Here’s a wild ride from the night Gunnison Brook played a senior class dance at Stevens High School in Claremont. The band was one of the most sought-after acts on the New England circuit and, according to Pete Merrigan, “We were very full of ourselves. Like many of our rock and roll peers, we had a righteous sense of anarchy. Bottles of beer and Boone’s Farm in the dressing room, a high school locker room, prior to the show? Never mind that Mario was only nineteen. So what! Hey, we’re in the band!”

Approaching the end of the dance, the band launched into its Rolling Stones medley, which often closed a show. Two hundred seniors had stuck around for the medley. It started with “Honky Tonk Women,” rose and fell through sections of “Sympathy for the Devil” and other Stones staples, and climaxed with “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”

“As the medley reached its climax,” Pete remembers, “the janitor came up on the stage, went to the breaker panel and snapped on the house lights. As he left the stage I walked over to the breaker panel and shut the lights off again. The band never stopped playing. The janitor stormed back onstage and once again switched the lights on. This time, as he neared the edge of the stage, I told him, ‘Leave the damn lights alone,’ and gave him a swift kick in the butt to help him off the stage. He glared at me and charged off in the direction of the police officers on duty at the front of the building.

“About a minute later, across the mass of teenagers, I saw the janitor and two uniformed cops headed for the stage. I knew if I stuck around I’d be arrested, so I did what any self-respecting rock star would do. I bolted. Ran off the stage, out the rear stage door and up the street, ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ still echoing through the night air. Three of the band’s girlfriends were just driving back toward the gym in my car. I flagged them down, jumped in and said, ‘Don’t go to the gym, head back to Goshen!’ On our ride out of town we saw several cruisers, blue lights flashing and sirens blaring, heading toward the high school.

“I didn’t know until later that night when the band filled me in that my good pal Ron Grace had come up on the stage after I’d fled and rallied the audience into a near riot while ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ played out. Since the cops couldn’t find me, they arrested him instead….

In the pantheon of band house lore, nothing rivals the Gunnison Manor house party of August 1972. The band threw a summer party in 1970, 1971, and 1972. The first year was very small, and in fact the Gunnison Brook boys supplied a couple of cases of cheap wine, Boones Farm and Night Train, handing it out to the audience of maybe two dozen. The next year it was a little bigger.

Pete Merrigan says, “The third party was the one ‘for the books’ that everyone still talks about. We began mentioning it from the stage months ahead of time and inviting people wherever we played, Newport, RI, to Burlington, VT, and all points in between. We knew we had a big party on our hands when people began showing up to camp out two days early. Maybe half a dozen came on Friday and some more on Saturday for the party on Sunday, August 6th. When the party got going, people at Mt. Sunapee’s Craftsmen’s Fair told us they could hear the music there, five miles away on the other side of the mountain.

“Steven called a couple of times that morning from Boston saying Aerosmith really wanted to come play but they were trying to track down Joe Perry. They eventually showed up sometime in the early afternoon. They were the last band to go on, right after Gunnison Brook.

“By early that Sunday afternoon, we had what the papers estimated to be a crowd of five hundred to a thousand people. Cars were lined up and down both sides of the road, a couple of miles north and south of the house. We had five bands that year including American Stone; Spice; Stop, Look, and Listen; Aerosmith; and Gunnison Brook. The bands all played on our back porch, which made a natural stage as it was about four feet off the ground and ran the length of the south and east sides of the house. We faced south and most of the audience was on the lawn. In reality, they were on all sides of the house, including across the road, in the woods...everywhere!”

Rick Hunt, who had become friends with Mario Casella and did some art work for Gunnison Brook, came down from Littleton, NH, for the party. “I was upstairs in Mario’s room drawing, I had my sketch book out, sitting there on the bed, and the door opens and Steven Tyler comes in. He sat down on the edge of the bed, there was a mirror on the wall, and he was putting red glitter on his eyes. Then he started singing ‘dream on’ (I hadn’t heard the song before) and I remember thinking, ‘Yeah, that’s a catchy tune.’ I was sitting there with my head cocked kind of like the RCA Victor dog and I’m like, huh, well that’s kind of different, that’s kind of catchy. We were just sitting there sharing the same space, didn’t have a conversation, Steven just acknowledged my presence and I kept drawing. That was a Forrest Gump moment.”

Rick Davis of Davis Brothers Garage remembers the scene as Aerosmith took the stage. “Steven went up on stage first and tuned all the instruments. Then the band came on and played a set that blew everybody away. It turned out it was most of their first album that they began recording two months later in Boston.”