Franklin Castle Band History

Franklin Castle began in 1992 when I took a class from my dad’s friend, Bob Caruthers, who ran a recording studio in Middleburg Heights. I had worked with Bob on a demo of a couple songs I had written before I moved back to Ohio. He offered this course on studio recording techniques and how to get around on a sound board, and a guy named Dave Racine took the same course. I hit it off with Dave and I introduced him to Mike, and we started working together on music. Dave knew where to play open mikes, and before we knew it, we were up at places like The Barking Spider in Cleveland, playing a mix of cover tunes and originals. The crowd was great—Martin, the owner, usually gave us a half-hour or more to play, and even as unpolished and (looking back) awful we were, we seemed to get a good response.

I chose the name Franklin Castle because I wanted a name that would associate us with Cleveland. I had lived out of state for several years, and I was really happy to move back. I love Cleveland, and I love being from Cleveland. My mom raised me on ghost stories and other scary things, and as a kid growing up in Lakewood I couldn’t think of anything cooler than having a bona fide haunted house so close to home. (Of course, I grew up in a haunted house there in Lakewood, but that’s a story for another day.)

My most recent work in music in 1992 was with a madrigal group in Texas, singing a cappella songs that were several hundred years old, with brilliant harmonic arrangements. I had always had a vision of a band that would be somewhat influenced by that type of music, which really seemed possible with Dave Racine, who had a passion for Peter Gabriel’s music. But the honeymoon only lasted a couple months, and Mike and I and Dave really seemed to be moving in different directions. So, we called it quits for the time being and parted on good terms.

Some months later, in 1993, Mike and I were sitting at The Barking Spider, a college bar in Cleveland near Case Western Reserve University, trying to feel musical again. A guy approached us and said, “hey, aren’t you guys part of Franklin Castle?”

The guy was Dennis Cassidy, a friend of Dave Racine who had seen us at the Spider on probably our best night. We struck up an immediate friendship, and soon Dennis was coming over to our house, working on music. He talked about how much he wanted to be able to get up in front of a crowd and play guitar, but I never thought Dennis knew how good he was. He had drive, though, and was determined to get over any feelings of anxiety he had on stage. I was so pleased to have him around—he was such a stabilizing force for me and Mike, who would get into shouting matches in the middle of songs while Dennis, completely unruffled, kicked back and ran through rather interesting chord progressions until we were through. Dennis introduced us to Neil Young’ music. Comes A Time, a Franklin Castle Band standard, was brought in during one of our first practices with Dennis. And he added one more crucial aspect—he wrote. Again, I don’t think Dennis quite knows what a good songwriter he is. (I think that’s part of his appeal.) We began working on his songs as well as mine, and it wasn’t long before we were playing the open mike circuit again. We hit several coffee houses, and began to work steadily at places like The Southwest Café in Parma and The 12 Step Club in Brunswick. But Dennis wasn’t finished changing the face of the band yet. It seems he obtained a snare drum from..somewhere. ?? He brought it over and presented it to Mike, who up until that time had been hitting a tambourine. They both assured me that this didn’t mean we were going to end up with a full drum set, oh no—we weren’t going to abandon our folky ties…

In 1994 Franklyn Castle entered the studio. (I changed the spelling of the name to bring in a little Welsh influence). We produced “Live In Studio” in one session: a six song effort including Tiananmen Square (It’s Far From Over), Hell Is Frozen, and Burning Bridges. We were quite pleased. Our tapes sold at our gigs, our mailing list was growing, and life was good. We were ready to go to another level.

It’s hard to explain where my songs come from. Some of them write themselves, where I’m doing little more than taking dictation from my head, like the case of Tiananmen Square. Others don’t come that easily. One song woke me up in the middle of the night—this theme kept running through my head, and I wasn’t going to be able to go back to sleep until I got up, went downstairs to the piano, and wrote down the letter names of the notes on a piece of paper so that I wouldn’t forget. The only thing I knew about the song at that time was that it was rather Celtic sounding, and I was going to need a fiddle player to play that theme. Shortly afterwards, a new girl came to work at Triton. Her name was Holly Jorgensen. She was pretty, professional, and rumor had it she had a degree in music from Baldwin Wallace and played the violin. I approached her one day and said something like, “So I hear you play the violin. Do you play the fiddle?” Knowing exactly what I was eluding to, the difference between the fiddle and the violin, she smiled and said, “I try!” So I asked her if she wanted to come over and sit in with the band—that I had a song I had written that was going to need a fiddle. She came over, hit it off with everyone, and we became a four-piece. (Of course this put me in quite a predicament—I had not finished the song yet. All I had was a theme that repeated! I didn’t even know what the song was about! But at some point I got inspired to write the words and music to The Flying Dutchman, weave in my Celtic theme, and I have Holly to thank for what remains one of my favorite originals to date..)

Holly brought us a whole new dimension. There were so many more songs we could do now, both original and cover, because besides being extremely proficient on her instrument, she gave me what I really needed—a third harmony vocal, as well as another lead voice. She brought her influences as well—Nancy Griffith, among others. So now Franklyn Castle had four lead singers, potentially three guitar players, potentially three bass players, up to 4-part harmony, and not to mention, Mike’s drum set kept growing. We continued to play the coffee house set, but it became more and more difficult as Mike’s drum set grew and our music began to have more of an edge. Dennis continued to get better all the time as a lead guitar player, and Mike, completely self-taught, continued to improve as a drummer. When we made the decision to go back into the studio, we had to leave the coffee houses behind. We had a CD to pay for now, and it was just a natural evolution for us to stick to venues that wanted and expected heavier, louder, and more lively music. Even our writing was changing—Holly was writing as well, and we were moving toward a more beat-driven sound.

We still had a gap in our overall show, however. When I played rhythm guitar so that Dennis could solo, there was a huge gap left where the bass needed to go. We needed another pair of hands…. Enter Don Torok. I had known Don for years already as one of the better musicians around town—I had been very impressed with him as a lead guitar player, and it was great when he would come to our shows, help us mix our sound (I was still mixing from the stage), and even sit in on a few songs. I found out then that he also happened to be an outstanding bass player. The four of us got together as a band and decided to ask Don to come on board, and we became a five-piece.

Don brings, again, a level of professionalism that I definitely need to push myself. Don challenges the band to do more difficult music—to write more difficult music, as well. There is nothing that I want to do that I feel like we can’t do, and Don is largely responsible for that. Dennis and Don truly seem to compliment each other; they know when it’s time to showcase the other, as they have distinctly different styles. But some songs just seem to have “Dennis” written all over them, and vice versa, and the nice part is they both seem to know which songs are which.

So that’s where we stand now; we are currently going under the name “The Franklyn Castle Band,” but for internet purposes, I may change the spelling back to “Franklin.” We are continuing to work on a CD, which is probably ¾’s done. Our covers include a lot of Beatles, Neil Young, CS & N, The Doobie Bros., and songs in that style of music, whatever you call it. We also do our share of British Rock other than the Beatles. I’ve always had a tough time defining us, but what I do know is, all we have to do is get people to see us live. Then we get ‘em hooked. This would be a current line-up:

Hope to see you at one of our shows.

Michele Ward