Lawyer putting the band back together

If you ask attorney Peter J. Strand for his business card, he’ll hand you a guitar pick.

Written across the white pick in small black letters is Strand’s contact information. It’s a fitting choice for an entertainment lawyer who keeps a guitar in his office.

When he’s not representing artists, producers and companies in entertainment, media and intellectual property issues as a partner at Leavens, Strand & Glover LLC or lobbying in D.C. on behalf of musicians with the Chicago chapter of the Recording Academy, Strand is reviving his own music career.

From 1977 to 1981, Strand was the bassist for the five-piece rock band Yipes, which toured with the likes of Cheap Trick and opened for such bands as Foreigner.

This year, the old band members started recording a third album — 36 years after their last release.

Strand, his co-founding partner Thomas R. Leavens and his client Rick Nielsen said his passion for music makes him a better attorney.

“Any lawyer that’s ridden on a tour bus probably has a little more insight than somebody that just sits in their office 24/7,” said Nielsen, the lead guitarist, songwriter and backup vocalist for Cheap Trick who wrote songs like “I Want You To Want Me” and “Surrender.”

“Like lots of boomers,” Strand said, he became interested in playing music in 1964 when he watched The Beatles perform on the “Ed Sullivan Show.”

He started playing guitar with a neighbor and bandmates in Brookfield, Wis., a Milwaukee suburb. New members would come in and out as they gained and lost interest. They would practice at different friends’ houses in basements and garages.

“Next thing you know, you’ve got a band,” Strand said.

Strand and his friends formed his first band his sophomore year of high school. They played ’50s-style music at sock hops and Catholic Youth Organization dances in church basements and fell in favor with a Milwaukee radio DJ.

Strand’s mom gave them $300 to make a 45 rpm record covering Del Shannon’s “Runaway” and Danny and the Juniors’ “At the Hop.” The junior high kids went crazy.

Strand and another member played weekends and summers as undergraduate students at University of Wisconsin at Madison.

In the fall of his senior year, Strand had taken the LSAT and applied to law schools, but his plans changed when the band took off. He and his bandmates became friends with the lead of a band with a big regional following in Madison and opened for their reunion concert. Strand started playing bass full-time after graduation.

In the fall of 1977, Strand and four bandmates formed Yipes (sans the familiar exclamation point), whose sound he described as “kind of punky, kind of power pop.” He said there was “a tongue in cheek element to the lyrics” and “smart-assery is probably the best way to put it.”

The band was renamed Yipes! after its first album “Yipes!” was released in 1979 and “Yipes!!” in 1980 when their sophomore album “A Bit Irrational” was released.

Strand said the band is considering branding the third album as Yipes!!! to be consistent with the other albums’ exclamation marks, but they haven’t decided yet.

They played about 20 nights a month, plus a practice or two a week, he said.

In pre-internet days, they cultivated fans by snail mail. They printed new calendar postcards every month, and the five band members would spend a day attaching stamps and handwriting the names and mailing addresses of the nearly 1,000 fans whose contact information they kept in a recipe box, Strand said.

They bounced between agents until they landed a manager who, thanks to a referral from a friend at a soul music record label, got them a recording deal with RCA/Millennium, Strand added.

Opening for big bands was really fun, Strand said. He remembers the deli tray in their dressing room the first time they played in an arena. Audiences of 10,000 to 20,000 people were often “just ready to like you,” he said. Young fans would be giddy to be at a rock show and have their lighters out and ready to wave, he said.

They opened for and toured with Cheap Trick, Southside Johnny, Eddie Money, Kansas, Foreigner, Moon Martin, Head East and Sha Na Na.

On the road, sometimes members of the headlining band would come out to play along as Yipes opened. The crowds would go wild, he recounted.

Sometimes technicians would prank them. A lighting guy would sing the Yipes song along into the monitor to mess with them while they were performing, he recalled.

Strand also said some headlining band members would sabotage their act, not wanting to be outshone by a few moderately successful 20-somethings from Milwaukee.

Their monitors would turn off midshow or they would notice only half of the audience’s speakers were turned on. Strand said Yipes took it as a compliment that they were being taken seriously.

However, the second album didn’t sell as well as their record company had hoped. They got a phone call at the beginning of 1981 saying they were being dropped.

In those days, Strand said a do-it-yourself record was an admission of surrender, so they played their last show as Yipes in June of 1981, a prom that Strand said was “purely for money” and “truly awful.”

Shortly after Yipes ended, Dick Clark played their music on American Bandstand’s Rate-a-Record segment. Yipes!! won. Staring at his television in shock, Strand thought, “Dick, you’re six weeks too late. We broke up.”

Strand and a few other band members formed a new band, Pat McCurdy and the Men About Town. In 1983, they got flown out to Los Angeles to compete in a TV talent competition show called “Star Search.” They lost, drank in the dressing room and jammed with the other losers.

Playing music had become a struggle. Strand wasn’t enjoying it like he had in the past and was working side jobs to make enough money.

The summer of 1984, he took the LSAT in East Lansing Mich., near the bar where the band was booked to play.

He initially panicked when he opened the envelope with his score. He was expecting a score on the 800-point scale that had been in use in 1975. When he saw his score was only two digits, he thought, “A chimpanzee could have done this” and “Oh God, I better get a bib.”

Once he read that the test’s grading scale had been changed to 50 points, he realized he did as well on the test as he had done his senior year of college.

At 30 years old, Strand left music to attend University of Wisconsin Law School in Madison. He got up at 6 a.m. for his first class, an hour he was only used to seeing when coming home after a long night.

He worked at some growing law firms — a firm now named Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP and then the now-closed Peterson & Ross LLC — and practiced solo until co-founding his firm in 2009.

He started in commercial litigation but kept getting phone calls from people he knew that were still in bands asking if he would take a look at offers they had. He took every continuing legal education program on entertainment law he could find and paid out of pocket to attend conferences across the nation.

He also volunteered for Lawyers for the Creative Arts, which provides free legal services to local artists, like dance companies trying to negotiate their leases and illustrators trying to negotiate a contract. Strand became a board member, which introduced him to local intellectual property contacts and strengthened his relationships with the attorneys who are now his co-workers.

Strand said starting a firm triggered muscle memory of the entrepreneurial skills he used helping schedule shows as a band member.

The firm represents artists like Rick Nielsen; the company that produces “The Ellen Show”; a company that’s going to make a show for “Shark Week” next year; and a theater in Uptown.

In 2013, for the first time in 32 years, all five members performed together as Yipes! was inducted into the Wisconsin Area Music Industry Hall of Fame. They looked older — now ranging from white hair in a tie to a forearm tattoos in a T-shirt — and lead singer Pat McCurdy joked that they will see the audience again for their next show in another 32 years.

Jamming together again recaptured their energy, Strand said, and inspired them to start working on the upcoming album.

Thomas R. Leavens, who watched his legal partner rock out with the band for the first time at the WAMI Hall of Fame show, said Yipes! was “really tight.”

Leavens said he didn’t picture Strand as he was in Yipes! He said he sometimes looks at the picture of his co-founding partner in his 20s, wearing those red pants with a mop of curly hair, his mouth making that dramatic face and a bass guitar throttling in his hands and thinks, “That would be interesting to see Peter in that kind of role.”