Bands That Time Forgot: Network

Rock Metal Machine
Sep 25
9 min read

Seven people pose confidently against a blue background, wearing black and white clothing. The mood is retro and stylish.

Dave Reynolds looks back at some of the great acts who slipped under the radar…

New York outfit Network – not to be confused with the Philadelphia-based Melodic Rock band of the same name, fronted by Larry Baud, who appeared on the scene much later – released two albums in the late-70s on the Epic label. Despite the undoubted talents of all involved, neither record left anything like a huge impact on the charts. However, they were solid, very well presented musical documents nonetheless.

The Network story actually begins in the late-60s, with the Long Island-based, almost proto-Glam Rock outfit The Illusion. “They were the New York Dolls before the New York Dolls existed! I used to see them walking around Greenwich Village with their long shag hair-dos and flashy women’s clothing. Those guys were ahead of their time,” former Balance frontman Peppy Castro once told me.

Originally formed as The ‘5’ Illusions, The Illusion recorded three albums between 1969 and 1970 for the Steed label (owned by songwriter and producer Jeff Barry). They had earned a solid reputation for themselves, not only locally but throughout the US (where they enjoyed a popular hit single with ‘Did You See Her Eyes’ in 1969). The quintet – comprised of vocalist John Vinci, guitarist Richie Cerniglia, bassist Chuck Alder, keyboard player Mike Maniscalco and drummer Mike Ricciardella – supported The Who, Jimi Hendrix, the Allman Brothers and Sly Stone in their time. Their reputation had led to a fair degree of support in Europe too. Yet disagreements over musical direction led to a split in the ranks, with Ricciardella teaming up with the aforementioned Peppy Castro (formerly of the Blues Magoos) and the Alessi brothers in the Atlantic Records signed outfit Barnaby Bye in 1972.

Barnaby Bye would release two albums during their original tenure together in the form of ‘Room To Grow’ in 1973 and ‘Touch’ the following year. The group would reform decades later; releasing a third album, ‘Thrice Upon A Time’, in 2008. A long-awaited fourth album is apparently on the way!

After the break-up of The Illusion, Richie Cerniglia had worked with Hall & Oates. He played on a solitary track (‘Is It A Star’) on their ‘War Babies’ album (released in 1974) and toured with them for eighteen months before he was reunited with Ricciardella and Maniscalco in a new project that also involved Castro and a bassist by the name of Dennis Santiago (aka Dennis Feldman, later of Speedway Blvd, Balance, Heaven, etc.). The new group would become known as Wiggy Bits, with management provided by Tommy Mottola (thanks to Cerniglia’s Hall & Oates connections). The choice of name had gained such rousing approval from the members of Foghat (who the quintet had encountered while recording at the Record Plant in Manhattan) that the New Yorkers had decided to keep it!

Wiggy Bits released an excellent, self-titled album through Polydor in 1976. Sounding very much like a heavier precursor to what Peppy Castro would be doing a few years later with Balance, the album sadly failed to gain any kind of attention at the time.

Undeterred by the Wiggy Bits experience and maintaining relations with Tommy Mottola in a managerial capacity, Cerniglia, Ricciardella and Maniscalco decided to continue as a team under the new handle of Network. “So, I basically put a bunch of new songs together,” recalls Mike today. “We enlisted Howie Blume (who had actually been a founding member of The Illusion under their original moniker of The ‘5’ Illusions) who was a great bass player – I loved the way he played – as well as George Bitzer on keyboards (who went on to have an amazing career as a session player after Network), and Butch Poveromo on percussion.”

Former The Illusion frontman John Vinci came in on vocals to complete the line-up: “When Wiggy Bits broke up Peppy and I had a little bit of a falling out, well not really (a falling out), but in hindsight I wished we had used Peppy instead of John to sing in Network.”

With Castro already having signed with the Leber-Krebs Management stable and on a career trajectory that would eventually see him form Balance with guitarist Bob Kulick and keyboard maestro Doug Katsaros, Network retained managerial guidance from Tommy Mottola. “We played Tommy some of the songs and he immediately got us signed,” offers Ricciardella. “At the time he got us the biggest deal Epic Records had ever laid out money for, and we chose Albhy Galuten to produce our first record.”

Having gained his start working for Atlantic Records as an assistant engineer for producer Tom Dowd in Miami in the early-70s, the later Grammy Award winning Galuten’s list of production and engineering credits was certainly impressive, even that early on. Working primarily with the Bee Gees by then, he would go on to co-produce their songs on the massively successful ‘Saturday Night Fever’ soundtrack album, released in November 1977. “Albhy came up to New York to do pre-production with us for four of five weeks, but he wanted to work in Miami (at Criteria Recording Studios) so that Barry Gibb from the Bee Gees could come in every day to work with us too,” recalls Mike. “He was a great influence on our vocals and helped us a lot. What I should’ve done was get Barry to co-write some of our songs with me too, besides just the song he and Albhy wrote for us called ‘Save Me, Save Me’. We became good friends with him. Barry was living in Miami in this beautiful house on Biscayne Bay. We actually stayed in this mansion right next door to Barry while we were down in Florida. It took us about five weeks to complete the album.”

Released in 1977, ‘Network’ bizarrely found Cerniglia, Maniscalco and Butch Poveromo not credited under their real names (they are noted on the album as Richie C., Mike Coxton and Jean Paul Gaspar respectively), because the record label thought the band sounded “too Italian”! “Butch’s parents were actually from France,” notes Mike. Curiously, Blume also adopted the nom-de-plume of Howard Davidson!

Rather than taking the heavier Hard Rock approach of Wiggy Bits, ‘Network’ found the band mixing Funk and Soul with Hard Rock, it was an interesting blend. “It was more of what was going on musically at the time,” states Mike. “In hindsight, we could’ve done things differently, but back then we were searching for a hit record, it was trying to go with the times. The second album we deliberately wanted to get far more into Rock, which was more towards where Richie and I eventually went with Aviator a few years later.”

Ah yes, Aviator! We’ll come to that group a little later....

Strangely, Epic chose not to release the Galuten/Gibb co-written ‘Save Me, Save Me’ as the first single: “We thought we’d have a hit, but ‘You Lied’ (the album’s opening track) was released as the first single… that was the first mistake.” Mike then tells the story of an encounter with Frankie Valli in an L.A. recording studio a year later when the former Four Seasons frontman excitedly told him he was covering ‘Save Me, Save Me’, also produced by Albhy Galuten, as a follow-up to his hugely successful ‘Grease’ 45 from the movie of the same name. “He didn’t have a hit with it either,” observes Ricciardella. It seemingly only reached #48 on Billboard’s Adult Contemporary chart.

Still, Network toured with Hall & Oates throughout North America before recording their second album, ‘Nightwork’, released a year later in 1978: “Tommy got us on the tour and we started in British Columbia, Canada and were out for around six months with them.”

This sophomore record found the band going for a much heavier direction thanks to the involvement of a new producer – Eddie Leonetti (Rex, Legs Diamond, Angel) – and a change in vocalist. By this point B.G. Gibson had replaced John Vinci and Mike Maniscalco (still using the pseudonym of Coxton) had reverted to rhythm guitar: “Tommy suggested we work with Eddie. We interviewed him for the job. I liked the drum sounds he got on his records. He was really into our music, as was Neil Kernon who was very much the same kinda guy as Eddie, who we later worked with on the Aviator record. Eddie was just a great guy. In actual fact, after we recorded the album he got us playing on some commercials with him. We had a great relationship with him.”

What, then, had led to the split with John Vinci?

“Along with Lennie Petze, who was our A&R guy at Epic, and Tommy, we just didn’t feel that John’s voice was strong enough. Of course, we’d had a hit together with The Illusion. He was great with those records and he did great on the first Network album, but the songs I was writing we just felt we needed a more powerful vocalist. That’s why we enlisted B.G. I felt bad because it meant that Johnny and I had a falling out, but with the songs I had written he just wasn’t cutting it on that stuff.”

“B.G’s voice was tremendous. I had originally written the songs an octave lower vocally, so when we went in to record he was an octave higher. He was like Mickey Thomas (Elvin Bishop Group/Jefferson Starship) on steroids! It was Eddie Leonetti who had found B.G. for us, they had worked together previously.”

Indeed, one such project being Walter Murphy’s ‘Phantom Of The Opera’ concept album, released on the Private Stock label in 1978 that Leonetti had co-produced: “We flew B.G. in. His voice was a little over the top, but when you hear a voice like his you get excited.”

‘Nightwork’ was, on the face of it, more consistent in terms of the material than the debut thanks to the focus being on Hard Rock. Mike is full of praise for the support Epic gave the band, but is all too aware the hits just weren’t there. In hindsight he believes he should’ve written with outside writers. Network did cover Carole King and Gerry Goffin’s ‘Halfway To Paradise’ (a huge hit for both Tony Orlando and Billy Fury back in 1961), which Eddie Leonetti suggested they take a shot at because it really suited Gibson’s voice. Yet success just wasn’t meant to be.

I’m unsure as to which is my favourite of the two Network albums. Both are as good as each other musically and have a lot to commend them. Hard Rock purists would no doubt go for ‘Nightwork’, yet there’s a great deal to thoroughly enjoy on the debut. It’s a little schizophrenic, with those ‘disco-fied’ tracks opening proceedings, but putting any genre prejudices aside the musicianship is utterly flawless. ‘Holly’ is pure Melodic Rock, the percussive ‘Backstreet Driver’ reminiscent of Desmond Child & Rouge, ‘Without You’ a pummelling rocker and ‘So Far Gone’ the perfect blend of Funk, Rock and Soul. Highlights on ‘Nightwork’ include the sassy, Styx-like ‘Beautiful Lady’, the atmospheric ‘Sundown’ and the keyboard laden Progressive Rock of ‘I Already Played It’.

Sadly, as with the debut record, there was little movement chart-wise. It didn’t help that by this time the band members were becoming busier individually than as a collective: “We never got on any tours, but we did do some dates locally. However, the group had begun to fall apart by then. We’d all started to do different things.”

Indeed, Mike found himself recording with Alice Cooper on his ‘From The Inside’ album in 1978 and then co-produced fellow New York-based outfit Susan’s excellent ‘Falling In Love Again’ album (which featured future Joan Jett & The Blackhearts man Ricky Byrd on guitar) that appeared a year later. Richie Cerniglia, in the meantime, joined Ellen Shipley’s band (collectively known as The Numbers). New York-based Shipley was also part of Tommy Mottola’s Champion Management’s stable. George Bitzer wound up working with the likes of the Bee Gees, Andy Gibb, Barbra Streisand, Teri De Sario, Hall & Oates, Peter Cetera and Olivia Newton John.

Of course, Mike Ricciardella and Richie Cerniglia would eventually team up again in the mid-80s to put the aforementioned, excellent, yet sadly short-lived Hard Rock outfit Aviator together with bassist Steve Vitale and vocalist Ernie White. It’s worth noting that the original vocalist in the band was B.G. Gibson. Ernie White had initially joined Aviator as a rhythm guitarist. “I got involved thanks to B.G. Gibson,” he told me when we talked about the group while working on the booklet essay for the Rock Candy reissue of the ‘Aviator’ album in early 2019. Gibson had told him the group needed a second guitarist who could sing back-ups. “But I wound up being the lead singer by default,” White continued. “It wasn’t planned for me to replace B.G. and it wasn’t to diminish him in any way.”

Still, Aviator is a whole other story. So far as Network is concerned I find them to be a hugely underappreciated group. The two albums they released offer some outstanding playing and are both well worth further investigation if you’ve never encountered them before. If you have then they are hopefully now awaiting full rediscovery somewhere in your collection!

See Network on Discogs