Flamin' Harry
recorded at:
J.C. Dobbs
Philadelphia, PA
May 15, 1985
WYSP-FM
01 Announcer - WYSP Intro
02 Flamin' Harry - Tore Up
03 Flamin' Harry - Rude Shoes
04 Flamin' Harry - unknown
05 Flamin' Harry - Rock and Roll Woman
06 Flamin' Harry - Whiskey & Women
07 Flamin' Harry - Smokey Burnouts (tape flip)
08 Flamin' Harry - I Just Wanna Make Love
09 Flamin' Harry - Ride On
10 Flamin' Harry - encore break
11 Flamin' Harry - Rockin' In New Hope
12 Flamin' Harry - 2nd encore break
13 Flamin' Harry - Great Balls of Fire, Whole Lotta Shakin'
14 Announcer - WYSP-FM outro
From the Sam Eliot's Mustache Collection
Brought to you by the Collective For Live Music
The tape starts out rough, showing aging issues but it settles down.
Flamin' Harry... named Hank McGonigal by his parents... ran McGonigal's Music Studio in Perkasie, Pennsylvania, a borough about 30 miles north of downtown Philadelphia.
I found a good story about him in a local newspaper. The story mentions that "George Thorogood once called McGonigal "The most underrated blues guitarist in North America today."
That got me to wondering...why do I know Thorogood, and don't know Flamin' Harry? Some combination of motivation, passion, skill, execution, discipline, luck, and perseverance kept this player as an unknown to me.
With Thorogood, he toured relentlessly...and at times ridiculously. Thorogood's 50/50 Tour hit fifty states in fifty days, which is a crazy schedule, but one drums up press coverage. I first heard of Thorogood when he was out here in the Bay Area, playing the Boarding House. I ran a search on newspapers.com and found the very first California press was in the Berkeley Gazette. He was playing two benefit concerts for the California Homemakers Association at the Rockridge B.A.R.T. station in Oakland before playing the Starry Plow (a small Irish bar). Seriously....the BART parking lot? This was in October 1976; his album didn't come out until August 1977. The reason I've heard of of Thorogood is he showed up here and played, thousands of miles away from his home base in Delaware.
I look at Flamin' Harry with similar searches, and he stayed close to his home base in Philadelphia. Besides Philadelphia, he played Wilkes-Barre, Allentown, Scranton, Trenton and Atlantic City in New Jersey, Wilmington in Delaware.
With exception of a show at a motorcycle swap meet in Morristown, there's nothing close to New York City. It's all within an hour to ninety minute drive of his home in Perkasie. No shows at all outside of a very short drive time.
In 1992, 25 years into his career, he said "...more than anything else I've always wanted to be self-sufficient...and when I realized that the only way I could do that as a blues musician was to stay on the road all the time - something I definitely wanted no part of - I got into other things. So now I can play when I want to and not put pressure on the music to pay all bills."
To the music store he added a tattoo business. So it wasn't lack of motivation. The extensive local press coverage says he had an audience. What he didn't want was the hard slog of touring.
Nothing wrong with that. He had a local career, and now I can hear him thanks to the magic of the Internet.
