After debuting more than half a century ago, the band Pendrift will reunite this weekend. The group will take the stage at Outlook Farm in Westhampton on Sunday, Aug. 16, from 1 to 4 p.m., featuring guitarist and vocalist Al Fuller, drummer Chet Pasek, bassist Jim “Chetz” Keegan and keyboardist Steve Sienkiewicz. While it is not the band’s first reunion show since its heyday — in fact, they also reunited last year — it will be only the second time they have performed together since the late 1980s.
“It’s a bunch of musicians who just know their stuff,” Sienkiewicz said. “There’s no pretense. Nobody’s trying to showboat. Everybody knows how to play, and we just want to enjoy playing together.”
The band was most active between 1971 and 1974. During those years, Sienkiewicz said, “We didn’t fit in any particular niche that was already established, so we had to just seek out the places that liked what we did.”
Their sets were a diverse mix of styles, spanning everything from classical pieces by Mozart and Bach to rock tracks by Jethro Tull and the Allman Brothers Band, alongside their own original material. About three-quarters of what they played, by Fuller’s estimation, consisted of original songs.
“We weren’t the band that … would go into a club and just rock the house all night, make everybody dance and drink,” Sienkiewicz said. It was a little more ethereal, a little more … for people who enjoyed a little deeper music, who didn’t mind taking that journey through a few different genres.”
They performed throughout western Massachusetts, playing frat parties in Amherst as well as traveling to regional hubs like Boston, Cape Cod, Hartford and Brattleboro, Vermont. The Valley at the time, Sienkiewicz said, was a “seven-nights-a-week music utopia.”
During their first year playing at the Wellfleet venue The Beachcomber, they relied on audience generosity. “We were paid by passing the hat — an old, revered tradition that got you tens of dollars,” Sienkiewicz said with a laugh. “But it was fun. We’d go there, it was all locals. It was right on the beach. Everybody was real cool.”
After their sets, they would either sleep on the beach or crash upstairs inside the venue.
“You’d go for a swim in the local ponds, just play every night, [and] have a ball,” he said.
Back then, the band operated as a trio without a drummer. It wasn’t until their final year that Sienkiewicz’s friend Kent Blackmer joined the lineup after returning home from the Navy. To compensate for the missing percussion in the meantime, the group “developed a kind of interplay to get the rhythm going,” he said.
“I just love playing with those guys. … We have that magic between us that you don’t find,” Fuller said.
He compared Pendrift’s unscripted musical chemistry to the Grateful Dead, where members intuitively listen and respond to each other on stage like a form of “ongoing ESP.”
The surviving original members no longer live in the area. Fuller, who grew up in Westhampton, now resides in Sarasota, Florida. Sienkiewicz also lived in Florida for more than three decades before recently relocating to North Carolina. He had originally moved to Orlando to work as a musician for Disney, but “I wasn’t their cup of tea,” he said, “which turned out to be good.”
Being a successful musician in Orlando, he noted, required mastering a wide variety of styles. “As opposed to the fun of the music business that I had in New England,” he explained, “it was the business of the music business.” He eventually found success playing as a sideman for legendary groups like The Coasters, The Drifters and The Platters, traveling to the Middle East with The Drifters and Japan with The Platters.
Now, returning to the Valley, the band members are looking forward to reuniting with friends and family while seeing how much the area has changed since their departure.
With the band’s upcoming show, there might be a few surprise guests. Last year, for instance, Peter Newland from the band Fat played harmonica, and Jim Armenia from the Lonesome Brothers joined on mandolin.
The setlist had not yet been finalized at the time of writing, but Sienkiewicz said it might include songs by Donovan, Bob Dylan and The Beatles. While audiences can certainly expect a few Pendrift originals, the performance promises to be “a real mixed bag of stuff” — a true reflection of the band’s historically diverse repertoire.
Admission to the show is $5 at the door. For more information about Al Fuller, visit alfuller.net.
