Submitted photo Blue Ash, standing from left, Frank Secich, David Evans and Bill Bartolin and, sitting, Jim Kendzor, are shown in a 1973 Mercury Records publicity photo.

It took about five decades to serve up “Dinner at Mr. Billy’s.”

The new Blue Ash album, available now on streaming and due on vinyl and CD in February, compiles some of the previously unreleased music from the 1970s by the band.

It’s the latest release by Peppermint Records, a project started by Peppermint Recording Studios owner Gary Rhamy and musicians Dean Anshutz and Anthony LaMarca to showcase the region’s rich musical legacy.

Blue Ash — Jim Kendzor, lead vocals and guitar; Frank Secich, bass and vocals; Bill Bartolin, lead guitar and vocals; and David Evans, drums and vocals — were local favorites, playing throughout northeast Ohio and western Pennsylvania from its first gig in Youngstown in 1969 and through the ’70s, including record deals with two nationally distributed labels. When it comes to area acts from the late ’60s and ’70s, “Blue Ash is right up there with Left End and Glass Harp,” Anshutz said.

A Blue Ash release on Peppermint always was part of the plan, Anshutz said, because there was so much music from which to choose. Blue Ash signed a unique deal with Youngstown recording studio in 1972.

“We would get two free days of recording (each month) for five years,” Secich said. “We did our first demos in June of that year. They sent them out to record labels, and unbelievable to us, four labels were interested — Mercury, Polydor, MGM and Metromedia, which was owned by Merv Griffin at the time.”

They ended up getting signed by Mercury with the help of another local musician, Warren’s Gary Del Vecchio

“Gary was in Paul Nelson’s office (at Mercury) trying to get his band signed,” Secich said. “Paul had stacks of demos that came in the mail every day to the A&R department there, and Blue Ash’s tape was on top of one of the stacks. Gary saw it and said, ‘You’ve got to listen to those guys. They’re a very good band.’ He listened to it and just went crazy over it and got a hold of us and came down here and signed us up.”

Blue Ash’s 1973 Mercury release “No More, No Less” and 1977’s “Front Page News” (released by Playboy Records) features 23 songs between the two of them. Some CD rarities collections include a few dozen more. But Secich estimated that only 70 or 80 out of about 230 songs initially recorded at Peppermint have been released in some version.

The only previously released song on “Dinner” is a version of “Jazel Jane,” Secich said, which they included because the song was featured in an episode of the 2023 Prime limited series “Daisy Jones & the Six.”

Many of the recordings are one-take demos recorded mainly for copyright purposes to document the song’s creation and/or as tracks to send to Nelson at Mercury so he could hear what the band was writing. Secich described the recordings as “warts and all’ but he’s proud of what the band produced.

“There are a lot of good songs on there,” Secich said. “‘When I Get You’ would have been a perfect song for Bad Company or a band like that. ‘Movin’ Right Along’ or ‘She’s a Pleaser’ could be covered by any good rock ‘n’ roll band. They still hold up very well. I like the rawness of it. And David Evans’ drumming is just extraordinary. He was a fabulous drummer. A big part of the sound of Blue Ash was his thunderous drums.”

Blue Ash often is grouped with the great underrated power pop acts of the ’70s, such as Big Star and The Raspberries, but a lot of the songs on “Dinner” don’t fit in that niche. Anshutz said he’s been describing the album as a Blue Ash record for people who think they don’t like Blue Ash.

“There’s some stuff on there where you’re like, ‘Is this like the first version of punk rock?,'” Anshutz said. “The ‘(Dangerous) Dynamite’ tune, it’s just vocals and guitar, and it’s so cool. To me that sounds like early versions of Dead Boys or things Frank did with Stiv Bators.”

In addition to the songs recorded in Youngstown, the release includes three tracks from the band’s very first recording session in Philadelphia when they still were teenagers. It was arranged by a Pittsburgh DJ, who wanted the band to record “We’ll Live Tomorrow,” written by folk singer Teri Gruber following the deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. They also recorded two originals, “I’ve Been Rolled” and “Everybody’s Singing That Song.”

“I hadn’t heard the tapes from Philadelphia in 50, 55 years,” Secich said.

The title track for the album was inspired by a trip to a gig in Clarion, Pa., in the early days of the band. Bartolin saw a sign advertising a restaurant called Mr. Billy’s and said, “If we ever get to make an album, we should call it ‘Dinner At Mr. Billy’s.'”

Bartolin died in 2009. Secich and Kendzor still live in Sharon, Pa.. Evans, a Warren native, now lives in Florida.

Once the physical copies are available, Secich said they hope to get Evans up from Florida and do some signing events to promote its release.

And it’s only the first dinner on the menu.

Secich said, “Right after we get this out, we’ll be searching through (the archives) and doing other stuff.”