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TOMMY AND THE BAND SAY GOODBYE TO RANDY MCDONALD:
After 16 years of very soulful service, Randy McDonald is leaving the Tommy Castro Band. Randy has been with me from the beginning, in fact he was the first guy I asked to join when I started the band. Randy and I worked together for a while in a band called the Dynatones. I liked his style of playing, his stage presence and show. He was hard worker and a really nice guy, so he was the first guy I called.
Together we went from passing the tip bucket at the Saloon in North Beach to touring with B.B. King, several tours of Europe, and over 1,000,000 actual miles in the US alone. We had a lot of fun together over the years and accomplished most of what we set out to do.
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Randy was a major contributor to the music we created. His ideas on stage, at rehearsal and in the studio were a big part of the Castro Band sound. Randy and I wrote several songs together: Like an Angel, Callin San Francisco, Take Me Off the Road, and Take The Highway Down.
He always had great arrangement ideas. For example, the Memphis groove on the Albert King song we did called Everybody Wants To Go To Heaven. That idea made it one of our strongest tunes, which is why I like to close with it at most shows. It was his idea for Dave Maxwell and I to do the piano vocal thing on It Ain't Easy Being Me. That whole Sex Machine jam was something he and our old drummer Shad Harris started.
The fact that we did steps on stage was also because of Randy. We did that stuff in the Dynatones and after we started TCB, Randy would always come over to me when Keith took a solo and start steppin’. I would join in and it became a part of the show.
Randy was also the band’s road manager—a thankless job—as well as the bass player and he was really good at it. He had a strange gift for logistics and routing. After a while I would have our agent talk to him before we accepted any gigs.
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I could go on, but I just wanted to give Randy some credit here publicly for all he has done for me and the band. We will miss him a lot and I know all of you will too. He has some plans that he is very excited about and will begin a whole new chapter in his life.
I love him like brother and wish him nothing but the best.
Tommy
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