Ellis was the bass player extraordinaire in HotSpitt. He also did a fine job singing the bass vocal  parts on all the on ZZ Top songs, especially "LaGrange."

"Hotspitt came before Sky King, and Zsa Zsa followed. My recollection is that you
entered Hotspitt, and we may have called ourselves that for a little while, but you didn't like the name much. 'Sky  King' was your idea, and we went with it. 

"The last job I remember us playing was 7/14/72 at the Battle of  the  Bands in Tipp City - which we won. I think we played out a few more times in late July and early August. I know that I became preoccupied  with other things about mid-August of '72, and Tom, Kenny, and I each went off to our  respective colleges in late August, early September.

"Around mid-1973, Kenny and I had quit our respective colleges, and were back in Dayton.  We started up a band again (Zsa Zsa).  Various people in the band at one time or another included: Keith Booth (who sang, played some piano, and played some sax), Michael Biggs, who had a fabulous voice, Stan Malone, who played guitar, Mark Sorah, and Dale Walton.  Through some means, everyone left except for Mark Sorah, Kenny, and me. Jeff Tutt joined us at some point, and we stayed together perhaps a year as Zsa Zsa.

Where is Ellis now?

"I finished college, went to medical school, moved to Richmond, then to DC. I became a cardiologist, and have been working here since 1983.

"Between a wife, 3 kids, a dog, and the maintenance of a house, I haven't really played much music. Once in a while I play piano, and rarely I play bass. Sometimes the kid's school will ask me to play a few songs for one of the choirs, and it's fun to do that. (It's hard to forget how to play bass.) As the girls grow older and I get less busy, I plan to have more time to play.

"For my 50 th birthday, my wife threw me a surprise party, and a rather special one at that. She talked Tom, Kenny, and Mark Sorah into coming here for a musical reunion. The 4 of us provided the musical entertainment for about 50 of our friends. We just got up cold and played!!! We hadn't played together in 30 years. We just got on the stage and broke into 'All Right Now.' We actually sounded really good!!! We played on and on. Tom mostly made up all the words. The biggest problem we had was remembering the songs we played - not how to play the individual songs, but remembering names of songs we used to do."

 

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