Feb. 29, 1980 Gusto music feature: Alyn Syms

 

A guitar wizard conjures up his own path to follow.

Feb. 29, 1980

Alyn Syms doesn’t mind being scarce …

For now, all Alyn Syms wants to do is play a date in March, then go into hiding for a while and write some new songs. For his band, ASG (Alyn Syms Group), there’ll be no overexposure.

“Having the record out,” he says, “would be like playing out,” he says. If we played out too much, I’d feel funny. We’d be like a glorified bar band with good material.”

ASG has made a career out of making itself scarce. Since the band first emerged last summer, it has played hardly more than half a dozen gigs. Starting at a corner tavern in its hometown Lackawanna, ASG has gone on to headline in Shea’s Buffalo in front of 2,000 kids.

The band has done it with good guitar, a good beat and that elusive ingredient that separates the hits from the stiffs – radio airplay. What happened was that ASG’s management, the independent record pluggers from Could Be Wild Promotions, took a demonstration tape of a tune called “Can’t Keep a Good Band Down” to the local rock FM stations last fall and quickly set off a small sensation.

That revelatory number and three others are on ASG’s first record, an EP released earlier this week. Could Be Wild’s Bruce Moser has lined up airplay at Cleveland’s influential WMMS-FM and at stations across Upstate New York. Could be that Moser intends to shock the music business by making ASG a Northeast breakout on its own label.

If this seems like a shortcut to success, remember that it took Syms a dozen years to find it. Following his older brother, Mickey, a drummer, into music, he was playing the bars at 16. Not with rock bands, but with soul groups doing Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett. He picked up on a little Wes Montgomery too. He grew a goatee so he’d look older. Often he was the only white player in the band.

“If you were a white guy and you could do it, you were all right,” Syms recalls in his management’s disheveled Elmwood Avenue offices. “The first band I was with was real cutthroat. If somebody sat in and burned me up, he’d get the job. So I was always showing people up.

“Then I got with my brother’s groups. That was the big leagues. Ridge Road. Maxie’s at the lower end. We played a lot of places with bands 50-50 Black and white, but we couldn’t play the white clubs because they didn’t want Blacks.”

ASG’s second guitarist, Erie “Bo” Boyd, the group’s only Black member, was a fan of Syms back then. When Boyd asked Syms for advice on being a good musician, Syms told him to quit school and play guitar all the time. Ultimately, Boyd was recruited to replace an earlier ASG guitarist. “The other guy didn’t have enough feel,” Syms remarks, punching one hand into the other.

Syms played loud in those days. His instinct for high volume was further abetted when he discovered the great English heavy metal guitarists – Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. He locked himself away, revamping his style and his personal discipline as well. He delved into meditation and the martial arts, inspired by Bruce Lee.

“What he did was synthesize a lot of philosophies into his own,” Syms observes. “I figured why not do that with music. The more you develop yourself, the more interesting your music becomes. It made me thing about other areas too. Who says you have to wear certain clothes and grab a mike and say: ‘Let’s party!’”

All the while, Syms was writing songs. His first breakthrough came out of the depths of despair in the mid ‘70s. He and Peter Davis, now singer for ASG, collaborated on both the misery and the creation. They were collecting unemployment and had just broken up with their wives. “Changing Love,” the song was called. It had a lot more emotion than Syms’ earlier stuff. He came up with a solo for it that was so good he hasn’t been able to top it.

Meantime, he and his brother were enlisted for some early recording sessions with singer Rick James. For Syms, the association continued off and on through James’ second album, after which he quit the Stone City Band in a dispute over late payment for recording sessions. Syms wanted the money so he could get his mother’s heat turned back on.

“The hardest thing about his band was wearing the clothes,” Syms says. “He had these costumes that were like Flash Gordon. Mine had one strap because I had hair on my chest and they wanted to show it off. Rick took me over to Motown one day and told everybody: ‘This is the best guitarist in the country, but his head is (expletive) up.’”

That was the same opinion folks in Lackawanna had when he came home a year ago after turning down a $30,000-a-year gig with Rick James. His girlfriend turned on her heel and left. Syms, meanwhile, was convinced he could do better playing his own music. And this brazen act of denial gave him an unimpeachable sense of self-determination.

“After that,” Syms suggests, “what’s turning down $300 to play in a bar? I didn’t want to hear about money anymore. It’s like being in a car accident and being close to death. Then for the rest of your life, you’re not afraid of it.”

Syms still needed to get his music to the public. In 1977, with the first version of ASG, he’d tried without much luck. In that year of Fleetwood Mac, only one bar – My Place in Lackawanna – would let the band play what it liked. Syms spent considerable time and money at Trackmaster studios without getting an acceptable tape.

So Syms started over. He rounded up the current ASG – drummers Michael Simonson and Lenny Potts, bassist Tom Marvich, singer Davis and guitarist Boyd – and went back to Trackmaster last year. The results were a bit better. Trackmaster’s Alan Baumgardner referred Syms to Moser and Doug Dombrowski at Could Be Wild. The record promoters liked what they heard. Since then, Syms’ strategy has been flawless. Nobody’s calling him stupid now.

“I told the guys initially we’re not going to make any money, because the stakes are big,” Syms says. “We’re going to approach this situation like we’re well-to-do, even though we’re not. We’re going to play out when we want to play out. You can’t play a song convincingly if you play to the same people five nights a week. I think if a record gets enough circulation and if people like it, then we’ll go out and play for them.

“I don’t want to get an album just so I can get a new car,” Syms adds. “I want to work in a top-notch studio. If we make enough money, I’d invest in a studio here. I plan on living here. I don’t want to live in New York or L.A. I want to prove to people here, to other musicians, that if you apply yourself enough and sacrifice, you can break that bar band syndrome.”

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IN THE PHOTO: Flyer for an ASG date at Stage One in October 1979.

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FOOTNOTE: ASG followed the EP with a full-length album, "The Offering," in 1981. Syms, a/k/a Al Szymanski, kept the momentum going until 1990, then decided to break away.

"I became totally disillusioned with the music industry,” he told freelance writer Christina Abt in 2019. “It felt as if everything I had given to making it in the that world had been a sham. So, in 1990, I quit. I set my guitars on a shelf and got a job that paid the bills. Yet the music in my soul kept playing, but in a different sound than the rock and roll I’d performed for over twenty years. Eventually, I decided to go back to school and see what I could learn about creating my own kind of music.”

He worked in a record store and had other jobs, got a degree from Empire State College and studied for a master's in composition at SUNY Fredonia. Then he went back to the studio in 2004. The result was "The Lost Art," which ranged from hard rock to ambient sounds. He followed it up with a couple entries in an anthology of what he described as "acoustic guitar work with a medieval flair." Among its fans is Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra music director JoAnn Falletta. In the meantime, he's been inducted into the Buffalo Music Hall of Fame.

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