Quacky Duck and His Barnyard Friends, a country rock band, featured two sons of singer Tony Bennett and violinist, guitarist, and composer David Mansfield, who went on to work with Bob Dylan and become an in-demand session musician. The group released one album, which appeared around the time that the interview for the following article took place.

Rip the shrink wrap from Media Push, the debut album by Quacky Duck and His Barnyard Friends, and you remove its title, which is printed only on a label attached to the cellophane.

The disposable name was the band’s idea, its way of saying its members don’t like the “media push” side of the record business. “You know how hard it is to be natural these days,” they sing on the album. “You try and yet, how basic can you get, when you know that it’s coming through your TV set.”

With the group’s material beginning to be heard on radios and stereos, one might wonder how “basic” Quacky Duck itself can remain. “We want to share our music with everybody, and its gonna cost us,” admits the Duck’s Dea Bennett. “Because we’re gonna be just as much a part of the ‘media push’ as any other band. And in one sense, there’s not much we can do about that.

“But we don’t have to like it. And if you gain a certain amount of prestige through what you’ve done, then you won’t need all the hype. What we’re working toward is not the stardom and the money, but the artistic freedom.”

Trying to achieve this goal, the group’s six young members (their ages range from 17 to 22) had, by last year, set aside unrelated projects and turned all efforts to floating the Duck. Percussionist Dea Bennett (son of singer Tony Bennett) and David Mansfield (guitar, violin, pedal steel) both managed to arrange early graduation from high school; Dea’s brother, Danny, a guitarist with the band, shelved his interest in painting; Curtis Fried (bass, banjo, 12-string) dropped out of drama school; and percussionist Jon Yaffee and guitarist Gordon Yavna quit Rutgers and the Philadelphia School of Art, respectively.

The band’s resourcefulness has been evident to listeners for several years now, ever since it began playing locally in the Bergen County, New Jersey, area. Refusing, for example, to earn barroom gigs by churning out copies of current radio hits, the group rented out halls and advertised its own shows so it could perform original material.

To increase audience interest in its concerts, the band painted backdrops and brought furniture, stuffed parrots, and oversized plants to the stage. It interrupted songs with mock commercials, threw cornflakes and marshmallows at the fans, and set off smoke bombs. Once, after an MC announced them, the group’s members emerged from an outhouse that had been placed on the stage.

By late 1972, they had begun to draw enough attention to be written up in the Bergen County Record. Lauding the group’s musicianship, the paper predicted that Quacky Duck would soon be known nationwide.

That prophecy quickly started to come true. The band was mentioned on national TV by Hollywood’s Rona Barrett and began to get important dates at New York City–area clubs such as the Bitter End, My Father’s Place, and Max’s Kansas City. Meanwhile, producer Stephen Galfas had read the Record‘s review and heard the group. He put its members in touch with Warner Brothers, from which they received a recording contract.

“The thing that really makes this group is that we’re all best friends,” Dea asserts. “We do a lot of things together, even when we’re not gigging or rehearsing. You know, we spend our time off together.”

What are they working on now? “A second album,” replies Curtis. “Assembling material for a third. Performing. And trying to improve our stage act. You know, at the beginning, most of the props were brought in just because they were funny. Now we’re trying to connect the theatrics more directly to what’s being said in our music.

“For example, the last time we played New Jersey, our album had just come out, so we decided to do a concept around the ‘media push.’ We got a few of our friends to help with it. One’s a director and a couple are actors. We made the stage into a TV set by putting corners in and hanging a huge lighted dial, you know, to change the channels. We also had a real TV there. And a screen came down to show film that was taken from TV. So there were three levels of television brought into the show.

“And the transitions were all made very smoothly between the three levels. There was a film of us coming into the auditorium, going backstage, and coming onstage. And, all of a sudden, the lights came on, and there we were for real—as if we had walked through a level or something.”