Gaffney said, “Everybody that I meet from that era tells me, ‘You were so hot in Lost Angeles .’ ”

Now older and wiser (the average age is 39), getting together for the reunion show has been far more a pleasure than a pain. They said it’s possible they might get together each year for a reunion show, a la Honk, another veteran Orange County band.

“I would love to do this thing yearly,” Reese said, “if for no other reason than to be able to stay in touch with everybody else. I had some apprehensions about doing this. But as soon as we started in on the songs, I remembered how much I liked playing with everybody and how fun the songs were. That and seeing people in the audience that we haven’t for a long time would be nice. We’re not doing it for any more than that. We’re not out to relive anything.”

Phantom Herd and Lost Angeles play Sunday at 9 p.m. at Peppers Golden Bear, 306 Pacific Coast Highway, Huntington Beach. Tickets: $5. Information: (714) 374-2327.