01:00 AM EDT on Saturday, April 22, 2006

BY RICK MASSIMO
Journal Pop Music Writer

Tomorrow evening, one of Rhode Island's musical institutions celebrates its history in the place where it all began, as Ken Lyon and the Tombstone Blues Band take the stage at Bovi's Town Tavern, in East Providence.

The band started in July 1967 with Lyon singing, Mark Taber playing piano, Al LoBello playing bass and Tommy DiQuattro on drums, with a revolving cast of guitar players (including a Duke Robillard who wasn't even called "Duke" yet) and harmonica players (with Lyon's brother Don giving way to Steve Nardella), playing at Bovi's. At first, Lyon says, it was a Tuesday-night thing with a changing cast that allowed players who were in other bands on the weekends to get together and mingle.

After a few weeks, "the people kept coming back," Lyon says. At that time, the old Red Bridge was still in operation, and students could walk from Brown and RISD into East Providence. By that fall, Lyon remembers, "you couldn't get into the joint."

They weren't the only white blues band in Rhode Island, but close to it. "The fact that white guys were playing blues at all was unique," Lyon remembers.

At the time, this distinction was important.

If you were white, Lyon remembers, you could drive slowly past the Celebrity Lounge in Randall Square to hear a bit of the music by Muddy Waters, Ruth Brown, B.B. King and others that wafted into the street. But the flip side of the de facto segregation of the times meant you couldn't go in. "It was an unwritten law," Lyon remembers.

In the mix of characters came Duke Robillard. Lyon had Scott Hamilton, who has since gone on to a prolific and successful jazz-saxophone career, as a harmonica player. Comedian Martin Mull, who went to RIC as well, "had a (Gibson) 335 (guitar) and just blew his brains out," Lyon remembers. The band's first semi-permanent drummer was Bobby Mason, who went on to play for years in Las Vegas with The Fifth Dimension, with Maria Muldaur and others.

They were booked by a friend of Lyon's named Charlie Douglas, who had the unique qualification of being just about totally deaf. "I can feel 'em!" he'd exclaim when asked how he could tout a band he couldn't hear.

And off they went.

Lyon will be joined by Tim Taylor, Killer Kane, LoBello, Taber and Jim DeCosta, and possibly Robillard. As well as a drummer whose name escapes him. After this many years and this many faces, Lyon says, "I don't pay attention to their names until they've been around for a while."

The show will be recorded, and hopefully a CD of the event will be released to benefit Family Services of Rhode Island and the AFIA Project, which deals with HIV/AIDS-related issues. And the connection of Lyon's music with social causes is no accident.

Lyon calls the late '60s and early '70s "the high point of the moral life of the country," and not coincidentally, "a hell of a time for music. . . . There was a good feeling in the air for blues." As a RIC student, he had organized a strike that shut the campus down for the last two weeks of the 1970-71 school year.

They played the Woods of Dartmouth Festival at UMass-Dartmouth, which drew 40,000 people (and at which Lyon irritated the rest of the band by announcing that the band would donate their proceeds to the Bobby Seale's defense fund). They opened for Arlo Guthrie at Veterans Memorial Auditorium.

They also played clubs, bars and proms. "We'd play wherever they'd have us."

In the early '70s, they put out a record on Decca and toured the country several times, opening for Mott the Hoople ("They were terrible!") and Queen ("Just wonderful!")

They opened for Janis Joplin in Springfield in 1969, a year before she died. Lyon went behind the PA speakers to bum a cigarette during a long Taber piano solo, and suddenly got a punch in the arm. "Where'd you get that guitar player!" she said, referring to Robillard. Lyon and Joplin ended up drinking together, and she advised him that a cigarette butt in his beer was no obstacle. "Strain it with your teeth!" she said.

A year later she was dead. Lyon wrote a song about her.

"Lie down mama, put your mind at ease," he sings in his Lincoln home. "You got what you want; you can go where you please."

When Decca refused their second record, tensions in the band came to a head and they broke up. With three sons, Lyon decided that his road days were over and he went to graduate school, eventually becoming a teacher, first in Hawaii and then at Burrillville High School, retiring in 2002.

On his return from Hawaii in 1979, Lyon kept local versions of Tombstone going, becoming a fixture at the Last Call Saloon in Providence, until about 1995.

Lyon now teaches speech and writing part-time at CCRI. He also plays with Rhode Island Celtic mainstay Pendragon, as well as with The Skeleton Crew (including Pendragon's Bob Drouin, Rich Calitri and Lori Lacaille), which he describes as primarily "ragtime and field hollers," without much of the "codified" 12-bar blues that have become the standard.

Lyon wears hearing aids in both ears, and estimates he's lost about half his hearing. The hearing aids "deprive me of tone, but not chops. . . . They really make it possible for me to continue."

Except for special events like, presumably, this one, you can always find a seat at a blues concert these days. "The whole social context has completely changed," Lyon says, and if that sounds bitter, he doesn't take it out on the music. As the palette of popular music expands, as radio atomizes into narrower niches and the Internet makes self-produced recordings as available as major-label stuff, "blues is just another niche market. . . .

"I still would rather listen to and play blues more than anything," citing Govt. Mule and the Allman Brothers as his current favorites. But while hip-hop, for example, doesn't turn him on as music, he recognizes the poetry as important and calls it "one of the grandchildren of the blues. . . .

"Nothing in this world does anything but grow."

One obvious question remains: Tombstone was born 39 years ago. Why not wait a year and celebrate the 40th anniversary?

"At my age," Lyon says, "You don't wait a year for anything."

Ken Lyon's Tombstone Blues Reunion is at Bovi's Town Tavern, 287 Taunton Ave., East Providence, tomorrow from 5 to 9 p.m. Call (401) 434-9670.