The Sugar Trio
Taking a Chance on Love
Dr. Feel Good
Making Whoopie
Sometime around 1984, I discovered a jam session in San Diego at the Bahia Resort Hotel lounge every Sunday night. I think I started going there while I was waiting to turn 21. I remember getting bounced a couple of times and spending a lot of time in the hallway listening through a door. I gave out my business card to anyone that would take it at that jam for a year without getting a single call for a gig.
I didn’t have a phone, so the number on the card was to a payphone in the Marine Corps Band Barracks. One Friday afternoon at about 5:00 PM it rang, and it was a guy who got my card from someone at the jam (Teddy Pico?) that recommended me. The band leader said his name was Sugar and the gig was at the La Jolla Broiler and started in 3 hours. I showed up and the band was a trio. Sugar Huff played a keyboard and Earl Vaults played tenor sax. La Jolla was the fanciest part of San Diego and that made me feel a little out of place, not to mention that each of the other two guys in the band had more experience as professional musicians than I had days on the earth.
At the end of the night Sugar paid me in cash and asked me what I was doing Saturday night, I said “nothing”, and he said “wrong, you’re playing here with us”. I became the band’s drummer and after a few months, we were working 5 gigs a week some weeks.
The woman vocalist you hear on some of the live recordings of the Sugar Trio is Miss Katie. She joined us on some of our gigs on and off for about a year. To this day I’ve never met a vocalist that approaches music quite the way she does. She was absolutely fearless on stage.
These recordings are all from a live radio concert we did for KSDS radio in 1985 or 1986.