The three Georges

If you say the name “George Pickard,” many Reno music fans will nod with recognition and approval. But which George Pickard do they know?

College-aged music fans might know George Pickard, 19, the lanky, rich-voiced lead singer and upright bassist of the Americana band Farewell Belladonna, often spotted busking along the Truckee River in downtown Reno or performing at all-ages venues.

Every music fan worth his or her salt who lived in Reno during the ’90s or early ’00s has a good story or two about different George Pickard, 42, the charismatic singer, guitar player and whiskey baptismal preacher of the Atomiks, the high-energy rock ’n’ roll band that taught a generation of Renoites everything they needed to know about UFO conspiracies, alcohol-fueled religion and stage presence.

And older, casino-going Renoites probably know yet another George Pickard, 68, the gregarious, piano-playing, multi-instrumentalist singer and storyteller, who has worked the showrooms and lounges of Northern Nevada to charming, cabaret-style effect for decades.

Together, the three Georges Pickard represent a local family tradition and family industry of songwriting craft and showmanship. And through their music and recollections, it’s also possible to glimpse how being a songwriter and a performer in Reno has changed over the years.

For the purposes of this article, we’ll refer to them as George I, George II and George III—eldest to youngest—but the name George Pickard goes back even farther than that. George II, of Atomiks fame, said that his grandmother told him he was the fourteenth of his name.

Engage!

“I was at the humane society, adopting a dog,” said George I, recounting a recent encounter. “I said the name, and she asked, you have a grandson George, a musician? She’s a big fan.”

These kind of “Are you related to—?” interactions are common occurrences for the Georges. George III, for example, sometimes receives Facebook messages asking if the Atomiks can play various events.

Atomiks performances are now relatively rare—just once or twice a year—but George I remains prolific, performing regularly at places like the Sands, the Carson Valley Inn, and the Carson Nugget, or venues in Yerington and Dayton.

George I is originally from Antioch, Calif. He’s performed as a professional musician for his entire adult life, around the Bay Area, in Nashville, and touring around the country with various groups, often having brushes and near misses with fame.

“My dad always made a living playing music,” said George II. “He’s been successful with a career in music. How many people can say this? So that gave me a lot of innate confidence to say, You can do this and make money at it. I think that a lot of people go into music without that. … It was always a profession in my eyes. I was trying to be a professional musician and entertainer. I saw it as a skill set versus something that you just do for fun. My role model was a professional musician.”

Most of the bands that George I performed with predominantly played cover songs, but he was also always writing songs. He co-wrote the song “What Did You Do With Your Old 45s?” for singer Bobby Vinton. His music career touched on several pop genres, including disco and country. He recorded several funny novelty songs about topical subjects, like “Humphrey the Humpback Whale,” about a whale that had been trapped in the San Francisco Bay, or “The Jar,” a song about tracking down a clean urine sample.

One novelty song that George I wrote was “Coke Was It”—a song written in protest of the reformulation of the iconic soda in the mid ’80s. George I was inspired to write the song by George II, who was then a cola-loving, 12-year-old boy who felt devastated and betrayed by the change in Coke.

After recording the song, George I hired a manager who booked him at the opening of an Albertson’s grocery store in Livermore, Calif. Young George II came along to help with the live sound.

“We sat there by the stacks of beer and potatoes and dog food, and sang to people checking out,” said George I. “It was the worst gig in the whole world. We sold one tape, and the manager says, ’Well, you made 10 bucks.’”

In the last few decades, George I has carved out a niche for himself as a locals’ favorite performer in the lounges all around the region.

“What’s really fun now is that I’m just observing it, like I’m not there,” he said. “There’s this robot going forward, and I’m Oz behind the curtain going, OK, let’s do this! And my body says, I don’t think we can do that anymore. But the brain works great.”

Make it so

George II spent much of his childhood in the van on the road with his father’s bands.

“When we were growing up, my brother and I and our sister would help Dad load in and what not into the nightclubs, and they would give us endless Shirley Temples and Roy Rogerses, and we felt so cool hanging out at the bar while Dad set up,” he said.

Before long, he was running the lights or sound fixtures for the shows. Then, when he was about 14, George II started playing the piano onstage with his father at venues like the Fitzgeralds Club, the MGM and the Ormsby House in Carson City.

“I hear the chords happening, so he’s playing piano,” said George I. “He’s playing piano—then we got to pay him.”

One night at Fitzgeralds, George II begged his father to let him play the catchy, instantly recognizable keyboard solo of Del Shannon’s early ’60s hit “Runaway.” George I eventually agreed.

“And I totally screwed it up,” said George II. “It was off-time and it was my one part. I felt so bad. Dad let me have that solo, but what was true love was letting me have it again the next set.”

His father gave George II a shot at redemption.

“I did better,” said George II. “I don’t remember nailing it. But I felt a lot better about things after that. If I couldn’t have done that, I would have just carried that—it would have been like the dropped catch at the end of a game or something. I’d have to live with it forever.”

Eventually, George II started the Atomiks, a band that consistently put on unforgettable, whiskey-fueled live performances, toured the country on multiple occasions and recorded several classic records—the band’s 1995 debut full-length, Pontiac, deserves a mention in any discussion about all-time great Reno rock records.

With the band’s upright bass, rollicking drum rhythms, perfect coifs, and George II’s crooning vocal style, the band was often classified as shockabilly or rockabilly revivalists. But George II always bristled at the easy genre identification.

“From the band perspective, they expected you to deliver that tribal message,” he said. “I found that stifling.”

Onstage, between songs, George II would deliver impassioned, satirical sermons with the fire-and-brimstone cadence of a country preacher before dropping shots of whiskey down the gullets of audience members. Atomiks shows would often spiral into decadent rock ’n’ roll insanity.

“That guy needs to get out once in a while,” said George II of his stage persona. “As long as he’s allowed out once in a while, then the rest of life is good, but if he doesn’t, then bad things happen. He needs a venue. The demon needs a sacrifice, a tribute.”

He said the Atomiks are actually working on a new album, which takes a psychedelic direction.

“The 140-character elevator pitch is, the band born out of a mushroom cloud has a mushroom trip,” he said. “We made a pact that we wouldn’t gig until we had another album in the can. It’s been a long time. It’s easy to go out and play the same stuff again. We don’t even need to practice to do the same songs.”

And just as George II made his concert debut performing with his father, so too did George III first appear as a young teen onstage with his father’s band, subbing for Atomiks bassist Luke Hoffman for a gig at the Zephyr Lounge.

“I thought this is going to be a really cool experience,” said George II. “How cool is it that your son can fill in for the bass player? And when it was actually happening, I was brought to tears—this is just so amazing, watching your baby’s hands play that instrument. And this sort of fractal mirror seeing your dad and your son all at the same time.”

The next generation

George III just finished his freshman year at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he’s studying environmental engineering.

“I look at science with a creative perspective, in a less organized way, and that helps me to understand it,” he said, adding that his scientific training helps him to more easily grasp some of the finer details of music theory.

George I describes his grandson’s band, Farewell Belladonna, as “kick-ass bluegrass.”

“I’ve never heard Alison Krauss say, ’shit,’” said George I. “That’s pretty cool. My grandson says ’shit.’ I could have never said that on a record. We had to do that real clean stuff.”

George III himself is fairly reticent. Like his father, he comes alive onstage in an energetic way that can be difficult to reconcile with his soft-spoken presence in casual conversation. He describes his band as “playing rock music, but looking for a new way to express it.”

That new way of expressing rock music is through acoustic guitar, banjo and bass—no drums. But it’s still rock music in the lyrics and delivery. George III is often a vocal dead ringer for his father. For Atomiks fans, listening to Farewell Belladonna’s self-titled album from last year is like hearing some great, long-lost Atomiks “unplugged” album—especially when a lyric like “He just got out of rehab with a bible in his hand” pops up in a song like “Place to Go.”

But a recent Farewell Belladonna gig at the Holland Project was billed as the band’s last show.

“We’re kind of in transition right now—not really sure where we’re going, what we’re going to continue,” said George III. “We’re wrapping things up as they are right now. I’m not totally sure what direction I’m going to take it.”

“It’s interesting to see your son’s band go through all the challenges that you went through,” said George II. “Especially when you’re starting off, and you’re idealistic and optimistic. And a band is like marriage—sometimes even more intense than that. So, I’m watching him go through those things and working out relationship issues. They grow up together, and you can’t save them. You can try to offer some helpful advice and be encouraging, but they got to go through it. It’s his thing. He gets to go through it. As much as I want to parent him in that moment and be a dad and protective, there’s no way to escape the cosmology of being in a band, the dharma of being in a band. You have to go through it on your own.”

Earl Grey, hot

George I came to Reno, years ago, because it was a place where musicians could come and sustain a career, and even support a family on a single income, playing in casino bands. That career model is largely gone. There aren’t bands playing multiple sets six or seven nights a week on various stages all around the casinos.

“Through my entire childhood, Dad never had another job,” said George II. “It was just playing music.”

“I got the tail end of it,” said George I. “When George started, they got the door and that was it. And they did well—they did really well. And now, Georgie plays a lot of venues, and I think the most money he gets is probably when you play out there on the street.”

George III acknowledges that’s probably true. His band makes more money busking on the street than playing in some of the proper venues. So, there’s the music industry in Reno in a nutshell—in just a couple of generations, a career in music has gone from making a living and supporting a family playing on glitzy casino stages to making pocket change out on the streets.

The plus side of this change, however, is greater creative freedom.

“Nowadays you go into any venue, and you play your tunes,” said George I. “You don’t play ’Proud Mary.’”

“We played ’Proud Mary,’” said George II, with a laugh.

“Well, you’d do some covers, but they’d be your choice,” said George I.

Live concerts are now, for many people, primarily a place to see touring bands with familiar recordings. The music in clubs and bars is often prerecorded stuff. The practice of just going someplace comfortable, having a beer, and enjoying an unknown band isn’t as prevalent as it once was.

“Most cover bands were wannabe writers and wannabe album groups, they just hadn’t been signed yet,” said George I. “We were playing everybody else’s songs, but we were writing our own songs”—but only rarely playing them in concert.

Another, more recent change in Reno music has been the advent of above-ground all-ages music venues, probably best epitomized by the Holland Project.

“The all-ages thing now is accepted,” said George II. “It’s sanctioned by the city in a way. But when I was in high school, and in my first bands, and when the Atomiks were first starting out, the police would show up and it would be over. Nobody wanted you to play if you were under 21.”

“One common thread, even in my time, everyone said, you better have a back-up plan because you won’t make it in music,” said George I. “They just humored you. You better study in school because when this doesn’t pan out you’re going to need something to fall back on. Go to work in the factory.”

Another thread shared among the three Georges is a compulsion toward songwriting.

“It always comes from a title for me,” said George I. “Somebody will say something and then there comes the song. Boom. One day, we cowrote a song with Bobby Vinton years ago, who was a crooner in the ’60s, and this girl and I were sitting in the studio one day and she said, ’What did you do with your old 45s? ’And I said ’What Did You Do With Your Old 45s’? That’s a title. That’s how it comes. I love stories.”

George II writes on piano first and then transfers the songs to guitar.

“It was just easier to bring guitars to shows,” he said.

“It always starts just natural rhythm,” said George III. “I write a lot when I’m walking, actually, or just moving around. It’ll just come as a lyrical hook, just with the pace of movement and that kind of rhythm. Then I’ll save those ideas and come back and just play. I always write on guitar. I’ll just play the same sort of rhythmic guitar and kind of voice out from there until it comes together. It’s all in the words, but they sort of just come out of nowhere. It’s like accessing a trance, like chanting. It’ll start without any meaning and then the meaning will come together as the words work out.”

“It’s like writing with a Ouija board,” said George II. “You take away the filters of ego and just let this stuff come out and then go back and try to arrange it.”

“We love writing, performing—all three of us,” said George I. “We all want to do it because of DNA structure, I think. My father and mom did it. They didn’t do it full-time, but they played the weekends, played the Elks Club and the Moose lodge and the bars. Dad, with a cigarette dangling, would play guitar, mom singing, they’d collect their tips and money and come home. It’s always been for the love of the craft.”

“For me, it’s like a religious practice,” said George II. “It’s the only sure way to connect to the greater thing. When music is good, there’s nothing better. For me, feeling connected, feeling that I’m in the right place, doing the right thing, when it works.”

“I don’t know what else I would do,” said George III. “Even when I was young, it was just part of me. To have something to say and go out there. It just feels right to have a guitar or a bass in hand and sing to the crowd.”

“That’s got to be the apple from the tree,” said George I.