Area native has jammed with the best
His resume reads like a “Who’s Who” of 70s music. He has graced the stage and jammed with the likes of Stevie Wonder, Jerry Garcia, Paul Simon, Mick Jagger and Chuck Berry.
He has made numerous appearances on many television shows, from Dick Cavett to Mike Douglas to Johnny Carson. His name is included in the John Lennon exhibit at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio.
So, who is he? He is Gary Van Scyoc, a gifted bass player who was born and raised in rural Greene County.
Van Scyoc’s auspicious beginnings into the world of music came when he was just a young musician playing trumpet in the high school band. But, he says it was his love of the Motown sound and that driving bass beat that really hooked him.
“I remember going to the Waynesburg Pool and the roller rink and hearing those sounds of those Motown greats coming out of the speakers,” Van Scyoc said. “I also remember listening to them on WAMO-FM out of Pittsburgh and I knew I wanted to do that.”
When Van Scyoc was voted the most talented among his high school classmates at Waynesburg High School, he said it was a sign of things to come.
“Those were good times. I was among a very talented group of people,” Van Scyoc said. “I had just a wonderful bunch of people that I graduated with. I can’t say enough about the class of ’64.”
Fortunately, Van Scyoc had the type of parents who encouraged him to go and chase his dream.
“My father [the late Hanlis Van Scyoc] was very supportive, as is my mother [June],” he said. “She is the proud mom. I believe my brother Jay and I got our musical talent from her. She is a great piano player, played saxophone and is a wonderful singer. She sang for years in the First Baptist Church Choir, as did I.”
After high school, Van Scyoc enrolled at Waynesburg College for a semester and said that he liked it there but he knew that wasn’t where he would reach his goal of becoming a professional musician.
His next stop on the path of higher education landed him at Salem College but it wasn’t very long before he realized that New York was the place to be if he wanted to make things happen.
“In my junior year at Salem I had the opportunity to play with a band in New York,” he said. “By then I was an accomplished bass player. I enrolled and finished my degree at the City University of New York and became a studio musician.”
By the time Van Scyoc reached the age of 19 he had written a song called “The Fife Piper” that would become a hit and in a crazy twist of fate be recorded on the Hanna Barbara label. This led to his group, the Dynatones, being signed as one of only a few groups who recorded for the Flintstones television series. “The Fife Piper” hit number 40 on the Billboard charts. Van Scyoc was making waves and he was just getting started.
As a studio musician in Manhattan, he worked on jingles for commercials with people like Neil Sedaka. As a member of the Radio Registry, he would receive calls to back up major recording artists of the time…among them was a musician named Paul Simon.
“It was a strange small music scene in New York in the 1960s,” Van Scyoc said. “Working with Paul Simon really set me up for what was to come. He is a very intense guy and some viewed him as not easy to work with. I found him to just be a great guy who was misunderstood and I found the knack for working well with him. I got a lot of jobs because I learned fast to play it straight, and got the reputation of not overplaying and showing off.”
In the early 70s, Van Scyoc was what is termed as a first call player. This meant that when a musician was needed at bass guitar, it was he who would get the first opportunity.
Along the way there were many people who he was fortunate enough to get that chance with obviously.
As a member of several different bands over the years, it would be the band Elephants Memory that would take his career to its pinnacle thus far.
The group was playing in a rented studio space in Greenwich Village one night when their manager came in the room and said that John Lennon and Yoko Ono were outside and wanted to meet the band. The band had achieved some buzz for recording the soundtrack to the cult classic film “Midnight Cowboy” and the group members were told that Lennon really liked their sound.
“We seriously thought our manager was joking. I remember us throwing packets of ketchup or something at him and just going back to playing,” Van Scyoc said. “It was like an hour later that he [Lennon] came through the door. He was in that white suit from Abbey Road and my jaw hit the floor.
“The Beatles were a great influence to me. Ironically, it was Paul who was my favorite growing up, but that changed when I met and worked with John.”
As it turns out, Lennon was missing playing with a band and suggested that he join Elephants Memory.
“We thought this was crazy,” Van Scyoc said with a laugh. “I mean, come on…He was John Lennon!”
That first night, Lennon ordered up some take-out food, picked up a guitar and jammed with the Elephants Memory Band into the wee hours.
“We played until our fingers were sore,” Van Scyoc said. “Those were incredible times. We became the Plastic Ono Elephants Memory Band. It was Yoko’s idea. The first letters spelled out the word ‘Poem’ and she just thought it was cute and oh so hip.”
Van Scyoc has so many stories that he said it would be impossible to write them all. Working with Lennon, Van Scyoc learned a lot. They even collaborated on a song that is titled, “Wind Ridge,” and it is about the time Van Scyoc spent as a boy visiting with his grandparents in Wind Ridge in Greene County.
“Those were good times. I appreciated the beauty of the whole area out there. It was a great place to grow up and I am very proud of that song,” Van Scyoc said. “EMI Records picked it up last year. John produced it but he was a modest guy and didn’t put his name on it as a collaborator to the writing, even though he helped with the piano parts. He was that kind of guy.”
Van Scyoc said that he and Yoko were “both just wonderful, sweet people.” According to him, the media had inaccurately portrayed the couple during that time period.
Ono, he said, was very benevolent to the band member’s families and although he said that there probably was some friction over the break up of the Beatles that it was more like the type of friction that occurs between siblings.
In fact, Van Scyoc said Lennon would regularly take a break of an hour or more during recording sessions with the band to take a call from Paul McCartney to chat and laugh.
When asked what was the biggest musical highlight of his career, Van Scyoc did not hesitate to answer.
“I’d have to say that was the night we played live at Madison Square Garden in the ‘One to One Concert’ with John,” he said. “The concert was held to benefit mentally retarded children at the Willowbrook Hospital in New York. We raised over $400,000, which was a lot of money at that time.
“We couldn’t have known then that this would be his last live performance after the Beatles,” he continued. “It was just insane. There were two shows with 25,000 people at each and 28,000 tamborines were given to the audience. The Rolling Stones’ light show was loaned to us by Mick (Jagger). It was definitely my biggest night musically in my career.”
Van Scyoc believes that to this day it is still considered to be the loudest concert ever held at Madison Square Garden.
But Van Scyoc’s relationship with Lennon did not end there. When Lennon would go on to record his “Double Fantasy” album, he would call up his friend one more time.
“He was about to do the world tour for ‘Double Fantasy’ and the studio players that worked on the album were tied up so he called to say that he was thinking of me going on the tour with him,” Van Scyoc said. “We were pretty tight. I used to give him rides to the Dakota [the apartment building where Lennon lived with Yoko Ono and where he would be shot outside on Dec. 8, 1980].
“He was a friend,” he said. “When I got the call that he had died, I wanted to do something to honor his memory.”
Along with Randy Clark, the star of Beatlemania, Van Scyoc helped form a tribute band that played a limited run of six months.
“We sold out every show but it was not about making money it was about finding a way to grieve our friend,” Van Scyoc said. “It turned out that it was also a way for fans to deal with his loss. I remember looking into the audience and seeing people just bawling. It was a labor of love for us. I still get calls from radio stations on the anniversary of his death each year to interview me. It is always a very sad time. He is missed.”
Today, Van Scyoc is keeping himself quite busy. He is still playing his guitar every chance he gets, he continues to record, perform and produce local acts, he just finished a theory book on playing the bass guitar and he will have his website www.garyvanscyoc.com up by the end of June for fans to check out his work. In the meantime, visit www.youtube.com where you can search Gary Van Scyoc and see some of his work with Lennon and others.