Moses

Websites:  https://davefilchak.com/moses-end-of-the-line/
Origin: Lethbridge, Alberta, 🇨🇦
Biography:

Most of the eventual members of Moses knew each other, at least casually, before Moses was formed. We were all playing in other bands or pursuing other music endevours. But we all admitted that at some point in time, we would like to try something together. Finally, the timing just worked out and we got together to start jamming and get a feel for where that could take us. The original people were: Lynn Johnson on guitar, Jim Williams on bass, a California export, Eric Geisreiter on drums and myself, also on guitar. Eventually, Eric left for personal reasons and we hired Randy “Skid” McCann to replace him. Turns out it felt good and sounded good. Our original vision was always to write most of our own material, with the odd exception for a cover song or two that we liked. So, this was back in the early seventies, maybe 1971. We kept writing and playing throughout Alberta, adding more material, getting better.

We had, for the time, pretty good equipment and a lot of it. Lynn and Jim, I think both played through Sunn amps, I was playing through two GBX amps and a 147 Leslie, we had Altec Lansing PA and 200K of lights on Super Genies and a carbon arc follow spot. For the time, a pretty extensive setup. Lunn played a lovely Gibson “Black Beauty” Les Paul, Jim played an EBO Bass and then switched to a Fender Precision, and a Gibson Hummingbird for our acoustic set. I played Hagstrom, Gibson ES-335 guitars and Martin D-28 acoustic. Vaguely correct I believe.

After playing around Alberta for a year or so, we hooked up with a major promoter from the area, Ron Sakamoto, and he booked our first tour in the USA in 1973. I was in university at that point and left to go on tour. We eventually hooked up with the Good Music Agency in the states, and Doug Brown, who managed us throughout our existence as Moses. We toured ten months out of every year, hundreds of thousands of miles, non-stop for the next five years. We originally based ourselves out of Missoula Montana, touring the northwest United States and all of the states along the Canada US border (those were affectionately known as the highway 2 border bug tours). Eventually, we ended up basing out of the Minneapolis/St Paul Minnesota area, then Seattle and finally ending up in Los Angeles in 1976. As I said, we did hundreds of thousands of tour miles and toured pretty much the entire North American Continent.