Episode 28 of Hooked on Creek features my interview with Amy Goodusky. Amy was a vocalist in Max Creek from 1976 to 1983 and was known as Amy “Barefoot” Fazzano at that time.
In this episode, Amy shares her memories of joining Max Creek and describes what it was like singing, recording and touring with the band. Amy also talks about her favorite songs that she performed with the band and the positive impact Max Creek has had in her life.
This episode also includes a selection of live Max Creek performances featuring Amy’s beautiful vocals:
- Angel from Montgomery performed on February 19, 1978
- Heat Wave performed on February 23, 1983
- Blue Letter performed on September 4, 1983
- Thought I Heard My Baby Calling performed on July 31, 1977
- Water Woman performed on December 4, 1981
- High Flying Bird performed on May 21, 1983
- Love Me Like a Man performed on March 12, 1983
- Dead Cat performed on June 29, 1983
Transcript of episode 28
You’re listening to Hooked on Creek, a podcast celebrating the music, history and fans of the legendary jam band Max Creek. I am your host, Korre Johnson, and you are listening to episode 28.
Thank you for tuning in to episode 28 of Hooked on Creek. This is a very special episode because it features a conversation with Amy Goodusky. Amy was a vocalist in Max Creek from 1976 to 1983 and was known as Amy “Barefoot” Fazzano at that time. In this episode, Amy shares her memories of joining Max Creek and describes what it was like singing, recording and touring with the band. Amy also talks about her favorite songs that she performed with the band and the positive impact Max Creek has had in her life. I had a great conversation with Amy, and I am really excited to share it with you. But stick around, because this episode concludes with a selection of Max Creek live performances featuring Amy’s beautiful vocals.
In the episode show notes, you can find direct links to stream or download the music featured in this episode, or simply head over to hookedoncreek.com. And while you are there, click the contact link and let me know what you think. I would love to hear from you! I am always looking for recommendations on topics to cover, people to interview or Max Creek shows to feature. You can also join discussions about the podcast by following Hooked on Creek on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. Just search for Hooked on Creek to get connected. Alright, now let’s get started.
Korre: Amy Goodusky. Welcome to Hooked on Creek.
Amy: Thank you, Korre. I’m really glad to be here.
Korre: Amy, you joined Max Creek in 1976 and you were a vocalist in the band through 1983. But before joining the band, do you remember the first time you heard or saw Max Creek, I’m curious how you were first exposed to their music.
Amy: Well, I was working as a waitress at Mad Murphy’s — which was sort of a notorious bar in downtown Hartford — in the upstairs cafe. And every Thursday night, Max Creek was the band. And so when I worked, I heard the band and I liked them. They were one of a number of bands that had regular weekend or weeknight gigs at Mad Murphy’s, along with High Times and Fountainhead and Stormin’ Norman & Suzy and various other acts of the era. And that was where I first heard Max Creek.
Korre: How old were you at that time?
Amy: 18
Korre: So, you’re 18 years old. You’re working at Mad Murphy’s and there’s this band coming in pretty regularly called Max Creek. Did you enjoy their music? Was it something that you liked listening to?
Amy: I really liked them a lot. It was interesting because they had a reputation for bringing in an audience that didn’t drink and didn’t tip, but I really liked the music.
Korre: How did you first get introduced to the band then?
Amy: Will every time I tell this story, I feel like somebody out there is going to say, “She’s making it up.” But this is how it happened. I certainly was exposed to the band — just sort of on a peripheral level by bringing them drinks — and ginger ales in John Rider’s case. And one night I was cleaning up the ashtrays in the bathroom, except that really I wasn’t cleaning the ashtrays at all. I was singing because the bathrooms, in addition to having the best graffiti I’ve ever seen, had perfect reverb. They had cathedral ceilings and it was really fun to sing in there. And I was singing one of the songs that they had actually performed that night, Dust On My Saddle. And when I came out of the bathroom with the still-filthy ashtrays in my hands, Mark Mercier asked me if I would be interested in singing with the band. And I said, “Yes”.
Korre: Wow. When he asked you and you said yes, was it a hard sell to bring a female vocalist into the band? Or is that something that you think they were already thinking about?
Amy: Well, I know that Mark had been thinking about this for a long while. He was tired of singing the high harmonies and he had been sort of scheming about it. And many years later when I left the band, I found out that the whole thing had been conducted surreptitiously while John Rider was on vacation. Mark asked me without his knowledge and certainly without his permission. So Mark invited me to his apartment on Warrenton Avenue in Hartford. And I met the sound man, John Archer, and Mark rehearsed me through a couple of songs and presented me to the full band at the next formal rehearsal. He had arrived at some songs that he taught me the harmonies to and made some arrangements of that he wanted the band to do. So as I said, years later, I found out that this was not something that was OK with John Rider. And I don’t think that he has still forgiven Mark for hiring me.
Korre: Well, you must have done a good job, because you stuck around for a while.
Amy: I did stick around for a while.
Korre: Were you nervous when you got that invitation to meet the rest of the band and start to perform?
Amy: Yeah, I stayed petrified for the entire seven years.
Korre: How did you become known as Amy Barefoot?
Amy: My first gig was in Bushnell Park and it was an outdoor concert. It was put on by Peace Train, which was a local organization that did live concerts and all sorts of musical events all over the city. It was an outdoor gig and it was my debut and I had rehearsed with the band by that time, but it came to the point where I was going to come up and be introduced. And I got on stage and I sang Big Boat and Bob said, “Here’s our new singer.” And he realized he didn’t know my last name, and I didn’t have any shoes on, so he just said, “Amy Barefoot.” And it stuck.
Korre: That’s great. I love that story. At that point in time, when you’re 18 years old, did you think you wanted to be a singer? Did you imagine yourself someday joining a band?
Amy: The fact is in the back of my mind, I wanted to distinguish myself somehow in life — whether it was as like an Olympic equestrian or a figure skater or an actor or something like that. But how it panned out was something that I could never, I don’t think, have predicted. Even though I survived my adolescents by locking myself in my room and singing along with my Joni Mitchell records, I never dreamed that I had really any sort of defining talent in that area. And Max Creek was my ticket out of lowly Bloomfield, Connecticut, and my avenue to the sort of notoriety that I dreamed of, but never thought was possible.
Korre: I’m curious, what did your parents and family think when you told them that you’re going to be part of a band?
Amy: Well, they were not particularly pleased. Long afterward, I think when we started touring and making records — and it looked as if we might have some measure of success — I think they revised their attitudes. But in the beginning they were reasonably opposed to it. But neither one of my parents was really watching the store too closely at that point. I had moved out of the house at that point in time. And my mother’s part of the family — my mother’s stepfather and two half-brothers — had moved to Arizona, so they weren’t really in proximity to my little step stool into a brush with fame. But my dad continued to live locally. And occasionally he would bring a group of friends out to hear us. And I think in his way, he was proud of me, eventually
Korre: At this point in time, were you familiar with the Grateful Dead’s music? And to what extent were you a Grateful Dead fan? Because I know Max Creek is often compared to the Grateful dead, for better or worse. I’m curious, was that part of the music you were listening to on your own?
Amy: I wasn’t listening to it on my own. In fact, somebody gave me a copy of Europe ’72 when I was about 14 or 15, and I didn’t like it. But when I got into the band, I liked actually the Max Creek versions of the Grateful Dead tunes that they played better than the Dead’s versions. I thought our vocals were better. I thought our arrangements were better. I liked our jams better. And the Grateful Dead became sort of the backing soundtrack and the pleasant music that brought back many, many associations and good memories from that era. And that’s how it’s remained.
Korre: Did fans compare you to Donna Jean Godchaux from the Grateful Dead at all?
Amy: All the time.
Korre: What did that feel like?
Amy: I didn’t like it. I would like to think that I sound like myself and I would sort of like to think that I got hired to sing in the band not because we were trying to emulate the Dead. But people in the audience didn’t necessarily see it that way. And I’m sure that they thought that they were paying me a compliment, but I didn’t really like Donna Godchaux’s singing and still don’t. If I were compared to anybody, I wish it were other singers of the era.
Korre: Well, we talked a little bit about Mark and John. What were your first impressions of Scott?
Amy: My first impression of Scott was that he was a phenomenal musician and really, really talented. I have always really loved his writing as a musician. I have really enjoyed his lyrics. He was closest to me in age in the band. And so we were close for that reason and I admired him.
Korre: What about Bob Gosselin? Did you get a chance to strike a friendship up with him?
Amy: Yes, Bob and I continue to be friends to this day. We have a lot in common. We had a wonderful working relationship when we were both playing together and he and I have kept in closer touch really than any of the other members.
Korre: Amy, what did it feel like to be on stage with Max Creek at that era of the band? I mean, what were the crowds like? What were you feeling when you’re standing next to those players and performing this music?
Amy: I was way out of my league. All of these guys were classically trained. Mark and John have degrees from Hartt. They were both music teachers. Scott, I think got into, but didn’t go to, Berkeley. Bob was a classically trained concert snare player. I can’t — I still can’t — read music. I didn’t know what I was doing. I have a reasonably decent ear and I was absolutely out of my mind wondering if I was just 15 seconds ahead of getting fired. It was scary. It was thrilling. It was like having a wonderful secret. I remember when I had been in the band about a year, we all made the decision conjointly to quit our day jobs and we got an agent and we started to play full time as our primary means of employment. And at that point, when we were touring beyond sort of the Connecticut and western Massachusetts area, we started going out to different towns and different cities.
And I remember walking around, like in the day period before we were going on to play. I’d be in whatever place we were — Portland, Maine, or Syracuse, New York. And I’d be walking around and thinking like, “I have this secret. I am the singer in the band.” And it was a really, really glorious feeling. The audience was, as it is now, really devoted. We did have some experiences. We had an agent that sent us to some places that were questionable, where we didn’t really have a following. And they weren’t prepared for the type of music that we played. There was one gig that we had in Niagara, New York, and it actually had a chicken wire screen, and people threw things — just like in the Blues Brothers. And the night after we played there, the bar burned to the ground. So that was one of the adverse experiences that we had.
But by and large, we had just a terrific reception among the audience members. Even back then, there was a following of considerable size and dimension and true devotion. And we had a newsletter that John Archer wrote that back then was sent to people by snail mail. And the people to whom it was sent numbered in the hundreds, even then.
Korre: Wow. So while you were in the band, you performed some incredible covers by Bonnie Raitt, Fleetwood Mac, Joni Mitchell, Little Feat, among others. Did you pick the songs you wanted to cover or did other members of the band recommend them to you?
Amy: Both. I had probably the primary say. I brought some songs to the band that I wanted to do that we tried and they didn’t necessarily succeed. There were a couple of Linda Ronstadt tunes that we did very briefly and another couple of tunes that I remember trying out that didn’t go over so well. But primarily, I would bring the stuff that I wanted to do to the band. But also Mark had some suggestions for me. He was the one who found the song Thought I Heard My Baby Calling, which I did for a long time. And it became sort of a trademark, as a song that I really, really loved to perform.
Korre: I understand you actually wrote a couple songs, too, that were performed by Max Creek. Which songs were those?
Amy: I wrote a few. I wrote Water Woman. I wrote a song called I Told You So, and I wrote a song that actually made it on to the live album Drink the Stars called Dead Cat, which I understand people are still interested in asking the band to play today. And of course they don’t because I’m not there to sing it, and I don’t think any of the drummers that succeeded Bob actually ever played it.
Korre: When you think back, what were some of your favorite songs to perform with the band?
Amy: Well, the songs that I sang solo I really loved them. I never picked a song that I didn’t like. So I really loved High Flying Bird. I really loved Thought I Heard My Baby Calling. My all-time favorite Max Creek song is The Field. I could listen to that all day, every day. There’s a song of Scott’s that he performed very briefly. It just never got picked up by the band, but it was called No Deposit, No Return. I still remember that as being just a terrific song. I love Emerald Eyes. I like Devil’s Heart, Rainbow, Gypsy Blue. There are so many of them. I really love the band’s originals, even the ones that I didn’t sing on.
Korre: Do you remember when Rob Fried joined the band in 1979? How did his addition to the band change the dynamic of the music?
Amy: Well, Rob delivered to the band just an incredible depth of sound. It was really beautiful to have percussion on the stage. It relieved me of the responsibility of playing shaker and tambourine, which I was never very good at anyway. And it added a dimension to the band that was very rich, very full — just delightful. And in terms of what was happening on the stage, Rob’s equipment took up a lot of space, which meant that not everybody had as much of a place to stand and put their equipment.
And in those days we had a bread truck called Big Orange and everything fit in the truck. And the truck was filled to capacity. It was 26 feet long and it was huge. And we had crammed it to the teeth with sound equipment. And many of the stages that we wound up playing on left you with a postage-stamp-size square to do your performance on. And Rob’s equipment contributed to that. But it was great to have him there.
Korre: Amy, while you’re with the band, Max Creek released three albums — one in 1977, 1980 and 1982. Do you have any specific memories about the process of releasing those albums that you want to share?
Amy: Lots. So the first album, actually, I used my life savings to fund. I paid for the studio time with all of the money that I had saved up waitressing. And, it was really an honor to contribute to the band in that manner. It was daunting and exciting and really cool to be in the studio. It was a huge education. One of the really great things that Max Creek and my experience in the band gave me was some street cred, you know — just having had the experience. And when we were in the studio, I learned an awful lot more about sound, sound equipment, recording, how it was done, and that broadened my horizons considerably. I really loved that experience.
The second album, Rainbow, I really liked the material that was on that album. I was really happy to be a part of it. And the live album, I was exceptionally happy about because there was an original song that I wrote on it. And all of the recording experiences were really illuminating. All of them were really difficult. We were under a lot of time pressure because studio time costs money and we didn’t have a lot of it. We had a great recording engineer, Ronnie Scalise, who has since died. And he did just an astonishingly wonderful job mastering the albums with John Rider and Scott working on it, as well. And it’s astounding to me today that I’m immortalized on vinyl.
Korre: Amy, why did you leave the band in 1983?
Amy: By 1983, it had become really clear that we weren’t going to probably achieve the kind of Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac sort of fame that I think we all craved and which I think the band deserved. We weren’t making very much money. We had established a connection with a bar owner in Rochester, New York, named John Ross. He was called Burdock, colloquially, and he was going to sort of try to get us to California and acquire a recording contract for us. He was sort of fueling the next step. And in 1983, he committed suicide. And the momentum fell out of the band for the next step forward. And we were sort of on the treadmill to oblivion.
But on a personal level, my reason for leaving the band was that my insides didn’t match my outsides. I was feeling still that I was not the singer that I ought to be. And I was feeling that the adulation and respect and praise that I was getting from the audience was not deserved. And I thought that it was probably the best thing for me to leave the band.
Korre: 2021 is the 50th anniversary of Max Creek. What do you think is so special about this band and their music that has kept them going for this long?
Amy: I think that Max Creek has always attached itself to people who wanted to belong somewhere — me included. And it has been a receptive environment, like the Island of the Misfit Toys — for all of us. Whether it’s because you love the music, whether it’s because you are, as a member of the audience or a member of the band, a part of something that is greater than the sum of its parts. It’s an extraordinary entity. It offers belonging. It offers unity. It offers absolutely incomparable musicianship. It’s an energetic enterprise that surpasses really description.
Korre: Yeah. I love this band and I’ve never even seen him perform. It’s amazing!
Amy: Wow. That just astonishes me that you’ve never seen them live. And really like the Dead, Max Creek is a live concert not to be missed. And I really hope that if there is a 50th anniversary gig — if it’s allowed and they perform one — that you’ll go.
Korre: Yeah. Amy, thank you so much. This has been a lot of fun. Are there any final thoughts you want to share?
Amy: The only thing that I’d really like to add is that the band changed my life in a really extraordinary way. And I am so grateful that I had that experience. Just absolutely, it has been the defining era of my life. Everything that I took away from that band, everything that I learned there, has informed and enriched the rest of my life. And I am so thankful to all of the members for indulging me, for teaching me, for helping me and for the education that I got in real-life-down-and-dirty stuff in the music business and in performance. It helped me everywhere. So I hope that they hear this and know that I feel that way.
Korre: Amy Goodusky, thank you for joining me on Hooked on Creek.
Amy: Thank you so much, Korre, for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity.
It was a huge honor getting the opportunity to talk with Amy Goodusky and I really hope you enjoyed listening to our conversation. But don’t go anywhere because now I have some sweet Max Creek tunes lined up featuring Amy on vocals. First up, you are going to hear High Flying Bird, that will be followed by Love Me Like A Man and finally Dead Cat.
This is Max Creek performing live at Jonathan Swift’s in Cambridge, Massachusetts on May 21, 1983.
This Max Creek performing Love Me Like A Man at Kayo’s Pub in Portland, Maine, on March 12, 1983.
And now, this is Max Creek performing Dead Cat live at Two Mattoon in Springfield, Massachusetts, on June 29, 1983.
And that concludes episode 28 of Hooked on Creek. If you are curious, earlier in this episode I featured clips of the following live Max Creek recordings: Angel from Montgomery performed on February 19, 1978, Heat Wave performed on February 23, 1983, Blue Letter performed on September 4, 1983, Thought I Heard My Baby Calling performed on July 31, 1977, and Water Woman performed on December 4, 1981.
You can get direct links to stream or download all the songs featured in this episode on the Hooked on Creek website. Just visit hookedoncreek.com and while you are there, be sure to click the contact link and let me know what you think of this podcast. I look forward to hearing from you. Thanks for tuning in.