The Avantes of San Antonio formed in November 1964 at Robert G. Cole High School. Members were Chuck Klein (guitar), R.V. Brinkerhoff (lead guitar), Woody Brinkerhoff (drums, violin) and Randy Wilson (guitar and trumpet). All but Chuck Klein were sons of army officers at Ft. Sam Houston.
I don’t believe they recorded, at least under this name. For every combo that recorded a single or demo, there must have been 50 that did not.
I came across the photo by accident when looking for info on another group. There’s a half-page write-up of the band in the society pages that accompanies this photo.
Really surprised to see this! My brother, Woody and I moved with our family to Lawrence, Kansas in 1966 when our Dad was reassigned from Fort Sam to the University of Kansas to run the ROTC program. A few years later the revolution arrived in Lawrence and the radicals burned the city for the second time. The first time, Aug. 21, 1863, it was Quantrill’s Raiders, Confederate guerrillas from Missouri because Lawrence was the epicenter of the underground railway and the Free State of Kansas. On May 9th, 1969, the Annual Chancellor’s ROTC review in Memorial Stadium had to be cancelled due to anti-war protests. Woody was already serving with a helicopter battalion in Vietnam and I left KU for a six year stint in the USAF. Less than a year later members of SDS and the Black Panthers, burned several blocks of downtown Lawrence, the new KU student union complex and tried to burn the ROTC building. Dad retired, Woody made it back from Vietnam and went back to KU to finish a degree in broadcast journalism and me…well, I still play guitar and wave Old Glory, but I do my pickin’ in the Texas Hill Country, where it still feels like America to me and I have more in common with my neighbors than I did with those crazies in Kansas. I do love the band Kansas, however, and just saw them in Denver a month ago. Carry on, my wayward son!