To the rest of 1970s America, Landshark was just a character on Saturday Night Live, lunging through women’s apartment doors after pretending – in the voice of Chevy Chase – to be a repairman or delivery boy.
Then a real delivery man named Gary Roland quit his job at UPS, moved to Florida and started a band called the Landsharks. Seemingly overnight, by bracketing with Jimmy Buffett songs whatever was playing on pop radio, the band developed an irresistible, beach- and beer-friendly sound that made it perfectly OK to slide off your barstool or get up out of your folding chair and dance by yourself in public.
Friday night, there will be plenty of that when the Landsharks take the stage at the 20th anniversary of Downtown Friday, just as they did in 1994 when the street party was launched by the local chapter of downtown redevelopment advocates, Main Street USA.
Roland may drive others to bust a move on the dance floor, but it’s thanks to him busting a gut – twice – that we got him here with his happy-making band. He was working at UPS in New Jersey, developed hernias from lifting all those boxes, and had to quit what he thought would be a stable career. Instead he embarked on a typically unstable career – playing guitar and singing at bars in Cocoa Beach, Florida. He eventually migrated south, joined up with some other musicians, and started playing at a marina restaurant called Summit Landing in Micco, and at Marvin Gardens in Vero.
He sang every single night, he says, until he finally lost his voice.
“I had never sung every night professionally,” he says. “I couldn’t sing, I couldn’t even talk, polyps, the whole thing. I wrote everything down on a piece of paper for a year,” he says.
Roland gave up the solo guitar/vocalist spot and took up bass as a duo with Sam Masiello, playing at the Patio restaurant. Soon they took on three female vocalists and a drummer, Sam Johnson. The guys dressed up in white suits – their “Miami Vice” phase, Roland says.
Then one woman got pregnant, another left with a boyfriend, and one quit, he says. With the girls gone, they hired a keyboard player.
Those four guys became “pretty much the staple group.” Roland’s voice healed, they headed for Key West, started playing a lot of Jimmy Buffett songs, and got themselves booked at a Parrothead convention with an eight-piece band that so rocked the crowd, Jimmy Buffett himself joined them on stage.
Since then, the band has played with up to 18 musicians, expanding when the gig demands it, and traveling to Aspen, San Diego, Mexico, Puerto Rico, the Bahamas, Singapore, Tokyo and the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
“We played a retirement party at some private school in Aspen and they flew us in with a 14-piece band,” he recalls, amazed at the lavish lengths to which people go to get his sound at their events. ”We just played in Nantucket with 14 pieces.”
Eventually, after auditioning for Disney World, Roland based himself in Orlando to do mostly corporate events, buying a home in Windermere, though he has a condo in Vero Beach and comes here frequently.
He tells the story of the time he got a call from Hugh Raiten, original owner of Riverside Café, where the Landsharks often played. Raiten asked if Roland could come down and set up his equipment for a kid named Josh, home from Florida State, who wanted to play for free. “I said, Huey, it’s not even 10 in the morning. I’m not coming down there and setting up for some kid.”
When he got to the bar for his own gig, there was Josh – who now goes by Jake Owen – standing at the bar with his guitar, singing a Dave Mathews song. He hadn’t yet fashioned himself a country singer, Roland says.
“He was literally singing to people on their bar stools,” says Roland. “Then he came up to me – and I’m the guy who blew him off about the equipment – and he says, ‘Excuse me. I really like what you’re doing. What advice would you give a guy like me starting out?’ I was really impressed by that. It really shows something about his personality. I thought about it for a second, and I said, ‘Treat it like a business.’
“A year later, I went on his website, and it said, ‘Join the Jake Owen Fan Club, only $7.95.’ He took my advice!“
As for Roland, he is hardly taking his own advice in agreeing to play at the Halloween event. “This job – honestly? I am not paying myself a single penny. Once I pay eight guys to come down, I’m going to have no money left over,” he says laughing.
“It’s a labor of love. All these years we’ve played around here, we’ve developed some great friendships. People take it to heart when you play at a community event. It takes them back, and it does the same thing for me. This is something that I want to nurture.”
The free Downtown Friday celebration along 14th Avenue starts at 5:30 p.m. with a family bike ride originating in the city parking lot across from Jetson’s Appliances, and includes a Halloween costume competition and parade.
From the lark of the Landsharks Friday, the week’s best-laid plans should include seeing “Of Mice and Men,” at the Majestic Theatre this coming Thursday, Nov. 6. The stage version of the powerful Steinbeck classic, “Of Mice and Men” stars James Franco and Chris O’Dowd in a live performance simulcast in HD from London’s National Theatre. The actual simulcast of the play begins a 2 p.m. and is rebroadcast at 7 p.m. Tickets are only $20 – how can you go astray with James Franco?
And with luck there should still be seats available for Saturday’s Live from the Met HD simulcast of English director Richard Eyre’s updated version of Bizet’s “Carmen,” also at the Majestic. Mezzo-soprano Anita Rachvalishvili sings the title role. Call 770-0774 or go to www.cinemaworldonline.com.
If you’re over fears and tears and it’s laughs you’re after, there’s comedy aplenty this weekend, with two shows and two comedians Friday and Saturday at Riverside Theatre’s Comedy Zone, for $16 and $18 admission (231-6990); and Sunday, Nov. 2, the finalists of the 2014 season of NBC’s “Last Comic Standing” appear at 8 p.m. at West Palm’s Kravis Center. Tickets start at $15. Call 561-832-7469, or go to www.kravis.org.