Night School #224: Romeo / Visions Band

As students of Vancouver's Clark College, Winters and Love quickly set to work as Visions Band. In one format or another they would travel the Albina circuit playing venues such as Geneva's, Irving Park, Texas Two, Niecey’s, and the Toot 'N Tail. As an all black band, it proved difficult to break into the city's segregated downtown scene. They would first do this by adding a white vocalist but later flipped the script entirely.

Winters & Love later reconfigured their group as a four-piece called Romeo – demanding acceptance downtown through raising the bar in their performances as well as production. As the era of what we now call boogie-funk subsided into new jack swing, the live band element had undergone a transformation. Live electronics were supplementing and then replacing live musicians and many groups on the national level utilized this platform to step out front with choreographed routines. In the late 1980s, Romeo was the definitive group to do so in Portland at notable downtown hot spots such as Last Hurrah and Key Largo. Like many of the 20th century Albina musicians, theirs is a story of adversity overcome.