FRANK BARBALACE
Wild Blue grew out of a Chicago group called Jinx that toiled in the local club scene beginning in the late 1970’s. The core members of this band were Joe Zanona (keyboards), Terry Curtin (bass guitar), and Frank Barbalace (guitars). They had been looking for a female vocalist, and they found one in Renee Varo; Mike Neff was also added as the drummer.
Chrysalis Records caused unnecessary friction in the band, however, by flying Renee Varo and Joe Zanona over to London to record half of the No More Jinx album with other studio musicians. (They were also the only two bandmembers to make the front cover). About this time, Terry Curtin and Mike Neff quit; they were replaced by Mike Gorman (bass) and Ken Harck (drums), two members of a late 1970’s Chicago power-pop band called Off Broadway (Mike Neff had also been in that band).
Frank Barbalace is also a member of a well-regarded progressive-rock band (also from Chicago) called Trillion. I won’t say anything more about that for now, because they will likely be a future UARB before the end of the year.
Anyway, Frank Barbalace is ambitiously advertising on his website a two-CD collection of most of his recorded works – Wild Blue, Trillion and other material, including some that he did with who I gather is his wife Rebecca Barbalace in a band called Ondavon – for a $50 tab. Oddly, there are only three tracks from the No More Jinx album that are listed. He was one of the bandmembers who was left behind when most of the recording was done across the pond; and these are the songs that he co-wrote, though he also played guitar on one of the best songs on the album, “Fire with Fire”.
But what is interesting about this offer is that this is the only reference on the Internet that I have been able to find of a second album by Wild Blue called Primitive Prayer. Primitive Prayer is evidently the new name of the band as well, since the name Wild Blue had been dropped according to several newspaper and magazine articles about the “upcoming album”, and it was to come out on a different label called Pasha Records. Besides these various articles though – and there were quite a few of them, which tells me that Wild Blue had a lot of fans, at least in the Chicago area – I could find nothing else about the album other than what is available on his website. Whether the album was actually released or not is unknown to me.
(June 2012)
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