“I was sitting here thinking,” says Ken Lyon. “What am I gonna tell you? You know, am I gonna say I think I’ve got the greatest band on earth? I’ll sound like Jimmy Dean selling sausages. I’m not into that.

“But aside from all the hype, the band cooks. We’re not out to be a super glitter group. We’re not out to be crazy. We just try to wreck our audiences and get them involved. We look at the whole thing as a party.

“And you know, we’re another New England Band. Aerosmith, J. Geils, Bonnie Raitt, James Taylor—there’s an incredible string of New England musicians that have come down the pike over the past few years. So, here we are. We stuck together long enough to get an album to you, and now we’re going on the road and kicking ass the best way we know how.”

Lyon has himself been “kicking ass”—otherwise known as playing rock and roll—for several years now, mostly in clubs around his Providence, Rhode Island, stomping grounds. Before that, he was performing as a folk artist. Altogether, he has been making music professionally for about 15 years.

“I first recorded in 1960,” Lyon says. “And, at least on albums, I was a folk singer until about 1970. I had a folk thing out on Decca, Ken Lyon in Concert, which didn’t sell too much. You can still get it in the cheapie pile.

“And I did other people’s’ albums. Studio work on and off. And I hung around with Richie Havens in New York, because we were playing in the same joints at the same time—downtown at night and uptown during the day. And we were writing songs for whatever we could get for ’em and doing the studio stuff.

“So, anyway, in 1967, I put together a band in Providence. I had had a folk gig and a bunch of my friends showed up. The only thing we could do was blues, because it was the only kind of music we all knew. We had heard about or seen [Paul] Butterfield and a few of the other white blues guys by this time, and blues was no longer untouchable for us as white guys. So, we started jamming blues and, tangential to that, I kept the folk singing going, but it kind of faded out after the Decca album.”

Though Lyon has managed to maintain a consistent musical direction since forming the band, it is no longer the same aggregation of musicians.

“I guess we’ve had about 20 graduates,” says Lyon. “Martin Mull, for instance, played bass with us for a few months when he was going to Rhode Island School of Design. This was before he really started to make it.

“And Bobby Mason, who just got off the road with Maria Muldaur and worked with the Fugs for a year and with Van Morrison. He was a drummer of mine, another graduate.”

In the group today, the only remaining original members are pianist Mark Taber and Lyon, who sings lead and plays bass, electric, and acustic guitars. Completing the present lineup are Sybilla (vocals, percussion), Brenda Mosher (vocals, acoustic guitar), Michael Quinn (drums, percussion), Paul DiChiara (lead, rhythm guitars) and Thomas Enright (rhythm, lead guitars, bass). Jon Polce, a member when the group cut its first album, has since left.

“Everybody in the band is very versatile,” Lyon says, “and it’s hard to get everything out at once on an album. You can’t do it; you confuse people. Some people say that our record is too diverse, that it should have been heavier. I think it’s good because it’s a spectrum; it points at some of the directions we’d like to take.”

Called simply Ken Lyon & Tombstone, the LP is as wide-ranging, musically and lyrically, as the group’s leader indicates. “Sing Song City,” the album’s first single, is energetic rock with strong, prominently mixed vocals. While also powerful and rock-based, “Goin’ Down (Hallelujah)” evidences the band’s gospel and blues influences. “Bird on a Witre,” the Leonard Cohen tune, receives a folk treatment not far removed from its author’s original version. “Hold Me Closer,” a folk/rocker featuring Brenda as lead vocalist, is a love song. And “Lorraine” represents a revamped version of the old public domain tune, “Cocaine.”

Asked why he replaced the word “cocaine” with a woman’s name in that song, Lyon says “the McClellan Committee was responsible for that more than anything. As you know, there have been some troubles at Columbia Records, which is our label. I suppose it’s still in the courts, but there were some allegations made, some problems with Mr. [Clive] Davis, and everybody at Columbia wanted to avoid drug-oriented material.

“So, even though that song’s been played a million times, we changed it. Because these executives are being continually harassed by the federal government. And now you can’t do songs about drugs—it doesn’t matter whether they’re for or against—without a certain amount of risk. You know, making records takes you into the business world. And where the world of business meets the world of art, there’s always a crunch.

Obviously, Lyon prefers the artistic sphere. And if that milieu has a center, he believes it is located on the concert stages of Rhode Island. He likes live shows because “you don’t need any masks and you can really get down. Like we always do the original ‘Cocaine’ at our shows.” And, as for Rhode Island: “There’s a huge cult of musicians here. We’re right between Boston and New York, and a lot of the big shows come through town. We pick up a lot of influences.

And maybe because it’s a small state, the musicians in Rhode Island have always stuck together and taken care of each other.”

When the band is on the road, Lyon says, he still feels at home, since he runs into a lot of groups based in Rhode Island and its neighborinb New England states. And should Tombstone be billed with a band from outside the region, he’s willing to employ his imagination to bring it into the fold.

“Like, we’re gonna be playing soon with Blue Oyster Cult. And they’re almost a New England band, because Long Island is really just Connecticut snipped off by the ocean.

“I once had a great theory,” Lyon adds with a laugh, “that there used to be a land bridge between us and Long Island. And musicians walked there in a dazed state from the southern tip of Rhode Island—which is where all the good musicians come from.

Ken Lyon & Tombstone is available here.