Hunting for Trolls: The Quest for an Unfindable Band, Part Two
In the previous installment of Hunting for Trolls — or How ‘Something Here Inside’ Turned Out To Be Nothing — we learned how the love for an unknown group’s material led a naïve youngish lad to attempt to document their story. In this final installment, we witness how a primrose path can turn into a trail of tears while attempting to not be overdramatic about it.
My first order of business was to locate Richard Clark, the only member whose whereabouts were unknown. This was especially important to me because he was the main songwriter of the group, so I figured that he might have the most to say. The problem was trying to locate a guy with a name as common as Richard Clark. If he had gone by the name Dick Clark instead, that would have made the Google haystack impossibly huge, but thankfully Richard was his moniker.
Mr. Naivete here decided that the first thing to do was determine if maybe he still lived in the Chicago area. Using the white pages online — a lovely combination of old and new ways of searching for somebody, which is kind of like using an oven to heat up a microwaveable meal — I found a handful of Richard Clarks in and around Chicago.
I grabbed my phone one afternoon and called the ones whose phone numbers were listed. Each time somebody answered, I explained who I was and told them who I was looking for and why. None of the folks had heard of the Trolls, but I have to admit they were all very congenial, if not a little bemused. I sent off a couple of letters to the ones who didn’t have phone numbers listed. This resulted in absolutely nothing, but that’s what I expected, so no huge blow to the ego there.
I gave up on that idea because I didn’t have enough time or energy to contact every Richard Clark in the United States, so I shifted gears to what information I did have. I was able to find Max Jordan’s address, and immediately decided not to call the guy since he was fairly adamant in the past that he didn’t want to talk about the Trolls. However, I did send him a letter expressing my love for the group and my desire to talk to him about their history. I didn’t really expect a response, and I didn’t get one, but it was worth a shot.
My next plan of action was to contact Richard Gallagher. Here was a guy who had contact information and wasn’t necessarily refusing to talk about the Trolls. I found his company’s website one day and gave them a call. I got his answering service and left a message as to why I was calling. For various reasons that are too ludicrous to bother remembering, I left my work number as my contact information.
The good news was the guy actually called back! The bad news was he called while I was out, and instead of going to my voicemail, somebody else in my office answered my phone. When I got back, my co-worker told me that a Richard Gallagher had called back asking for me and told him that he was in some group called the Trolls and blah blah blah. I was a bit embarrassed when he finished recounting their conversation, but he thought it was funny.
I tried calling Gallagher back and got his answering service again, so I left another message. You can probably guess where this is going. He called back again when I was away from my desk, and for some reason, my co-worker answered the phone again, which is something he rarely did, much less twice in two days’ time. The same thing happened as before, and while he was still amused, I felt that I might be pushing my luck, so I decided to wait and call Gallagher later once I figured out a better phone situation. It was sounding like he was just as likely to be calling to talk to me about the Trolls or calling to tell me to leave him alone, so I might as well find that out away from work.
Around the same time that this phone phiasco — yes, I spelled it that way on purpose — was going on, I acted on another “brilliant” idea. I grabbed my one Trolls 45 and noticed that the songs were registered with Broadcast Music, Inc., more commonly known as BMI. This is a company that, along with ASCAP and SESAC, makes sure that royalties are paid to artists for their material.
It occurred to me that there might be some kind of contact information on the BMI website stating who currently owned the rights to the Trolls’ material. I searched the database and found a bunch of their songs listed, but the only information given was a phone number. Having absolutely nothing to lose at this point, I picked up the phone and rolled the dice.
A gentleman answered, and I explained yet again who I was and what I was trying to accomplish regarding the Trolls. The guy seemed a bit confused, then bemused. He told me his name was Johnny Pate, and he was the producer of the Trolls’ recordings while they were at ABC Records.
Finally! Success of some sort! I talked to him for a couple of minutes, then asked if I could call him back another time when there was more time to talk. He said that was fine, and the conversation ended. For the first time during this whole process, I was genuinely elated. I hadn’t really given up on talking to any of the band members, but since the experience was making me feel like Sisyphus, it was a huge boost to talk to somebody who was involved in the creation of this music I so dearly loved.
I also searched the BMI database for the album they recorded as Troll and found another number. That led me to whatever company that currently owned the material recorded for the Smash label. The guy I talked to was sympathetic to my cause, but said they didn’t have any information readily available on contacting anybody involved with that album, especially since it had been recorded and forgotten 35 years earlier. The possibility of searching through mounds of paperwork to actually find anything was simply out of the question.
I should stop here and explain how dumb I felt after my initial conversation with Johnny Pate. If you’re reading anything at REBEAT, you may have heard of him; at that time, I didn’t know who he was. I researched him and found out really quickly that he was a pretty big producer in the 1960s. Look on any Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions record during their time at ABC, and you’ll see Pate’s name on there.
Whoops. Given my love for the music of that era, I probably should have known who he was, but I’ve always been bad about keeping track of the folks working behind the scenes. Come to think of it, the last guy I expected to talk to during this exercise in sleuthing was their producer!
This didn’t bother me too much. He was pretty congenial, and I’m sure I sounded like some young idiot, so he couldn’t fault me too much for not saying immediately “you mean you’re THAT Johnny Pate?!” With that bit of salve on my wounded ego, I called him back a few days later.
This conversation lasted a little longer, and got really promising. He mentioned to me that he dug through his files and found some information about the Trolls. He didn’t remember much at the moment about the recordings, so I offered to send him a copy of the CD I had with their ABC material on it, which he accepted. He also told me that he remembered when the Trolls were signed to ABC, because the guys were really excited. He even recalled Richard Gallagher saying, “We’re gonna be as big as the Beatles!”
He remembered something like that? Fantastic! Things were looking really rosy, until…
He mentioned to me that usually people were paid for these kinds of discussions. It felt like an off-the-cuff statement, so I wasn’t too bothered by it. I was honest and told him the website that I was writing for wasn’t really making money off of anything — and neither was I — and that it was more a labor of love, especially for me. We exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then I told him that I would mail him the CD and get back in touch with him in a couple of weeks.
I immediately mailed the disc and left things alone for a few days. I had already decided that I would give him a good two weeks to get the CD and listen to the music, and then I would call him back again. I was finally feeling pretty good about the whole experience.
A week after I mailed the CD, I received a letter from the city where Johnny Pate lived. It was pretty thin, and I felt my stomach drop. I hadn’t asked him to write me back, and what he sent wasn’t more than one sheet of paper, so there couldn’t be much information in there if he had decided he wanted to correspond via mail instead of phone.
I opened the envelope and read it with trepidation. Pate notified me that he listened to the disc, didn’t really remember anything about the music (“It was really only a job, after all”) and basically said there was no reason to contact him further.
That night, I hardly slept. I kept trying to figure out what went wrong. How could this guy tell me on the phone that he remembered when the Trolls were signed to ABC, but he didn’t remember anything else?! Why string me along like that? Was it because there was no money to be made in talking about them? Did I accidentally offend him at some point? Did he legitimately not remember anything else about them?
I didn’t know the answers then, and I still don’t know today. I crumpled up the letter and threw it away and didn’t bother Pate ever again.
After that rejection, I took a few days to think about it, and decided that somebody was telling me to give up on this project. Nothing was working out, and it was turning into a thankless task full of frustration and heartbreak. Why keep bothering to try to get these people to talk? If they don’t care, why should I?
My will to be the Trolls’ biographer completely disappeared. I wrote Mike Dugo back, told him about everything that went wrong — perhaps with too much emotion — and basically said that I was giving up. He was kind enough to tell me not to feel too bad about it. He understood my frustration, but said not to let it get to me. I gave it my best shot and he appreciated it.
Thankfully, as time went on, I had the pleasure to write a few more things here and there, which helped wash away some — but not all — of the bad vibes this whole experience left in me. I won’t say I was completely jaded, but it still knocked the wind out of me. What I did learn is that not everybody — especially these guys — will see as much importance in their past endeavors as I do. C’est la vie.
Postscript:
After writing a couple of more things for Mike’s website, I dropped off the radar because I had pretty much lost the desire to keep writing about music. A few years later, I contacted him out of the blue to ask if he ever had any luck getting any further with the project. He told me that he was eventually contacted by Richard Clark, but there wasn’t much he had to offer about the Trolls. Other folks who remembered the group had contacted him with their memories of seeing them live, or sharing a picture or two they had taken, but that was it.
I also found out somewhere along the way that sometime in the 1970s, ABC decided to purge their tape library of any material that they didn’t deem necessary to keep. It is safe to assume that all of the Trolls’ master tapes were destroyed decades ago. Even their record label didn’t see the importance of the Trolls.
It may seem like I took this experience a little too personally, and I wouldn’t disagree. All I can say is that I made the mistake of being too idealistic, and had to learn the hard way that different people have different views of their past, and no amount of fawning or enthusiasm will change their feelings. That’s sad, but it’s certainly fair.
It didn’t occur to me until I started writing this article that — aside from hearing “Something Here Inside” once in a while — I never listened to the Trolls again. I still have those CDs that Mike sent me, but my desire to listen to them completely disappeared when this whole experience wrangled me to the ground. I seriously considered listening to their entire output for the first time in 10 years while finishing this article, but I just don’t feel like hearing any of their songs.
Having said that, I am determined that it won’t always be that way. Just because these people don’t have any passion for their music doesn’t mean I can’t. When the feeling is right, I’ll give them a listen. They may never care about the Trolls ever again, but I guarantee you that someday I will.
So, to Richard Clark, Ken Cortese (in spirit), Richard Gallagher, Max Jordan, Jr., and Johnny Pate, I want to honestly thank you for what you created. I’m sure I’m not the only person who appreciates what you did all these years later, so I say this on their behalf as well. Wherever your heads and hearts are these days, I sincerely hope you can eventually look back to those days and smile.
Someday I will as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrcYX92m7RE
