Mozart's Mafia - Home Page. Al Galles Jim Greenberg Dennis Peterson Jock Sutherland Steve Ryder Tom Bergquist Tom Wright Chuck Worthly

The Kat Club!: The Sixties. Coming Soon

Mozart's Mafia - Home Page (see Homestead , Skogie and the Flaming Pachucos)

1964-1969

Al Galles	-	Drums, Vocal (Homestead, Skogie and the Flaming Pachucos v5, Skogie, Skogie Band, The Kats v1, v2, v3, Nu Kats, The Danny Johnson Band, Waxie's Gargle, The Kat Club Trio)
Jock Sutherland	-	Guitar, Bass, Vocal
Dennis Peterson	-	Lead Guitar, Vocal (Homestead, Skogie and the Flaming Pachucos v5, Skogie, Skogie Band, The Kats v1, v2, v3, Nu Kats, Roach and the White Boys, Boy v2, BFM, The Kat Club Trio, The Kat Club!)
Steve Reiter (v2)	-	Bass (Cabin Fever)
Tom Bergquist (v1)	-	Guitar
Tom Wright (v2)	-	Trumpet
Jim Greenberg (v2)	-	Sax (Skogie and the Flaming Pachucos v4, v5)
Chuck Worthly (v2)	-	Organ

Mozarts Mafia 1967: Galles (Drms), Peterson (Gtr), Reiter (Bass), Sutherland (Gtr), Worthly (Organ)

The Denny and Al Soul Review 1967

Class of 1969 Southwest High School Yearbook:

Galles

Peterson

Reiter

Southerland

Quote taken from Insider Magazine: At Southwest High School, Peterson and Galles started their first 5-piece group, Mozart's Mafia. The two had gotten guitars in grade school, and convened their first band when one guy said he played piano. Peterson: "The popular song he could play was "Green, Green" by the Christy Minstrels, so we thought we'd better hang it up for a while and learn to play before we played. We didn't know anything. We just thought you had to bang on it and music would come out. We never knew you had to practice."

They returned home to woodshed. "Al would call me on the phone, and I got really envious because clean chords were coming out and I was still struggling with C, F and G7." When Peterson and Galles got together after summer, Peterson had discovered Galles had been playing his guitar in an open tuning with a pencil. "I almost killed him when I found out…" Chastened Galles switched to drums.

The Mafia was a step up from playing in garages with a wollensak tape recorder to the beat of a single snare drum. The original Mafia was an English Invasion group that faked accents on stage - a trick picked up from some of the "big time" local groups of the mid-sixties. Galles met some horn players (including Jim Greenberg ) in the gym class when he was thinking of adding a horn section for a school assembly. After the appropriate amount of soul searching and overcoming parental opposition to their association with such unsavory characters as Peterson and Galles ("the black sheep of the school") they joined. The Mafia's version of "Harlem Shuffle" and "I Feel Good" went over with the student body, so the group became an 8-piece choreographed white punk-soul band playing the standard local bag of "Show Me" and "Midnight Hour."

After graduation the Mafia disbanded and went their own ways. Meanwhile Peterson and Galles played country rock and surrogate Buffalo Springfield with the band, Homestead.

Greenberg, Peterson and Galles all ended up in Skogie and the Flaming Pachucos in 1971.

Reiter (bass), Sutherland (gtr), Worthly (organ)

STEVE REITER (2008):

Blues de Ville. Steive Reiter (Gtr)

Blues de Ville

TOM BERGQUIST (2010):

I do remember setting up our equipment sometimes in our basement and turning on the amps, The kids in the neighborhood were quite impressed even though their parents weren't too sure about the noise. Our first paying gig was a birthday party for Marcia Jaffey, who lived across the street from the Galles and a few houses from Jock Sutherland. I also remember Denny was always the first one to buy the newest equipment - ie the 2 piece fender amplifier and he invested in most of the microphones.