Stories

A 12 inch vinyl Collectors' Edition reissue by Anazitisi Records of the 1977 " Bermuda Triangle" album is set for spring 2008.

In 2006 Bermuda Triangle's career surged upward with the unexpected reissue of their 1977 album by a British record company and its being played by radio station all over the world. In 2007 Roger and Wendy officially reissued the "77 album "Bermuda Triamgle" as a CD with 6 additional bonus songs. The bonus cuts date from 1969 to 1976 and were taped at Rensselaer Polytechnical Institute, Folk City(New York City), Woodstock New York, and Bell Sound(NYC), and most had never before been released.

The band also released in 2007 "The Missing Tapes" CD, a compilation of some of their psych folk tracks from the 70's. Five of these cuts are reissues. The other 8 were part of the group's live performances but were never released on disc. A number of the songs had been completely lost with no known existing copies until they were unearthed in a longtime friend's collection in New York and in the archives of the radio station at R.P.I.

©copyright 2007.All Rights Reserved.Wendy and Roger Penney

ROGER and WENDY aka BERMUDA TRIANGLE BAND aka R-W PENNEY HAVE RECENTLY RELEASED their NEW CD, ONE DAY AT A TIME, ON THE WINTER SOLSTICE RECORDS LABEL, OUR 5TH ALBUM. ALL SONGS ARE WRITTEN BY ROGER PENNEY, ALL INSTRUMENTS PLAYED BY HIM. THE VOCALS ARE SHARED BY WENDY AND ROGER.Different in feel from our other albums,it has a folk,country,cajun flavor.Click MUSIC button to hear tracks.

And now we have returned to recording in our original Psychedelic Folk style. ----FLASH:: Just Reissued: The EUPHORIA album. We were the LEAD SINGERS , Autoharp, Bass

HERE ARE THE STORIES:
Not long before he died, we were talking with Jimi Hendrix on MacDougal St. in Greenwich Village,New York City. (You can see exactly where we were if you view the movie 'Next Stop Greenwich Village" a Paul Mazursky film. We were standing just outside the cafe Reggio, the coffee shop in the movie where many scenes were shot with the actors trying to figure out what to do with there lives.) Hendrix,Tall and skinny, would bend over closely and speak in a soft voice. He was a very polite and self-effacing guy,quite gentlemanly.At the time he was deeply into jazz and jazz-rock.This was the period when he wasn't taking drugs.He truly loved creating jazz and hoped his fans would appreciate his new style.Sadly, they didn't.Instead,the fans exerted tremendous pressure on him to return to his old life and old style of music, which finally he yielded to.The word on the street was that,essentially,that was what killed him.

As we said goodbye to Jimi and rounded the corner from MacDougal St onto 3rd we went past the Night Owl, Sharon referred to Jimi Hendrix as Jimi James and the Blue Flames. The Night Owl was a little club where she and Tom had played in a band called the Ragamuffins. That's where Jimi Hendrix had played several years earlier as Jimi James and the Blue Flames and the same club where we had seen the Ragamuffins a year or two past. Tom Pacheco and Sharon Alexander were two of the members of the Ragamuffins, The Night Owl was also known as the starting place of the Lovin Spoonful. In the Ragamuffins was Jon Hall who later formed Orleans (Dance With Me).
When Sharon and Tom saw us playing at the Cafe Wha? on MacDougal St, they asked us to form a group together and we became partners in a band called EUPHORIA (summer of love west coast harmony pop) JUST REISSUED 04/07. As a coincidence,performing with us at the cafe Wha? (yes the questionmark was a part of the name) Very' Beatnick' don't you think??? was Jon Hall and his inbetween band Kangaroo.
The Cafe Wha? was a downstairs Greenwich Village club where years before Roger had first seen Bob Dylan play one Sunday afternoon. It was then a "basket house" which meant that after each set the performer got up and passed around with a straw basket for tips. Dylan was still playing mostly Woody Guthrie songs. Yes, Rog put in his quarter for Bob.
Actually the Wha? was an upscale basket house. That is,the waitress passed the basket for the performer. The following evening at the Gerdes(pronounced Gerdees) Folk City hootenanny Roger and Bob met and Dylan was going to hitch a ride with him and a couple of friends to New England. Dylan later changed his mind and decided to go West instead. Later that night we gave Screamin Jay Hawkins 'I Put A Spell On You' a ride home. we waited to make sure he got inside his building before leaving. To put it politely, one of us was somewhat inebriated. Some of the clubs like Folk City had a liquor license and others like the Freudian Slip did not. Their specialty was Rum and Coke, but the only rum was from food extract. Once in a while a 'knowledgable' customer would complain that there wasn't any rum in his coke, so the waitress would take the drink back into the kitchen and give it a tripple dose of extract. That always satisfied the customer.

Greenwich Village is an area in lower Manhattan about 15 blocks high and wide, but the "Village" that every musician refers to was a zig zag strip of just 5 short blocks. I counted 22 venues where there was full time live music,some running from 7PM to 4AM, plus a couple of off-Broadway theatres. Opening a club off the strip meant almost certain death. Our manager was a partner in a venture that was 4 blocks away, The Generation Club.It had previously been a country western bar called the Wagon Wheel-replete with,yes,wagon wheels on the walls and a New York doorman dressed in an old timey country western outfit. Anyway, they had 4 acts for one week each. 1. Jimi Hendrix 2. Ian and Sylvia 3.(can't remember) 4. Chuck Berry. Like the others, they told Chuck he'd be paid at the end of the week. He started to pack up and said he wanted his dough up front in cash or he'd walk. So he got paid- the only one who did get paid. all the rest were stiffed. The club folded afer 4 weeks even with great stars in the lineup. Hendrix took over the lease to turn it into his own Electric Lady Studio. -- Speaking of studios, when we were Euphoria we had a rehearsal studio in an old hotel room, the Broadway Central . The hotel boasted that Abraham Lincoln had stayed there, and i believe it. It collapsed shortly after Euphoria broke up, well- part of it collapsed- several people were killed, and then they tore the rest down. Was it Wendy's Bass playing that loosened the foundation?

At the time we were living in the East Village. On the floor below was the trumpeter for Blood Sweat and Tears, and two floors below that a motorcycle gang had taken up residence. It was never quiet, but one night, very late, we were awakened by what sounded like a violent rain storm, and there were people yelling in the hallway (not uncommon). The gang war had erupted with a rival motorcycle gang, and they had set our building on fire. It seems that the gang from third street had tried to fricasee our gang. After the fire was put out we moved back into our building, the only ones who did. There was a one foot diameter hole in our floor to the apartment below that the firemen had chopped, so i put a board there and life went on. Until- a couple weeks later when during the middle of the night when OUR Gang brought one of THEIR Gang to our building for a little barbecue, right across the hall from us. At that point the detectives investigating the murder suggested that it might be time to move, and we were 'on the street' and a good friend Joan Egan took us in for a couple of months. Joannie was the press agent for most of the big acts in this country, including the Rolling Stones, the Doors, Led Zeppelin etc. And all of this was going on while we were doing the Euphoria album. Joannie told us that when the Rolling Stones first came to this country they came with a reputation of being "bad boys". She was a tough lesbian and confronted them with "I'm not going to have any trouble from you, am I". Their response was a Very Very Polite "no ma'am, certainly not". Not at all what their 'image' would have you believe. When Jim Morrison of the Doors exposed himself on stage in Florida, she was the one who went there and secretly got him out of the state, to avoid jail time. I remember sitting on her desk at J.Walter Thompson, the agency she worked for and looking at a 62 page promo kit that she had just gotten for Led Zepplin.

Going back a year or two, we were playing at a club called Rienzi's on MacDougal when a good friend Barry Drake whom we had shared the stage with many times, brought a guy by the name of Brian Bowers to see our show. And, to the point, my autoharp playing. Brian invited us to come across the street to the Gaslight Cafe to check him out. We did, and at the time he was alternating instruments that he played in his performance between guitar, banjo, mandolin and autoharp. He also sang some. The next time I saw Brian Bowers he had focused solely on 'harp. Did I influence him?

Another coffeehouse we played at was the Four Winds on third street. Open till 4 AM every night, and on a cold NY winter night would find a bunch of musicians there keeping warm and dry, along with a couple of narcs doing the same. Often people would just take their instruments and play along as we were doing our set. Not from the stage, from their seats. There was barely enough room for us on the stage. Among those who would, was David Bromberg and Tom Ghent, and a guy we only knew as 'Billy the Flute". He was Neil Diamonds flute player and keyboardist. He invited us one time to watch them rehearse before a show a t the Bitter End Cafe. Others who were playing at the Four Winds at the time were Steve Goodman 'City of New Orleans', and Emmylou Harris. Emmy had just come up from Texas where she had learned 'Bo Jangles' from Jerry Jeff Walker, and we learned it from her, and eventually put it on our 'Roger and Wendy' album. Sometime later, with her guitar on-top her belly, a very pregnant Emmy shared the bill with us for a week or two at Folk City across the street. A few years later we played a couple of gigs with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, who had the 'hit' with BoJangles.

Skipping ahead to the mid 80's: I just read an interview with someone we met at the Speakeasy Cafe(formerly Rienzi's) Michelle Shocked. She was playing at the open mic night and living in a squat on the east side. We went there with her and there were a half dozen or more? people living in the abandoned building, very reminiscent of our 1st Street apt. after the first fire. We became good friends and when we had a college gig in New Jersey we asked her to come with us and be our opener. The show went really well, so when we had an upcoming tour we asked her to join us. So the three of us set out in our van to the midwest. One of the gig's was at Eureka college, the then president Reagans alma mater. About a month after getting back she came over to tell us that someone who had recorded her live at Kerrville Folk Festival (informally) had released the tape (bootleged) and it was on the charts in Britain. The Texas Campfire Takes. Coincidently, before going on tour she had recorded some songs in our basement rehearsal room on the same type of tape recorder as the campfire tapes, My Sony Walkman 'PRO'. A fantastic little tape recorder. See photo page for recent pic. When we talked recently she said she probably still has the cassette somewhere as she never throws things away.