- Joe Bouchard
- Photo: Sheryl Rob
This section is intended to document all those gigs played by Orleans & Friends which featured Joe Bouchard as a guest musician.
At the moment, I'm keeping the Orleans & Friends gigs as a separate and distinct entity from that other Orleans-driven enterprise, The Rock and Pop Masters project (which Joe is also involved with) simply because they have different names, but it might be the case that I end up combining them at a later date as that would seem to have a certain logic to it, from a structural point of view.
The Joe Bouchard / Orleans & Friends giglist is here, the known setlists here and reviews here. If you can add any information to any of these pages, please let me know.
Anyway, if you ever saw one of the "Orleans & Friends" shows which featured Joe Bouchard, please send me a .
Orleans were formed in Woodstock, NY in 1972 by John Hall, brothers Lance and Larry Hoppen and the late Wells Kelly, their name being inspired by the legendary city of New Orleans.
After signing with Asylum Records, they produced such chart-topping hits including Dance With Me, Let There Be Music, Love Takes Time, Reach and, of course, their American standard, Still The One.
Hall, their main songwriter, quit for a solo career and the band continued to tour and record - even scoring a Top 10 hit with Love Takes Time in 1979.
The untimely death of Wells Kelly in 1984 resulted in a memorial gig which reunited the Hoppens with Hall and they continued on with that core unit until late 2005 when John Hall announced to Larry and Lance that he intended to run for Congress!
The band subsequently re-recruited Dennis "Fly" Amero, who had played guitar with the band when John went solo earlier on, and carried on regardless, vowing to re-unite with John Hall whenever schedules might allow.
So that's Orleans in a nutshell. Quite how "Orleans & Friends" came into being - and how they got involved with Joe Bouchard - I don't yet know, but I'll find out!!