The Daze Of The Week

Collectors of obscure garage band 45s have often wondered why Tacoma, Washington's Piece label consecutively released singles by bands that recorded the classic song One Night Stand. As a result, it has often been wondered whether the two groups - The Grotesque Mommies and The Daze of the Week - were the same band. We're happy to be able to sort it all out, with the great assistance of bassist and saxophonist Scott Jones.

Scott Jones Recalls The Daze Of The Week

My interest in music pretty much came about naturally. I started playing the alto saxophone in fifth grade and continued until the end of sophomore year when marching seemed so lame. I did play tenor sax in the band for a short time. Brent would play bass and I played sax for maybe two songs. It was fun to switch instruments.

The Daze of the Week: Mark Harkness, lead guitar and vocals (Mark is one of those naturally gifted players. From what I understand he just picked up the guitar and began playing it; he never had a lesson in his life); Gregg Gagliardi, keyboard and vocals (Gregg started playing the bass with the band before I joined. He has such pudgy little fingers I have no idea how he could have played it…much less keyboards! But he does); Brent Lund, rhythm guitar, bass and vocals; Mark Watson, drums; and me, Scott Jones, bass and sax.

During our first year, 1966-1967, we played a lot of junior high and high schools. We began with an after school dance at Mason Junior high school in September. I think we then played for their Howdy Dance just a bit later. We also played at various fraternities at UPS and the U of W during the first year. One of the frat parties was in the top of the Smith Tower in Seattle. That was pretty unusual. Taking all our stuff up and down in the elevator was such a pain. That I can still remember.

We did a battle of the bands one night in Lakewood with The Atlantic Steamer. It was fun but I don't think there was any winner. They had groupies (it seemed) and we never did. Our standing long-term joke is that the reason we never seemed to have any teenaged girls following us was because Gregg refused to wear his Beatle boots and instead insisted on wearing his Wingtips! This can be seen in one of those pictures on the PNW band page. The boots really were terrible but it was our costume!

Mark and Brent had previously been in a band known as The Henchmen. I never heard them and I don't know anything about them. I just know that at the end of the school year of the ninth grade Brent was trying to talk me into playing the bass. I was insistent that I wanted to play rhythm guitar so when I joined the band after that summer I asked that I play guitar for a few songs - which I did. Those songs eventually didn't last with the band and my guitar was an old acoustic that I had put a pickup in. The sound was terrible. I think I played Hey Joe on it with the band.

We recorded at Wiley's in Tacoma, with Doug Hewitt producing, as well as at Kearny's in Seattle with a guy named Dave Anderson supposedly producing. The Kearny stuff was done in the winter of ‘69 after Gregg and I had both left the band. We got out at the end of the summer of ’68 while the band was playing four or five nights a week. A lot of that was at Ft. Lewis or McCord Airbase. Gordon Amott took over bass and I forget who played keys. That band eventually became Crackers and I think had a life of about twenty years. Gregg played with them again off and on over the years.

The Anderson tapes had been left at Kearny's and never finished. On the Anderson tapes, the drummer was Rick Harris and Ned Blake played the French horn. We were all together to some degree in a band or band at school. That was how we got Ned involved. At one point Ned got frustrated with his part and stood up and put his hand through the sheetrock wall in one of the small rooms at Kearny's. That was really humorous! He didn't seem to hurt his hand, however. Years later Kearny said he never had the hole patched, that it was still there when he was forced to move. I was driving to Seattle every week in the early ‘90's and I somehow got motivated to look up Kearny. He had moved to Laurehurst District but he was still in the phone book. I managed to get him to find the tapes and make a new copy of them. His place was and is at last visit an amazing mess but he is still a truly great recording engineer!

Kearny was able to locate the Anderson tapes after I pursued him for quite a while with phone calls and visits but he had no recollection of the two masters from when Hewitt did the producing. Hewitt sent copies of the master to a record company in Nashville that went out of business later and never received the tapes back. I'm not sure what became of them. After I got the Anderson tapes I finally gave them to Gregg. They then sat for about six years. We finally got organized and four of us, including Margret, who used to be married to Brent, went up and had Kearny remix them. They were all done on three-track and Kearny was the only person who could do anything with it. We had CDs made and I still love the vocals. Margret did those harmonies! She still has that voice!

In the spring of ‘67 we had been playing a lot of frat parties and Brent was not being as responsible as we wanted him to be so we decided to get rid of him. We replaced him eventually with a guy named John English who was in the army and got us connected out there at the clubs. That resulted in our playing so much that we had too much of it! The band later discovered that John had been cheating them by taking a cut as a manager besides just being a member.

We played at Vashon several times. It was where I spent my summers at a family beach place since the mid ‘50's. We played a street dance once for free, I think, then played at the Island club several times. Mark Watson, our drummer, decided to record us with his reel to reel. The vocal were through a very basic amp with two horn type speakers. I think one mic was draped over the speaker and I don't remember where the other one was. It's a miracle that anything at all actually got on the tape or survived. I managed to get that reel-to-reel from Mark Watson in the mid ‘70's and held on to it…I don't remember for what reason. It used to have two sets on it but someone recorded over the other side. I think it was Mark but there’s no way to know! I had it copied to digital just last summer. We then gave a copy to Doug Hewitt! He had it cleaned up some.

We actually did two singles: One under the name Daze of the Week and the other under the name The Grotesque Mommies. We never played You Gotta Give live anyplace. We never acknowledged it in the slightest. We did play One Night Stand live, however. Gregg wrote that. He was trying to avoid three-chord repetition…which we did with that song! The One Night Stand and You Gotta Give by The Mommies, ie Daze, were recorded at a very small place in Tacoma that was owned by an uncle of Mark Harkness. It was just a little amateur thing of course on Pearl Street near Pt. Defiance, but in actuality not that far from Wiley's. The flip side of One Night Stand by The Daze was a song called Believe Me. I still like that song. Those two were both recorded at Kearny's with Doug Hewitt producing. That must have been done in early '67 because it was when Brent was still with The Daze. He sings with Gregg on that song.

For the last three years or so, four of us - Gregg, Mark H, Brent and me - have been meeting about once a week to play music. We have never performed anyplace and have no plans to. We run all the sound through Gregg's soundboard and sometimes use his drum machine. We do a lot of original material that Brent writes. Sometimes we play old stuff, though, which is a lot of fun.

To read Scott's recollections on the Grotesque Mommies visit the excellent Pacific Northwest Bands website.

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