Buzzbox

The holidays are the perfect time to catch up with friends and relatives, patch up old wounds, and attempt to rid yourself of vices by crafting New Year’s resolutions. As psychologists will tell you, the holidays’ combined stress of shopping and travel can send families that were teetering on the brink of disaster over the edge. Unfortunately for fans of Kansas City cover band the Rockets, the holidays this year have brought less than glad tidings. It all started a few weeks back when the group’s lead singer, relative newcomer Nnik Ramm, decided that she would part ways with the group’s four founding members and pursue her own musical endeavors. Not a problem, the remaining Rockets thought, we’ll get another singer and keep on covering our favorite tunes. However, guitarist Terry Gann says, this task turned out to be easier said than done.

“If I could visualize the title for this story, it would be ‘The chick singer stole our band,'” Gann confides without a hint of sarcasm. That’s because, in Gann’s mind at least, Ramm did steal the band. Ramm, for her part, replies, “No comment.”

Never mind that Ramm couldn’t have actually stolen any songs; the Rockets have made a career out of getting paid to play songs others have made famous. Technically, she couldn’t have stolen the name either because, in addition to the Rockets that back up Anson Funderburgh and the ’60s-era, L.A.-based Rockets that went on to form the core of Crazy Horse, there is another female-fronted band called the Rockets that hails from Philadelphia. Gann says Ramm took something far more valuable than the band’s set list or its ubiquitous name.

“As soon as she told me she was quitting, I got on the phone with the other guys, and we decided to cancel the rest of the gigs we had scheduled for this year,” he explains. “When I started to call around to some places, like the Hyatt, where we had a New Year’s show scheduled for the fourth year in a row, they told me the Rockets were still playing.” And they weren’t talking about the quintet from Philly.

It seems that Ramm, having booked this show at the Hyatt in the first place, had taken it upon herself to fill the bill. “Originally, the Hyatt agreed to quit using our names in their ads because these Rockets that were going to play didn’t have the same personnel,” says Gann, “but that only lasted a week, until my (former) singer and keyboard player (Vic Stock) satisfied their legal department that they had the rights to the name.”

So this is how it currently stands: Gann, whom you might recognize from his one-man band at the Kansas City St. Patty’s Day Parade, plans to spend his New Year’s Eve alone, playing a solo gig before a substantially smaller crowd at Pickering’s in Olathe, while the Rockets (Ramm, Stock, and unnamed others) satisfy the desires of Kansas City’s cover-band fanatics at the Hyatt as usual.

“I don’t mind that someone left the band,” reiterates Gann, “or even that they took a member with them, but it’s Christmas, and the drummer and myself both have new babies, and she took away our way of making extra money in the holidays.”