Hot Wax Heats Up, 40 Years On
This is how it began: “This guy’s coming from the city to play piano.”
That was the message from Paul Harrison, the manager of the Silver Seahorse on Three Mile Harbor Road in East Hampton, to Brad Beyer, said Mr. Beyer’s brother, Bruce.
“This guy” was Fred Goodman, a musician and journalist who was performing a solo rock ’n’ roll act in New York. A publicist friend was close to Mr. Harrison’s wife, and by 1978 he was performing regularly at the Silver Seahorse, later known as the Sea Wolf.
“The owner wanted to have big Sunday brunches on the patio,” Mr. Goodman said, “and thought one piano wasn’t going to make it.”
“That gig was getting so popular, the owner asked if he knew anybody else to get a band together,” said Bucky Silipo of Springs. He and Bruce Beyer had met a year earlier, contracted to back a husband-and-wife duo on bass and drums, and quickly discovered a musical kinship.
“Brad rented the piano to the Silver Seahorse, and the owner called him to see if anybody could accompany a pianist,” Mr. Silipo said. “Brad recommended his brother and, because our bond was strong, he and I went and played with Freddy.”
“One night I showed up at the Silver Seahorse, and all of a sudden there’s a drummer and bass player,” said Mr. Goodman, who lives in Seal Beach, Calif. “I said ‘Okay, I’m fine with that’ — I was going to make the same $50, or whatever it was. We started jamming that night, and all I had to say was the key the song was in. They knew just about everything.”
“Fred sat down at the piano, started rocking,” Mr. Beyer said, the hastily assembled trio effortlessly gelling on songs like “The Way You Do the Things You Do” and “Drift Away.” “We fit like three amigos. At the end of the night, it was, ‘Come back next week.’ We did, every Tuesday from July 20 to Labor Day, and then Fred went back. We thought we’d never see him again.”
But they did see him again, and again, and again. With disco’s sterile beats and tacky clothes still ruling the music scene in 1978, the old-time rock ’n’ roll served up by this new band was exactly what South Fork clubgoers craved, and Hot Wax, as the group would soon call itself, was an instant hit.
On Saturday, 40 years after that first serendipitous pairing, the classic lineup of Hot Wax will plug in their instruments and get the crowd dancing once again. Mr. Beyer, Mr. Goodman, Mr. Silipo, and Bruce Macarthy, a guitarist who joined soon after the band’s formation, will perform at the Breakwater Yacht Club in Sag Harbor, where Pierson High School’s Class of 1968, which includes Mr. Beyer, will celebrate its 50th reunion.
The name, said Mr. Beyer, a lifelong resident of Sag Harbor, came from the pioneering disc jockey Alan Freed, who reportedly coined the phrase rock ’n’ roll and in the genre’s early days announced “the new hot wax” — 45 r.p.m. singles — that he was about to play. (The 1978 film “American Hot Wax” is loosely based on Mr. Freed.)
“We played all these rock ’n’ roll favorites,” Mr. Beyer said. “We were intoxicated with the sound. It was so real; there was nothing phony about it. The people picked up on it.”
“From the first note, the whole was bigger than the sum of the parts,” said Mr. Silipo, who returned to his native Long Island in the early 1970s after college and soon came to Montauk. “It must have been okay, because back in August of ’78, the phone kept ringing for Hot Wax.”
“Bruce, since he was from Sag Harbor, and Bucky, who lived in Montauk, got us gigs at places like the Corner Bar and the Sandbar,” in Sag Harbor, “and Christman’s,” in Montauk, said Mr. Goodman. “We became regulars.”
At the Corner, “the place just lit up, electric, packed, everybody dancing,” Mr. Beyer said, remembering Russell (Jim) Smyth, the bar’s late owner, “dancing on the pinball machine with his shirt off.”
“Next thing, we’re playing Christman’s almost every week,” he said. “It kept going from there.” At Christman’s, “Bucky called Bruce [Macarthy] up. He came down with this old Mosrite guitar and a Fender amp, and we started playing with a guitar player.”
“There was nothing going on” in Ghent, N.Y., Mr. Macarthy said of his hometown. “The Donahues were from Babylon, but their dad was originally from up there. They moved up there and I became friends with them. A couple of them moved to Montauk, called me, and said, ‘Come on down, there’s plenty of work.’ I started bartending at Shagwong in, like, ’74. Jimmy [Hewitt] found out I played guitar, and said, ‘Do you want to play here? Thirty-five dollars a night and all you can drink.’ ”
“You’d go on at 10, end at 2, then load out, have breakfast at 4 at the diner,” Mr. Goodman said. “You’d stay up all night.” After gigs at Christman’s, “Half the band would get eggs at Salivar’s,” Mr. Macarthy said, “and the other half would get cheeseburgers.”
Hot Wax remained a top-drawing band on the South Fork, performing at bars, weddings, and parties for many years. “Since those guys lived out there, they kept getting gigs in the winter, so I would take the train out or drive,” Mr. Goodman said. “We became a thing.”
But nothing lasts forever. A songwriter, Mr. Goodman’s “Hideaway” and “We Belong to the Night” were recorded by Ellen Foley, best known for her vocals on Meatloaf’s epic song “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.” “We Belong to the Night” hit No. 1 in Holland and Belgium, and Mr. Goodman moved to Florida for several years. He returned to New York in the mid-1980s and rejoined the band for a few years before moving again. Hot Wax persevered through personnel changes well into the new century.
For several years, Mr. Silipo and Mr. Macarthy also performed as a duo, and in recent years formed the 3B’s with Brandon Neff of Montauk. But Hot Wax still plays at the Devon Yacht Club in Amagansett, as it has every year since 1978. “I can’t explain the feeling of looking out and seeing three generations of people we’ve played to” at Devon, Mr. Silipo said. “It’s such a gift.” For that matter, “I can’t believe that I still get to do this. I feel very blessed. I appreciate every moment of playing.”
“It’s been an amazing ride,” Mr. Beyer echoed. “It was fun, man. I loved every minute of it.”
“We used to rock Sag Harbor!” Mr. Macarthy said. “It was fun. We definitely had a good time.”
“The music is not difficult in the sense of technique,” Mr. Silipo said. “We’ve always relied on the energy and the love we have for the songs.”
“I never thought we were great musicians,” Mr. Goodman said, “but the energy was there, and that’s what people wanted at parties and things, to go nuts. It was a high for us because we liked watching people have a good time, jumping on tables, and for them it was a fun Saturday night. We got a bit of a reputation as a good-time rock ’n’ roll bar band.”
On Saturday, Pierson’s Class of ’68, whose coming of age coincided with rock ’n’ roll’s own flowering, will relive that magic time with a little help from their friend and classmate, Mr. Beyer, and his friends in Hot Wax, performing the soundtrack to their lives. “This ought to be fun,” Mr. Macarthy said. “I can’t wait.”