Before the gray hair, before the jobs, the mortgages, the children, they were the boys in the band.
At age 15 and 16, from about 1967 to 1969, Geno Ceccato, Greg Deck, Andrew Martorana, Jerry Keating, Bob Baker and Tim Martin (top photo, in that order) were known in Western New York as The Middle Class and later, after a change in sound and Tim leaving the band, Faith.
The boys stayed in touch and the families always heard the stories of those glory days, but the former bandmates had nothing from that pre-digital time that showed "this is what we did."
No long ago, Martorana decided maybe a reunion was in order so there could be a little more documentation that they once were a band.
"We realized we didn’t have any kind of legacy to leave our families," Martorana said. "They would hear these stories, but there were no recordings, no videos, just a couple of snapshots here and there."
All week The Middle Class/Faith have been rehearsing in space at the Harvester Center and tomorrow they will go in the studio to record a CD.
Martorana's wife has been making a video, interviewing band members and taking snapshots to include on a DVD of this week's "reunion tour."
None of this is for any commercial/public release. It's just a family thing, a living memento that these six men were once, in fact, a band.
While Jerry, Tim and Greg all carried on with musical pursuits after the band split in 1969, Martorana, who lives in Le Roy, put away his drums, stowed his sticks and pursued a career as an electrician. Before starting to practice for the reunion, he hadn't played drums in 43 years.
After he had been practicing a while, he posted a couple of videos on YouTube of him playing and sent the link to a couple of drummer friends.
"They said, 'oh, man, you've gotta keep playing after this,' " Martorana said. "I talked with my wife and she said I should keep playing. So I'm shopping for a band."
It was Greg, he said, who made the point that the music never dies.
"You may have to relearn it, but it's always in your soul."
