Honk, the Beloved, Almost-Legendary 1970’s Southern California Rock-Pop-Soul-Surf Band, Reunites

Honk at the Troubador 1974

 

Tris Imboden’s rock and roll resume’ is the envy of most musicians. Best known as the drummer for Chicago, the legendary rock band with horns, for nearly 30 years, Tris was given the daunting task of replacing Chicago’s original drummer and founding member Danny Seraphine.

But Tris carved out his own niche in the band. Impressing both his bandmates and audiences with his drum chops, high musical I.Q., and relentlessly positive attitude, Tris was given the green light by the band’s founding members to just be himself and not worry about parroting Seraphine's familiar licks.

While with Chicago, Tris contributed to twelve of the band's records and to tours alongside such artists as The Beach Boys, Earth, Wind and Fire and The Doobie Brothers. But after 28 years of virtually constant touring, Tris decided it was time to get off the merry-go-round that is life as a member of Chicago, a band of road warriors that has been touring for literally 52 straight years.

“I finally decided it was time to spend some time off the road,” says Tris, who after leaving Chicago rejoined Kenny Loggins’ band for a handful of gigs before undergoing shoulder surgery. Today, Tris has relocated from Malibu to his new home in Cardiff in North San Diego and is simply enjoying life with his wife of two years.

But he is excitedly preparing for a very special one-off reunion gig this weekend with Honk, his first band, which is quite possibly the greatest music group you’ve never heard of.

Honk If You Love "Honk"

The origins of Honk, an eclectic, melodic rock and roll outfit that deployed elements of rock and roll, jazz, blue-eyed soul, acoustic pop and surf rock, can be traced back to the late 1960’s when Tris was a drum-loving surfer at Newport Harbor High School in Newport Beach, Calif.

While Tris was hitchhiking one afternoon on Pacific Coast Highway, fate intervened when the driver who stopped to give him a ride turned out to be Steve Wood, a Laguna Beach-based musician who had only recently graduated from Newport Harbor High himself.

Tris recalls, “I didn’t have a car yet, and those were the hippie days when everyone hitchhiked. Steve was on his way to set up his equipment at Cinnamon Cinder, the music club in Long Beach. I noticed immediately that he had a B3 [keyboard] in the back. We started talking, and I knew who he was, he had a band. There was a harp on the dashboard, so I picked it up I started playing, mostly Paul Butterfield stuff, and he said, ‘Hey, hey, you can play.’ We just hit it off.”

That meeting was the genesis of Honk, who quickly climbed the So-Cal music food chain, gigging at the top L.A. clubs from the Whiskey to the Troubadour, and recording albums with producers who’d worked with Joni Mitchell, Stevie Wonder, the Beach Boys and Ike and Tina Turner.

Honk’s biggest coup was writing and recording the soundtrack to the popular, innovative surf film Five Summer Stories, directed by Greg MacGillivray and Jim Freeman.

The album was a hit, and the song Pipeline Sequence from the soundtrack touched a nerve in surfers worldwide. It was #1 in Hawaii for a month straight and received incessant airplay everywhere there was surf – from Australia to Southern California, where Honk was elevated to cult status among surfers.

Honk also became the darlings of the L.A. musician crowd, and in 1974 and ’75 the band toured the U.S. with The Beach Boys and opened concerts for Jesse Colin Young, Jackson Browne, and many others.

“Carl Wilson loved the band,” Tris says. “We also toured with Loggins and Messina, and we opened for Chicago at Balboa Stadium in San Diego. We sold out four or five nights in a row at the Troubador. We were on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert. The band got pretty big, and musicians loved us. I remember that we initially opened for The Sons of Champlin, and eventually they opened for us.”

Honk enjoyed airplay on KLOS and KMET, the two top FM rock stations in Los Angeles, and was seemingly on its way to superstardom. But the music business threw the band a nasty curve.

Just before Honk’s album with Epic Records, a major label owned by CBS, was set to be released, the band got into a heated and public argument with a top executive at CBS. One member of the band, who asked for anonymity, was particularly perturbed with the record label’s decision to release Honk's cover of “Heat Wave,” the only cover song on the album, as the first single.

That conflict led to a confrontation literally on the night the label was showcasing the band. It pretty much sealed the deal and Honk never got the push they deserved from the label.

Tris recalls, “This was gonna happen, it was really gonna happen. We played at a CBS convention in Atlanta, we were the darlings of the convention, they had air horns with Honk on them, CBS had given the nod to honk, we were told by all the execs that we were on their list. Seven years of my life I had devoted to this band.”

Talk about Almost Famous! Honk had all the elements a band needed to have major success, but the corporate suits sealed their fate, for all the wrong reasons. Ah, the music business.

Moving On, But Never Forgetting

Honk subsequently dissolved and each of the members - Will Brady (bass and vocals), Craig Buhler (saxophone, clarinet, and flute), Richard Stekol (vocals and guitar), Beth Fitchet Wood (vocals and guitar), Wood (keyboards and vocals) and Tris - went on to other successes both in and out of the music business. But they never lost touch with each other.

“I moved to L.A., and because of Honk’s reputation for musicianship, I was doing pretty well moving up the ranks as session player,” recalls Tris, who in 1977 was hired as the full-time recording and touring member of the Kenny Loggins Band, a collaboration that off and on lasted 12 years and was recently revived.

While with Loggins, Tris wrote and performed the drum set arrangements for the popular 1980’s movie soundtracks Caddyshack and Footloose. Tris also worked with a then-member of Chicago, Bill Champlin, and in 1988 he was a studio session player with Peter Cetera, the former bassist/vocalist with Chicago, on Cetera's solo album titled One More Story.

Tris has also toured with, opened for and/or recorded with such artists as Al Jarreau, Crosby Stills & Nash, Neil Diamond, Chaka Khan, and Steve Vai, to name a few. 

Tris Imboden, rock drummer extraordinaire

But the biggest moment of Tris’s career came in 1990 when he accepted the job as the full-time drummer for Chicago in time for the band's 1991 release titled Twenty 1. The coveted Chicago gig made him famous and took him literally across the globe. Tris has no bitterness about his years in Chicago. He has great admiration for the band and always will. But it was time to go.

“I know just how fortunate I am. I am so lucky. But I missed my daughter’s childhood. I missed the passing of my mother. I missed so much while I was on the road,” he says. “I had so many wonderful experiences and enjoyed so many perks, and all the places I’ve seen and people I’ve met. But in the last few years, I was like, ‘What am I doing?’ I just became unwilling to sacrifice the rest of my life to Chicago. I want to live.”

Beating Cancer, Loving Life

Tris says he probably should have gotten off the Chicago train back in late 2008 when he was diagnosed with stage 3A squamous cell lung cancer. “They gave me the stats, and said I had a 14 percent chance of making it even to five years,” Tris says. “I recently celebrated ten years. My new oncologist at Scripps in San Diego is calling it a cure.”

As horrific as his cancer diagnosis was, Tris says it opened his eyes and gave him a newfound appreciation for friends, for family, for music, for life.

“There’s always a gift that comes along with that diagnosis. It forces you to face your mortality, to look it right in the face,” says Tris, whose brother died of Burkitt’s lymphoma, a rare and sometimes deadly type of lymphoma. “My brother didn’t even make it to age 50, but I could not perform the eulogy because I was going through chemotherapy at the time."

Tris underwent radiation and chemotherapy and is now minus two lobes in his right lung.

“It was a seven-centimeter tumor, they had to shrink that before they could operate,” he says. “I’m amazed I didn’t leave the band after that experience. I will be forever grateful to the band. But I’ve got a theory about Robert (Lamm), Jimmy (Pankow) and Lee (Loughnane), which is that they would not know what do with themselves if they stopped touring, they’ve been doing it for so long. It’s been their reality since they were barely out of their teens.”

Tris Is Still A Chicago Fan

Tris has nothing negative to say about Chicago. No dirt. No bitterness. No anger. After all, when he joined, he was already a huge fan and he still is. 

“I saw the original Chicago band in 1968 at the Shrine Auditorium. They were opening for Procol Harum. They were this mostly unknown band no one even knew. I was with my girlfriend, and they were just an unbelievable band, with three horns, an amazing guitarist, incredible vocals. We were blown away.”

Tris immediately started asking people about this mystery band.

“I asked everyone, ‘Who are these guys?’ No one knew, because the record had not come out yet. But finally someone said ‘they’re called CTA, three letters.’ Someone said it stood for Chicago Transit Authority. I was a fan from that moment on. But if you had told me that night, ‘You are going to be their drummer,’ I would have said, ‘Right, and I am Napoleon’.”

Honk in the 90's

Chicago is in Tris's rear-view mirror. He is focused right now on the Honk reunion tonight. He says he treasures his lifelong association with his fellow members of Honk and adds that each of the members remain close friends. The band has reunited multiple times over the years, and each time they get together they are somehow able to recapture the positive vibe that Honk first demonstrated in the early 70s.

Honk will do it again tonight at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano in Orange County, where the band recorded a live album. Appropriately, the venue is just a short walk to a popular surf break.

“We never set out to be a surf band, but Steve and I were and are serious surfers,” Tris says.

The surf soundtrack, however, cemented the band’s reputation among water men and women and gave them a staying power that they all deeply appreciate. But you don’t have to be a surfer to dig Honk. The band doesn’t really sound much like Dick Dale or The Ventures or The Beach Boys, although the songs are superbly crafted, the guitar work is excellent, and the vocals are sublime. 

Anyone with a love for melodic rock, pop, soul and jazz from the early 1970s, arguably the most diverse and fertile era in rock music’s history, will appreciate Honk, whose onstage joy is palpable.

Regarding the enduring popularity in certain circles of a band that many have not heard of, and the level of success he has had ever since he was a high schooler, Tris is deeply grateful. He knows how many talented musicians there are out there who have never had the success he has had.

“I am so lucky, and so blessed. The work has been non-stop for me since I graduated from high school,” he says. 

Honk love!

As for Honk’s flirtation with fame, perhaps it’s better that it didn’t happen. After all, fame can be a destructive drug. It corrupts most people it touches. The fact that the band is so good and almost made it is what makes Honk so endearing. There was never really that loss of innocence that happens to seemingly every musician at some point in the journey.

Do the members of Honk wish they had four or five platinum albums under their belts? Sure. But they also appreciate the purity of this band, Tris says. These reunions are not about the money.

If you check out the show on Saturday, I guarantee you will have a good time. And hey, if you hitchhike to the gig, you just might meet someone on the way and create your own almost-legend.