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With the Amherst concert coming up, Mike Zizza, the keyboardist of Pink Voyd, reflects back to his time as a student at UMass Amherst.
"I'm very excited. I'm a graduate of UMass Amherst. I was at UMass up in the early 80s. I remember going there, I lived in Southwest, which is the party section, one of the houses on campus. I just want to give a shout out to all the people of Southwest. Southwest Rules!"
"I can't wait to go back to UMass and just see it again. I actually have a niece now who goes to UMass Amherst, and I hope to see her at the concert. I have a lot of great memories at UMass, I remember going to concerts before the Mullins Center was there. We used to go to the Curry Hicks Cage, I saw Jeff Beck there. But I never thought I'd actually be playing at UMass! So it's an exciting thing to come to UMass."
Mike related a little of what it was like being a student back in the day. "We would always hang out at the Blue Wall, which was down at the campus center. It was really the focal point of the campus. I think UMass was great socially, because it's an institution where everybody kind of stays in one social group on the weekends. You do a lot of work to find the right social crowd and at other colleges like Northeastern University, everybody disperses into the city for the weekend. Your social group is gone. If you go to UMass Amherst, you all stay. But it's a big community with plenty of people and that works."
Mike's a little shy but he admits he was quite the prankster as a student. "I used to do things, pranks, crazy college things. I used to have a beard in college and one day I shaved off half of it, just to walk around. Just for fun. I don't know what happened. We were sort of sitting around and then I got this idea. That's what UMass was like!"
"Another time, since we were allowed to paint the walls and our doors, we painted the door of this guy down the hall to look like prison bars. And we wrote 'I'm breaking rocks in the hot sun. I fought the law, and the law won.' It's from an old song from the 1960s."
"We didn't have a toga party but we decided to have an excellent Safari Party. We had this one guy on the floor who apparently didn't go to classes. He said he was in the Witness Protection Program because he was a 'confidential student'. So he never went to classes. He was older than the rest of us. He was in his mid-20s."
"He'd get up at 11 o'clock and just saunter into the showers and he liked to dress up in safari outfits. He had a pith helmet he'd walk around in. He was insane. Because that's how you hide, in a safari outfit. He was very noticeable."
"And one day we just had a spontaneous safari party. I don't know what happened but all of a sudden it was huge! It was funny when the police came. Whoever was in charge of Southwest was a man named Jerry Quarrels. He was the Dean of Southwest, the administration guy. He ran Southwest. The police came to break it up and we were all walking around in safari outfits."
"And this man had a penchant for drinking vin rose by the gallon, Ernest & Julio Gallo. All these people kept showing up and we're at Southwest and the common room was packed. A spontaoneous safari party of 60 people, all based around this one safari guy. So it got dispersed and of course the police were questioning Jim. Like 'what's your name?' but Jim said, 'I can't tell you my name, I'm a confidential student'."
"So we thought he was just pulling our legs, but they called up the regional office and sure enough, he really was a 'confidential student'. Jim goes to Jerry, 'Hey what's the big deal?' We're all just dressed in safari outfits trying to have a good time." And the police just left.
"And I was like 'Wow, I don't know if I want this guy living on my floor!'" He didn't last. I think he was just there for a year.
"I loved being at Amherst. My wife's coming out with me to UMass, because I said I want to take you out to Amherst, it's a nice town, see the campus, go play pool at Mike's Westview Cafe, hopefully it's still there. I bet once I go back to Umass I'll have a flood of things that come back to me."
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Please come out to see the band Friday & Saturday 4/17-18 in Plymouth, MA and Saturday 4/25 at UMass Amherst! For videos and info and tickets see www.pinkvoyd.com.
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