Wanda's Lost Yellow Balloon

[The following was posted as a comment on Mark Bialczak's music column which appears in the Syracuse Post-Standard. His article was about the recent refurbishment of a local rock venue variously called Wanda's, The Yellow Balloon, The Lost Horizon. Turns out that the club has a long and storied history, in which I made a brief, if terrifying, appearance...]

It was the early 'seventies, the place was called the Yellow Balloon and The Buddy Grealy Band was playing. I was young, the place was rockin' and the crowd was really into it. At one point, the crowd began to move in such perfect sync with the music that the floor started to bounce up and down like a trampoline.

All I could think of was my old man talking about his WW II engineering battalion being told to "break cadence" when they marched over the bridges in France so that they didn't accidentally match something called the "harmonic frequency" of the structure and bring it down. In a panic, I yelled to my buddy, "Man, we gotta get outta here!" And he yells back, "Calm down, man, this is just starting to be fun."

So we stayed almost to closing and nobody ended up in the basement and years later I'm thinkin' it was maybe just something in the, *cough, cough*, you know, tobacco. Still, as I read this, I have to admit feeling relieved that they replaced the floor. And good luck to Wanda's Lost Yellow Balloon for another fifty or so years of rock 'n' roll memories...

LPK
LiveJournal
3.13.2011