Stories and Tales

"Back in San Antonio Robert Gomez had a band called Turning Point and had pretty much dictatorshipped himself right out of the band through pay docking, being the all knowing manager type, and just an all around dick. Or so goes the story...I really never knew Robert. Once they mutinized him, we formed the band Gone City. This band consisted of Ronnie warner; vocals, Kort Ogden; bass Michael (flea)Feliciano; guitar / vocals, Fred Carillo; Sax / keys / vocals, Steve Camp; keys / vocals. Later we picked up Alfred Balderama on keys and vocals along with the other guys because he was a cool guy and we liked him. Also because this freed up Steve Camp to be the horn part keyboard player to do parts with Fred, and Al play the Fender Rhodes. Camp was the leader of the day at getting synth horn sounds and along with the real sax we were screaming with Earth Wind and Fire stuff and the like.

Then there was Ronnie Warner. He was a dynamo to say the least. He could do any of the Lou Rawls type stuff then turn around and do Streisands "evergreen". We did Michael Jackson's "Shake your body down to the ground" which was a huge production for the day. We were doing Paul Simon's "Late in the Evening," which required about a week of drum practice on my part before the band even took it out in rehearsal. I was practicing a lot now because I loved this music. Also Fred played congas and Flea played timbales which was really cool because we had a lot of dance breakdowns in radio songs. Ronnie was an incredible dancer and he would pick some girls and jump in the big middle of them and get after the James Brown/Michael Jackson thing, while we percussioned out. It was a blast. Ronnie decided to move on, with what we really didn't know since he was pretty drugged out and very vague. Something about a house gig in Lubbock. Actually, we welcomed it because we had been on the road for awhile and his extra curicular activities (sex, booze and drugs) were hurting the band. Imagine that ..... the front man for a very popular funk band getting mixed up in that sort of stuff ..... .hmmmm.

We picked up a fellow named Marc Rodriguez who was a fine singer and conga player. This lasted a while until his wife at the time said no more and he persued building his sound and lighting company. Which incidently became pretty big in the Tejano market. River City Sound and Lights. Enter the young Bobby Flores. A serious young guitar player/singer who in the past had been know throughout his teen years as the Big Red kid. There were a string of commercials for Big Red soda in the seventies that Bobby starred in and later grew to hate. He no longer wanted to be that darling little boy in a Roy Rogers cowboy hat that walked balancing on the cedar fence singing "Big Red you've been around so long and you still belong to me." By this time the 19 yr. old Bobby wanted to be taken seriously, and brother we did. He was a playing, singing mofo. Right about this time the Funk / Disco thing was starting to fade and the punk / techno thing was beginning to evolve. Sex pistols, Patti Smyth, Devo, Talking Heads. We weren't in that genre at all so gigs fell off and of course the band didn't last."

- Phil Dalmolin Dec., 2002