Musician maintains perfect 44-year GNP record
Scott Buttfield was only 15 and in high school when he joined forces with Bill Molzon’s rock and roll band in New Jersey.
Forty-eight years later, he’s still playing with Molzon in the Gross National Product (GNP) concert held annually on the campus of Waynesburg University.
“Scott has played in every gig we did in Waynesburg including two Rain Day concerts,” said Molzon, the GNP concert producer and director of TV operations at Waynesburg University.
Buttfield, now a financial planner from Red Bank, New Jersey, recalls the very first GNP concert, held in 1970 in the university’s old student union.
“I remember it was a long drive (out to Waynesburg from Red Bank), and I didn’t know what to expect,” he said. “While we only had a day-and-a-half to rehearse, it was a fairly intense practice session. The concert was so well received, we’ve been invited back every year since.”
From the very first concert, which focused mainly on rock music, the idea was to offer a variety of musical styles, and several musicians other than the original five from GNP joined in during the performance. Over the years, the number of musicians who take to the stage during the roughly 3-1/2 hour long concert has grown to 40 to 45, and the performance genre now includes rock, bluegrass, country, and even a bit of blues and jazz.
The same holds true for this year’s concert scheduled for Sunday, May 10 at the Performing Arts Center at Waynesburg University.
The doors open at 7 p.m., and the concert starts at 7:30 p.m. As it has been from the get-go, the performance is free and open to the public.
While the annual GNP concert is 44 years old this year, its roots go back even further to 1966, when Molzon formed a rock band called Knak with musicians mainly from Middletown, New Jersey.
“When the bass player quit, I joined the band at the age of 15,” Buttfield said.
“A year later, when the lead singer and drummer quit, we decided to try something new.”
At that time, Molzon and company looked for a way to distinguish his band from others in the region and found the answer by adding a female singer in an era when they were fewer and farther between than now. With the addition of drummer Bruce Douglas and Jeannie Clark Fisher as lead vocalist, Knak morphed into GNP and played acid rock covers made popular by bands like Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Moby Grape and The Grateful Dead.
The band also added an innovative light show that Douglas suggested after an encounter with the new phenomenon during a visit to California.
When Bill Molzon first came to Waynesburg University in the fall of 1969 as a freshman, he discovered that he missed playing with GNP, so he invited the band members in for a reunion concert the following year.
The concert and light show proved so successful, the university has invited them back every year since.
In addition to playing bass at the GNP concerts, Buttfield also serves as the music director, “politely telling people what to do and organizing the rehearsals, meetings and concert.”
“GNP is a lot of fun,” he said. “It gives us a chance to meet old friends, hang out together and joke around.”
While many of the musicians are from Greene County, Buttfield and four or five others from far away places stay with Marie Webb, a Waynesburg University alumnus and attorney from Graysville, who works the lights during the concert.
“Not only is the concert a homecoming for the musicians and tech people, it’s also a homecoming for many in the audience,” Buttfield said.
“One reason why we set up TV monitors in the lobby of the Performing Arts Center is to let people mingle and meet up with friends and old acquaintances. If the weather cooperates, we even put the monitors outside the center.”
With 43 concerts to his credit, Buttfield has recorded many pleasant memories and lots of laughs.
He recalls the time a couple of years ago when Bob Christian came on stage with a stump fiddle, a kind of walking stick with a rubber ball at the bottom and a bell, horn, woodblock, springs and a tin pan drum attached, and played a polka with Mark Sussman on the accordion.
He also recalls when Rachel Eisenstat, who first sang harmony at the concerts at the age of 13, later asked if she could sing lead.
“When we heard her, we were wowed, and she has become one of our lead singers over the past four or five years,” Buttfield said.
Now living in Fort Collins, Colorado, Eisenstat is currently raising funds to produce an album titled “Raven Jane.”
Eisenstat will return for this year’s concert as will five of the original GNP band members.
With as few as a single musician or as many as 25 or 30 on stage at any one time and with many microphones and “lots and lots of wires,” Buttfield faces many logistical challenges as music director.
Adding to his workload are the big production songs interspersed throughout the concert that include a Hammond organ, a grand piano, bass, two or three guitars, four percussionists, a horn section and vocalists.
“We do anywhere from 10 to 12 production songs during the concert,” he said. “While they vary from year to year, we always do ‘Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way’ by Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett.”
Over the years, the concert has become multi-generational, with many of the original GNP musicians now in their 60s joining with young students who perform with the band, serve in tech crew or simply enjoy as audience members.
“We also have two generations in the show,” Buttfield said. “Drummer Bill Harding is joined by his twin sons, Andrew and Billy, who started playing drums at GNP when they were around 13 and have been back every year since.”
As the concert producer, Molzon said one of his jobs is to see that GNP gets a full house.
“Many of our musicians and technicians come in on their vacations from all parts of the country and pay for their own transportation,” he said.
“I feel it’s my responsibility to have a large audience on hand when we open. Our audience is one of the key factors why we’ve been coming back all these years. We have many loyal fans, who tell their friends about the concert, which is why we keep growing.”
Buttfield said the audience is free to come and go, but that there’s always a core of fans that linger late into the evening.
“For me, the GNP concert is a very moving experience, not only because it allows everyone to get together with old friends, but because it creates a project that’s become something very special.”