• Carl Bergman: drums and vocals
• Colin Bodge: bass and vocals
• Ron Erickson: guitar and vocals
• Gary Shane: guitar and lead vocals

Gary Shane and the Detour
"Johnny's Coaltrain" b/w "I'm a Shark" (45, Pure and Easy, 1981)

• Everything I've ever seen about "Johnny's Coaltrain" suggests it was actually released in 1982.

The first single from Gary Shane and the Detour, "Johnny's Coaltrain" (Pure and Easy), is a swirl of chugging guitars, bursts of dissonance, bass and drums on military review, and entrancing, mysterious imagery of coal trains and John Coltrane "burning black ... like a smokestack." Part white man's ode to jazz and the blues, part tribute to the mesmerizing power of all music ("I can be anyone I wanna be/When I ride on Johnny's coaltrain"), "Johnny's Coaltrain" is the local hit of the year, popular at Spit, pervasive on 'BCN. There was little about the lightweight power pop, quasi-reggae of Gary Shane's former band, Shane Champagne, that portended this single's luminous and driven vision. Recently, Shane admitted that the song surprised him, too: "It just fell together in the right way."

-- Joyce Millman, Boston Phoenix, June 22, 1982

"New music is always trying to take what's there and push it outside," said Shane. "Hardcord punk is like that, though it's a lot more dangerous to me than 'outside' jazz. But it's got the same kind of living integrity. [When I was writing 'Coaltrain,'] I started getting this concept that the whole new wave-punk-hardcore thing was unknowingly influenced by the early jazz scene. I was thinking of Oedipus with his weird electric hair, and I was thinking of Coltrane with his sandals and beatnik image blowing weird saxophone. And it was the same thing all of a sudden to me." Shane's right--"Coaltrain," with the punk-inspired rawness bracing its jazz-inspired mysticism, weaves spiritual (and visceral) connections between opposites.

-- Joyce Millman, Boston Phoenix, June 22, 1982

A very few records are so widely accepted or so influential that they burrow into our memories and come to represent for us a certain place and time. Willie Alexander's "Kerouac" b/w "Mass. Ave." (45, Garage, n.d. [1975]) is about the ultimate New England example. "Johnny's Coaltrain" by Gary Shane and the Detour, with its curious theme and insistent rhythm, brings Boston in the summer of 1982 surely and swiftly to mind.

Gary Shane and the Detour released a strong album, Forever On Your Way (LP, Pure and Easy, 1982), along with scattered other recordings. Maybe two years later, we lost track of Shane. Later, we saw items in the Boston press reporting that he was experiencing the symptoms of multiple schlerosis and that at times those symptoms were severe. We have no way of knowing what Shane might have achieved musically had his health treated him more kindly; but we do know that we will not soon forget his part in the wonderful Boston-area hits, "Shadow World" and "Johnny's Coaltrain."

-- Alan Lewis

* We led of with this quote in large part because of its very early date.

** We do not subscribe to the unfavorable view of the Shane Champagne Band that is included in the passages quoted on this page. We liked the music, followed the group, and particularly loved "Shadow World," which led off the second side of their extended-play recording, Shane Champagne (10" EP, Pure and Easy, 1980). Nonetheless, we think it's important to record here that even those who never cared for Shane Champagne became real fans of the single, "Johnny's Coaltrain."