Craig Rutz wrote to me about his first group, Peter and the Wolves, which evolved into Synod:

My brother and I started Peter and the Wolves during my freshman year of high school (summer and fall of 1965) in Palatine, Illinois. We were one of the thousands of bands inspired by the Beatles. The members of Peter and the Wolves included Doug May (now the leader of Yard Fulla Cars), LeRoy (Buddy) Rogers, my brother Glenn Rutz and me.

My father worked for the Chicago Tribune and would take the train home every day from the city to Palatine. He often walked a mile and a half from the station. I was practicing my parts on my Harmony Hollywood guitar through my Kay 5-watt amplifier with one 6-inch speaker (I still have that amp) in the garage where our band sometimes practiced. My father walked through the garage on his way into the house and told me to “turn that thing down! I could hear you all the way from the train station!” I don’t think you could hear me playing that distance today using my Fender Twin or my Marshall, but I always remembered that little experience proudly. I felt like a rock star.

I used 3×5 cards to write down every practice and every performance we had, the dates, even what songs we did. And I still have those cards all these years later. I regret to say Peter and the Wolves never recorded anything. There are some rough tapes of us writing songs, and somewhere there’s at least one recording of us performing, but so far I haven’t been able to get my hands on anything that I could copy. Those were real garage band days.

As the band fizzled a couple of years later, my father actually co-signed a loan so I could buy my first professional guitar, a 1968 Gretsch Tennessean (which I also still have). In those days, the local music store (Olsen’s Music) would let a 14-year-old kid buy a top-of-the line guitar. Olsen’s kept a little box of note cards by the cash register and one would come in every week with some kind of payment, which was written down on the card, until the loan was paid. No interest, either. Just a promise to pay. In my case, I got a job at Burger King and I took in $10 or $20 each week for nearly a year.

When I went to college (Concordia University Chicago) I brought my Tennessean and Sears Silvertone amp with me. I played whenever I had the chance and even borrowed an acoustic guitar to play at a couple of protest rallies. In addition to the anti-Vietnam War movement, it was the time of the first real Jesus-movement of my era. There was a Wednesday night “folk service” at the college, and eventually I had an opportunity to play guitar with half a dozen other students. I didn’t own an acoustic guitar, so I brought my Tennessean and Silvertone. I started throwing in rock and roll lead guitar parts from Chuck Berry, the Beatles and The Beach Boys, and that made people laugh, so I did it more, and we suddenly became The Chapel Band.The Wednesday services got so big they had to move us to larger and larger spaces. At one point, they stopped the services because the couple hundred college kids were causing the floor of the cafeteria to bow. The services were popular and a lot of fun, and of course we wrote our own songs. Later that year the college sent us out for our Easter break to tour Midwest churches as ambassadors for the school. We had a great time, but people kept asking if we could also play for dances. That led us to start Synod, built around John Strege on keyboards, Paul Rogner as lead vocalist and me.

Synod’s first performance was at Concordia’s Spring Arts Festival on April 29, 1971. We’ve been together ever since. There were a few personnel changes, particularly in the first two years, but John, Paul and I have been in it the whole time. The first incarnation included Paul Sautter on guitar, Jack Giles on bass and Harv Mahavolic on drums. Scott King, later mayor of Gary, Indiana, became our bass player for the second performance, but less than a year later Sautter, King and Mahavolic left to start another band and we were joined by two other students, Brad Roche and Kim Kolander. We did some recording with that band, most notably a 9-song collection called “Sent to Reconcile.”

During the couple of years this 6-man version of the band was together we played constantly. We did some very long club dates in Clinton, Iowa and Branson, Missouri (before it became the Branson of today). We had great vocals, in part due to the influence of one of my favorite bands, The Association. One of our cover songs was a hit titled, “White Lies, Blue Eyes.” Along the way we auditioned for an agency called Gary Van Zeeland Talent from Little Chute, Wisconsin, not knowing they represented Bullet, the band that recorded “White Lies, Blue Eyes.” The A&R guy who auditioned us said we were the best band he’d ever seen and that we did “White Lies” much better than their flagship band, Bullet. They offered us a generous contract, and we thought we were on our way, but our drummer, Kim, announced several weeks later that he was quitting to get married. Because of that, Brad and Jack decided to call it quits. But John, Paul and I kept going.

I taught Paul to play bass, and we bought a Fender bass from our former bass player Scott King, and my brother, Glenn, joined us. We actually did some Peter and the Wolves songs, a few of which made it to recordings. Eventually, our part-time roadie, Bob Krueger, became a member of the band.

During the 1970s, Synod did a lot of writing and recording. We had a self-taught manager named Randy Schnack, who stayed with us about 15 years, and we went through a series of booking agents. We toured in 12 different states and performed at National Entertainment Conference showcases, Chicagofest, Summerfest, and dozens of universities, high schools, park districts and clubs.

We have always been primarily a dance band. That’s our preference, anyway. But on one tour of the college circuit we arrived in Houghton, Michigan to play a job and were surprised to see a stage the size of a lot of rooms we played. The university gym was set up with a thousand chairs, and we realized were about to do an unexpected concert. We’d done plenty of concerts before, but usually with some additional planning. The show went off alright, but during the intermission an organizer of the event came backstage to tell us how great we were, but couldn’t we turn up the volume and the lighting? We were on 10. When we got to the hotel that night we called our manager and said, “We’ll be home in 10 days. Buy us a truck.” When we got back, Randy had a new Chevy box truck, and we immediately filled it with gear. We eventually were traveling with two 16-channel sound boards (synched by the manufacturer, Acoustic Systems, for us) in stereo and bi-amped. We had 16 15-inch speakers and four splayed horns with an array of tweeters. We also put together a system of theater lighting using fresnels and ellipsoidal lamps, and even follow spots. At our level, nobody we ran into had the gear and show we had.

One of the agents we worked through, Ken Freeman, got us a record offer from Capitol. Around the same time we also had an offer from Mercury Records. It was a turning point for us, similar to the offer we had from Gary Van Zeeland. Both labels said they loved our original songs and our performance, both wanted to record our songs, but one said they wanted to use other singers (although it would be under our name and we’d still perform live) and another said they wanted to use studio instrumentalists on the records. That was and is a common practice, but it isn’t what we wanted, so we passed. Up until that time, we were working on the staff of Concordia University, but by 1982 I decided to take a job with the local police department.

We all took real jobs, but we kept Synod going. We travel less, and none of us are any good at booking so we play a lot less. But we practice all the time, perform whenever and wherever we can, and someday…. We’ve put together a little web site with a few sound samples at www.synodband.com

Craig Rutz, 2009