HISTORY

The Ides began in Berwyn, Illinois with Cub Scout packmates Peterik (lead vocals and lead guitar).  Larry Millas (keyboards), Mike Borch (drums) and Bob Bergland (bass).  In 1965 they were a British invasion cover band called the Shondels-heavy on Hollies-like harmonies and tentative, very white R&B.  They also wrote a lot of their own material and cut a single,"Like It Or Lump It," issued in the Chicago area on their own label, Epitome Records.

     In '66 The Shondels were discovered by Parrot Records which had only one rock act anybody could think of, The Zombies.  The band's debut was "You Wouldn't Listen," written during an all-night sleepover on Peterik's 15th birthday.
     Tommy James & The Shondells were starting to turn up on the charts, leaving Parrot's newly minted teen act in a quandary.  "Our record was just ready to come out and we had to scramble for a name," Peterik recalls.  "We were all reading Julius Caesar in high school.  Bob Bergland came across 'Beware the Ides of March.'  It sounded like a name to me."
     "You Wouldn't Listen" was a hit in Chicago and various areas around the U.S. peaking at #42 on the Billboard charts in the spring of '66.  Parrot never turned a profit on The Ides of March and after six singles the band was dropped.
     By 1968 the Ides were regularly playing James Brown, Curtis Mayfield and Arthur Conley covers in their sock-hop shows, so the decision was made to add horns.  Enter more school chums, Chuck Soumar (trumpet) and John Larson (trumpet and flugelhorn).  Bergland began to play saxophone onstage.
     Local promoters Bob Destocki and Frank Rand caught the Ides' act when they were opening a show for Neil Diamond and after a little negotiation they took over management and started promising big things.  Destocki was also a regional promotion man for Warner Bros. Records and through his contacts he got the Ides a four song demo deal with the label.
     "We put 'Vehicle' last on the demo," Peterik says.  "We didn't really value that song.  The first three songs we thought were the ones.  We sent them to the label and they went, 'Are you kidding me?  The fourth song is a smash."  (For the record, the other three were "Lead Me Home, Gently"; "Something Comin' On" and "The Sky Is Falling.")
     Peterik had written the sexually charged "Vehicle" as a joke.  "I got the idea from one of these anti-drug pamphlets they distributed in a school." he explains.  "It was very tongue-in-cheek."
     Produced by Destocki and Rand, the Vehicle album was recorded at CBS Studios in Chicago, which according to Peterik, had been used only for radio and TV voiceover work.  "They didn't know rock 'n' roll from a hole in the wall." he says.  "They did a good job, but it was a learning curve.  We were all learning together."  

"I remember that kind of feeling of experimentation.  I also remember 14 seconds of the master of 'Vehicle' being erased!  We were doing background vocals and suddenly 14 seconds were gone from the master.  No way to retrieve it.  The second engineer had hit the wrong button.  We spent two hours thinking. Our career is over, because at this time we knew we had something. Luckily, there was a Take One.  They inserted 14 seconds of Take One and I redid the vocals.  And now I hear it every time.  From the second 'Great God in heaven' all the way up to the guitar solo--when you hear how abrupt that first note of the solo sounds, that's an edit."

     Cool enough to drive the song to #2 on the Billboard Pop Singles chart, right behind The Guess Who's "American Woman," ("Vehicle" hit the top spot in the some what less prestigious Cash Box.)  The album never rose higher than #55.
     "One Woman Man" was actually released as a single before "Vehicle."  The two songs don't sound anything alike.  "That was more like The Association with brass.  We were a harmony band with horns at that point." 
    Influence-spotters had a field day with Vehicle.  "You gotta realize, we were all 18, 19 years old at the time," Peterik says.  "We were still looking for a sound.  Most people have their formative years in private, because they're under the radar.  Here we are, on the radar screen, still looking for who we are.
   "So, yeah, there's a real potpourri there, everything from B, S&T to a little Creedence. 'Factory Band' that's Creedence.  I mean, come on--we were fans of all those bands.  And yet we do have a sound.  It's the way our voices blend, the way we play together, it's still The Ides Of March, but obviously there's a real palette of influences represented on the record."
   One of Peterik's most accomplished ballads, "Home," has a familiarly unchained melody, but makes its point in a sweetly sentimental way.  The band's affection for the first Crosby, Stills & Nash album was laid bare with their jazzy, extended take on "Wooden Ships" - linked, for reasons Peterik doesn't remember, with the Jethro Tull instrumental "Dharma."  And they bit off a big one with a jazzy nine-minute arrangement of "Eleanor Rigby," which they titled "Symphony For Eleanor (Eleanor Rigby)."
   "It was hard to translate the grandeur of that in the studio," Peterik remembers.  "It was very au courant at the time.  I think Vanilla Fudge had their 'Eleanor Rigby' at the time.  I think every band had their 'Eleanor Rigby.'  It was kind of, like, required.  It has its moments.  But. boy if you could've been there in '70 and heard it live....."  
   Then there was "Bald Medusa."  "It was just a phrase that Mike Borch came up with," Peterik explains.  "He said, 'Bald Medusa,' and I said, 'Cool.'  Wrote a song that made about as much sense as that title.
    "It's a dirty, very hormonal song about getting it on.  Of course, you have the double entendre:  'I'm Bald Medusa' became 'I balled Medusa,' and that's the way we did it live.  We had a lot of fun with that.  It was 19-year-old hormones talking."

The Ides Of March spent most of 1970 on the road, opening for the likes of Janis Joplin and Led Zeppelin.  "We were the kind of band that lived very economically on the road," Peterik recalls.  "And we made money.  We didn't make money on the records, because we were always working off the record company debt.  But it was a very viable business."     Peterik has been telling this story for years:  "We were on a bill: Iron Butterfly, The Youngbloods, The Ides Of March and then Led Zeppelin, in Winnipeg.  And it was our night, that's all I can tell you. Zeppelin had an off night, we had an on night and the next day's entertainment headlines said, Ides of March steal the show.   We did our 20-minute version of Eleanor Rigby and brought down the house"

     Years later, The Guess Who's Randy Bachman ran into Peterik at a Nashville trade show and said, among other things, that he had been in that audience in Winnipeg and that The Ides Of March really had smoked Zeppelin.  "I said, 'Then it was real! I didn't dream it!'"
    Understandably, the label desired a follow-up single.  "We wanted to release Aire Of Good Feeling." recalls Peterik.  "Killer song.  Warner Bros, says.  'We want something more like 'Vehicle.'  Didn't matter that it wasn't on the album.  They wanted the same song basically rewritten, so, dutifully, I wrote Superman."
    The second and final Warner Bros. album, Common Bond, was more cohesive--and more ambitious--than its predecessor.  The Ides Of March were growing up (without Ray Herr, who left the group suddenly while the band was on tour promoting Vehicle).  L.A. Goodbye, is the hit that never was; successful regionally, hitting #1 in Chicago for five weeks, along with We Are Pillows, Peterik was doing Crosby, Stills & Nash almost as well as Crosby, Stills & Nash.
    Mrs. Grayson's Farm was inspired by a tour stop to a Midwestern farm.  It was an innocent experience -- they ate hamburgers and looked at the chickens -- that ultimately lent nothing to the multilayered psychedelic rock 'n' roll song.  "Man, is that hippie," Peterik laughs.  "I don't know what that is."
    Clocking in at 11:31, the album's tour de force, Tie-Dye Princess, blended elements of jazz, folk and progressive rock (something relatively new at the time) and still managed to avoid sounding too pretentious.  "Fortunately or unfortunately, we never had that kind of inflated sense of self," Peterik explains.  "We were always the kids from Berwyn going, 'Gee, are we lucky to be here."
    Common Bond wasn't successful and after a couple of well-crafted but obscure albums for RCA, The Ides Of March packed it in.  They played their last gig in November 1973 at the Berwyn high school where it all began, playing sock hops in 1964.
     Peterik went on to write or co-write many of .38 Special's late '70s and early '80s hits, including Hold On Loosely and Caught Up In You.  He formed the band Survivor and co-wrote Eye Of The Tiger and The Search Is Over along with a string of hits that would secure his reputation as a top songwriter.
    When the Ides re-formed in 1990, it was with the intention of doing one reunion concert.  Peterik says, "That's all it was gonna be.  And we were having so much fun, we said, 'Hey, we rehearsed three months for this one show.  Let's not waste all this rehearsal.'  And we never looked back."