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When we were kings: The story of the Headlights

Bill DeYoung

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The Headlights (l-r): Steve Connelly, Steve Robinson, Danny DiPietra and Scott Dempster. Publicity photo.

So long ago, and such an innocent time, it seems now. But a community’s music scene, in any generation, is built upon the bones of those who came before.

For all of the 1980s and the first half of the ‘90s, the bay area band to beat was The Headlights. The group’s closest competition, in terms of large, fanatical fan base and bronze badge of “almost famous” glory, was the hard-rocking, tough-talking Stranger.

The Headlights played ‘60s-style rock and power-pop – short, punchy, melodic songs, many of them self-penned … and for the bulk of their run had no close competitors in that category.

When the first flush of melody-minded “new wave” music arrived in the late ‘70s, skinny ties and all, the Headlights turned on: Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe & Rockpile, Squeeze, the Cars, Talking Heads. All economy, no excess. Don’t bore us, get to the chorus.

They continued to evolve, and as they did huge crowds came to Clancy’s, Club Detroit and the ACL Club in St. Pete. The Masquerade in Ybor. Dance clubs in Clearwater, Dunedin, Tarpon, Lakeland, Orlando. The Headlights once played a solid month in Gainesville, with its notorious picky music fans.

From the early, figuring-it-out days to the final flush of glory on top of the local music hierarchy, the band’s main songwriter was guitarist and co-lead singer Steve Connelly.

“We were the first band to actually go out playing originals and getting booked,” he recalls. “Nobody thought you could do it. I refused to do what was popular, Top 40 covers. We stuck to our guns and we started building this thing up. And from that, all the other bands, the whole scene here, opened up.”

The Headlights begat Deloris Telescope, Mad For Electra, Multicolor House and other popular “quirky” pop-rock bands of the era and beyond. The ripples spread and are still felt today. “We spawned that whole scene,” Connelly pronounces proudly. “That all started from the Headlights, doing originals.”

Perhaps the Headlights’ biggest claim to fame – and what Connelly, in retrospect, realizes was their high-water mark – was playing behind former Byrd Roger McGuinn (then a bay area resident) on a cross-country tour during 1991. With McGuinn, they even opened for megastars ZZ Top in Stockholm, Sweden.

Headlights bassist Scott Dempster.

“We never would have had any of it happen if it wasn’t for Scott Dempster,” observes Connelly. “Scott was a rock ‘n’ roll star; that’s all he ever wanted to be. He would try to get backstage at any big shows.”

Dempster, the Headlights’ ever-enthusiastic bassman, ran into McGuinn behind the scenes at a Bob Dylan concert in 1988, and began chatting him up.

“Scott says ‘Hey man, we’re going into this studio next week. Why don’t you come produce us?’

“And Roger goes ‘Yeah, OK.’”

Simple as that. “We worked at the old Hitmakers in Tampa, which is now Morrisound Studios. And Roger drove his Volkswagen camper van there every day, from Indian Rocks Beach, to hang out with us and produce the four-song EP that we did, Earthbound. He really didn’t do much – he hung out with us and made suggestions.” Nevertheless, he was listed as producer on the cassette-only EP.

It was Club Detroit’s Rob Douglas, according to Connelly, who convinced the rock legend to hire the Headlights to play behind him on his 1991 “comeback” tour (the Byrds had just been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame).

“You’ve got the perfect backup band in your back yard,” Douglas said. “They play the Byrds, they play jangle-rock, they’re your perfect band.”

The tour was a success, and the Headlights even appeared on the Tonight Show with McGuinn.

However, says Connelly, he never saw that exposure, the stops in L.A. and New York, as a “big break” for the Headlights. “Everyone,” he smirks, “was making such a big deal out of it. But I knew we were just a glorified backup band.”

In short order, McGuinn moved on and the Headlights were back playing the Masquerade, Clancy’s, Club Detroit and the ACL Club.

Even though they were feted as the “local boys made good,” Connelly – an admitted homebody – was only too glad to be back in local clubs. He was all into the big fish, small pond equation.

“I don’t give a shit about making it in the music business,” he says. “I didn’t have that drive, that desire to be famous. I wanted to be accepted, and I wanted to be loved and all, but I didn’t care about the music business.

“And as soon as I got inside it and saw it, I realized how evil and dark it was. Some guys can handle it and traverse through. I didn’t have the desire to do the things you had to do.”

It all started, improbably, with a band that played nothing but Grateful Dead covers. Connelly was the singer and guitarist for the group, which was called Real Eyes (aka Realize).

In 1972, at a Battle of the Bands contest in Tampa, he met folksinger Charlotte Wilson. They both won in their respective categories, and not so long afterwards they became an item.

With violinist Paul Kelly, Connelly and Wilson formed an acoustic group, Just Another Rainbow. “We were like a high-energy Old and in the Way,” recalls Connelly, “a high-energy bluegrass band. We played the Dead, New Riders … with two Martin guitars and a fiddle.”

It just kept getting bigger. In time the band added a bass-playing friend of Connelly’s younger brother named Scott Dempster, and drummer Bob Leichner.

Just Another Rainbow was the first band to perform live in the WYNF Studios when the station began in 1979, and the first to play Skippers Smokehouse when it opened the following year. The band’s home base was the Two Horses Pub, on Fletcher Avenue near the University of South Florida campus. People lined up circling around the building to see them, Connelly says.

But a change was coming.

A September, 1980 story in local music magazine Rocks Off! profiled the “Headlites.”

“When new wave hit, I got totally enamored with it,” Connelly says. “So we became a schizophrenic band, because we all got into this stuff, but still our power base was this country-rock thing.” They’d do country-rock for the first set, “but for the second set we’d come out and do Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, Blondie … the first and second set were two completely different bands. It was kinda weird, but people accepted it.”

As a moniker, Just Another Rainbow was colossally uncool. An early manager suggested The Headlites … the spelling was eventually changed to the significantly less cutesy Headlights.

By the time Steve and Charlotte’s relationship soured, in 1980, the old country-rock stuff was gone, as was the fiddler. They were a full time new wave rock ‘n’ roll group. Her replacement as singer and second guitarist was Steve Robinson, an Englishman recently arrived in the bay area. And the band’s music continued to evolve.

Robinson, also a strong singer and songwriter, took the band on a deeper dive into modern English sounds – the likes of Echo & the Bunnymen, U2, XTC and the Smiths. “That’s what he was doing, and I was doing Springsteen and Petty and my originals,” says Connelly. “That’s what the early Headlights were. We were a little offbeat and esoteric, doing that. But we had a great following.”

The longest-lived, “classic” band was Connelly and Robinson on guitars (electric and acoustic, respectively) and vocals, Dempster on bass and Danny DiPietra playing drums.

“When I first joined the band,” recalls Robinson, “I’m not sure I brought that much, really. I hadn’t really started writing songs, so if anything, I was just responsible for expanding the band’s repertoire of cover material.”

That, too, would change.

“After I began to write songs, I think I had more of an effect on the band than in those early days. Although Steve and I didn’t verbalize it, I think that over time, our songwriting styles maybe had a bit of a symbiotic thing going on. I was certainly influenced by him, and I think that in some way, some of what I brought to the table rubbed off on him, and The Headlights gained a little focus and an identity of their own.”

In 1986, the Headlights won the Willie Nelson Wrangler Jeans Invitational, sort of a national Battle of the Bands. They were awarded $10,000 and a week of recording time at Nelson’s home studio in Pedernales, Texas.

The money got pissed away fast, on dinners and drama, and the studio sessions were disastrous. Nothing ever came of any of it.

Next, the great Roger McGuinn adventure – when the Byrd and the band played Tonight (with then-guest host Jay Leno) in April, 1991, VCRs all over Tampa Bay were set on record. But by ’94, everyone was out of gas. The Headlights disbanded, and the musicians went their separate ways.

In 1995 Connelly signed on as Chief Engineer at Zen, a small Pinellas County recording studio. Eventually he bought the business, and produced (and played on) dozens of records by local artists, including some by former Headlights.

“Our recorded output is woefully inadequate,” Robinson says today. “I think it weighed on us all. Even after the band broke up, we’d often speak of getting together to record some new Headlights material. We even did assemble once at Zen (at Scott’s behest, of course) and layed down rhythm tracks for a couple of songs, but sadly, we never finished work on them.

“It’s a shame, because I remember it being a great time and a few musical sparks were flying. Personally, I felt like we had a pretty damn good album left in us, so I feel a little sad that we didn’t follow through.”

A liver transplant in 2015 slowed Connelly down – a little – and the loss of studio business due to Covid-19 meant he was forced to sell his interest in Zen. But no matter: “It’s good, I’m enjoying it,” he says. “I made six records in my front room last year with just one microphone, a pre-amp, a drum machine and a guitar box.”

Connelly recently guested on the album Shadow Play, a collaboration between Robinson and singer/guitarist Ed Woltil.

“I’m still happy playing here,” Connelly swears. “It’s a spiritual thing or me. I do music because it’s my raison d’etre, my reason for being. I feel like a success story, even though I’m broke.”

In November 2022 Scott Dempster died of a heart attack, at age 67. He was, to Connelly’s mind, “A great good bass player … he had such a great tone. He was just happy to be onstage, that kind of thing. He wanted to be a rock star.”

Robinson agreed. “Scott loved being in a band more than anyone I’ve ever known. It was just in his soul, and he had an energy about him when it came to getting the lads together for rehearsals, recording and playing shows. He was the engine room of the band really; always the one putting in the legwork to make things happen for us.

“Looking back, I get a little weepy since it’s apparent to me that he considered the band his family; he seemed most content when we were all together. Never shy about letting us know he loved us. I just hope that he knew how much he meant to us.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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3 Comments

3 Comments

  1. Avatar

    Cindy Welch

    August 22, 2023at5:54 pm

    I am so thankful for this article as I’ve often wondered how everything turned out. What I really want to say is thank-you! My friends and I rocked out and danced for hours following you guys around town. Thanks for the killer shows, the fun and terrific memories. My 20s would have been more dull without The Headlights! Thank you and the boys! Well done kind sirs!!

  2. Avatar

    Kenny Schupp

    February 5, 2023at1:39 pm

    The Headlights were one of the Bayarea’s Best back in the early 80’s. I enjoyed all the shows that I caught back then. Especially the one’s at the Swamp Club up close and personal. Scott was a cool guy and a very entertaining bassist.
    He will miss. God Rest His Soul.
    Kenny Schupp

  3. Avatar

    Janice Taylor

    February 4, 2023at9:01 pm

    Tore up, yeah, yeah, yeah… From Clancy’s to Club Detroit, I followed them from their Just Another Rainbow days through their Headlights days. Their last set was always their best. I had their Test the Spirit cassette made into a CD at Bananas. So sorry that another one of our local music greats has left us.

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