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.
