June 16, 1978 Gusto feature story: The Jumpers

 

Was this one of Buffalo's best-ever live bands? Lots of people thought so.

June 16, 1978 

The Jumpers: Edging into the big time

The Jumpers jam into Steve Ralbovsky's living room on Buffalo's West Side and they're a bit restless. No wonder. Coming up is their baptism in big-time underground rock 'n roll.

"At the end of the summer," Ralbovsky promises, "we're going to sit down and reassess everything."

There'll be plenty to talk over. The plunge began last Friday in Toronto's punk-rock emporium, the Horseshoe. It'll continue next week when their first single is released, complete with picture sleeve and nationwide distribution courtesy of the Los Angeles-based aficionados at Bomp Records.

The next big date is July 1 – a concert in the Armory Tavern on Connecticut Street. What happens after that depends on how Ralbovsky, concert director at Buffalo State College last year, makes out in his efforts to get the band into major rock showcases in the Northeast. Places like Max's Kansas City in New York.

Don't get the idea that the Jumpers are a punk-rock band, though. They defy categorization and that's the way they want it.

"All I can say is we're a rock 'n roll band," singer Terry Sullivan says at one point "We've always liked to do what we want to do."

"As far as punk goes, we like the fashions," says guitarist Scott Michaels, who was sticking his hair up in clumps long before anyone heard of Johnny Rotten. "And we like the action that's going on. But as far as a punk image, we don't go spitting on people."

"If punk hadn't happened," guitarist Bob Kozak proposes, "we still would've happened. Some of the songs we're doing were written in 1973. It could've happened a couple years ago, but things weren't right."

The Jumpers were bucking trends all along. When Sullivan, Michaels and Kozak were music-crazy kids at Frontier High School in suburban Hamburg, it was the age of heavy metal rock – Deep Purple doing "Smoke on the Water" and all that. Except these guys weren't into heavy metal. They were listening to Chuck Berry, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Foghat, the bluesy stuff.

"That's the reason we couldn't get anywhere then," Michaels remarks. "Nothing against heavy metal. We'd do what anybody else does, you know, play Beatles records and pretend you're John Lennon."

"That's why none of us are into playing the local bar scene," says Sullivan. "You get molded into things. Like people come up to me and say: 'Hey, Mick Jagger.'"

"Some guy came up to me," says Michaels, "and said: 'Hey, Sex Pistols.' I told him: 'No, they think they're me.'"

They didn't settle into their present course until last summer, though, when they recruited bassist Craig Maylan and drummer Roger Nicol, who also hail from Frontier High. Rehearsals ran three nights a week into the winter, mostly on original material. On Jan. 31, the Jumpers became the first group to lay down tracks at Select Sound's new Kenmore Avenue studio.

Recording, however, was not what sprang them out of the practice room into the public. Instead, it came about through one of those friend-of-a-friend things. Kozak's friend Dave Meinzer did graphics for Buffalo State College's music magazine, Eggz. When Eggz held a benefit show last February, Meinzer suggested getting the Jumpers.

The Jumpers laid it down and the Eggz crowd loved it. Their originals weren't really punk rock, which is what folks expected, but they had so much power and drive that it scarcely mattered. A better comparison was early Rolling Stones, with singer Sullivan evolving stage moves from Mick Jagger.

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IN THE PHOTO: Picture sleeve for the Jumpers’ 1978 single “You’ll Know Better When I’m Gone.”

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FOOTNOTE: The Jumpers were powerhouse openers on concert bills here, paired with the Ramones, Patti Smith and the B-52s, among others. They tried briefly to make a go of it in New York City and, before they fizzled out in late 1979, they released two singles and a song, "Hello Girl," that was included on Bomp Records' "Waves, Vol. 2" compilation album in the 1980s. They were inducted into the Buffalo Music Hall of Fame in 2017.

Terry Sullivan went on to be frontman for a succession of underground bands – the Celibates, Terry & the Headhunters and the Dollywatchers. In the mid-1980s, he was a key element in the Restless, a local supergroup that was recruited and managed by record promoters Bruce Moser and Doug Dombrowski of Could Be Wild. He was inducted by himself into the Buffalo Music Hall of Fame in 1992.

Guitarist Bob Kozak, who was the band's key songwriter, played with Scott Michaels (original surname: Miklasz) in the Nite Crawlers and other bands in the 1980s, then left town. The Jumpers have reunited from time to time and Kozak and Michaels, both back in town, have played with various alternative rock groups. Lately they’ve been doing gigs under the name of Bobfinger.

Steve Ralbovsky went on to become tour manager for the B-52s and artist manager for Tom Verlaine, among others. He followed that with a stellar career as an A&R executive with Columbia and RCA Records. When he returned to Columbia in the mid-2000s as senior vice president of A&R, he got his own label, Canvasback Music, which became affiliated with Atlantic Records. He's furthered the careers of the Kings of Leon, the War on Drugs and My Morning Jacket, to name a few.

P.S.: Sometimes a story that turns out to be significant in retrospect, like this one, wound up getting short shrift back when it appeared. Unlisted in the index that week, it was stuck like an afterthought underneath a record review in the back of Gusto. That flourish that I usually put on the finale? Probably cut from the bottom by the editors. And to add insult to injury, no photo.