Product Details

• Actors: Zonkaraz
• Directors: Gil Markle, Producer
• Format: Color, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC
• Language: English
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 2
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Studio: Studiowner, Desert Dreams Records
• DVD Release Date: July 26, 2011
• Run Time: 145 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B005B1QT12
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #202,648 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Zonkaraz back in the day, July 16, 2011

By 

Walter H. Crockett (Worcester, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Zonkaraz at the Hanover Theatre: November 13, 2010 (DVD)

This is a blurb that I wrote for the DVD itself. I am member of the band, so please consider the source of both my positive comments and high number of stars. However, I think what follows is a fair depiction of the band in its heyday:

1972. The fans are 19, 20, 21 years old. Second half of the Baby Boom generation poured into a working man's roadhouse, the Blue Plate Lounge, in Holden, Massachusetts. Long-hairs and short-hairs, nurses and painters, grad students and weed-dealers packed 200-tight in a room built for maybe 70.

Standing on tables, dancing in place, rocking the foundations and bouncing the dance floor like a trampoline, as the trio on stage plays songs no one outside of Worcester County has ever heard.

Magical songs, with three-part harmonies. Just a pounding electric piano and a strummed acoustic guitar, and maybe a tambourine, laying down this mongrel cross of folk, country, blues, rock, pop. Gorgeous, bouncy, dark and joyous songs of love won and lost, green river rushes, moonlit nights, the month of May sleeping in my bones, and a place somewhere over the rainbow that never seemed more real, more here, more now. Marvelous harmonies that flow together without calculation, like water to a mountain stream, and this amazing young woman who makes every song her own whether she sings lead or background, riffing like a bluebird over the strong male voices, frisking like a colt in April, aching, just like a woman, to run free, to be free, to love.

It was eighteen years since the river of rock 'n' roll tumbled headlong into the river of time. Sixteen years after Elvis released "Hound Dog." Nine years after JFK went down. Eight years since the Beatles played the Ed Sullivan Show. Just three years after man walked on the Moon, and only months before the drinking age would drop to 18 in Massachusetts.

It was the most prosperous time in American history. You could drop out of college and get a job, go back to college and get an education. Stay up half of Monday night dancing to Zonkaraz and sleep-walk through work the next day. You could catch the Celtics at the Garden for $10 bucks on the day of the game. See Hendrix or the Dead at Clark University for less.

Music had exploded as the generations changed. There were live rock 'n' roll bands everywhere, playing for real money three, four, five, six nights a week. There was rock, folk-rock, country-rock, blues-rock and schlock-rock and you could hear it all on the same radio station. This generation shared a common musical vocabulary, they had money to spend, beer to drink, brain cells to burn and their whole lives in front of them.

Worcester, where Zonkaraz was born and rose to local fame, is often called a "gritty industrial city" because people are too polite to call it plain ugly. But Worcester is above all a melting pot, a cauldron of ethnicity on gray streets just minutes from the wooded hills of Central Massachusetts. Out of this cauldron came Zonkaraz, a group that melded the city's already dissolving ethnic and religious divisions: Ric Porter, son of Jewish parents, loved to fish and hunt, never finished high school, lived in a teepee in the woods. Paul Vuona, son of Italian-American parents, graduated from University of Miami in fine arts, worked in construction. Joanne Barnard, old-line Anglo-Saxon, dabbled in college but she was born to sing.

Vuona, on piano, was the musician of the trio, and became the godfather in the years when the band grew large. He combined a flair for wistfully romantic songs with a pulsing, no-prisoners boogie-woogie style. In the early days he'd handle the bass lines with his left hand, and drive the melody home with his right, pumping out solo after solo for the dancing crowd. The buoyant "Morning Sunrise" and "Chico Chico (A Cuban Love Song)," are among his tunes.

Porter, the band's most prolific songwriter, brought a rocking blues influence and a folk-country sound to the group, with classics like "I've Been Thinking 'Bout You" and "East Virginia." And he was the master of writing hauntingly beautiful songs like "Moonshine Mama" and "Different Song." Porter brought the simplicity and sensitivity to his songs that he found in his love of the outdoors.

Barnard was a work of nature. Preternaturally sensual. Sexy just breathing. Gifted with a belting lower register, a silky, keening falsetto and vocal quality that would be distinctive on any stage. But the biggest gift of all was the emotion that filled her sound. This was no finely tuned and tinkered machine, this was a natural woman singing of love and heartache, hope and despair.

Vuona and Porter got together first, playing the London Towers lounge at Worcester Airport. They bonded right away. Each of them had a colorful, distinctive voice and each was writing great original tunes. They played some songs with Barnard at a wedding and she blew them away. The wedding led to a Blue Plate gig and suddenly Zonkaraz was rolling.

They exploded like no other local band. They wrote whatever songs came to mind, and many of them became instant classics. They needed a roadie, so they added high-school dropout Paul "Spider" Hanson. With moves like Mick Jagger, Spider took up the tambourine and maracas and spent the rest of the band's eight-year run doubling as rock star and roadie.

Within a few years they eased from a trio into a full band. They needed a bass player to hold the sound down and they lucked into Jon Webster, a monstrously melodic player who could sing any harmony and hit all of Barnard's notes in rehearsal. From the beginning, everybody was dancing to Zonkaraz, so the drummer was inevitable. Dennis Wright joined, along with second percussionist/roadie Mitch Sephlin. Walter Crockett followed on lead guitar in 1975. A year later, Wright and Barnard left and were replaced by Tom Grignon and Nancy Roche.

And the band kept growing. On Monday nights in 1977 they would draw 500 people to the Last Chance Saloon. That's more people than you could find in all the music clubs in Worcester put together on a Friday or Saturday night 10, 20, or 30 years later.

Crockett left in '79 and was replaced by Larry Preston. Roche left in '80 and was replaced by Kim Page. Not long after, the wave had crested, the drinking age rose back to 21, the Baby Boomers started families, the music scene fragmented into disco, heavy metal, and punk. The Zonkaraz era was over.

But the songs live on. These exceptional songs, these danceable, romantic songs are as compelling today as they were in 1972. And the players and singers haven't lost a lick either. Sometimes you can go home.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Captured Live and Forever Young -- Zonkaraz at the Hanover Theatre in Worcester, July 12, 2011

By 

Chet Williamson - See all my reviews

This review is from: Zonkaraz at the Hanover Theatre: November 13, 2010 (DVD)

Zonkaraz At The Hanover Theatre November 13, 2010

Zonkaraz is arguably the most popular club and concert band ever to have originated from Central Massachusetts. In its original iteration as a trio, Zonkaraz (named after a band member's two dogs -- Zonk and Raz) consisted of pianist Paul Vuona, guitarist Ric Porter, and singer Joanne Barnard, piping lead and backup vocals.

The musical style which they developed in the early days of the 1970s (country and blues-influenced, up-tempo roadhouse rock) never changed; nor did the lyrical content of their songs, which has always been green, environmentally-themed mountain and river talk, with an ever-present boy-girl love interest thrown in for many a good measure.

This was simple, happy and often cyclical music, with long instrumental grooves reminiscent of the Greatful Dead allowing for the endless refilling of cocktail glasses and pitchers of beer. It was stone music to drink and dance to, don't you know. It was this feature of the band that made it almost immediately the toast of regional club owners, bistro moguls and saloon keepers, elevating Zonkaraz for many years to the status of a watering hole spectacular.

It was the Clark University professor, Gil Markle, who made the earliest known recordings of the band (some of them still available) in the early `70s. Using an Ampex 440 tape recorder in his suburban Paxton home, Markle captured the young Zonk magic.

Subsequently, now electric, louder, and larger with the addition of guitarist Walter Crockett, bassist Jon Webster, and drummer Tom Grignon, the band would record frequently at Markle's soon-to-be famous countryside recording studio in North Brookfield, Long View Farm.

The result leading to Drivin' -- an LP produced in 1976 by industry veteran, Bill Halverson. Unfortunately, the record company, Bayshore Records, went out of business almost immediately after setting sail, consigning the album to the status of a collector's piece, which it still enjoys today.

Changes in line up of the band towards the end of the decade took its toll as well. Singer Barnard was the first to strike out on her own as a solo artist, replaced first by Nancy Roche, who was herself replaced a few years later by Kim Page.

By the early `80s, Porter, perhaps the most career-tenacious of the original players, would be seen fronting the Preston-Porter band, and later, the Shades. (He is currently heard with his newest creation, the Sons of the Soil.) With these changes, the foot-stomping Zonkaraz-induced barroom blast was heard less and less frequently, and finally no more.

That is until 20 years later, when popular demand persuaded the band to re-group in what turned out to be a series of bi-annual reunion concerts -- which were, by the way, hugely supported by a now somewhat aging but loud-as-ever crowd of dedicated fans.

The third, most recent, and best of these reunion concerts was staged and filmed in November of 2010 at the Hanover Theatre for Performing Arts in Worcester. The result is this compelling double DVD release.

Zonkaraz is at its definitive best in this concert -- tight, energetic, and well-rehearsed. All the hits are here, notably "California," "Jack Frost," "Rumor Has It," and "Talk to Me Baby" -- each sounding fresh and alive. The viewing will transport the baby-boomers back to the glory days of youth and a give a new generation the opportunity to catch up on what they missed.

Singer Barnard's voice is still bell-like. Now Barnard-List, her voice serenely gets up and over even the most raucous jamming produced by the band, including Vuona's stellar keyboard cascading performances, Porter's emphatic guitar weavings, and the show-stopping, squeezing-out-the-sparks-electric guitar duels squared off by Crockett and Larry Preston.

Not to be outdone, rhythm mates, including bassist Webster with drummers MacGillivray, Michael Allard-Madaus, and (now Nashville resident) Tom Grignon, give the performance a rock-hard platform to stand, stomp, swing and, well, rock on. This was the show to see.

Now you can. If there is one piece of recorded media product that the thousands of Zonkaraz fans should have, this is it.

The double DVD set was produced and edited by the long-time band booster and friend, Gil Markle.

Peace,

Chet

5.0 out of 5 stars The return of Zonkaraz, October 31, 2011

By 

Mattsmacs - See all my reviews

This review is from: Zonkaraz at the Hanover Theatre: November 13, 2010 (DVD)

Every so often, the rewards of being a free-lance writer exceed expectations. This video of the Zonkaraz reunion at the Hanover Theatre is such a case. I have to confess that I got the rough cut of this gem about two months before its official release, and was enthralled. The subsequent polish that was put on the video under the ever skillful guiding hand of Dr. Gil Markle serves up a feast for both eyes and ears.

For those unfamiliar with the phenomenon that was Zonkaraz, a trip back to 1972 is in order. That's when Paul Vuona and Ric Porter, two musicians from wildly different backgrounds got together and began Worcester's legendary music ensemble. Zonkaraz comes from a concatenation of the names of the founding members' two dogs. Paul's dog Zonka, named after football star Larry Csonka, and Ric's dog, Raz. The two dogs got along so well that Paul and Ric decided to name the band after them. Thus Zonkaraz was born.

Joanne Barnard joined the duo after seeing them play at Clark University and their young roadie, Spider Hanson, started sitting in on percussion. The band's roster grew from there to include guitarists Walter Crockett and Larry Preston, bassist Jon Webster, and drummer Tom Grignon.

This engaging double DVD set opens with the band ripping through "It's a Lovely Feeling"; one of the original Zonkaraz songs from the "Paxton Tapes" which were recorded in the spare bedroom of a ranch style house in central Massachusetts back in 1972. Manning the Ampex 440 tape machine and engineering the sessions -- many of which were recorded direct to stereo -- was Gil Markle; the same Gil Markle who would go on to create the legendary Long View Farm recording studio and, eventually nearly 40 years later, come full circle to produce this video chronicle of the reunion of this icon of New England rock.

Peppered throughout the set are several other songs from "The Paxton Tapes" like: "I've Been Thinking `Bout You", "Jack Frost", and "Moonshine Mama". The band plays them with a freshness that makes you believe they were written only yesterday. It's easy to see why, in its heyday, Zonkaraz was packing New England clubs three or four nights a week.

With well over 100 songs in their legendary repertoire, it must have been a daunting task to choose just twenty-five songs to populate the set list of this reunion concert. Yet, as always, the band doesn't disappoint. The songs sparkle with a newness that belies their age. This is a must-have DVD for anyone interested in New England music. Zonkaraz was a phenomenon that may never be repeated.

But all is not lost, because as Ric Porter said recently, "I love playing with these guys and I'd love to do new songs with them and to play like we did in the old days when we'd do three 60-minute sets and get into, like, Grateful Dead territory with some of the tunes." He added, "When you're young, you have time, but no money. Now we have less time, but we are a bit more solvent and could work out a way to get everyone together for shows."