TRIBUTE TO PETE SHERIDAN

November 1, 2021

By Larry Carlin

There are a few people in your life that you can look back on, smile about, and say, “If I had never met him, I don’t know who or where I’d be right now.” Such is the case with my late friend, Pete Sheridan, who passed at age 84 on September 15th.

As anyone that ever knew him knows, Pete – also known as “Juke” or “The Jukester” – was an old-school blues harmonica player. I, as a fledgling musician at the ripe young age of 20, had the good fortune of meeting him when I moved to State College, PA, in March of 1974 to continue my education at Penn State University. My late drummer friend Daryl Katz and I had relocated to the town in time to start the spring semester. Not knowing any other musicians there, I soon placed a note on the message board at Discount Records on Allen Street, saying that a bass player and drummer were looking for pickers with whom to play some tunes.

Before long I got a call from Jim “Pigman” Mortimer, who was a rhythm guitar player in Pete’s blues band, and he told me that he and some friends often get together to play some country and blues, so he invited Daryl and I out to his place in the Laurel Glen apartment complex. When we drove out there a few days later in Daryl’s 1966 VW van, as we pulled into a parking spot this other VW van arrived with two guys inside that at first appeared to be twins, and on the back window there was a sign that said “Juke Jelly Blues Band.” That was when I met Juke and his youngest brother, Kevin. That first jam was a lot of fun, as Jim’s wife Anna and his good friend Dave “Bad” Devecka were also there, and before long beers were offered while some longtime friendships began. We ended up getting together to jam occasionally, and if my memory serves me well, we also played a gig or two as either The Jug Hollow Boys or Muskrat Springs.

Within a year Daryl joined another band and left town to go “make it” in music in Philly, so my car rides and trips out to Laurel Glen came to an end. I eventually started playing with some other pickers in town, but my friendships with all the guys mentioned above continued for years to come. Pete and I would still get together from time to time, and I had him join me on some occasional coffeehouse gigs at the Kern Graduate Center on campus. And occasionally I’d stop in at the Tavern Restaurant to have a beer on the nights when he was working as a bartender.

In December of 1977, my housemates and I were planning a Christmas party at our house at 244 S. Atherton, and realizing that I had not seen Pete in a while, I phoned and invited him over. Little did I know at that time that it was a call that would change the direction of my life forever, and for the better.

The party took place a couple of days before Christmas, and the house was packed with a few dozen holiday revelers. About halfway through the night I saw the bony, bespectacled, and bearded Juke coming in the back door, and I immediately greeted him. We had not seen each other in a few months, and I asked him, “What’s new, what have you been up to?” He replied that he’d been busy with his school teaching, bar tending, and a variety of music projects, and that he was going to be taking a drive out to Los Angeles just after Christmas to check out the area, as all his brothers lived out there and he was thinking about relocating to the City of Angels as well. Knowing that it was a long journey, especially in the dead of winter, I then asked, “Who’s going with you?”

When his answer was, “No one, I’m going on my own,” the proverbial wheels started turning in my mind, and I then asked the question that, unbeknownst to me at the time, would turn out to be one of the most important ones that I have ever queried.

“Would you like some company?

By now you know what his answer was. Two days after Christmas he picked me up in that same VW van at my house, and we were headed west for the Promised Land of sunny California.

It ended up being the journey of a lifetime for me. We took the Southern route out and got there in three days, with Pete doing all the driving! Here I was, an experienced bus driver as his navigator, yet the iron man logged all the miles behind the wheel. When we got to LA, he dropped me off at my cousin’s house, and for the next week or so both of us did stuff on our own. As luck would have it, a relative of my cousin’s wife was going to be making a drive up to San Francisco, and I knew a former band mate from the college town who had recently moved out there, so I got a ride up and stayed with the friend for two days. He lived north of the city, but he took me on a sightseeing tour all around the area. In the dead of winter, it was sunny and 65 degrees and I fell instantly in love with the Bay Area. I then flew back down to LA to reconnect with Pete, but on the plane I started wondering how I could move out there to live, even though I owned no car and only had a few hundred dollars in the bank.

The two of us then began our trek back East, staying with friends and in cheap motels along the way, talking about music, listening to the radio, and discussing the possibility of starting a new band. (Yeah, this made a lot of sense – starting a band while also trying to leave town!)(But at age 23, this seemed “normal” to me.) We tossed around some ideas and decided that when we got back to State College that we’d jam with some friends to see how it went. We also wanted to come up with a name. There were dozens of suggestions, none of which were feeling good. And then, somewhere on the desolate plains of Kansas, we heard the Jim Croce song, “Bad Bad Leroy Brown,” on the radio, and both of us were taken by a line in the chorus. We looked at each other and said, “What about calling ourselves the Junkyard Dogs?” Two months later we had a five-piece band and we started playing our mix of country and blues at various venues in the State College area.

The original lineup of the group was Pete on harmonica, me on electric bass, John “Bubba” Beschler on drums, Gary Brubaker on rhythm guitar and piano, and Donn Overly on lead and pedal steel guitars. A few months later Donn left the band and we then invited Cy Anderson to join us. We played at the Phyrst and Brewery in State College, at an outdoor festival on campus, on Allen Street for the Arts Festival, and at some other locations in the surrounding region. I did my first road trip gig with the Dogs, traveling to Alfred University in southern New York, and in November of that year we played a memorable job at the nearby Rockview Prison.

One song in particular that Pete sang so well that I will always remember was Little Walter’s classic “Boom Boom, Out Go the Lights.” We’d often close our show with this one, and it never failed to get the juke joints jumpin’.

That road trip to California really opened my eyes to a whole new world of possibilities. By the end of 1978 I gave my notice to the band, and then by February of 1979 I was once again driving out to the Golden State, in a car loaded with my guitars and clothes, heading on a new adventure, one that continues to this day. Now, some 42 years later, I have been living in the San Francisco/Bay Area ever since.

But Pete and I stayed friends across the miles and decades. I did see him a bit in Los Angeles, where he moved in 1980 with his kids Shawn and Heather after their mother, Bobbie, died from cancer at the all-too-young age of 40. Pete lived in Culver City for eight years, and while the kids ended up staying there, he wasn’t enamored of the scene, so he moved back to the State College area in 1988, formed a couple of new bands, met and married Sharon, and before long they had two sons, Liam and Brian, before moving to Mechanicsburg, where he lived for the rest of his life.

I’d occasionally see Pete in State College when I went back to visit during the Arts Festivals in July. For many years one of his bands had gigs at Zeno’s during the fest. On other occasions, on my way from Philly to State College, I stopped by a couple of times to see him in Mechanicsburg, and there were Christmas cards, the occasional phone calls, and emails. The last time we spoke was a few months back, when he was in a rehab facility while dealing with a mysterious illness called White Matter Disease. He sounded pretty weak at the time, and I was concerned about his well being.

He had been ailing and was immunocompromised for the past two years, so when I saw his brother Kevin’s name appear on my iPhone screen at 8:37 a.m. on September 16th, I already had a sense of dread, which was confirmed when I first heard the sound of Kevin’s voice. Even though I knew that this call could be coming at any time, it still was a tough one to answer. Within minutes my fears were confirmed, as the sad news arrived that Juke had gone on to that big blues jam in the sky.

Pete was one of my longest and influential friends, and I know that he had a positive effect on countless other musicians in Central PA and well beyond. After the Dogs I know of at least four other bands that he was part of: Sailin’ Shoes, The Jumpin’ Mudcats, the Triple Blues Band, and Juke and the Tone Patrol. He not only had a website that was all about the blues, on it he sold Juke’s Harmonica Supplies, and he also wrote three books: The Quest for Tone in Amplified Blues Harp, Affordable Axes and Cool Amps for the Slide Guitarist/Harp Player, and Wayne Raney: That Hillbilly Boogie Boy, Country Crooner, and Born Again Gospel Guy with The Talking Harmonica.

Now, I can’t claim to know a lot about playing the blues, but what I do know, I learned at the master’s knee. I will always cherish the years that Pete and I played music together, as well as the camaraderie over the decades. And I will forever be thankful that he came to that Christmas party at my house in 1977. I can only imagine how less fulfilled my musical career would have been, or how my life would have turned out, if The Jukester had not turned up on that frosty winter night.

And I have no doubt that right now, somewhere over the rainbow, Pete is leading an eternal and smokin’ blues jam with Little Walter, Robert Johnson, Sonny Boy Williamson, and countless others, bringing smiles to all their faces…