The Geronimo Black Story - Part I: 1969-70

 
[Sept 1969 - Frank Zappa breaks up the original Mothers of Invention]

[For Mother's Sake - JCB's Memoirs:]
"I just started to look around to see who was available to jam, and maybe form a band. Bunk was ready to try things out too... Andy [Cahan] had just come off the road and had been playing with Dr. John. Tom [Leavey] was a bass player who’d just moved out to California from New York...Tjay Contrelli, who I knew from his days in Love, came and played sax along with Bunk.
We started rehearsing in my garage in Woodland Hills at the end of September... I decided to call the band Geronimo Black... So, when we started, we had me on drums, Tom on bass, Andy on keyboards, Bunk and Tjay on the two Saxes and an electric violin player named Greg Bloch. There was no guitar in the first band...We only had about three rehearsals before we played our first gig, which was at a fairly progressive church in Pasadena, California...
We got a young guitar player called Chris in for a while and he was a good little player...We started playing some gigs at the Topanga Corral, which soon turned into a residency. We ended up playing there four nights a week, for about six months. We were the house band and we played Thursday through Sunday. On the other nights they had some great bands playing."

1970 April - June: Geronimo Black
"Geronimo Black played for about three months but then Bunk, Andy and Tom left and went on tour with Tim Buckley" [For Mother's Sake - JCB's Memoirs:]