Formed at The University of New Hampshire in 1964, The Spectras evolved greatly thoughout their five-year existence. In addition to changing and adding numerous personnel, the group also changed musically along with the times. From the sounds of the British Invasion, to blue-eyed soul, through horn rock and finally blues-based rock, The Spectras remained a very popular group throughout the North East. Guitarist Dick Ray was a mainstay for most of the band's duration, but left when army duty called. Insired by a 20-year reunion request for the UNH Class of 1970, The Spectras reunited and still continue to perform today. More information is available via their website.
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An Interview With Dick Ray
60sgaragebands.com: How did you first get interested in music?
Dick Ray: My family, especially my dad, was very musical, and from a very early age we were singing around the dinner table and in the car on family trips—and there was a piano in the cellar to bang on. I took clarinet lessons in fourth grade, played in the high school band and sang in the chorus. I taught myself to play guitar when I was 14 and very quickly made the connection between being a rock star and being popular with the girls. Ricky Nelson was my hero! I was in three garage bands in high school and knew I wanted to get into a band in college.
60s: Where and when were The Spectras formed?
DR: The Spectras were formed in October of 1964 on the campus of the University of New Hampshire by Chris Quackenbush, Les Warren, Chip Wayne, and myself. Chris, Les, and Chip were jamming together in the laundry room of Randall Hitchcock Hall because there were metal garbage cans for Chip to bang on with his hands; he didn’t have his drum set or any drumsticks at school yet. They soon realized they needed a lead guitar player and put up a 3”x5” card at my dining hall advertising the position. I saw it and thought it would be fun, so I went over to Chris’s dorm room and jammed with them. They liked my playing and singing, and the rest is history.
The Spectras featured many members throughout the band’s existence:
Chris Quackenbush (bass/vocals)
Dick Ray (guitar/vocals)
Chip Wayne (drums)
Les Warren (guitar/vocals)
Bill "Ody" Maniotis (guitar/vocals; replaced Warren)
Bruce Hawkins (keyboards)
Buddy Brown (drums; replaced Wayne)
Bob Lassonde (trumpet)
Willie Spanos (trumpet)
Marc Keroack (trombone)
Ed Gibbs (trombone)
Glenn Jordan (guitar/vocals; replaced Maniotis)
Branch Sanders (trombone/arranger)
Rick Hibbs (trumpet; replaced Spanos)
Danny Mehan (trumpet; replaced Hibbs)
Wiley Crawford (keyboards; replaced Hawkins)
Paul Nizza (keyboards; replaced Crawford)
John Hoik (drums; replaced Brown)
Al MacIntosh (trombone; replaced Gibbs)
In addition, there were some other guys in the “revolving door period” (September 1969 to November 1970) that were considered full-time members of the band. Also playing under The Spectras name were John Kane (guitar; replaced Jordan), Bobby Hearne (guitar; replaced Jordan), Sam DeSantos (organ; replaced Nizza), Russ Thibeault and John Bethel (saxophones; replaced Sanders, Mehan, Lassonde, and MacIntosh), Pete Peterson (drums; replaced Hoik), Greg Dame (guitar—added guitar, not a direct replacement; moved to drums, replacing Peterson)
60s: What inspired The Spectras to expand in 1967 by adding a horn section?
DR: Several factors came together to inspire us. By the fall of 1966 there were a lot of four and five piece garage bands in our area competing for gigs, and I think we wanted to differentiate our band from the pack and to offer our audiences something different. I also think we were hearing a lot of Motown, Memphis Soul, Atlantic Soul, and blue-eyed soul-influenced music (The Boxtops, for example) that had horns in it that we wanted to play. I think we were also getting a little sick of playing the British Invasion stuff and wanted to move in a different direction.
One of our roadies and my roommate, Willie Spanos, had played trumpet in high school and so as an experiment at one gig we asked him to play the four-note high-rising trumpet part at the end of each chorus on ‘Time Won’t Let Me.’ We liked the way it sounded, and wanted to try more of that. We had ready access to good horn players on campus. Two of our girl friends played in the UNH marching and concert bands and were good friends with Bobby, Marc, and Ed, whom we asked to join us as an experiment at first. They weren’t considered members of the band for the first six months; they even dressed differently on stage than we did and had their own promo picture as The Inherited Brass. By July 1967, we were convinced that they were a valuable asset and incorporated them as full timers.
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60s: How would you describe the band's sound? What bands influenced you?
DR: The band really had four different phases with regard to sound during the 1960s. Although I’ll provide dates, they are only rough approximations, and the transition from one phase to the next took several months.
When we first formed, we were heavily influenced by The Beatles and other British Invasion groups and tried to sound just like them. It was your basic garage band repertoire with two guitars, bass, and drums. We had the advantage over other bands in the area of having three strong lead singers and we knew how to sing well in three-part harmony. We spent a lot of time getting the vocals to sound good.
During our second phase (September 1966 to July 1967) we added a Hammond B-3, which allowed us to authentically play Young Rascals, Vanilla Fudge, Booker T and the MGs, and The Spencer Davis Group that moved us more toward the blue-eyed soul sound. We were still playing Beatles in our set list, but as their music became more studio-driven we moved away from that.
In the third phase (January 1967 to September 1969) we were a horn band with R&B and blues mixed in—influenced by Motown, Stax, Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Mitch Ryder, Electric Flag, and Blood, Sweat, and Tears. We also played Top 40 songs that had horns.
Phase Four (October 1969 to November 1970) was a turbulent period both in terms of personnel and an attempt to find a defining sound. At the end, the band had gotten rid of the horns and was playing more blues-based, non-horn rock. I was not in the band at the time (I went in the army in December 1968) so I can’t really speak to how the band sounded at that point.
60s: What other local New Hampshire groups do you recall from the era?
DR: When we began in 1964, the two hot groups on campus were The Crossfires and The Checkmates. Later, some of the local area bands included The Tidal Waves, The Ill Wind, The Young Adults, Spice, The Empires, The Gyrls, The Pandoras, Bundle of Joy, The Rockin’ ramrods, and Little John and The Sherwoods.
60s: How far was the band's "touring" territory?
DR: With the Seacoast of New Hampshire as our epicenter, we played one-niters all over New England, from New Britian, Connecticut and Warwick, Rhode Island in the south to Northhampton, Massachusetts and Bolton Valley, Vermont in the west to Orono, Maine in the north, and hundreds of gigs in between. In the summer of 1965 the band lived on Long Island, New York and played a few gigs down there.
60s: How did The Spectras land the gig as house band for the Hampton Beach Casino?
DR: In the spring of 1966 our manager hooked us up with a booking agent, Charlie Kearns, who ran New England Orchestra Service in Manchester, New Hampshire. This was a big step up for us because Charlie booked a lot of high school, college, and club gigs all over New England. He also had the Hampton Beach Casino account and had for many years and was good friends with the owner, John Dineen. Mr. Dineen was very old school (retired FBI agent) and had resisted moving the Casino Ballroom entertainment format from big band stars to rock stars. But by 1966 he could see the handwriting on the wall and knew he was losing a lot of money, so Charlie convinced him to audition us as the house band for dancing to bring in the teen market.
We were coached by Charlie Kearns to be extra clean-cut in our appearance, stage deportment, and any verbal interactions we might have with Mr. Dineen. We went over very well, pulled in a large crowd that night, and Mr. Dineen liked us personally and liked the crowds we pulled in, but he could never understand or like our music. We were signed for that summer for four nights a week for dancing. When big acts like The Doors or Simon and Garfunkel played there, we would do a 45-minute opening set for the big name, and then after they went off we’d play for an hour of dancing. The ballroom did so well financially that first summer, we were asked back for the summers of 1967, 1968, and 1969. It was an incredible opportunity for the band that we only sort of appreciated at the time.
60s: Where did The Spectras typically play otherwise?
DR: At first we played on campus at dorm and campus-wide dances and fraternity parties, but then spread out to play teen clubs and high school dances in the area. After we hooked up with Mr. Kearns as our booking agent, we were playing mostly colleges and big teen dance venues in larger cities like Worcester, Massachusetts and Holyoke, Massachusetts.
We had four managers. In 1964-1965 our manager was Barry Bradley, a friend of Chris Quackenbush who was a little older, and more importantly, had transportation—a hearse! He was a surfer, and in those days that was the cool way to carry your surfboard. It was the only way we could play off campus. We could get all our stuff in his hearse, and it also served as an eye-catching promotional tool. Barry tried to promote the band in the summer of 1965 on Long Island, but didn’t have much success.
When we returned to campus in the fall of 1965, Barry stayed on Long Island so we needed a new manager, and we found Mitch Julian, who was a part-time student at UNH but was eight years older, having been in the service. He did a good job of promoting the band locally and most importantly getting us connected with our booking agent, Charlie Kearns. Mitch stayed with us until the fall of 1966 when he began to manage and promote several other bands and we wanted a manager exclusively for our band, so we parted ways. We hired Bruce Binney who was more of an administrator than a promoter. By that time Charlie Kearns was doing all the promoting and booking, so Bruce Binney just needed to keep us organized and do the payroll.
In the spring of 1969 the band decided it wanted to reach for the big time and get a record deal, so they fired Binney and hired Charlie Dreyer who had contacts in New York City with a records company. He actually did get them a record deal with Project 3 Records in the summer of 1969. Unfortunately he proved to be a crook and absconded with the band’s funds sometime in the summer of 1970.
60s: Did The Spectras record?
DR: The band recorded several times. Our first real session in a studio was in December of 1965, and it was in the studio of WUNH, the on-campus radio station. As I recall it was mono, and everything was laid down at once; there was no overdubbing. In April of 1966 we went to a real professional studio in New York City to record four original tunes.
I remember several things about that session. We couldn’t get our organ player’s B3 up to the second floor studio because of the narrow, winding stairs and there was no elevator, so we had to use a cheesy little organ that was in the studio, and we were all disappointed with the sound. We had grown our hair long and were dressing in ‘mod’ outfits so we felt very cool. The session was two-track as I recall, with the vocals laid down after the instrumentals. Even though we were in awe of the recording equipment and being in a big time New York City studio, we tried to act super-cool and sophisticated. The final mix that was mailed to us as a 33-rpm record had a lot of echo and reverb and took some getting used to. That single disc was to serve as demos for a record deal, but our manager at the time, Mitch Julian, didn’t have the contacts to make that happen.
We were so occupied with gigging and college in 1967 that we didn’t have recording as a priority, and we weren’t doing any writing. But by 1968 Glenn Jordan and Branch Sanders joined the band and had written some songs that we felt had some potential. So early in 1969 Chris, Branch, and Glenn pushed the band to change managers, and get a record deal, which they did, and in the spring of 1969 they signed with Project 3 Records. They cut an album that summer in a Boston studio and it got national distribution. The single ‘Best Years Of Our Lives’ got a lot of airplay locally and actually charted in some other regional markets. Even today, if you go on eBay and put “Best Years Of Our Lives Spectras” or “And You Love Her Spectras” into the search bar, you may find copies of the 45s or the album that was distributed from that session. (I did it today and found copies of the 45 selling for $16.99 as well as two copies of the album, one selling for $49.99 and the other for $100!) The band members were pretty dissatisfied with the album. They thought there was a big difference between what they heard in the studio in Boston and what was pressed as a final mix in New York City. Branch especially was dissatisfied with the sound of the horns.
60s: Did the band make any local TV appearances? Does any home movie film footage exist of the band?
DR: In February 1966 we appeared on The Dave Astor Show on Channel 8 in Portland, Maine and played a couple of our original songs. I have asked Channel 8 if they had any archival footage of those shows and they said no. Some home movie footage (no sound) exists of a performance at The Swing Thing in Bedford, New Hampshire, probably shot in the fall of 1966. The speed is just a little fast which makes our stage dance moves look hilarious.
60s: What year and why did the band break up?
DR: The Spectras didn’t really have a Beatles-style breakup. It was more that members disappeared one by one and were replaced with ever-increasing frequency and then one day Chris looked around and realized he was the only one left, so he changed the name of the band. I think our breakup really started in December of 1968 when I had to go in the army. Several other guys were fired in 1969 when the band made its bid for the big time, thinking they were hiring better players. Several guys left the band in June of 1969 when they graduated from college and went into the service or pursued grad school or full time employment.
60s: How do you best summarize your experiences with The Spectras?
DR: Next to my family, The Spectras has been my love and my passion for over 45 years. The guys in the band are my best friends, and it really is like having another family. The experience of opening for over 40 headliners during the 1960s is every garage band’s dream come true. We just missed a shot at the big time, and we still can strap on the guitars in 2010 and be 19 years old again. Nothing compares with watching people respond enthusiastically to your playing and singing, both then and now. We are truly blessed to be able to enjoy the memories and still live the dream.
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