By CRAIG FREILICH

When Double Axel graced the front page of the first issue of North Country This Week in August 1984, they had already been playing around the North Country for more than a dozen years.

Now, more than two decades and several recordings later, what may well be the North Country’s best-known rock band is nearing its 40th anniversary and still performs for fans old and new.

As with just about any band, the musical connections among the players go back earlier than their first gig together – closing in on half a century.

This band still has a considerable following, and most if not all of the musicians who have played under the Double Axel name are expected to be in town this month for a grand reunion at their annual Potsdam Summer Festival gigs at Maxfields, this year on Friday and Saturday nights, July 15 and 16.

“We don’t really have to do this anymore,” said original member and current drummer Alex Vangellow. “We choose to do it.”

“The biggest reason we still do it is because people still have a good time when we play,” he said.

“If that didn’t happen, it wouldn’t be worth it,” said another of the original band members, Rob Zolner, who mainly plays keyboards and guitar these days.

Bassist Frank Johns, also a Double Axel member for all 40 years, is a retired teacher now, but he recalls one of the main reasons he has stuck with it so long.

“There was this thing I realized when I was teaching. When the weekends came, and we were playing Friday or Saturday or both, the gigs would recharge my batteries and I could go back to school on Monday ready to go.” And he still gets a charge out of it all.

Those three – Vangellow, Zolner and Johns -- formed the core of Double Axel from the beginning, and they make the band a “power trio” today.

The band hit its stride in the 1970s in an exciting time for popular musicians everywhere, including Double Axel. There was a breakout of experimentation in all forms of music, and Alex, Rob and drummer Rick Washik, playing music at night and working in music stores during the day, were completely immersed in it.

All of the musicians began playing music as kids, and all had been in bands in their home towns and in Potsdam before Double Axel hit the scene.

Alex, from Rochester, had piano lessons in grade school, but was not convinced of the value of the experience until he heard George Harrison of the Beatles play guitar, “and I thought maybe there was something to this music thing.” He came to Potsdam as a mechanical engineering student at Clarkson College of Technology, as the university was then known.

Rob grew up in Ravena, south of Albany, and started taking piano lessons when he was about 10 from a Crane School graduate. He saved up $20 to buy his first guitar, and kept up with music when he came to SUNY Potsdam to study economics. He never graduated, but it didn’t matter: “I was paying my way through college with music. I was very fortunate.”

Frank started playing trumpet in the fourth grade in South Glens Falls, and played in a three-piece band in Lake George in the summer of 1965. While he studied for a biology teaching degree at SUNY Potsdam, he played in dorm bands before meeting and joining up with Alex and Pete Thomson, eventually playing in the band Paul Lee and the Walkers.

After Paul Lee left, Alex, Frank and Pete wanted to stay and keep making music over the summer as The Walkers, “and we had a blast,” Alex said.

They decided they could use another strong voice and strong player, and they knew Rob from the local band Brass Tacks. “There was no debate. We just asked Rob,” Alex said.

With that, a new band was born, and named Double Axel.

Their original drummer, Pete Thomson, played from the first gig in 1971 until he went to teach in Massachusetts in 1973, when Rick “RickRock” Washik, who had been playing in local bands Brass Tacks and Matrix and had actually been a roadie for Double Axel for a time, was asked to join the band.

Rick played with the band for about 10 years, and left when his father became ill. They called in Brian Tupper to pick up the sticks, and he stayed with Double Axel for about another 10 years, before the obligations of a growing young family forced him to give it up. Since then, Alex has taken on the drumming duties, and the old core of Alex, Frank and Rob remain.

They brought in a brass section from time to time, and they had a female singer, Patty Perry, for a while in the early ’90s, Frank said.

“At the time, there were a lot of popular female singers, like Mariah Carey. Patty did a lot of songs we couldn’t do without her.”

Well before then, in the early ’70s, while Frank was teaching in Lake Placid and playing with the band evenings, Alex, Rob and Rick were working in music stores, first in Bronen’s on Main Street, and then when Alex and Wally Siebel teamed up to open Northern Music and brought in Rob and Rick to work with them.

“There was a distinct advantage working in a music store,” Rick said. “We heard the music of well known bands playing great music – a lot of really good stuff – and that was a learning experience.

“There were mainstream influences from groups like Three Dog Night, Loggins and Messina, and from others not so well known, like Orleans, The Fabulous Rhinestones, Domenic Troiano. We learned how to do what we did from listening to that stuff, ”Rick said.

“There was a youthful free spirit in the band, in an experimental, ambitious way,” Rob said. “We looked to pick songs we could cover and we were not afraid to arrange them to our own style. We also did some covers to perfection.” They also did some original songs that are still in the band’s lineup. In fact some of Rob’s songs made it into a compilation of garage band classics from Sundazed Records.

“It was a pretty creative, ambitious time,” Alex said. “Even if we took somebody’s song and completely pulverized it to suit ourselves, we learned all the parts, and the college audiences seemed accepting of those things.”

“At the early stage, when we were closest to the college scene, that audience was open to hearing something different, even if it was our own arrangement, even if we played long solos,” Rob said.

“As we got older and moved away from the college scene a bit, we moved more toward covers as faithful to the original as possible. The repertoire had to change quite a bit,” he said. “That’s all indicative of the audiences we have now. And if we do play for a college crowd, they want to hear the old tunes.”

“In the ’70s, we were on a train,” Rob said. “The more we played, the more we were hired. It got so we had gigs booked a year in advance.”

“We had to keep notes on paper napkins until the next year’s calendar books came out,” Alex said.

Their first gig in 1971 as Double Axel might have been at Frank’s Nu Bar on Market Street in Potsdam, or it might have been at The Store in Saranac Lake. It was 40 years ago, after all, so who could be certain?

Since then they have traveled all over the Northeast playing for appreciative crowds of listeners and dancers, for much of that time playing in Potsdam or Canton or on the road to Rochester, Syracuse, Ithaca, into Vermont or Pennsylvania’s Poconos, at least twice a week, sometimes three gigs in a week, and occasionally more.

Now a lot of their dates are annual gigs, like the Summer Festival appearances, and New Year’s at Maxfields, and performances for alumni from local colleges.

Looking back at highlights of the band’s performances, Alex, Rob, Frank and Rick all say it had to be playing for the athletes at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid.

“On the ice at the Olympic Arena. The games were over and they put a cover over the ice, and we played for all the athletes,” Alex said. “That had to be a high pint, among many.”

“We still enjoy getting together and playing,” he said. “No matter what’s happening in our lives, as soon as the first couple of notes are struck, we’re back.”