Nippertown: Silver Chicken Reunited

Silver Chicken
Posted by Rick Bedrosian

What the Cluck?!? Silver Chicken is back? Oh Yeah!

That’s the name of a jaunty, jumpin’, twang-laced track in the middle of Storm Ride, the about-to-be-released debut CD by country-rockers Silver Chicken. But if the members of the band knew that it would end up taking an excruciating 36 years to finish the album, they might have re-titled the song – or the whole album – “It Gets a Whole Lot Worse Before It Gets Better.”

One of the most popular bands on the Local 518 scene back in the mid-’70s, Silver Chicken had only a brief two-and-a-half-year run before the original line-up called it quits without releasing a single song. The bulk of Storm Ride was recorded in ’77 – on vintage consumer equipment by bassist Rick Bedrosian in his bedroom at his parents’ Delmar house – and as it turned out, the original band played their final gigs just a couple of months later on January 5-7, 1978, at the Boulevard, now Ristorante Paradiso. (Yes, the same place where Meryl Streep sang in “Ironweed.”) It seems that singer-songwriter-guitarist Jim Fish got a phone call from Henry Paul (formerly of the Outlaws) later that month inviting him to join his new band, and Fish left Silver Chicken and the Capital Region to head to Florida to join the Henry Paul Band.

Review and photographs by Greg Hymes