New album coming soon!

It’s a cold January in 1971. PE class at Terra Linda High School (TLHS) is over, and everyone is in the locker room, showering. Michael Gould starts singing Lollipop by the Chordettes, and suddenly Chuck Peden and Dave Moore [aka Monterey] join in. With the concrete-walled shower reverb, it sounds amazing and they decide to form a band, performing at the International Students Luncheon to vast school accolades. And thus, a 50+ year musical relationship is born.

This song, Sterilinda, celebrates the town, Terra Linda, suburb of San Rafael in Marin County, California, TLHS, and their musical friends and classmates there.

As Korral, and later renamed Cahoots, they are joined by Gary Koehler (also class of 1971) and Mark Von Lehr (TLHS class of 1973), together with a bassist, Kevin Forde, from another local high school, Marin Catholic. They wrote together and played together for four years, ending in 1974, then began a series of annual concerts called The Redwood Jam, which continued for 40 years in Marin.

In the interim, Chuck Peden, Dave Monterey and Michael Gould released an album in 2004, Spirits of the Woods, and another in 2010, Three Rivers. Sterilinda is the first song of a new collection they are writing and recording, to be released (hopefully) in 2025.

They started recording the song, and suddenly it was announced that the class of 1971 was having a 50-year reunion (at 51 years in 2022, delayed due to Covid-19). So Chuck, Dave and Mike spontaneously decided that in recording this song, they would invite only graduates of Terra Linda High School to play. They brought back Mark Von Lehr on drums, Gary Koehler on harmonica, and added Bernie Chiaravalle (1971, Michael McDonald’s guitarist), Bernie Bagshaw (1971) who had played in several later bands with Michael Gould, Julie Wilder Price-Sherman (1971) who had a career singing on cruise ships sailing all over the world, and Cynthia Haagens, (1972), a singer-songwriter-pianist-guitarist with whom they were friends back in the day.

Sterilindais a teasing name they called Terra Linda when they were teenagers. Unlike the lovely mature tree-lined town it is today, back then everything was new. All houses were parts of master developments; the suburb was young. But the hills were beautiful and inviting, and they used to sneak up to the hilltops and hike and camp, and occasionally take a toke for that illegal smile. And they really loved the place. After all, Terra Linda does mean ‘beautiful land’ in Portuguese, the language of the Freitas family, early land owners/ranchers.

The song is a conversation among high schoolers. The lead singers trade verse lines, sing harmonies, and the solo section trades licks among six different players. It is also a paean to Lollipop, the song that began it all. 

Co-written by Chuck, Dave and Mike (Peden Monterey Gould), Sterilinda is performed by:

Bernie Bagshaw:  guitars

Bernie Chiaravalle:  bass, guitars, vocals

Michael F. Gould:  keyboards, vocals

Cynthia Haagens:  vocals

Gary Wm. Koehler:  harmonica

Dave Monterey:  guitars, vocals

Chuck Peden:  acoustic guitar, vocals

Julie Wilder Price-Sherman:  vocals

Mark Von Lehr:  drums

Go Trojans!I