Alexander Rabbit
The Hunchback Of Notre Dame (The Bells Were My Friends)
(album, 1970)

Alexander Rabbit is the band that evolved from the Galaxies. Members of the band were:
Chris Holmes, Charles Brodowicz, Len Demski Alan Fowler & Steve Scheier. They also put out a 45 of their most popular live song, the Spanish classic "Malaguainia" (if you have this, I would love a tape of it!)

They were managed by Chris' father Bolton Holmes. Bolton used to play the big theater organ at the R.K.O. Capitol that was on Warren Street (my grandmother, Lottie Krum used to play the piano for the silent movies there!). That organ has been restored and is now at the Trenton War Memorial Theater.

Chris Holmes

Steve Scheier

Len Demski

Here are the liner notes from the back of the album (I'm still trying to figure out what this guy is saying!):

As a new band, the task of Alexander Rabbit is to place itself among the irreplaceables—all those bands that have claimed their fame and have no where else to go but home. Gaining acceptance into the world of the "top rock groups" seems to be getting harder every day. After all, how do you even begin to compete with the various highly specialized sounds of the big urban brass bands, the backstreet r&b bands, the soft formula bands, the heavy rock bands, the down home pedal-steel bands, and the myriad blues bands?

Alexander Rabbit answers that question with the album you hold in your hand, because it is a product of the assimulation and interpretation of all the observances that the members of Rabbit have made on the current pop scene. Into the listening time for the album is crammed all that is good and worthwhile in rock today. This is not to claim some sort of plagiarism, but to lend insight into their process of creation. Because they bother to surrender to a disciplined study of "what sound is working at what time for whom," Rabbit's music is all themselves and a bit of everyone. The group's nine originals (plus a tenth penned by Otis Redding) are related to each other so very well in their free flowing get well structured styles. And the album is related to every other one made before it because it reflects an open ear to all music that has preceded it.

Very few groups bother to look back or forth or side to side; Alexander Rabbit is one that has done just that and in so doing has sown its seed into fertile ground. Its got the something that should make it one of the irreplaceables—maybe even replace a few.

FRED HOLMAN, CASHBOX