My Life as a Rock and Roll Star

by Dennis Weldon

CASPER (1974)

Larry Bish, David Herr, Geoff Marenchin & Dennis Weldon

OK, so maybe I wasn’t a star, but I did play rock music in the early 70s.  My love of music started back in Junior High School, as I can distinctly remember music class with Mr. Groves.  In High School I sang in the choir and mixed ensemble, so I developed a love of vocal harmony. Then I saw my first live rock and roll band.  It was the band that I think both Jim and Bill Sparks were in, when they played at the American Legion on State Street. 

I got my first guitar our senior year and started to play a little.  My first instruction came from Linda Mamone’s brother, Nick, and we played together quite a bit.  When I went off to Penn State to study aerospace engineering, I continued playing with Nick and others.  Then in 1967 at a summer job, I met Larry Bish from Transfer.  He was an extremely good guitarist and singer and we started playing a lot of Simon and Garfunkel and similar songs.  

In the summer of 1968, I met a woman whose husband owned a small recording studio in the basement of a store downtown on State Street.  There Larry and I recorded Weldon and Bish’s first and only album, “Obiter Dictum” (i.e., “a passing remark” in Latin).  Recently someone posted the songs on the internet, so you can Google “Weldon and Bish” to hear them. The album was a bit crude and I was still a novice guitar player, but it was fun.  We made just 50 copies of the album for ourselves and our friends.

After a year of graduate school in the MBA program at Penn State, I dropped out because Larry and I decided to form a band and to try to make a living playing music.  It took a while to get things together, so during that time I worked on the railroad in Sharon as a brakeman and clerk.  We finally found a very good drummer/singer, Geoff Marenchin, from Sharpsville, and in 1973 we moved to State College.  There we met a bass player, David Herr, from the Philadelphia area, and our band was formed.  Against my strong objections, we named our band Casper! 

We played soft rock, and harmony was our specialty. We covered songs by groups like Crosby, Stills, and Nash, Neil Young, and Eagles, and we also performed some of our own material.  We got fairly popular in town, especially at our favorite bar called The Phyrst. But in the spring of ’74 Larry decided to quit the band and do something else.  By that time, I had spent almost three years trying to get this going and I wasn’t ready to invest more time, so I re-enrolled in grad school and finished my MBA in transportation and logistics.

And that was the end of my short-lived career as a rock and roll star!  It was challenging and frustrating but sometimes great fun, and I’m glad I tried it.

After that, my wife, Charlotte, and I moved to the Washington, DC area when I took a job as a management consultant with Ernst & Whinny (now Ernst & Young).  After seven years there, due to all the travel and having two young children, I found a job with a Fortune 500 electric utility company in Raleigh, NC.  I got into the IT world there and eventually found my way to IBM Global Services, where I was a project manager and eventually a senior manager, managing a number of our clients’ IT operations.  I retired in 2012 and now I do a lot of volunteer work, particularly with the Raleigh chapter of SCORE (Service Corps of Retired Executives), providing advice and counsel to small businesses.